Susan Franklin reveals some basic concepts that empowered her to create an organized home and homeschool. She talks about how doing housework first thing in the morning, paying attention to small details, scheduling, and regular habits help create order and cleanliness. Includes her top ten tips for others with messy tendencies.
This article includes great organization tricks and tips for getting organized, including organizing around themes, how less is more, how to plan in blocks of time, and a discussion of storage solutions.
Much of the time, public school initiatives and regulations do not affect homeschoolers. The “next big thing” in public education, called Common Core education standards, already is, however, and that influence will grow. There are three major ways this nationwide initiative affects homeschool families: curriculum, testing, and student data tracking. There are some positive things about Common Core for public school students. For homeschool families, it largely represents an intrusion into their education freedoms.
Home Schooling Achievement provides a concise look at home school achievement test score data, followed by a more in depth comparison of student's scores with parent education levels, money spent on home school curriculum, government regulation, and race, and gender. In all categories, home school students' successes defy the standard predictors. The final chart examines activities and community involvement and resoundingly explodes the myth that home schooled children lack adequate socialization opportunities.
The Teachers.Net Lesson Bank is a resource designed to allow teachers to post and/or request specific lesson plans and teaching ideas. These lesson plans cover all sorts of subjects and grade levels. There is a remarkable amount of creativity and resources that can only come from the experience of teachers using these ideas successfully to make learning exciting. Note that because they are posted by individual teachers, there is not a standard format for these lesson plans (some don't have objectives, materials list, etc).