Life is one of the biggest challenges – and blessings – of homeschooling for us, how about you?

There’s just so much to do and so often we don’t feel like we’re doing it all well. Today’s Carnival of Homeschooling has some help! Jenny Herman is pretty convicting for us plugged-in parents in Limiting “Tomorrow’s Homeschooler” posted at Home Educating Family Publishing, though maybe I should have saved this one for the end! If you’re in computer angst, check out Jacqui’s post with Tech Tip #88: 20 Techie Problems Every Student Can Fix « Ask a Tech Teacher posted at Ask a Tech Teacher.

The house seems overwhelming for most of us at some time or another. Mrs. White encourages us to get up and get busy with Only Rich People Have Clean Houses posted at The Legacy of Home and Angela Gray faces the challenges of Autumn head-on in It’s That Time Again – Team Gray! posted at team Gray!.

And Gidget encourages us in these difficult times to get our children involved in Giving in Order to Get posted at Homeschooling Unscripted.

Sometimes You Need School Stuff – Great tips, inspiration and ideas

Gina Glenn challenges us to focus on what’s important in The Tyranny of Tidbits! posted at A Cherished Keeper.

Nancy Kelly intrigues and inspires us with My Calendar of Firsts posted at Sage Parnassus, while Jenny Herman uses schedules to help her son on the autism spectrum in Back to School with a Simple Schedule | Many Hats Mommy posted at Back to School with a Simple Schedule.

Adam Faughn shares Children’s Project: Bible Time Line posted at The Faughn Family of Four. I really enjoyed seeing his family’s unique timeline — my younger ones could really get into this!

Jamerrill Stewart posted this Free Literature Based Civil War Study at Holy Spirit-led Homeschooling | Living the Life of Faith.

Lisa presents Memory Monday posted at Golden Grasses and Denise tells us How to Conquer the Times Table, Part 5 posted at Let’s Play Math!. Also, with regard to teaching math, Alexander Bogomolny presents Thought provokers to start a class with posted at CTK Insights.

Jennifer posts a very interesting Lesson 14: Dairy – Cheese, butter, milk, curds & whey, buttermilk, yogurt posted at Nutrition for Healthy Kids, while Aunt B reminds us to keep our children safe with Fire Safety for Homeschool at Homeschool 4 Free.

Great things to think about – or discuss

Nancy Flanders talks about The Cooperative Toddler posted at Parenting Squad and Kelly, a public school teacher planning to homeschool, reflects on Keeping Curious: Retaining Our Love of Learning posted at The Homeschool Co-op.

Darlene Franco is looking to the future in Life on the Franco Farm: Message to My Daughter posted at Life on the Franco Farm and Barbara Frank presents a guest post by Rachel Poling, who’s already there in “Debt-free College Grad at 19″ on Thriving in the 21st Century.

Christian musician Stephen Bagasao brings up some important issues in The Death of Steve Jobs: The Real Story posted at Stephen Bautista Music.

Pamela presents Relaxing Family Yoga…. Well….Not Really posted at Blah, Blah, Blog and Alasandra wants to explain that homeschoolers are diverse in NOT a Republican Foot Soldier at Alasandra’s Homeschool Blog.

Henry Cate, the father of this Carnival, asked one of his daughters what she liked about homeschooling and wrote A benefit to homeschooling – the flexibility at Why Homeschool and Linda Dobson reminds us all our sacrifice is worth it in Yes, You May Have to Give Up Some THINGS to Homeschool posted at PARENT AT THE HELM.

Matt Binz, Lee Binz’s dh, Mr. Homescholar posts a video blog on how parenting sons changes as they get older. It’s Raising Boys v. Raising Men at The Homescholar Record.

And Mike Smith of HSLDA, wanted to me to tell you something: “Melanie, tell the moms that the legend has it that Notre Dame’s star player in the 1920′s, George Gipp, lay dying in a hospital, his famous coach visited him and the last words of dying Gipp to Rockne were, “When the boys are up against it and they seem to have no where to turn, just tell them to win one for the Gipper.” Ronald Regan played Gipp in the movie. When the moms’ backs are against the wall and they can’t see light at the end of the tunnel and all hope is gone, tell them, “God didn’t call them to raise their children for Harvard but for Heaven.. Focus on that and God will take care of the rest.” We’ve certainly found that to be true – the more we focus on Christ, the more satisfied we are with what we’re seeing in our sons, whether the Lord takes them to a top university to shine for Him or whether we just see it in doing a messy job for the family cheerfully.

Our final contribution is our own. Tonight Hal’s mother took us all out to the movies. The ladies went to see Dolphin’s  Tale (I’ll review it in a few days) and Hal took the boys to see Courageous. It impacted him so much he came right home and wrote a review of it for you. Read it here!

Thank you for joining us for the Carnival of Homeschooling today – be sure to share it with others! While you’re here, we hope you’ll take a moment to sign up for our newsletter (you’ll get one of our most popular downloads free once we add your email if you do!), like us on Facebook, and check out our book (Raising Real Men was Christian Small Publishers Book of the Year this year!) and other resources. Thanks for stopping by!

Hal & Melanie

CARNIVAL OF HOMESCHOOLING
September 14, 2010 …

Renae at Life Nurturing Education is bravely climbing “Middle School Mountain” with the help of friends who share the load of lesson planning … and provide a little peer pressure:

Projects are so easy for me to drop when we get busy, but now I know other families are taking the time to create hieroglyphics. The pressure to give my children the same opportunity compels me to purchase clay and slip it in my children’s workboxes …

Marbel of Two Kid Schoolhouse describes how she is tweaking math for her son, while Lizzie writes about this year’s curriculum at A Dusty Frame and includes a lot of links for Civil War resources.

I’m still following Charlotte Mason and doing things the same way. We’re just stepping out of the rotation for a year. I really enjoyed choosing my own books. Now that I got a taste of picking everything myself, I don’t know if I’ll be able to go back to being told what to do! (My rebellious streak coming out!)

God Made, Home Grown: Tiana has young homeschoolers, a potty-training toddler, and another on the way. That spells “interruption” – as well as fatigue and nausea – but God shows her the solution.

Laura Grace Weldon takes her daughter to the symphony, enjoys beautiful music, and deals with a sublimely rude man.  Even better, she offers six ways to introduce fine arts, using the happy idiot method.

We probably all know how Charlotte Mason taught children, but Nancy at Sage Parnassus writes about how Charlotte Mason taught teachers — that’s us! “It’s why teachers made a commitment to her philosophy.  It’s also why, after 15 years, I’m still anticipating the upcoming school year,” she says. Jen at Living Charlotte Mason in California does a fantastic job of explaining this philosophy beyond the couple of things we think we all know. Get inspired.

Speaking of Charlotte Mason, do you keep notebooks?  Not just fill them, but keep them?  Susan Gaissert at The Expanding Life explains why she does in “Notebooks, Notebooks Everywhere.” So what do you do with all those notebooks – and textbooks, lined paper, art supplies, and on, and on, and on … Leave it to Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers to find creative ways to run a household and a school in the same space — Kris shows how she does it!

Micro Business for Teens: Carol Topp, CPA, shares advice from and for teenaged businesspeople.  One of her clients, an 18-year-old entrepreneur, was interviewed by USA Today!

Someone said there are two kinds of people in the world – those who divide people into two groups, and those who don’t.  Barbara Frank looks past the Christian/secular divide, or even the multi-faceted classifications-by-methodology, and sees two complementary camps — which need each other:

Instead of viewing other homeschoolers as those using a different method, we can look at them as being proactive or reactive homeschoolers. We all fall into one of those two groups, and each is the perfect helper to the other. We need to have a cooperative spirit with other homeschoolers instead of feeling different from them, because the assault on homeschooling freedoms continues. As Benjamin Franklin famously said upon signing the Declaration of Independence, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Tea Time with Annie Kate shares natural ways to teach your children another language in “How We Study Dutch,” and Robin Phillips helps them remember it in “Homeschooling a Foreign Language: 7 Additions to Make It Stick” at Crack the Egg.

“Queen of Carrots” doesn’t use a math curriculum when Introducing the World to her young students (5 and 6) — she has lots of other ideas that sound like fun ways to combine basic math with literature, fine arts, traditional games and more. Lynn at Eclectic Education has gathered resources for file folder games that she’s hoping will help out her son, who’s facing some challenges in learning. She links to a nice directory she’s made.

At Online Education for Kids, J.T. Gaddy asks “Where are the Patriots?” and inspires us to get busy raising some! Janine, at the originating blog for the Carnival of Homeschooling – Why Homeschool, shares a fascinating and surprising story about technology in education.

Having one of those days and trying to remember why you are homeschooling? Linda Dobson at Parent at the Helm will help you out with some shocking truths about remedial classes in college. Karen at Homeschool Girls posts pictures and thoughts that help her remember why, too. If you’ve just figured out you need to homeschool, Carol Alexander at Everything Home…With Carol has a great resource list to help you get started.

As the parents of six boys, you can imagine that we like to discuss raising sons! At Four & Twenty, Kim’s boys are having a “Da Vinci Summer” and learning that ancient boy skill of using refuse to build dreams on. At Books for Boys, children’s book author Max Elliot Anderson answers the question, “How Can You Interest Your Boys in Reading?” Kim at Homeschooling Peeps is talking about that, too, in “Instilling a Love of Reading.”

We love adventure, too, especially the kind you find in the midst of ordinary life and Pamela Jorrick of Blah, Blah, Blog (Love the name!) decides there’s a better way to cross the Golden Gate Bridge than merely driving across it.

Katherine at No Fighting, No Biting, is struggling over the transition from summer freedom to school year discipline.  Her twelve-year-old son isn’t responding consistently to either incentives or punishment. Katherine, we’ve gone through that stage with several sons and it ain’t pretty! Our entry in the Carnival may give you some encouragement:  Arrrggghhh Hope For Teenage Boys & Schoolwork

We’ve had a great time reading all the encouraging and informative posts in this week’s Carnival. I hope you do, too!

Technorati tags: carnival of homeschooling, blog carnival.

 Raising Real Men is pleased to bring you the

February 9, 2010 edition of the

     Carnival of Homeschooling! 

Welcome to Raising Real Men! We’ve done 14 radio interviews in the past week from eastern North Carolina to Los Angeles, so I know there are many people visiting here who don’t know us yet. I’d like to take a moment to explain a few things. The Carnival of Homeschooling is a weekly event that moves around the blogosphere. Bloggers contribute posts and the host blogger gathers all the links together for your reading pleasure. We don’t choose the entries: some we love, some we don’t!  

And a last word before we get started. Homeschooling is not the only way to raise boys, but it offers some serious advantages for parents who want to train their sons for manhood in a way that the common culture  simply doesn’t any longer.  We devote a chapter in Raising Real Men to the very real differences in the way boys approach education, compared to their sisters.  How we respond, as teachers and parents, will make a difference in how they respond as students. 

We’ve been thinking a lot about what we love lately: A year ago our precious Katie was born the day before Valentine’s Day. How appropriate since we’d spend the next year thinking about her heart. At two weeks, we discovered she was in SVT (dangerously fast heart rhythm) at 278 beats per minute. They had to stop her heart six times that night. We were hoping she’d be one of the 25% who grow out of the condition by a year old, but we just found out her heart is still in danger.  Not only that, but my best friend, husband and co-author, Hal has stage four Hodgkins lymphoma. We are thinking a lot about what we love – Christ, our family, and so much more!    

So, we dedicate this Carnival, in the week before Valentine’s Day to Things Homeschoolers Love. Homeschoolers are an incredibly diverse bunch, but it is safe to say that homeschoolers:  

Love to Think

legendswife reminds us not only that Home School Families Need Vision: 3 Reasons Why but how we can pass it on to our children at Christian Homeschool Resources. Note: Link Repaired

Susan Gaissert in writing Why We Need to Ask ?Why?? at The Expanding Life reminds us why inquiring minds really do want to know.

Alasandra thinks Anti-Science Fundamentalist Fruitcakes give homeschoolers a bad rap on Alasandra’s Homeschool Blog Awards. We’ve probably all gotten to the end of our rope at some point.

 Christina Strickland wrote Homeschool Burnout: Now What? at the LessonPathways.com blog to encourage us.

Homeschool graduate Natalie Wickham points out 3 Characteristics of a Person of Influence at Pajama School that should serve as a model for our children – and ourselves.

 Pamela Jorrick interviewed veteran homeschoolers in Following Their Own Path and came away impressed. Posted at Blah, Blah, Blog.

Renae presents a great Introduction to Biblical Poetry at Life Nurturing Education. It’ll make you think!

Michelle Miller at TruthQuest History submits an audio entry on the way mothers unwittingly block the role of fathers in homeschooling … making it Mission Impossible.  

Love to See Our Children Taking Their Place in Adult Society

We have always loved to mark special events in our children’s lives. Avivah at OCEANS OF JOY is not only Making Graduation Plans, but explains why.

 25 Essential Open Courseware Classes to Learn About Health Administration by Wendy Blue tells us how open courseware can let our children test drive a field of study at Masters in Health Administration.

Harold Gelien encourages us to check out Do Yale, Harvard Or Other Ivy League Schools Offer Online Courses / Degrees? and mrs laughton presents How To Use Facebook: Facebook 101  at  How To E-D-U.

 Alan Crosby presents 7 Essential Free Web Apps for Career Management posted at Online Career Schools.

Camille Hensley presents What’s a College Degree Actually Worth? 20 Good Answers. posted at College Stats.org.

Love to Learn

Kim Kautzer of WriteShop, talks about  Helping kids find an audience for their writing at In Our Write Minds.

Heather L presents EASY Visual Exercises for home! posted at Special Needs Homeschooling, saying, “Here is a get pre-reading exercise or visual therapy excerise. Fun and easy to right at home!”  

MrsMamaHen shares in pictures just how excited her daughter was to be doing her first biology dissection in “Biology: The Worm.”

 Lara DeHaven develops her own Natural Approach to Biology in high school at Texas Homesteader.

Devildogwife knows we ask ourselves Are We on Track? at Marine Corps Nomads and helps us to know we are.

NerdMom answers a new homeschooler’s question in Starting to Homeschool: Academics posted at Nerd Family.

Wondering what the other moms are doing? ChristineMM presents Homeschool Curriculum List for My Fourth Grader 2009 to 2010 at The Thinking Mother.

Tom DeRosa in Pentago Board Game Spins Me Round (Like a Record) at I Want to Teach Forever tells us about “a great family board game that promotes higher order thinking.”

Dana Wilson at Epi Kardia Home Education teaches us about graphic organizers to make learning more interesting in Make a Lapbook!

 Stop feeling guilty and get outside! Check out the getting started guide by Tonya called  Nature Study: At Home and on the Road at Live the Adventure.

Helping the Dysgraphic Child Succeed by Betty Eisenhour has some great ideas for dealing with what has been one of the most difficult things in our homeschool adventure at Peace Creek on the Prairie.  

Love to Laugh, Because Sometimes It’s All You Can Do

Henry Cate has a hilarious plan in his Looking for idea for a “socialization” video at Why Homeschool. Let’s give him some more ideas!

Have you ever been Threatened While Homeschooling? Barbara Frank keeps her sense of humor while having “just another day homeschooling a teen with Down syndrome.”

Dana shares her angst and finally comes to a point of peace (and laughter) in This is NOT a homeschool room. I don’t WANT a homeschool room. posted at Roscommon Acres.

 hall monitor presents ‘Joke’ letter from principal sent to parents posted at DetentionSlip.org, saying, “I guess public schools have a different sense of humor!”  Watch out for that SEND button, sir.

Brenda Sain sweetly expresses the ubiquitousness of Dirty Little Feet at The Tie That Binds Us.  

Love to Save Money

NerdMom clues us into an Awesome Book Sale from Scholastic on her Making Money, Keeping Money blog.

Mrs. White reflects on How the Old Time Mothers Survived Poverty at The Legacy of Home. Makes you realize times aren’t as tough as they could be! 

And, Love Our Families

A chapter of Raising Real Men deals with risk-taking and adventure in boys, so we were glad to see some really interesting posts on that topic: Rachel Lynette recommends Allowing Children to Take Risks at Minds in Bloom and Tiana Krenz points out the very real differences in Over-Protected, Under-Sheltered at God Made, Home Grown.

Teaching our children to stand on their own feet often means giving them the space to do so. Our Kid’s Pursuits Are Their Own posted by Laura Grace Weldon tells us that keeping children’s motivation alive has a lot to do with letting their interests be their own.

Michelle Dennis Evans and her daughters enjoy The Lady Beetle posted at Michelle Dennis Evans.  

Karen DeBeus started her day right in Walking in Truth at Beautiful Feet Bring Good News.  

Kerry Fletcher suggests a fun activity in How to make a candy topiary posted at Examine, but I’d buy a good bit of extra candy if I were you, so you don’t end up with a half-naked tree!

Here’s a contest for everyone: Beverly Hernandez tells us about the Homeschool friendly 2010 Doodle 4 Google Contest on Beverly’s Homeschooling Blog (About.com)  

And finally, Katherine Collins of No Fighting, No Biting  takes a Slacker Day which sounds like a great idea to me today!

That concludes this Valentine’s edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of carnival of homeschooling using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

We’d love to have you come back! We are celebrating the official release of Raising Real Men with giveaways, contests and fun – check back often or subscribe to our RSS feed in the footer.

Thanks to Chordboard for the great Valentines on Wikimedia Commons: Puppy, Plums, Astronaut, Football, and Apple,

Technorati tags: carnival of homeschooling, blog carnival.

Raising Real Men is featured in this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling at The Homeschool Post, along with a ton of other great blog posts – both Christmas oriented and not.  Now that we are home from Apologia‘s great Christmas party, I can’t wait to spend some time looking through these great sounding posts!