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No Essay $2,000.00 Giveaway

Jul13

5205491f-8558-4494-90ed-06b80a0a646f-iStock_000012964822XSmallThe cost of a college education can seem cost prohibitive and discouraging, but there are scholarships available for your student. I saw this ad and wanted to pass it along to you.  Here is a scholarship contest that your student doesn’t have to write an essay. They do need to sign up for a newsletter in order to be entered into the drawing. Here are the details:

$2,000 “No Essay” College Scholarship

NEXT DEADLINE:

July 31st at 11:00 p.m. EST Winner notified by August 15th Be sure to apply every month! Super easy. Anyone can win.

Scholarships don’t get any easier than this. Simply login or register for a free account using the form on this page and you could be the next winner!

How it Works The $2,000 “No Essay” Scholarship is open to all students and those planning on enrolling within 12 months. The monthly winner will be determined by random drawing and then contacted directly and announced in Niche’s e-newsletter and on the Scholarship Winners page. One entry per person, but you can come back each month to try again.

Who can apply? High schoolers, adults looking to head back to school, current college students and anyone else looking to attend college or graduate school within 12 months.

I hope you win! 🙂

Minecraft Online Classes

Jun1

imgresDo you have a child who is interested in Minecraft? Did you know there are online classes that your student can enroll in that would correlate with your school? Minecraft Homeschool has classes that are related to history, language arts, math, and science. Classes do not have a set time so they can be taken when it is convenient for your schedule.

Here is the website to see if anything interests your student. Chances are that you will have to limit the amount of classes s/he will want to take! Game Academy

Personal Finance for Students of All Ages

May4
Money

Image by AMagill via Flickr

Beginning with the graduating class of 2014, personal finance is a required subject for Ohio public school students. Given the state of economic affairs, I think this is a credit that will benefit all students. It’s never too early to begin showing and discussing money affairs with our children. I have some resources that you can incorporate into your math curriculum or teach as a separate topic.

My Family Counts workbook is free and can be downloaded and used to introduce and discuss with your elementary students ideas such as needs versus wants,saving, spending, giving, setting goals, budgeting, and banking transactions. There is also a free online game called Nicklesberg that you can register your student and is designed for students 3rd to 5th grade.

Looking for a homeschool curriculum? Many people recommend Dave Ramsey’s course.

Dave Ramsey Financial Peace The Foundations in Personal Finance for Homeschool Student Text is a comprehensive, 288-page student soft-cover consumable. It provides students an opportunity to learn, practice, and apply important personal finance knowledge and skills. The 12 chapters are aligned with the National Standards for Financial Literacy.

Here are several online courses for your high school student if you’d like to have your scholar do it this way.

Practical Money Skills for Life has a FREE downloadable course for your 9-12 grade student.

This dynamic financial literacy curriculum for 9 – 12 graders features engaging design, student-centered activities, research projects, discussion points, and tools and resources–all designed to engage students in learning the personal finance skills they need to succeed in life after high school.

Time4Learning is affordable if you have a student that can move through the coursework  fairly quickly. It is $30.00 per month and you may quit at any time. I have copied the description from the website

High School Personal Finance

The high school Personal Finance curriculum is organized into thirteen exercises that cover topics such as balancing a checkbook, avoiding debt, saving for home ownership, preparing for retirement, and performing investments using a program designed to simulate real stock market transactions. This course is designed to help students understand economics as a whole, and the importance of financial responsibility, both in college and beyond.

 

 

 

10 Reasons to Homeschool During the Teen Years

Apr6

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Homeschooling through high school can be difficult at times, but I found that the benefits and rewards far outweighed the difficulties we encountered. Here are some things to consider:

 TEN REASONS TO HOME SCHOOL DURING THE TEEN YEARS 

1. You get to see the completion of your efforts. Something is lost when you turn over your home discipling to others.

2. You can customize your children’s education to provide motivation for their gifts and abilities. No one else will be able to provide the consistent and loving support that you can in weak areas.

3.You can direct them to early college entrance. Even public high schools realize many students are ready for college level courses and have cooperating programs with colleges.

4. You can continue the family building process. The teen years continue to be impressionable and formative. This is an invaluable time to cement family relationships.

5. You can be sure that your teens are learning, if they are at home. Studies have revealed that public high school students average 2 hours and 13 minutes of academic work a day.

6. If you send your teens to high school, there will be a diversion away from the academic focus, as well as spiritual priorities. Be aware of the many distractions that won’t parallel the home life you have maintained.Vast amounts of time separated from the family will affect their relationship with you. We have all put great amounts of our heart and time into our home-schooling years, and we want those efforts preserved.

7. Home school is the best preparation for college studies. The home education “style” is closer to college-type instruction.

8. There is greater flexibility for work/study opportunities.

9. Home educators have the best available curriculum and greater selection. Public schools offer revisionist history and science that promotes their humanist perspective. The godly commitment of many great Americans has been deleted from public text books.

10. Age/grade isolation or segregation inhibits socialization. Public school children are behind their home school counterparts in maturity, socialization, and vocabulary development, as demonstrated by available research.

(source: HSLDA)

My personal reason: I enjoyed having my sons around the house! We had a lot of interesting discussions and fun too.  🙂

Language Arts Games to Play

Jan12

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Sometimes it’s just hard coming up with a way to reinforce grammar and spelling lessons. Instead of workbooks, how about some games? Your student will be engaged longer with the subject and with more than one of the senses involved, will better retain the information. So, pull out the games and have fun!

 

Word Games

  • Scrabble and Scrabble Jr. are not only ways to work on spelling, but these games require some strategy in the placement of words on the board. Mathematics skills can be reinforced as well if scorekeeping is involved. You can purchase it as a board game or you can get the app. for FREE!
  • Scattergories (pick a general category and write 10 letters of the alphabet going vertically) You don’t even have to purchase the game! You can create your own. Set the timer for one minute. Each player reviews their words and whoever has the most wins that round. Determine how many points will win the game ahead of time.
  • Boggle is a great game to play for middle school and older students. This online version has a timer and you can see how many words you can spell within the allotted time. Not only is this an online game, but it can be a board game to play with the whole family. You cab also purchase it as a board game if you like. Click Here
  • Mad Libs are fun, nonsensical stories that you fill in the blanks. A review of parts of speech and even giving a mini lesson helps students to think of adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs (plus others) to complete the story. You can download stories or purchase them. You can even download a free app of the game!