I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I was blessed to have family visit and enjoy my daughter's performance as Mathilda in CYT's Alice in Wonderland during Thanksgiving week. Now we are busily preparing for Christmas as well as the next CYT production and a full schedule of gymnastics meets in January! Enjoy this month's newsletter, and I hope you have a lovely holiday season.

Warm regards,
Mary Ann Kelley
Editor

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2. TheHomeSchoolMom.com Website Updates

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3. The Perfect Christmas Gift for Creative Kids (Ages 2-10)
(our sponsor)

Stretch-A-Book starts with reading a book and then adds singing, dancing, drawing and acting activities.

Your kids will be enhancing their reading, communication, and team building skills while they play. They won't even realize they are learning... but within a few weeks you will notice some very positive changes in your children.

Learn more here »

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4. Educational Resources

Savings Quest
This is an excellent interactive website from Wachovia that will help students see the reality of home budgeting and saving.
http://www.mysavingsquest.com/

My Story Maker
My StoryMaker lets you control characters and objects - and creates sentences for you! Once you are done with your story, save it online or print it out in the Library. This Flash-based activity is from the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and use of the program constitutes agreement to allow the library to display content created by the player for library promotional use. Requires some reading; best for elementary grades.
http://www.carnegielibrary.org/kids/mystorymaker/

e-Learning for Kids
e-Learning for Kids is a global, non-profit foundation dedicated to fun and free learning on the Internet for children ages 5 - 12. Their vision is to be the source for technology based childhood learning – accessible everywhere in the world and without charge. The site is very large with many resources; as with all resources, please review the content before sharing with your children.
http://e-learningforkids.org/

Learn To Type
Free online typing lessons are available with or without registration at Learn To Type. Without registration, progress is not saved. With free registration, you may login each use and save your progress. According to the site's terms of use, "TypingWeb will never share your email or personal information with any 3rd party source, and will never email you without your consent."
http://www.typingweb.com/

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5. Time4Learning

(Our Sponsor)

Looking for an affordable (and effective) Online Homeschool Curriculum? Voted a top three selection of the Homeschool.com "Top 100 Educational Websites of 2009, Time4Learning combines technology and curriculum to create an "outside-the-box" approach to learning. The PreK-8th grade curriculum includes:

Over 1,000 interactive lessons
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Detailed reporting for record keeping
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6. Recently Seen Online

Homeschool Burnout
"Burnout happens to all homeschoolers at least once, sometimes more than once in our homeschooling journeys. Even those who do not follow a scope and sequence or a particular curriculum can fall victim to burnout. We all have expectations, internal and external, on ourselves and our children and those expectations can easily lead us to question why we are homeschooling and if we should continue to homeschool..."

See more on TheHomeSchoolMom.com

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7. Article - Finding Ideas, Not Discouragement
by Barbara Frank

With the renaissance of homeschooling in the early 1980s came a trickle, and then a flood, of books and magazines about homeschooling. These were eagerly read by homeschooling parents wanting to know how others were teaching their children, because there weren’t many homeschoolers around to talk with.

Today, reading about how other families homeschool their children is almost too easy. There are more magazines and books than ever, plus countless blogs on the Internet where parents reveal every last detail of their homeschooling journeys, or so it seems.

There’s a very real danger here, however. With so much personal revelation out there, it’s way too easy to compare your family and your homeschooling experience to others. This is not a good thing!

You can always find someone whose homeschooling experience sounds far more successful than your own. It’s way too tempting to think, “We have so many struggles, and after reading about this family, it’s obvious that I’m in over my head in this homeschooling thing. Her kids are doing so many wonderful projects, and I have to fight to get mine away from the video games to do anything. I give up!”

The fact is that every family is different, and no family can imitate another and come up with the same results. It’s not fair to compare another family to yours: different kids, different parents, and different financial situations. When you read about other homeschooling families, try to think about which of their ideas would work for your family instead of imitating everything they do in a misguided attempt to “succeed.”

Besides, homeschooling success is defined in many different ways. For one child, it’s getting to college on a full scholarship. For another, it’s making his way in the world on his own. For a few, like my teenage son, it’s functioning to the best of your abilities despite multiple disabilities.

So go ahead, read all the homeschooling books and magazines and surf homeschoolers’ blogs. Visit online homeschool forums. Glean as many great ideas as you think might work for your family. Discard those that turn out to be wrong for your family. And always keep in mind that there’s no one right way to homeschool. The beauty of homeschooling is that it can be tailored to each family, each child, and each parent.

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Barbara Frank is the mother of four homeschooled-from-birth children ages 16-26, a freelance writer/editor, and the author of “Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers, “The Imperfect Homeschooler’s Guide to Homeschooling,”and “Homeschooling Your Teenagers.” You'll find her on the Web at www.cardamompublishers.com and http://barbarafrankonline.com/

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