Helpful Tip for Your Home School

I find our days flow better when things are in the right place, easy to access and of course easy to work with.
Trying to share a book between 2 or more people can be challenging. Especially when most subjects are done together.

Textbook Stand or Cook Book Stand 
(tomato - tomato)

Both boys are sketching in their notebooks pictures of different types of geophytes.

If you don't already own one or even if you do and don't use it for homeschooling, I encourage you to give it a try!

You might not have known how useful a book stand is until you've owned one.
I bought mine in college for my enormous Art History books.

• useful for picture study (similar to an easel).
• reading together, when Zazu and I worked on his reading lessons (How to Teach your Child to read in 100 easy lessons).
• Bible reading
• sharing a book during family work time like in the picture above with our Exploring Creation with Botany book.
• to stand up your iPad when ie: watching a youtube clip on volcanoes erupting. 
• and of course for cooking with your kids so the recipe book doesn't get mucky.

If you ever come across one at a thrift store or garage sale pick it up, it's a handy little item.

This is the one we have

Good Day Friends
MO

Digital Narrating

Narration is a term used by Charlotte Mason. 

It is basically telling back what you know.

We are fairly new to this practice but I do my best to work it into most of what we do in our learning time.

In the summer when preparing for this coming school year I purchased a digital voice recorder. I initially bought it for creative writing and/or Eagle to get his ideas out verbally.  

One of the problems I find is multi-tasking multiple children's needs throughout the school day. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. It seems that at the moment I need to spend time with Zazu (7) of his narration, Alba requires some TLC, or Eagle needs to run something by me. So using a voice recorder I'm able to kill two birds with one stone. 

Just recently I decided to pull out the recorder to give to Zazu for his narration in history. I just told him to tell back what he could remember from our reading into the recorder. I prompted him a few times to jog his memory (because I knew he knew). He pressed pause when he needed to think and used the recorder quite well, I found. I played it back for him to hear his narration. And as a bonus he finds it fun to use also.

Then I took the digital file and I transcribed it, and popped it into his notebook. He can also add images to it from the web, or drawn and coloured by hand to make it personal. Or of course, leave it as is without any illustrations.

It's been a great tool for Zazu (7) to narrate all on his own. 
As, it's taken the pressure off of him to present what he knows to me. Because sometimes there's an off day and he just needs to get alone with his thoughts.

This is the one we have

Another idea

• An older student could upload the file onto the computer for a multimedia presentation, using an application like Keynote (Apple) or Microsoft's Movie Maker.




Happy (digital) Narrating,
Mo