Adventures in Mama-Land

First of all, one of my biggest happy impressions – as always, when speaking to homeschoolers in the US – was, thank goodness I live in Canada!  While other people talk about curriculum and reporting and consulting and government interference and accountability, I basically sit back and close my eyes and wait for all that boring stuff to be over. In case you are in the U.S., let me explain what we had to do, in terms of accountability and paperwork, when we decided to homeschool our two youngest children:  we decided to homeschool them.  Period.  The law here is a bit blurry and opinions are divided on whether it’s necessary to file a Notice of Intent to Homeschool if your kids have never been in school.  Anyway, we never have, for the younger kids (both older kids have been officially “homeschooled” at one time or another, as this is required to take certain Ministry-funded high school correspondence courses). But that’s not really a conference thing, just m...

Oy, vey!  Vendors, Curriculum, Yay! I’ve already posted about everything BUT the conference.  Turns out, there is just too much to say to put even the conference stuff into a single post.  So I’ll start with what seemed to me the biggest difference from previous years – limudei kodesh vendors and curriculum creators. All the cravings I’ve had in the past years for booths and vendors and people talking up their materials, all my wildest curriculum-crazed dreams, came true - a little bit.   Not, probably, in the way they would have if I were Christian attending a Christian homeschool conference, in which case I’d have dozens of programs to choose from for every little subject (Bible-based handwriting, anybody?  Faith-based science or history curriculum?).  But, as I say, a little. As an outsider, this seems to have been the year in which something tipped and suddenly, people are realizing that frum people are homeschooling (gasp! regardless of occas...

Yes, indeed; you heard that right… exactly what I’ve been hoping for:  I got an email late last night suggesting that Part 2 is officially in the works! Apparently, the new volume “covers the rest of Lech Lecha and has very upgraded worksheets as well as chazara [review] tools.” Naturally, I suggested that he arrange to come and show the thing as a vendor at the upcoming Torah Home Education Conference in May! Bright Beginnings is the Chumash workbook we have been working our way slooooowly through since July of 2011.  It’s cute, it’s fun, and I have found that its method of emphasizing roots and prefixes is very sound and appropriate for this level, while the layout is visually more appealing than almost anything I have seen in a limudei kodesh text. Here’s a typical page from Bright Beginnings: It’s not too busy – engaging, but not distracting.  There’s enough interaction, but also enough focus on just reading and getting the job done.  It’s true that we ha...

One surreal thing about schooling all year is that there’s always this feeling that you’re “partway” through the year.  Nowhere near the beginning, but not approaching the end either.  I don’t mind it, we’re definitely not in the doldrums, but it makes it tough to figure out when to stop and evaluate what we’re doing and whether it’s working. Here’s what we’ve got going on for Limudei Kodesh (Jewish Studies) these days: Parsha: Copywork, my own (download printables here ) Reading, questions and narrating from My First Parsha Reader Safa = Hebrew Language: Currently Migdalor , but I’m not thrilled with it anymore… see below for future plans. Chumash = Torah in depth: Leshon HaTorah, still plodding through book 1 Bright Beginnings Lech Lecha workbook My own cut-apart sheets for individual pesukim Bekius = Breadth of Torah: Reading sequentially through Seymour Rossel's A Child's Bible books:  Lessons from the Torah / Lessons from the Prophets and Writings ...

This is our last “normal” week before the roller-coaster of the chagim (MONTH of Jewish holidays coming up).  I’ve found it’s best to cram a lot in the first couple of days of the week, because after that, things tend to fall apart… like this week, when I worked a full day yesterday outside of the home.  Blah. But here’s what we were up to on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and today… Had an “arty” day with Draw Write Now and Mozart!   Did some kinda teary measurement math with JUMP and Cuisenaire Rods.  Not that we don’t love math!  And hopefully, we will love it even more now that we have started reading “Life of Fred:  Apples,” which just arrived this week.  It’s a very, VERY, very strange book.  Naomi isn’t sure she likes it yet, and at first, based only on the cover, she asked me NOT to read it.  But I think she’ll get into it once we’re on our way. Carrying on through First-Time Analogies (we do it during math time).  We’ve move...

We’ve been doing bits and pieces over the summer, but nothing really systematic, and it’s always tough  getting back into the groove when you’re grooving in a whole other language. Slogging through Kriyah v’Od, and it really DOES feel like a slog sometimes.  The way the book substitutes images for words is starting to annoy both of us, because she is regularly grappling with ALL the nekudos (vowels) in our Chumash studies. Kriyah v’Od uses pictures for any word containing a vowel other than shva, chirik, kamatz and patach (basically A & I).  Here is the word “ochelet,” for example.  Because it has “o” and “e” in it, they use a picture instead, cued with the letter alef (meaningless because it’s silent, but perhaps it will help her spelling later on down the line). Still, it was an exciting day, because we got to use the STICKERS!  There are so few sticker activities in the book that it makes me wonder why they even bothered, but I ham it up and do a bi...