57 Questions

Burn Out, Classroom Help, Informative, Organization, Preschoolers

Written with Permission
By Kendra Fletcher
www.TOSMagazine.com

You may have heard this before, but I think we all need to be reminded: Putting a routine into place will be the single most helpful weapon in your arsenal to assure homeschooling success. At the very least, having a routine (or a schedule or a battle plan or a flow chart) will bring a measure of peace to your home simply because you won’t have to fly by the seat of your pants and think through decisions all day long.

Those decisions are exhausting, and often they are the deal breakers for me—questions like these: What’s for breakfast/lunch/dinner? Where do you want me to put this finished worksheet? When can we go to the craft store to buy more paint? How many pages do I have to read? Can I give the dog a bath in your bathroom? Times about 500 hundred. Seriously. (more…)

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Astronomy in “The Hobbit”

Classroom Help, Informative, Just For Fun

Written with Permission
By Jay Ryan
www.TOSMagazine.com

J.R.R Tolkien’s fantasy world of Middle Earth is populated by many unusual races, for which the author created elaborate panoply of languages, poetry, cultures, and back-stories. Since Middle Earth is a medieval, pre-industrial society, Tolkien did not neglect to depict pre-industrial techniques for measuring the passage of time. In our modern society, we rely on artificial clocks and calendars to keep track of time for us, but our friends from Middle Earth had to rely on those natural timekeepers used throughout our own pre-industrial history . . . the Sun and Moon. (more…)

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Paperwork for the Home School Family

Informative, Organization

Written with Permission
By Malia Russell
www.TOSMagazine.com

Taxes. Medical bills. Permission slips. Calendars. Rosters. Phone trees. Papers to grade. Schoolwork to file. Artwork by children. Prayer journals. Bills. Bank statements. Ads. Junk mail. Newspapers. Magazines. Legal paperwork.

No wonder the word paperwork has a bad reputation. It seems benign as it quietly seeps into our happy homes. Then it gets stacked, piled, filed, pushed, dumped, hidden, and crammed until it can no longer be ignored. Finally, in frustration or out of necessity, we spend half a day struggling with paperwork. One curse of the electronic age is the speed with which we can take a single message, mass produce it, and send it all over the globe. Unfortunately, paperwork is one area we simply cannot afford to ignore.

Although I have not yet found a solution to eliminate the constant deluge of paper found in our homes, I have found that there are some things you can do to make handling all that paperwork a little easier. (more…)

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