-by Mimi Rothschild

As autumn comes on, we love to get outdoors into the crisp fall air! You don’t have to choose between study and fresh air when you take some learning scavenger hunts to support your studies.

Just give your students paper and writing implements, maybe a digital camera or a sketch book, and a list of things to hunt for. Have a great walk, and come home with a lot of teaching points for the rest of the day.

Signs of Fall
• Birds flying south for the winter – monarch butterflies, too.
• Color in the leaves of trees and shrubs.
• Seed pods on the ground, sticking to your socks, and floating in the air (collect them and make a lapbook or labeled display).
• Chipmunks chattering.
• Ripening fruits: grapes, pumpkins, apples, more.
• Blooming flowers: Michaelmas daisies, chrysanthemum, and bittersweet.
• Cooler temperatures at night.
• Morning mists.
• Pine cones fallen on the ground, along with some nibbled acorns and nuts.
• Yellowjackets getting busy.

Architecture Walk
• A-frame
• Arch
• Casement window (a window that opens by swinging out, not sliding up)
• Columns
• Dutch door (a door divided in half, so the halves open separately)
• Eaves
• Gables
• Keystone
• Mullions (the vertical piece between windows)
• Oriel (a box-like window that sticks out from the wall)
• Shutters

Alphabet Walk
• Try to find an example of every letter before getting home.
• Decide whether you’ll include “accidental letters” – the half-circle gate that looks like a C or the O-shaped manhole cover.

You can take scavenger hunt walks at any time of year, but the fall is a particularly nice time to do it.

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Mimi Rothschild is the Founder of Learning By Grace, Inc. the nation’s leading provider of online PreK-12 online Christian educational programs for homeschoolers.

-by Mimi Rothschild

If the leaves are turning color where you live, you can make use of them in your homeschool lessons. Here are some fun ideas:

• Press leaves. Just find an assortment of fall leaves and put them carefully between the pages of an old phonebook or another book you won’t need to read for a while. Lay the book flat in a dry place and set a couple more heavy books on top of it. When you return in a few weeks, you’ll have perfectly pressed leaves for your scrapbook. Label them to make a leaf identification book or leaf collection. See how many different leaves you can find in your neighborhood!
• Preserve leaves. You can buy glycerin at the drugstore. Collect freshly fallen leaves and set them into glycerin just as you would put flowers into water. Soon you’ll have beautifully preserved leaves for plant study, or for household decorating. Spraying leaves with hairspray doesn’t work quite as well, but it’ll do if you don’t have access to glycerin.
• Wax leaves. Old fashioned waxed paper makes great leaf art. Put leaves between two sheets and carefully iron them together at low heat. You can make many different designs, from simple single leaves to complicated pictures built up from leaves, and then fix the leaves in place by this method.
• Rub leaves. Put leaves down on a flat surface so that the veins show. Lay a sheet of paper over the leaf and gently rub with the flat side of a crayon or with a pencil. You’ll have a fine textured tracing.
• Pound leaves. Put leaves between pieces of white cotton (a pillowcase is perfect). Take your cloth and leaf sandwich out to the sidewalk or patio and carefully but thoroughly hammer the cloth everywhere there are leaves. The leaves will make neat patterns on the cloth. Iron them to set the color. Some leaves work better than others. Try different kinds, keep track of your results, and you have a good science experiment, too.
• Bleach leaves. Arrange leaves on the front of colored T-shirts. Put a fairly strong solution of bleach into a spray bottle and spray on the leaves and shirt. An adult should do this part, with care. You’ll be surprised by the colors that appear!

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Mimi Rothschild is the Founder of Learning By Grace, Inc. the nation’s leading provider of online PreK-12 online Christian educational programs for homeschoolers.

By Mimi Rothschild, Founder of Learning By Grace, Inc., the nation’s leading provider of online Christian programs for homeschoolers.

It is the first day of the new homeschool year. The homeschooling parent studies the faces before her. How shall she guides these children who look to her to open the way of life to them? Her eagerness to help them, her Christian purposes, her knowledge of the Bible necessary as they are are not enough for all that must be done. Children have basic needs. Children need to know that God invites them to enter into a deep personal relationship with him. They need to understand that through repentance and trust naming claim God’s forgiveness and help because he is promised these. Just when the child’s realization of his need for God will come the teacher cannot know. His confidence must rest upon his knowledge that God is the initiator, but his spirit is already seeking after each member of the homeschool group, continually active, continually present in human life.

God, in winning the children for Christ’s. So the homeschooling teacher counts herself a humble coworker with God in winning her children were cries. In order to be effective in soul winning, the homeschooling parent must know these children if she is to win their confidence in each one to become the best that he or she can be. As Emmett A. that’s says, we must learn our children before we can teach them. This is double the true leaders value individual personality and refuse to accept an assembly line ideal as their goal for children’s progress towards Christ likeness of the homeschooling teacher must learn to know her children by every means at her command. She must know what they are like, how they learn and what can be expected of them individually. She must discover their strong points, while not overlooking their weak ones. Fortunately, there are a variety of ways by which an adult leader may be calm, acquainted with her homeschooled children.

Undoubtedly, the people who know the children best, are his parents. Not only has the mother given birth to him, but she has lived with him in closest in Tennessee for all of his life. The parent knows the state of the child’s health, is present stage and rate of growth, what era tapes or embarrasses him, whether or not he reads easily, who are his friends, and if he is over six, but his academic achievements are thus far. The importance of this information is obvious to every homeschooling parent.

Other issues that a homeschooling parent should consider when teaching her children are things like how many and what sort of adults. Does he have to adjust. Is the child lost among many brothers and sisters? Is he a pampered only child or an overburdened oldest child? Is he the only boy among many sisters? Is she the only girl among many brothers? What is his relationship to his siblings like, whether his responses and reactions to others in the family? All these matters are important if the homeschooling parent is to help the individual child to grow

Every homeschooling teacher has a purpose. His or her purpose may be stated in many ways, but however they differ, the goals of Christian homeschooling are almost always centered around bringing our children to a closer relationship with the Lord and a better understanding of His creation. Teachers will be found to have one desire and one goal in common. Each desires to see the children in his or her care developed into a loyal, affected Christians, and each purpose is to guide their child through his throws in that direction. How that dieting will be done, what materials and methods will be used, depends on the wisdom, experience and knowledge of the child nature which the individual homeschooling teacher learns.

Homeschooling programs should have both long-term and short-term goals. The thoughtful homeschooling parent always keeps in mind that Christlike character is one of the primary purposes of the program. Most parents know that Christlike character does not come all at once, but that it is always a matter of slow growth. Homeschooling parents want children in their programs to be interested, engaged and happy while they are learning and growing.

All this means that the homeschooling teachers concerned not only with the kind of man that Terri will be calm, but with what is happening to Terri now. Bus, his purpose includes both a long-term goal of building a Christlike character, and the immediate objective, which may be to beat Kerry to share his new football with the boy next door. The teacher keeps in mind the ultimate goal, which is to help Terri become a Christian citizen will act and react in his homeschool, and in his church, in his community as one who is truly a believer. Parents also want their children to meet the tests of life now, on his present level of development. So sometimes the near and far goldens merge and become one. There are many experiences and opportunities which are homeschooling children need now. With the ultimate goal in mind, the homeschooling teacher plans for her children so that each experience, each opportunity is a step towards that goal. Children need to know that what Jesus said about worshiping God in spirit and in truth, and to discover what this means for a 10-year-old 15 and even a three year old. You must find ways of helping his brother, which will not humiliate him what make it difficult for him to help himself. He must learn the difference between giving and sharing. Through such experiences our homeschool students can grow in sympathy and in understanding.

In all of our planning for our children’s educational christian homeschool programs, we must use our utmost wisdom, and all the knowledge we can gain about the nature and needs of our children. We must strive to give the children many successful experiences in Christian living. Of course, we also realize that none of us grow steadily toward perfection. We all stumble at times and fall: Nice skin and then we need to repent and ask forgiveness which God grants us freely through Christ. It is at such times that we need the guidance of loving and understanding parents and friends, especially while we are still image were in our attempts to live as followers of Christ. The homeschooling parent may sometimes feel inadequate, but we can always remember that we are workers for God and that God’s grace will supply all of our human needs.

“When will I be big enough to go to college like all these boys?” This used to be the favorite question of our seven year old as the father and son walked together through the campus of the University or the father was employed. Although he was thinking of “big” from the standpoint of chronological age, his questions got us thinking about the questions which many homeschooling parents ponder at times. When will my child, be prepared for making his own contribution to the larger society of which he is a part? When will he be mature enough to make his own choices and decisions? Will he develop the degree of self reliance and independence, which all successful adults require?

The problem of the child’s readiness for taking his or her place in the adult world, when that day comes, is pushed into the distant future, as parents untangle their homeschool children from the immediate problems of the day. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” They gasp, “we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” Actually, these parents are crossing now, the bridge of the child’s adjustment in later years. What that far off day holds is being determined now by the way parents help the child learn to adjust day, by the maturity parents help them to achieve with the passing years, by the attitudes which he is developing day by day.

Maturity is a possession which none of us can dispel upon our children: the most that we can do is provide them with the experience is and relationships which will enable them to claim this precious possession for themselves. Doing this is one of our biggest tasks as parents. If our homeschooling children are able to cope with the vicciisitudes which life inevitably brings, the personal characteristics which make them so will be the result of guidance given, usually by parents, through the years of their childhood. A wise professor once said, if the early years of life are of such importance for personality development, it follows that the family occupies a commanding position in the field, since the child’s earliest and most profound experiences are with his family. Parents must be concerned with affording the child the opportunities for growth toward maturity during his early years, so that the anticipated adventure of being on his own will be another stage in his development rather than a frustrating and disappointing experience.

How big will our children be when they grow up? Will they have what it takes to measure up to the demands of life? Well, the future of our children is in our hands as parents, for we are entrusted with their training to our relationships with them day by day, right in our own homes: through the attitudes we communicate to them: through helping them to understand a person must learn to trust other people: through helping them to discover their own unique abilities and to trust in their own worth: to helping them to understand that the golden rule is of little use, unless they realize that the next move is bears: through enabling them to learn through experience that the world is a looking glass, which gives back to every man the reflection of his own attitudes.

The strains and tensions of modern life require that our children develop healthy personalities. If our children are to be able to withstand the pressures that are sure to come in later life, the foundation stone of this healthy personality is maturity, which consists of faith in God, devotion to Christian principles, trusting one’s self, and in life as a whole, and independence and reliance on the Lord in thought and action.

Mimi Rothschild is the Founder and CEO of Learning By Grace, Inc., the nation’s largest provider of online K-12 Christian homeschooling programs and homeschool Christian curriculum. For more information about how online homeschooling is revolutionizing homeschooling, please go to www.LearningByGrace.org today.

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