July is full of all sorts of great science and nature opportunities. Here are five fun ones to work into your homeschooling this month. MythBusting: You hear all sorts of folk wisdom that can be great fun for kids to test out. When we heard that you should draw chalk lines outside your house because […]
Category: Real-world learning
Take part in citizen science projects monitoring butterflies this summer
Two wonderful citizen science projects are being offered this summer through SciStarter and they’re a great way to help butterflies while also doing science. These projects are free to take part in and can be done in your own park, town or back yard. The Monarch Larva Monitoring Project was developed by researchers at the […]
Homeschool 101: What is deschooling?
If you are contemplating taking your children out of public school to homeschool them, you’ll probably hear a lot of advice about “deschooling.” What is deschooling? Simply put, it is a period of time after institutionalized schooling where parents let kids be free to do whatever they want and relearn their love of learning. Wikipedia […]
Five lessons to take from Montessori for your homeschool
One of the joys of homeschooling is that you can adapt ideas from all different places and use them with your kids. Montessori schools and theories are a great source of some of those ideas. I attended a Montessori preschool myself (back in the dark ages) and it was one of the best educational experiences […]
A Montessori education for middle school years
Recently, a reader asked me for information about using Montessori principles to homeschool her older children. She wanted to know if Montessori methods could still be used with teens and preteens. The question intrigued me, as I’ve mainly seen Montessori methods taught for children up to age 12. What I found is that yes, there […]
A Montessori education for high school years
I wrote recently of the unique perspective Maria Montessori had about education during the middle school years. But what about the high school years? Here, Montessori believed in more serious academics, but with much real-world experience. Montessori expert Michael Olaf says of the years 15-18: “For age fifteen to eighteen, when the rapid growth of […]