Homeschooling project

[celticdragonfly]

Okay, dear people, help me out here.

Now that Jamie is in school in the mornings, I'm Getting Serious about moving ahead with Maggie's homeschooling.

Not at a really heavy level. She is only 4. I don't want to push too hard. We're looking at oh, a half hour to an hour's worth of work each day, to start.

I need to keep records. Well, I don't really need it NOW - but I will need it in the future. And I suck at this sort of thing, so I better try hard to establish habits now. I want to get a folder (Hey, Karl, bring me a few folders tonight, please) and put the sheets we write on in it and have a slot in the filing cabinet for them. Maybe by month?

And I want to create a secondary livejournal account, that I will note what we do in it. Just little entries. I suck at keeping records, but you know, I'm not bad at writing up lots of LJ stuff.

I'm trying to think what to call the LJ account. GallagherHomeschool is too long. Miles suggested Gallagher_HS, but that sounds like Gallagher High School, and that's a long way away.

Suggestions, please?

I will friends-lock everything, just because I don't think this should be public, but if you're on my flist and interested in following her progress, let me know.

Also, I clearly need a good homeschooling icon. Also accepting suggestions.

Comments

[woobiewoobster.livejournal.com]

What about: mags_school

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

Possible, although I expect it to eventually be for record-keeping for Maggie AND Jamie, once he *hopefully* catches up verbally and can come out of special ed. And for that matter, eventually for the Little Larva that's due out in June.

[toraks.livejournal.com]

I don't remember where at all, but I do remember seeing something about a web site exactly created for this-- homeschooling records.

You might want to do a web search for it or something like it. I seem to remember it being a supportive place for parents homeschooling as well. It might be useful!!

To be more clear, what you've suggested as far as recordkeeping ounds great! Just that I remember a very pertinent web site existing and it might help you. And if it was something that others used the same way, it might encourage you to keep it up. (I'm sure that's going to be hard to do!)

Good luck! I'm very impressed by you for doing this!

[xinef.livejournal.com]

What about Maggie_HS? Not likely to be mistaken for a high school. You could set one up for Jamie_HS too, while you're at it. Then you could keep comments on each separate.

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

Lazily, I wanted to do it all with one LJ. Then I just keep it logged in on IE, say, while I keep this one logged in on Firefox. Makes it more likely to actually get used. I could see maybe doing separate entries for each child, keep them tagged under the kids' names, in case I had to come up with what was up for each one, yes.

[xinef.livejournal.com]

Gallagher_hmsc?

[selenite.livejournal.com]

"Gallagher.edu" ? Or Gallagher_edu if the other isn't LJ-legal.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Potential student icons from Girl Genius:

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/cgi-bin/gg101.cgi?date=20050314

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/cgi-bin/gg101.cgi?date=20050406

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/cgi-bin/gg101.cgi?date=20050518

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/cgi-bin/gg101.cgi?date=20050916

Oh, this is the best one:
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/cgi-bin/gg101.cgi?date=20050919
"We're all supposed to be learning about science and how to rule properly and stuff like that." Not a bad curriculum for our kids . . .

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

I am now seized with a desire to officially name us Gallagher Polygnostic. Hm, not GPU, as university really does imply older. Gallagher Polygnostic Academy? GPA? Possible.

[taerin.livejournal.com]

Of course GPA, because it also means Grade Point Average. :-)

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Which may be what most people think. We, of course, will chortle because homeschoolers don't really care about grade points, and we will be ANYTHING but average.

Plus it gives me a built in motto.

Now I need to find a font like the one on the wall here
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/cgi-bin/gg101.cgi?date=20050314

[selenite.livejournal.com]

I like GPA.

"Yes, our children have a damn good GPA."

Also, Polygnostic works well with our personal philosophies.

[archangelbeth]

Oh, yes, GPA is great.

I'd love to be on the list. I was... Um, "homeschooled" doesn't really work. I got reading from the IAHP.org (Better Baby aka Glen Doman's Teach Your Baby To Read) technique, and now read quite well (as does the minx, who got the same), and math came up somewhere enough to do adding and subtracting...

Anyway, I started (private) school around my 9th birthday -- reading well, doing math adaquately -- and I'd love to see hints of how that sort of thing is supposed to work. O:>

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

I'd like to be on the filter/community, once it's up. Don't have any kids yet myself, but we'd like to mostly homeschool them once we do, and I'd really like to hear how it goes on your end. I mean, I have vague plans for the future, but far too many of them boil down to "Well, let's not repeat the mistakes made when I was being homeschooled."

[friday18.livejournal.com]

I think the LJ idea is a great one. I'd be very interested in being on th f-list.

I know a number of homeschooling families, although we don't have any kids yet, so we haven't done it ourselves.

As far as record keeping goes, month-by-month may work well while the kids are very young, but as they get a bit older, it may be more helpful to file things by general subject and year (reading 2007, math 2008, science, history, etc). That will make it easier in case you;re trying to prove what the kids studied on a given subject. Also, as homeschoolers, some of their projects are going to span more than a month, so it might make it easier to have it filed by topic.

I do have some background in education, at various levels of formality/informality. I also have a lot of experience with organizing and record-keeping.

Here's a page on About.com that links to a number of pages and sites with info that you might find helpful on this:
http://homeschooling.about.com/od/records/Record_Keeping_and_Scheduling.htm

That's all I've got for now, but let me know if there's any way I can help.

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

LJ should make it reasonably easy to pull that sort of thing up with tags for different topics as we get to that.

We are ...

[mamalynx.livejournal.com]

Caerdroia Classical Academy ... if that helps you any. On a bad day, we're St. Brutus' ;-)

I keep records casually. Very, very casually. I figure I'll get serious around 8th grade.