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Homeschooling

How To Organize Your Homeschool

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In this post I am going to show you how to organize your homeschool with Evernote. At the end of this post I am also sharing a free copy of my Trello board which I now use together with Evernote to plan and organizine our homeschool.

When we were in NJ we were lucky to be limited by very little when it came to homeschooling. We did not have to report with portfolios or make our young people take standardized testing. Not having to “prove” that we were learning certain things at certain times, we had a lot of freedom to let them really follow their passions with learning, delve deeply into things they found interesting, and spend as much time on any given subject that they like.

*Update* We have been homeschooing in PA for about 3 years now (and this baby you see below is now 8!) and although I was terrified at first of the requirements (PA is notiriously difficult to homeschool in, especially when you unschool or self-direct like we do.) but after some deep breaths and a lot of research I definitely found a way to keep to our way of homeschooling and still complete the reporting requirements. If you have questions about how to self-direct or unschool in your homeschool, please reach out to me here and I would be happy to get you started. You can also join our Facebook group, You Can Homeschool.

OK, let’s get back to organizing your homeschool with Evernote.

I started using evernote when my oldest son was  3 1/2 – he has been coming up with up with his own exploration ideas since so having somewhere to keep track of it all is super helpful. Some days it’s hard to keep up with all of his ideas! While I didn’t need to keep a portfolio of our work for reporting purposes (and certainly didn’tt need to at this young of an age) I find that I love journaling these moments of our day.

how to organize your homeschool with evernote

Benefits of journaling your homeschool with evernote:

  •  Memories! This is one of the biggest reasons for me. It will be so nice to look back and see all of the ways he was growing and exploring from such a young age-for me and well as for my son (S!).
  • This does act as a portfolio should you ever find the need for one. While I don’t need one now, I am sure that at some point  my son will need some type of documentation for something and it would be nice to have this already at hand then to have to go back through the years and think of everything we have done.
  • Having a journal of passions, interests, and projects helps to inspire and keep on track with works in progress, as well as provides a jumping off point for future projects. In Lori Pickard’s book Project-Based Homeschooling, Mentoring the Self-Directed Learner, I found her idea of hanging photos of recent trips and pictures of your young person working on their projects hanging around their workspace to be very helpful. O often looks at pics of things he was doing and is re-inspired to finish something of gets a shoot-off idea from that.
  • It’s a great way to keep track of useful resources that you find and use along the way.

Organizing your homeschool

Now, onto how to keep all this stuff in order. I definitely keep paper artwork (some of course, I literally do not have the space for all of it) and other memorabilia from trips, holidays, ext.  As far as daily journaling, to be honest, by the time nighttime rolls around and I would have a chance to sit and handwrite in a journal (or type for that matter) I am so tired and have probably forgotten half of what we have done.

The solution? Evernote. Inspired by this post over at City Kids Homeschooling, I decided to give Evernote a try for journaling and documenting our days.

How to use evernote organize your homeschool:

  • Create a notebook
  • for each new activity I want to document I create a note within that notebook
  • We keep it really simple right now. I have one notebook for all of O’s stuff, and notes from all activities we want to record go in there. Later, I may separate into different notebooks as needed. (I have since added a new notebook for my other son)
  • In each note I can quickly add in a picture, a few notes, any links we were using, ect.
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The main menu. using notebooks and notes section only at this point.

 

List of notes in O's project and interest notebook
List of notes in O’s project and interest notebook
Individual note with simply photo and a few quick notes
Individual note with simply photo and a few quick notes
Note with link to website we were using along with a quick note
Note with link to website we were using along with a quick note.

Conclusion

Using Evernote to organize my homeschool has a lot of benefits. I now use this in combination with Trello for planning- at the bottom of this post you can download a copy of the trello board I created and use it for planning your homeschool. one of the best things about using Evernote for recording is that it really doesn’t interrupt anything we are doing. In just a few quick minutes (or minute) I can jot this stuff down and be on with it. Later, when I want to organize (which I usually do quarterly, or seasonally) I can sync to my computer and organize away when I have time.

So what do you think? Do you already have an organizing system that works for you or are you still looking for your perfect method?

Grab your free copy of the Trello Board I use to plan my homeschool below!

(make a copy once you open it so you have a clean slate to add your items)

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Reading is the Reward

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Yesterday we ventured to our local farmer’s market as we do every Wednesday to grab some dinner…and the occasional maple bacon donut (good lord these are good-if you are local to South Jersey, these beauties are from Farm and Fisherman). With food in tow, we ended up sitting next to the public library’s info table. I love that the library has a table at the farmer’s market. As we ate, the woman working the booth approached the table and asked if we were members. Of course we are, and we go to the library weekly. Awesome.

She handed me their list of summer programming for kids and then…

“are you part of our reading for rewards program?”

oh no. I have super strong feelings about reading for rewards folks. And they are not good feelings. Not wanting to stir the pot while we ate dinner, I took the sheet that promised my son a variety of silly rewards for each “milestone.” Read: large amount of books he could read by a certain time.

“1,000 books before kindergarten. Then they can be recognized!”

and my smart ass, “recognized by who?”

“well, the library.”

“oh.” I stopped myself. I really did! It was hard.

While I LOVE the library and I love the idea of kids everywhere reading millions of books, I have a big problems with the idea of reading for rewards. Here’s some of them:

I truly believe that when you present reading to kids in this competitive, finish line, get your sticker way, you are embedding in young people that the value of reading lies outside of the actual experience of reading. It does not. As all of us who love to read know, the rewards for reading a good book far surpass a gold star, toy, or recognition that you have completed said book. Confession time: when I finish something by Proust I do crack a bottle of wine and celebrate myself, because dang, those are long and difficult, but I digress…

These programs also glorify quantity over quality. No bueno. Some months I read one AMAZING book. and I don’t want to read anything else. I want to ruminate on that experience- journal it, think on it, live with it- before I move onto the next book. Some months I read a really BAD book and I sit with that, sadly. Wondering who the heck let that go to publishing. Some months I read a whole bunch of books-whole books, half books. It depends. I believe young people should have the same experiences. My son often reads the same book for weeks straight. Some times he reads something once loves it- or doesn’t- and moves on.

If we want our young people to truly love reading, for the sheer pleasure and passion of reading, if we want them to come to us when they are young, book in hand, saying “will you read this to me?” randomly, in the middle of the afternoon, we need to stop pressuring them with programs like these. Take then to the library, ask them what they would like to look for today, show them the sections where things they are interested in are located. Bring books, books, and more books into our homes. Sprinkle books everywhere-leave them in every room, take them outside with you, leave them in the car. Read yourself and let them see you- for pleasure, for a recipe, for directions, for inspiration, for information.

Like so many other things in life we don’t need to shove the value of reading down our young people’s throats. Just live the love of books, they will see it, they will WANT it-if that’s is going to be there thing. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but in their own time, in their own way, they will read what they want, how often they want, because they want to and that will be reward enough ( I once awoke to the horror that my children might not grow up to be book fanatics. After the cold sweats were over I realized it’s ok-not everyone would spend every waking minute reading if they could. I guess…who are these people? Just kidding.)

Solutions? I love the idea of library’s designing more programs for kids that help them delve into their own personal interests using books and library resources. But more on that at another time.

Have a great Thursday, and happy reading (or not- it’s your choice 😉

 

Yes, They’re Listening

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I can’t tell you how many times my Four year old will ask me a question that requires a complicated answer and once I start to answer it, he will, after about on minute, drift of into something else-dancing, jumping, eating, hiding, dinosaurs, construction emergency!

This morning, half way through my answer to his question of “Why is Minnesota so Cold because of where it is in the country?!” he declared with much emergency, “I need a snack!”

This was followed by:

“Is Everything made of molecules?” “What are animals called that don’t have fur or feathers?” “How many different types of birds are there? Are all birds owls or are all owls birds?” “Why do things have a life cycle?””Does everything have a lifecycle?”

And so on, at least 400 of these a day. Most of the time my response begins with, “I wonder…Do you have any ideas?” I let him really flush through these, and then we move on to investigation. (I do this in a effort to not cover over any developing ideas he has going on beneath these questions. Young people at this age are just figuring out how to ask questions, so if we leave space for them to expand their abstract ideas rather than jumping in with our own concrete explanations, we can allow them to better understand how to form questions around concepts they are curious about.)

Listening to these endless questions, while it can be exhausting at times, is one of my favorite parts of unschooling. It’s a privilege to witness this incredible growth hour by hour, day by day. You couldn’t pay me any amount of money to hand that privilege over to someone else. And because I value these questions so much it can be frustrating when he phases out mid investigation. Don’t get me wrong,  he will focus for long periods when he is working alone, but I can’t even think about pontificating on the subject.

For some reason the Minnesota phase out, as will now be known, had me more annoyed than usual. Maybe it was because I don’t particularly like geography. Or maybe it was because It was early and I have had to give up coffee again. Sigh. I pulled out the picture atlas and I guess I was in the mood to be all “teachery” (side note, when I feel that vibe coming on, I can be sure a phase out is in the near future) anywhoo, because it annoyed me more than usual I decided to think about why.

As usual, I realized it annoyed me because of my own issues and insecurities “What if he doesn’t ever learn things because he refuses to listen to explanations?” Once I got to this place, I realized a few key things that made me feel all good about his disruptive calls of the wild during my explanations:

First, he learns more than anyone I know on a daily basis. So that  just signals some more deschooling I need to do on myself.

Second, 99% of the time, every question he asks during the day he revisits later in the evening, usually around bedtime. And guess what? It turns out  he was listening the whole time. How do I know this? Because he will ask me a follow up question based on some things I told him while he was dancing, constructing, playing with dinosaurs, or riding in a rocket ship.

And there you have it folks. They are listening. They are always listening. They may not seem like it, but they are. When they seem distracted maybe they are simply busy connecting things, or maybe the answer you gave wasn’t what they were looking for-either way, it doesn’t matter if they drift off, what matters is that we take the time to answer.

This unschooling journey is about nothing more important than relationship. Learning is a side bonus, a natural effect that needs no coaxing. By helping them to find answers to their questions-opening that book, taking them to visit that animal they are so in to, traveling to the museum, searching for the video, and yes, even waxing philosophical on the nature of a life cycle, we are not “teaching” our young people. What we are doing is developing a relationship with them. Joining them on their journey-walking and learning next to them, not in front of them. Developing a trust. We are opening doors, becoming that kind facilitator who takes the time to help them reach those branches of knowledge that they so feverishly seek to reach.

 

 

 

 

What Other People Think

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My oldest son has this hat-a fox hat to be precise. It started out as a regular Winter hat that I picked up along with his Winter coat. Then it changed into something else, or rather many things. At any given time it can be a costume of whatever he is pretending to be at the moment. It can also be comfort in a situation that he feels uneasy about.

Today it was unseasonably warm here- freakishly warm-it was 80 degrees in March. As we packed up for a walk to the park, my son, wearing a tee shirt and light pants put on his Winter fox hat and headed for the door.

I told him it was hot out and he would probably want to leave the hat here today. He told me he needed it for his lizard costume (We are knee deep in habitats and all of the workings of cold-blooded animals. During any of our intensive explorations he always ends up in character, he really gets in there!.) Then this happened:

Me: “You really should leave the hat here today, bud.”

O: “Why?”

Me: “Well, it’s hot, and people might say ‘why are you wearing a Winter hat when it’s so hot out.'”

As soon as it came out of my mouth I wanted to suck it back in. One of the most important things I want to instill in my kids is that they should do what makes them happy, not what other people tell them should make them happy. I want them to learn how to let their decisions come from inside them, not from outside influences.

So why would I say something so contrary to this principle? Why would I tell him that he should do something based on what other people will think? I said it because in all my efforts to instill this strength of character in him, my protecting mother side cringes at the thought of him being hurt by someone’s words of taunt or criticism. But in that moment I realized in an effort to protect him I was taking away the type of experiences that would build that character up in him in the long run. If I wanted him to stand up for himself and for what he wants and believes in , I better not get in his way while he is learning to make his own decisions.

So I took it back.

Me: “Bud, I don’t like what I just said, so I’m going to change it. You wear your hat if that’s what you want to do. Because it does’t matter what other people think. You should do what makes you happy.”

And before I had a chance to explain that to him further, he explained it to me.

O: “Right. Because they can just do what they want to do and I’ll just do what I want to do. It’s fine, mom.”

Yup. It was one of those days. One of those days when my kids teach me something really important. So, really, just a day, like any other day. Learning, changing, growing-no matter what other people think.

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A is for Atypical, A is for Awesome.

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Monday’s are tough. They can be even tougher for mom’s or dad’s who are heading into another week with their atypical kids. Some of us may have had a bit of a break on the weekend, with help from spouses and/or breaks from the constraints of stressful obligations. Some may not have. Whether our kids are heading to school, or learning at home and out in the world-both bring their own challenges. Many challenges. So let’s get ready for the week by celebrating all the awesome that atypical-ness can bring.

Here are some great historical examples of Awesome adults who were super challenging children and most likely drove their caregivers and educators to the brink of insanity.

Atypical is Awesome.

Pope John XIII was sent home with a note saying he continually came to class unprepared; he did not deliver the note.

Ludwig Van Beethoven was rude and ill-mannered towards his friends and was subject to wild fits of rage.

Arturo Toscanini was an obstinate and disobedient boy; once he made up his mind not to do something, nothing could make him change his mind.

Winston Churchill was called the naughtiest small boy in England by his dancing teacher. He was frequently released from the classroom and allowed to run around the school yard to release his energies. HIs later school experiences were similarly difficult. He refused to study Math, Greek, or Latin and was placed with the lowest group of student.

William Wordsworth was described before his eightht year as a “stubborn, wayward, and intractable boy”

Arthur Conan Doyle was aggressive and continually involved in fights; he would break rules deliberately so he could show others how well he could take the punishment.

Now, let’s think of all of the achievements these people reached in their lifetimes.

This week, when things get tough, or tougher than tough, let’s focus on of all of the awesome things about our kids. I can’t wait to see what these amazing young people get up to as adults.

 

Mid Winter-Light and Shadow

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This week we celebrated Imbolc, or Mid-Winter. With all of the rain melting piles of snow, there was a glorious smell of mud-and Spring-in the air as explored light and shadow around the neighborhood.

Arriving at the mid-Winter point kind of snuck up on me this year. Aside from one major snowstorm, it feels as though Winter has barely begun here. Temps have been so mild it feels more like the tail end of March than the beginning of February. I have had to remind myself that this is the time of rest, of coming in, so we don’t miss that cycle of our year.

I’m hoping for at least another snowfall or two before we head into the busy work of Spring. Of building the garden beds and preparing our plantings. Of a flurry of outings each week. So we are still nesting and reflecting. Breathing in some home. Finishing some home imporovements-refreshing our spaces. And of course, exploring.