Helping Parents Raise Kids of Character
Question: Do my kids need to be in a co-op if I am homeschooling?
Answer: Absolutely not. I homeschooled my kids for 37 years and never had any of them in a co-op. There wasn’t any such thing ’till recent years.
Continue reading Q&A: Do my kids need to be in a co-op if I am homeschooling?
We were home schooling when nobody was homeschooling. We started with our firstborn son in his kindergarten year, 1980–81. It started out as a matter of convenience but soon grew into a conviction.
Close to 40 years later, we have never experienced a moment of doubt as to our choice. That little boy in kindergarten is now a college graduate, a lawyer and a married man with five children, all of whom he and his wife plan on teaching at home. He is also the eldest of our fourteen sons and daughters. His younger siblings, some of whom are also the parents of our 16 grandchildren, are homeschooling as well. Obviously, our children are as pleased as their parents are with the method of education we chose.
Over the years, of course, curious people have asked us why we made the decision to begin and continue homeschooling our children. There are many reasons we love it, but for the sake of brevity I’ll share just a few here.
Continue reading Why Did We Homeschool Our Children?
Rainy Days getting you down?
It’s true- after a few days of rainy weather, the kids are just bored and full of energy, and you feel worn out trying to keep them occupied.
Here’s a few ideas to spark some new interest and add a little fun to these otherwise gloomy days.
All these ideas cost very little, or nothing at all, and they can all be done from the comforts of home.
I have included some activities for all ages- preschool, elementary age, and even teens. (plus it always amazes me what little ones can do if they see the older ones doing it.)
We’ve used so many of these ideas in our own home over the years!
You might even see your kids all excited when a rainy day comes!!
1. Bubble stuff– let them don raincoats and step out to blow bubbles in the rain
2. Play dough
Here’s a less crumbly type of play dough you can make, and the kids will enjoy helping to make it and choose their favorite color to distinguish theirs from everyone else.
Mix and cook in saucepan on medium heat until mixture coagulates into a ball. Cool. Store in air tight container.
3. Outlining– gather a bunch of objects- jar lids, combs, Popsicle sticks, cookie cutters, bottle tops, containers, etc. and let the kids place them on a sheet of paper and trace around their outlines.
4. Gluing shapes– cut a bunch of rectangles, circles, squares, triangles, and so on from construction paper and use glue sticks to glue them down in creative arrangements. If you have older kids, they can cut the shapes out for you.
Continue reading 50 Rainy Day Activities for Kids
Let me tell you about a great resource for teaching economics to your high schooler. It’s called Biblical Economics in Comics by Vic Lockman.
It actually looks and reads like a comic book! You might be thinking, Comic book…for a high schooler? How can that be all that educational, and aren’t they, after all, a little old for comics?
Continue reading Easy Economics for High Schoolers
Rick and I used to joke whenever we’d sing the hymn Blessed Quietness, saying, “hey, what is that?!” Quietness was not something you often experienced in our home. I remember times when the noise was so overpowering that I’d call a quiet time. That meant everyone had to sit quietly, read or play a quiet game for a specified period of time just to give mom a time to collect her thoughts. It wasn’t always chaos but when you have 16 people living in the same house, it’s just not quiet. It’s busy. It’s active. There’s always something going on.
Well, things have changed now. I only have 2 kids living at home. Those 2 kids have jobs and interests and commitments and more often than not, my house is REALLY quiet. I’ve had a couple of occasions lately when a friend has stopped by and comments, “Wow, it just seems weird that your house is so quiet now.” It is weird ,and I’m not sure I like it. It has it’s advantages sometimes,(it’s easier to concentrate when I write for instance) but I LOVED experiencing life with my growing kiddos. I am proud of every one of them for the people they’ve turned out to be, but I do miss being mommy to little people.
Continue reading My House is Quiet Now
We home schooled all of our children (14 of them) all the way through high school. And I am so glad that we did.
Here are 10 tips that I have learned through the years of homeschooling highschoolers that can help to make these years more enjoyable, effective, and productive for you and your kids.
1.Don’t be afraid to substitute creative subjects for what is usually taught in high school. Public schools don’t have the one best plan for education. Every young person is unique. One of my daughters wanted to do biology, advanced biology, first aid and advanced first aid for her science credits. That’s fine. Don’t feel like you have to follow a public school plan.
2. Ask for input from your student. Ask them how they learn best, what they would like to learn, what curriculum looks good to them. The more input they have into what they learn, the more they will invest themselves in learning.
3. Be sure you have an outlet for your high schooler to invest in the lives of others. Teaching them to have a servant’s heart and not be self-focused is key. Teach them to look for needs in others and extend themselves in meeting those needs. If you instill that in them, you’ve been a success. Life is about serving others, not pleasing self.
Continue reading 10 Tips for Teaching High Schoolers at Home
One Sunday night we came home late from church. Marilyn and I were tired as we always were late on Sunday evenings.
Four-year old Rickey wanted to know what was for supper. That, of course inspired three-year-old Timmy. “Yeah, what’s for supper?”, he echoed his brother.
I tried to convince him they weren’t really hungry and that we’d all better just forget supper and go to bed. But it didn’t work. They were not to be denied.
I did a little scouting. “I don’t see much boys, ” I said discouragingly, my head deep in the interior of the refrigerator. “Don’t you think maybe this time we should just….”
“I’m hungry,” moaned little Rickey. “Me too,” chimed in Tim.
This would never do. There was nothing in here that would be quick to cook. Just odds and ends of leftovers. This called for some creativity.
Continue reading Bean Pie and Corn Pizza
As I said in Part 2 of this series, homeschooling really took off and began to grow. We had a meeting in our basement helping others get started, but all over the country the same thing was happening. It wasn’t long before groups formed and homeschooling conventions, though really small at first started to spring up.
We had a lot of people asking us questions. We began to get some speaking engagements. People wanted to know why we focused on character building in training our kids and how we did it. “What about socialization?” was a big concern for many. We tried to answer questions, but soon forgot what we had told to who. Hence, our first book was The Socialization Trap. We wrote it because of the growing concern in the country.
State homeschooling groups continued to emerge, and we started getting more requests for speaking. It wasn’t easy to travel with so many little ones still at home and more on the way, but we really felt God was calling us to encourage other parents. Hence, The Learning Parent was born- our ministry of parent encouragement.
We told others how we taught our kids, and as the years went by people asked if we could make materials available so they could glean from our experience and teach character to their kids as well. So we began producing character curriculum. Now, The Learning Parent, has produced a whole line of character curriculum and we call ourselves Character Concepts and provide curriculum from preschool through high school.
Anyway, I thought it might be kind of fun to give you a visual picture of how things developed through the years through a timeline.
I’m sure I’ll leave out some important details, but I hope you enjoy taking a peak at the Boyer family – then and now.
So here we go…..
Continue reading Our Story Part 3- “Through the Years”
