“My 7-year-old is still not reading at the level I keep thinking she needs to.” “My 14-year-old has been taught phonics but is having a very difficult time with applying the rules to spelling words and reading is slow–he will see a difficult word and just say something. I really think that he is being a very lazy reader” This is a common concern, and one that is very understandable. After all, the single most important educational skill your child will learn is reading, and a student who loves to read will find he has a tremendous advantage in every...

Timberdoodle has often heard the question, “how do you schedule homeschooling?” and while many families do it differently we thought we would share what worked well for our family. Our philosophy has been that the sooner a child can learn how to learn the easier homeschooling becomes. (For more on this see Why Timberdoodle Encourages Independent Learning.) So in our family growing up, as soon as we were able to read we became responsible for completing our own assignments. Mom started each school year by figuring out how much we needed to accomplish each week in order to finish that grade level by...

By January, the anticipation of a new school year has become a distant memory and the remaining months of homeschooling loom either as mountains of drudgery or peaks of delight. While using a relevant curriculum is paramount, I suspect that there is another key element at play here, one that most homeschooling parents would do well to consider. Whatever your reason for undertaking a task of this great magnitude, the relevant question to consider is how you see your decision to homeschool altering with time? In your wildest dreams, do you think that in years to come, government schools will...

In response to an article I recently reposted about family devotions, there was a comment about the difficulty of doing family devotions when your family includes special needs children. This is a very valid and relevant concern, and one that many families are facing, so I will make mention of a few personal experiences. While our family currently does not have any special needs members, we did have an 8-year-old girl with severe autism live with us for about a year. I acknowledge that our experience is limited, but here are a couple of things we found helpful. When Krissy came to stay...

There are dozens of ways to make camel bags. Ours are very crudely made and yet have served us well for many, many years. Here is what you will need: 2 yards of burlap glue gun coarse glitter Fold in half lengthwise, for easier cutting and cut so that the finished piece measures 72 by 24 inches. We drape our bags over the back of our dining room chairs. If your chairs are appreciably wider or narrower, you may want to adjust the second measurement.   Using a glue gun, glue along all the edges... ...and fold over about 1...