Reading Assignment

This will conclude the reading of the textbook. I hope you've marked the areas you want to go back to, but if you need them the Table of Contents and Index are quite helpful.

Please read from the following chapters:

Chapter 11 - Record Keeping

Chapter 20 - Veteran Homeschoolers and Burnout

Chapter 21 - College & Beyond

Chapter 22 - Adult Homeschoolers, including "Life after the Nest is Empty"

Record Keeping ☼

There are lots of different ways to do this, but it's an area where you'll do better if you pick something before the school year starts and stick with it.

For this assignment, I'd like you to take a look at several software packages for home school record keeping.

• Check each of the following sites and get a general idea of the product they offer. (You don't need to spend a lot of time on each one unless you find one you really like.) These are programs you purchase, but even if that's more than you want to do, you can get some great ideas from them.
• As you're looking, jot down a list of features you see that you think would work well with your family.
• Keep in mind, that the biggest drawback for many of these is the setup and maintenance time. It can be a lot! You may prefer to create your own system that's faster to manage.
• Some of these have free downloads so you can try the software. If you like, go ahead and try those that do.

Home School Solutions

Home School Minder

HomeSchool P.R.O.

Do you have an idea of the kinds of things you can track? How much time do you want to spend on tracking? Could your children manage some of that? Is a formal program something you need? If you have high school students planning on going to college, you may want to review these programs with that in mind.

As you complete this review, determine what you think would work best for you!

Creating Fun Tests and Exercises

Not all testing has be to hard or dreary. You can create some fun activities for your children by hand, on the computer, and online.

You'll find a number of software packages available to make puzzles, many of which are free and easy to use. Here's a little sample of what you can do! (Note: Please use the Back button in your browser to return to the class page after opening these crossword links.)

I like the Discovery Channel's school site, http://www.discoveryschool.com where you can create all types of puzzles and take advantage of many of their other tools as well. This is also the site for great free educational clip art--a bit of which you have seen in this class.

To download their free clip art, follow these steps:

1. Access the DiscoverySchool site, as listed above and open their Clip Art Gallery.



2. Choose a Category from the list.
3. Find an image you like. Note that you can scroll through them using the Next 12 images link on each page.
4. Click the image and open it so you see it in a larger format.
5. Right-click the image and choose the option to Save Picture as. This will take you to the standard Save box and you can select which folder you want to save it in.
6. Once you have saved the image, you can insert it in a word processing document or any other computer file you are creating. If you use MS Word, you can insert the image by using these steps (Insert > Picture > From File) and then locate the saved image. To control the size and location of the image in MS Word, right-click the image once it is in your document and choose Format for a number of options.