17th Carnival of Homeschooling- Better Late Than Never Edition

Apologies for the delay in the carnival of homeschooling. Blogger wasn't working for most of us yesterday, and this morning my email account, my connection and my computer have been giving me fits. I hope you find it was worth the wait! Here are the entries, in roughly the order they were received, nothing fancy this time, so you can focus on the posts instead of how clever I was in organizing them this time (Next time I'll be clever).


Sprittibee gives a sample lesson plan for her homeschool day (she uses Konos Character Building Curriculum – a Christian based Unit Study Program) in Season Unit Lesson Plans (...and Plague Reviews?)

Danielle Bean shares a post about a "learning day" at the lake.


Kathy at the blog Through It All talks about developing a
family philosophy of education to help guide you in your homeschool
journey, and compares home educating without figuring out what your educational philosophy is with trying to drive to a location without a roadmap.


Trinity Prep School has a post about Making a Book of Centuries-a fun way to record your history studies. She says her kids can thumb through 5000 years of story pages, laughing at their early artwork, critiquing their crooked primary handwriting, and recalling the rabbit trails they chased. Are you ready to turn the pages of time in your homeschool? She tells us how to go about it,


I don't know about you, but just reading the title to this post made me excited about reading the post: Charlemagne’s Math Tutor
Percival Blakeney Academy
tells us that many of the challenging word problems and logic stumpers we enjoy today were first written by Alcuin, an early middle ages monk and the head of Charlemagne’s palace school at Aachen. He mastered the art of setting logic and math problems in everyday contexts. How cool is that? Carolingian era word problems?!


Patricia Ann's Pollywog Creek Porch asks "Are your children blooming on schedule?"
I can relate when she says she worried needlessly about the slower learning time table one of hr children had, but just like the trees in my backyard, he "bloomed" in his time, and you would never know it today.

The Queen of Carrots is one of my favorite bloggers. She's smart, funny, and she was homeschooled herself. She's working on a series of posts about growing up homeschooled, and here's the first: Before there was School. At the next big homeschool blogger contest, we need a category for 'family you would most like to have as next door neighbors. The Queen would be one of my nominations. Reading this post, her parents and grandparents would have to come with her.

Melissa at Home Sweet Home shares A Great Day at Home Sweet Home: An example of how they have arranged their days and what it is like when the day works the way it should.


Farm School presents Power To The People, The power, and real goal, of critical thinking.


Allan, who has raised five homeschooled children and blogs at Bastiat Free University, has listed some interesting quotes about education and liberty from Jefferson to Hazlitt, several of which would make some nice copywork and handwriting practice.

Suffering from Burnout? A Home for Homeschoolers is where you need to be, reading about ten tips for coping.


Maria at the Homeschool Math Blog
Says "kids need to learn the facts and the way school systems are going about teaching math can be quite a mess. But some IDEAS within the mathematics reform movement are actually good and sound." She tells us which ideas she thinks are the good ones.

The Imperfect Homeschooler
This time of year, homeschooling parents are planning which curriculum to buy, but they also need to think about their hidden curriculum, i.e. how they teach their children by their examples. She tells us how to go about Recognizing Your Hidden Curriculum

Lennie at Cross Blogging wants to let other homeschoolers know about HSLDA's six month trial offer- if you're interested in joining HSLDA for six months free, see Lennie's post.

Raising Independent Kids? Rebecca at The Upside Down World examines the stereotype of clingy, dependent children of stay-at-home moms (which goes double for stay-at-home homeschooling moms). Is this true, or is this a symptom of a calloused cultural disregard for the legitimate needs of children?

For some philosophical discussion, pay a visit to Principled Discovery, where
Dana summarizes her educational philosophy and compares it to two other dominant worldviews

The Nerd Family shares a lighthearted view of the crazy adventure called homeschooling.

Nancy from their relaxed homeschooling and how she realized at the beginning of their homeschooling journey that so many of life's lessons would just be a part of their normal everyday routine.

Over at Why Homeschool
Henry answers a question about the attitude homeschoolers have towards the public school system.

Mama Squirrel presents This is too hard, too boring, irrelevant... posted at Dewey's Treehouse (and another excellent read it is, too, but we knew it would be when we saw it was Mama Squirrels's).

The Twice Bloomed Wisteria offers an introspective post on self-evaluation and how hard it can be to watch our children fail struggle. (This entry corrected at Wisteria's demand, as she says she never used the word failure and if there are any failures they are hers rather than her children's. I apologize for offending her.)

Karen presents Damning With Faint Praise posted at The Thomas Institute.

David and the boys at Bruggie Tales recently attended a games convention at a local school and found two more reasons
to continue to home educate.

The Thinking Mother has yet another thoughtful post, this one about supporting other homeschoolers. Although Cindy didn't enter this post in the carnival, I think her latest post on Gestapo Homeschooling Moms is an excellent companion piece to this one. If you've ever been made to feel guilty, stupid, or less of a Christian because you don't bake your own bread or because you do (yes, I've been told I was in bondage because we grind our own wheat and bake a lot of our own bread), because your kids chew gum or do not chew gum, because you have goats or because you don't, because you start homeschooling at 7 a.m. or because you do not get out of bed until 10 a.m., because you go to bed at sunset or because you let your kids stay up until midnight (or later), because you play sports or because you don't, or for any of a number of other reasons, if you've ever asked a question and felt stifled by the replies, or if you have a tendency to shut people up with your replies, these are two posts you must read. Or not. I don't wanta be the Gestapo Homeschooling Mom.

Teaching children the value of hard work isn't easy. Here's two basic principles Spunky has taught her children that have helped make that life lesson a little more real and understandable.

And that's it, for now. Because Blogger failed to save to drafts of this post, because Yahoo told me 'this page cannot be displayed' and forced me to hit refresh in between every. single. email. (but no, I am not bitter, why do you ask?), because I am scatterbrained and unorganized, and for all these and other reasons, it's very likely I've missed some submissions. If I missed yours, please let me know in the comments and I'll address it as soon as possible.

Update: Broken links to Mama Squirrel's and Karen's blogposts fixed.