I am delighted to share with you an inexpensive yet highly effective learning tool. Dry-erase boards have been around for years, and business people use them all the time in meetings, to manage to-do lists, or as bulletin boards. Although dry erase boards are not exactly ‘emerging technology’, they are very useful tools for [...]
Archive for the ‘Teaching methods’ Category
Homeschool Learning Strategy: Engage Learners with Personal Dry-Erase Boards
Posted by ginac on September 12th, 2009
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Five TED Videos Homeschoolers Will Enjoy
Posted by ginac on September 3rd, 2009
TED is an inspirational movement of great thinkers from around the globe who gather to share unique insights and ideas about humanity. There are TED videos on all sorts of topics, and there are many creative ways to weave them into your lessons. Use these videos to ‘kick-off’ unit studies, to inspire creativity with a [...]
CNN Article Supports Homeschool as a Change Agent for Public Education
Posted by ginac on August 25th, 2009
Clark Howard, HLN money expert, wrote an interesting article for CNN about how alternative learning environments can contribute to changing the current public school education system in America. Citing a few high-profile court cases involving ridiculous actions by the school systems, Clark highlights the potential for bureaucracy to overshadow the learning process. In addition to [...]
Beautiful Statistics – Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.org
Posted by ginac on July 29th, 2009
Sometimes children assume that the way things are in the world today are the way things have always been and the way things will always be. Gapminder empowers the user to visually manipulate graphs to focus on elements of interest, but definitely shows that things don’t always stay the same in the world, even within [...]
Microsoft Research Makes Feynman Lectures Available for Free
Posted by ginac on July 17th, 2009
Microsoft Research, in collaboration with Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, makes the Messenger lecture series by physicist Richard Feynman freely available to the general public for the first time. The Messenger Series explains the relation of Mathematics and Physics. If you have ever read any of his books, you will really enjoy seeing and hearing [...]
Arizona Public School Takes Cues From Homeschool Philosophy
Posted by ginac on June 25th, 2009
Arizona State University reports on an innovative partnership with University Public Schools. Polytechnic Elementary, a public school/university partnership, looks much like a homeschool in a public environment. Even though it took ‘cutting edge’ university research, it looks like Polytechnic Elementary in Arizona is finally breaking the mold on the lecture-based, ‘drill-and-kill’ curriculum in favor of [...]
10 Reasons Why Homeschoolers Should Ditch Grade Level Assignment By Age
Posted by ginac on June 10th, 2009
Grade level assignments by age make it easy for public schools to teach children while keeping them safe. After all, classrooms have large numbers of children in them. Homeschoolers, however, have the luxury of choosing who they teach, how they teach and what they teach! Other than the fact that a grade level by age [...]
YouTube Adds an EDU Channel
Posted by ginac on May 28th, 2009
Whether your homeschooler is looking for challenging coursework or deciding on a college to attend this fall, she will have a new online research tool from a familiar website. YouTube has created a new EDU ‘channel’ to help organize university content, making it even easier to find the information your homeschooler needs. There are well [...]
Key Homeschool Strategy: Make Learning Fun!
Posted by ginac on May 18th, 2009
First, I want to start by noting that the overall strategy of our homeschool ‘curriculum’ is to make learning fun. We can teach some pretty advanced concepts to our young learner if we engage his natural curiosity through play. Our philosophy is that if a student has trouble learning a concept, it is because the [...]
The Public Library as a School?
Posted by ginac on April 7th, 2009
Using the public library as a school (in some form) has crossed my mind, and when I came across this video, I was amazed to hear similar sentiments from a student! If he had been home schooled, maybe he could actually have spent ‘school’ time reading what he liked in the public library! This bright [...]
