Dear Friends, 

For some reason, the entire second half of the newsletter disappeared when I sent it. I'm sorry! Here is the second half. The only difficulty is that my link tool has disappeared, so if you want to visit a link, you may have to cut and paste. Technology is wonderful... when it works;-).

Blessings,
Janice Campbell- www.EverydayEducation.com

Contents

Note from Janice
Events and Deadlines
Excerpt from My Blog
Coming Next Time
What's Up With e-Books?

Guest Article: "Homeschool High School the Third Time Around" by Barbara Frank
Featured Free Resource

Guest Article
Homeschool High School the Third Time Around
by Barbara Frank

     The baby I carried on my hip while I homeschooled my first two children is now 14. It\'s time for me to think about how I homeschooled her older siblings when they were teens, and how I want to homeschool her now that she\'s reached high school age.

     In reviewing what I did with my older two, my goal is to avoid what didn\'t work and to repeat what did. In that vein, here are a few things I\'ve decided.

This time around in our homeschool high school, I will not:

1)   Use a correspondence curriculum with prescribed course requirements and graded-by-computer tests. I did that with my older children, and consequently they learned to memorize facts long enough to ace the test, and then forget them. That\'s what I did in high school, and I certainly wanted better than that for my own children. But I was afraid to tackle my older children\'s home education without the guidance of a formal curriculum, nor did I have the time to design each one\'s ideal program because I had two younger children (including one with disabilities) who needed me. But this time around, my youngest is 12, and while he will always have developmental delays, he\'s much easier to care for. So I am now free to design and implement a high school curriculum tailored to my daughter\'s interests and future plans.

2)    Use the local school district\'s driver education course. Both of my older children took driver\'s ed at the local high school, and we all agree it was a total waste of time. Since then, the school board has voted to raise the fee from $50 to $300, which makes this decision even easier, since private driving school costs about $350.

3)   Cut our teenager slack on household chores because she may have a part-time job, rigorous school work, or both. We did that with the older two, and found it difficult to ever get them back in the groove of helping out at home. That\'s why our home-for-the-summer college student son is very little help around here.

There are also some things I did with the older two that I definitely want to do with our third-born. This time around, I will:

1)     Regularly update her high school transcript on my computer, adding every bit of volunteer work, every job, every online course, her driver\'s ed class, and every bit of \"school work\" she does that can be listed on a transcript. I will do this promptly, so I don\'t have to rely on my not-very-good-these-days memory. This way, each time I need a copy of her transcript for future college applications, I can just print out an up-to-date copy from my computer. [http://www.transcriptsmadeeasy.com]

2)      Sign her up to take the ACT each year of high school, so that by junior year, she\'s very comfortable with it. Doing this with my older children was part of the reason they both scored very well. I already knew that high scores make teens very attractive to colleges; what I learned was that they directly lead to scholarship money.

3)     Continue to encourage her to learn to use the computer (she bought a laptop with babysitting money) because she will need that skill in the future, whether she goes to college, works, starts her own business, and/or runs a household.

4)     Use community and local colleges to augment her studies, as they\'ll provide her with classroom experience in areas I don\'t want to teach (#1: Chemistry!) as well as college credit.

5)     Give her increasing responsibility for deciding when to do her assignments, to the point that by senior year, my involvement in her schoolwork will center on a once-a-week meeting with her to review her assignments.

6)     Do Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers (LINK) with her during her junior and senior years of high school, because it worked so well with the older two, and because I\'d like to add some resources and books to it that will be chosen just for her.

 Also, as I did with her older sister, I will:

7)     Give her increasing experience in cooking, cleaning and other household chores. That, combined with the babysitting she already does in our neighborhood, will help train her for that most important of all jobs, being a homemaker for the family she hopes to have someday.

8)     Continue to garden and sew with her, because it gives me great joy to share such pleasurable activities with her, and because I want the time with her. I learned from the last two to treasure such times because the days pass so quickly.
 
      Finally, in addition to the all of the above, there\'s one more thing I will do with her that I was not able to do with her older sister:
 
9)     I will continue to do the Mother/Daughter study of \"Women of the Bible\" that we began a year ago, because it\'s so nice to study the Bible together, and we have had such great discussions!
    
      These are the basics of my plan. Making these plans is kind of bittersweet, because this is my last opportunity to do our \"traditional\" version of high school. (My son\'s high school will be much different because of his delays, but will surely bring its own joys, as teaching him thus far has done.) This time around, I have a much better idea of how well homeschool high school can be done; I saw it with my older children. Thus I have a lot more confidence this time around.

     If you\'re going to homeschool your children during their high school years, I hope these tips help you. Just remember the most important thing: enjoy these years, because they will be over before you know it.

 © 2006 Barbara Frank / Cardamom Publishers

Barbara Frank is the mother of four homeschooled-from-birth children ages 13-22, a freelance writer/editor, and the author of \"Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers\" and the new eBook, \"The Imperfect Homeschooler\'s Guide to Homeschooling.\" To visit her Web site, \"The Imperfect Homeschooler,\" go to Cardamom Publishers- http://jceved.cpguidehs.hop.clickbank.net.   

Featured Free Resource
National Gallery of Art Education Resources- This isn't just a single resource, it's a whole catalog full of high-quality free, borrowable, resources for teaching art! Available items include slides, teaching packets, videocassetes, videodiscs, CD-ROMs, and DVDs. You can search the website by curriculum, subject, artist, and resource format, or you may prefer to request a catalog and browse from the comfort of your rocking chair. These are terrific resources for studying both art history and art appreciation, and they would be very helpful for students who plan to study for the Humanities CLEP exam.
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Watch for Zeitgeist Literature: Self-Directed, College Preparatory, Literature-Based English for Homeschoolers-- coming soon! You'll hear about it if you're signed up for the newsletter! www.z-lit.com

Until next time, take joy in the fleeting days you share as a family. The years pass more quickly than you can imagine!
Janice

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