Keyboarding

Keyboarding. Do you know what it is, and are your children practicing it?
Well, you probably do know what keyboarding is, because you are reading this online. That indicates that you probably used keyboarding to get here. Not so long ago homeschooling was done around the kitchen table, with notebooks, workbooks, and textbooks.
Now days, more and more families are utilizing the internet to home educate their children. When I was in high school, we took typing lessons, now children are practicing keyboarding. This is more than just typing letters, but includes learning to utilize the functionality of today’s modern keyboards.
In our house, keyboarding is also an adaptive technology. My daughter hates to write. She says that writing for any length of time causes pain in her hand and arm. If you saw how tightly she grips the pen you would probably agree that writing is painful for her. However, I cannot allow her to not write just because it is painful.
Our way around this is that she practices keyboarding as a course. She practices her typing skills in her core curriculum, as well as using keyboarding games. The games make it fun, and challenging. She enjoys trying to beat her best time, or her accuracy in the keyboarding games. Learning should be fun, right??

Homeschool Science

Homeschool science is what I wanted to write about today. My daughter loves science. She would never do any other course if I didn’t make her move on and study such things as language arts or math. We went to a library book sale not long ago, and do you know what she purchased? Yes, science text books. She wanted a chemistry and a physics text book.
That is what she bough the year before also. So my sixth grader has a growing collection of science text books on the high school level or higher.
What does she do with these books? She reads them…for fun. Don’t get me wrong, I love science, I find it fascinating, I have even studied it at the college level. But my daughter is eleven. I hope that this interest and fascination at a young age will lead to a career in a scientific field in her future.
Our core curriculum has science included in it. However, my daughter would like more, more, more science. Fortunately, the internet is a great source of science videos, and science information. There are even games that she has found online that allow her to apply physics concepts. She even found a game where she balances size of planets with gravitational pulls to build her own solar systems.
If your child is interested in science, foster this and like the unschooling parent, be a facilitator. Make sure that your child knows how to search for and enjoy various science web sites.