How we’re doing “techie” in our homeschool

In one of my latest blog posts, I talked about how we restructured our homeschool for 2010.

It’s been a month of trial and error, and pretty much, that routine has held fast and has become our school “core”.  It’s how we “do school”, wherever we are.  The cool thing is the flexibility the workbooks and schedule checks give us.  We’ve done school at Barnes and Noble, a local coffee shop (if you haven’t figured it out by now, I love coffee shops–not so much for the coffee, though I’ll take that too- but I think I may addicted to the coffee smells and being surrounded by books and chocolate!)…oh, and we have finished up school at doctor’s offices (January was a sick month for our fam as everyone seemed to be catching bugs and sniffles).

So we got the core down.  Basically it’s the three r’s (reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic, as they say).

We’re layering the electives week by week.  These past few weeks we’ve been working diligently on our online American History class, learning about Columbus and the early explorers.  Hopefully before the end of the month we would have reached the segments on slavery, which will fit in nicely with Black History Month.  NyGirl is also taking an online art class through Free K12 Homeschool. I keep saying I am going to post some of her art pics…I am hoping to get around to a lot of that this weekend.

In January I didn’t give NyGirl a new piano lesson, but she has been practicing all of her old songs.  So that’s one thing we’ll change for February (taking one month at a time).  We’re also kind of thinking ahead to the summer camps.  I may sign her up for vioiln again, since I definitely do not play or teach violin.

So back to the idea of restructuring our school.  In my last post I mentioned how that we made it so that our faith is the backbone of our school process.  I like to teach my children  the Bible and Christian foundation and principles daily (I try at least).  For that we are using Bible Lifepacs, Children’s Illustrated Bible, and other workbooks and online resources. These lessons naturally progress to our math, language arts, history, and other electives.

But there is one important point I seemed to have left out of that post:

Technology.

After re-reading it, I thought “Wow!  I didn’t even mention how we integrate technology into our curriculum.”

So, I wanted to salvage that.  Here’s how we do it:

• Typing, typing, and more typing.  Check out http://sense-lang.org/typing/
• If we can find subject matter games and resources online, we use them so the kids become familiar with using the computer.  Safe online resources like Zoodles or even the famous JumpStart CD’s help with tech integration.  We’ve never used it, but I heard StarFall is good for teaching kids phonics.
• We do voice narration recordings whenever possible.  What I do is let NyGirl take my voice recorder and answer questions either in one of her textbooks, or I might have a conversation with her about what she’s been learning, which we record.  Then later, I download those audio clips onto my computer, piece them together into a little “online radio show”, and upload our podcast.  She watches the process, and is currently learning the smaller steps to creating a podcast.
• From time to time I also like to teach her how to use productivity software.  NyGirl recently began using PowerPoint to do a slideshow on the solar system. We took that Power Point document and uploaded it to VoiceThread where she was able to combine both her voice and the presentation and make it available for people to comment, so it was kind of a social media thing too, but for education.  Fun!  I think next we will work on basic word processing (example- typing up a letter to a friend, etc.).  Nothing major.

So these are some of the things we’ve been doing and plan to do to integrate technology.  This is probably one of my favorite parts of home schooling.  If I were to ever teach in an actual school setting, becoming a technology specialist would probably be my goal.  Nonetheless, it is ultimately rewarding for me to watch my kids grow and learn- about technology, about God, about life.

Twitter This

Usuario: Password: