Friday, I read a post on Examiner.com entitled “Public School Enrollment Increasing Due to Economic Crisis“. Is this true? I don’t know.

Certainly no one can argue that money-wise things have gotten tough and will likely get tougher! Many people, if not fearful, are concerned, very concerned about the economy’s effect on their family and lifestyle. Many  have begun tightening and re-tightening their belts. Tough choices are being made.

The author, in the above mentioned post, wrote that many homeschoolers are considering putting their kids back into public school because the cost of home school is too expensive in today’s economic crisis. She stated she personally knew homeschoolers who are considering public school as an option in order to cut household expenses and to allow the homeschooling parent to get a job to further ease the financial pressures.

For any of you who may be considering the tough choice of putting your children in public school for financial reasons, may I encourage you to take your time in making this decision.

1. Pray. Ask God to show you His desires. Ask Him to reveal to you ways you can either increase your income or decrease your household outflow. Ask Him to show you creative ways to homeschool and to bring others alongside.
2. Consider why you began homeschooling in the first place and carefully, prayerfully reconsider those reasons. Have any of them changed? My guess is, if anything, they have grown stronger. Read the rest of this entry »

We are a nation of consumers. We want what we want when we want it. Perhaps our plastic “money” should contain the slogan “Buy Now, Pay later.”

Gone are the principles of previous generations of “saving until you can afford it” and “when the money in the envelope is gone, it’s gone. Period. Make do.” We are over our heads in debt.

Or as US News and World Report puts it:

For more than four decades, our shopaholic nation has shown an insatiable desire to spend until our credit cards melt. … Indeed, it often seems that we have defined ourselves by our ability to buy supersized everything, from McMansions to tricked-out SUVs to 60-inch flat-screen televisions—all enabled by decades of cheap credit.

Consider just a few statistics from, interestingly enough, CreditCards.com:

• 55 percent of credit card users keep a balance on their credit card
• The average American with a credit file is responsible for $16,635 in debt, excluding mortgages
• The average credit card indebted young adult household now spends nearly 24 percent of its income on debt payments
• Total U.S. consumer debt (which includes credit card debt and noncredit-card debt but not mortgage debt) reached $2.55 trillion at the end of 2007, up from $2.42 trillion at the end of 2006
• Young Americans now have the second highest rate of bankruptcy, just after those aged 35 to 44.
• U.S. consumers racked up an estimated $51 billion worth of fast food on their personal credit and debit cards in 2006

Book One: How to Understand Economics in One Hour

This year we tackled a ½ credit course of Civics. A large part of our course was a study of Economics, which I confess, I knew very little about. Our primary text for economics, which I highly recommend, Read the rest of this entry »

Several months ago, a friend sent me this quote from the late President Reagan:

“All great change in America begins at the dinner table.“

I really liked it and yet, it really bothered me. A lot. I couldn’t get it out of my head – it just kept nagging me. But why? I can be a little slow sometimes, but eventually, I realized, God was trying to teach me something.

My grandkids and I began our home education adventure late in the game, so to speak. First, my granddaughter asked to be homeschooled in March of her 7th grade year of public schooling. I knew it was the right thing to do and a week later, we began. She needed to be home where she could excel, but, as I wrote in an earlier post, she also desperately needed time – a full year to be exact – to decompress from the stresses she brought home with her. Once she was ready, she went from a struggling student who was barely pulling a ”C” in most of her classes, to one who will graduate this year with a 4.0 (so far) GPA.

The next year, in October, my grandson also in 7th grade at the time, asked to come home and try homeschooling. He is now a high school junior and doing great! His interests and style of learning are as different as night and day from his sister, but being home educated has afforded him to learn his way and pursue his interests. I know in my heart of hearts, had he stayed in public school, he would have sunk.

Before we began home educating, I prayerfully asked God to show me His priorities. His answer was very clear: “Teach them about Me and My Word, be a Godly example and trust Me to lead you as you continue.”

I confess I get side-tracked sometimes, putting my agenda before His. But, Read the rest of this entry »

We have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us! It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.
~ President Abraham Lincoln
National Proclamation of Prayer and Repentance, 1863

We owe humble and heartfelt thanks to the Author of all blessings.
~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1904

We should ask what we can do as individuals to demonstrate our gratitude for all He has done.
~ Ronald Reagan 1981

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
~ Somerset Maugham

Thank you.
Sue

As promised, here’s the rest of Charter & Other Free Online Schools as a distance learning option for homeschoolers. As discussed in the Part 1 a “free” school is a public school and therefore will be controlled to varying degrees by government regulations either at the local or state level.

People choose homeschool for many reasons and in my opinion the question to ask is:

Why are you homeschooling or considering homeschool?

• You don’t agree with what was/is being taught in the public school?
• For religious reasons – you want your children to learn from a faith perspective?
• You want to remove your child from the physical environment and influences of the public school?
• For health or some other reason, your child is unable to attend school?
• Frustration with the long hours that traditional public school requires, including the homework?
• To alleviate some of the stress you are observing, particularly in you highschool student’s life because of the demands and expectations place upon them?

Having given thought to why you want to homeschool, let’s take a quick look at the advantages and disadvantages of choosing an online government school or public brick & mortar charter school as a distance learning option. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever have one of those days, or maybe a few in a row, when life just gets in the way? You have your day’s agenda all laid out & BOOM, life happens and your plans go out the window. Ever have that happen? Yeah, me too! Yesterday and today have been two such days when unexpected events, turned our usual routine, especially homeschool, upside down. Read the rest of this entry »

In graphic design, there’s a term called “white space”. Good design leaves plenty of room for white space in the margins and throughout the piece – space where there is nothing but paper showing through. White space is restful to the reader’s eye and evokes a non-busy, non-overwhelming feel to the publication. White space is an important design element that invites the reader to keep reading.

We need white space in our lives too. Read the rest of this entry »