Posts Tagged ‘high school’

Homemaking for Teens

Thursday, May 27th, 2021

homemaking-for-teens

Are you looking to teach your homeschooled kids how to run a home? Today I’m going to show you some of the homemaking materials that we used in our homeschool.

My daughter has been learning more advanced homemaking skills for the past year, as she is more involved in the management of the home. One of the electives for high school is home economics, which includes cooking, baking, sewing, cleaning, and taking care of children. When I was gone for several weeks last month, my daughter managed the home perfectly, cooking meals from scratch, keeping up with the laundry, and tidying up the house. I was impressed.

My three sons also learned the basic skills of cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry before going to college, so that they would not squander their money by eating out every meal. They learned a lot of these skills through Cub Scouts when they were younger, including basic sewing skills. So home economics is good for anyone to learn.

We also did Dave Ramsey’s Foundations in Personal Finance: High School Edition for Homeschool. This personal finance course is a one semester high school course that has DVD’s and a workbook, where you learn all the basic financial skills to manage money well, including staying out of debt and budgeting. It goes really well with a homemaking course, since it includes skills needed to run a home.

stuffed-bell-peppers

One of the homemaking materials we loved was The Homemaker’s Journal: Practical Instruction for the Keeper at Home. It’s an online PDF, which we printed and had spiral bound. It’s a simple e-book that has information on how to maintain a home. It’s not curriculum, though. But if it was the only book you had, along with teaching the practical skills beside you, that would be enough for a home economics course. Not everything has to have written tests. PE doesn’t, for example. Most practical skills are learned best through hands-on learning.

However, there is something charming about a proper curriculum for home economics that has vocabulary, instruction, and quizzes and tests on the information. I found that in the Home Economics high school elective from Christian Light Education. There are 10 workbooks that teach all the skills for maintaining a home. We did not do all the workbooks, but instead, we did whatever we wanted. We spent 2-3 hours a day on homemaking this year, and we used a lot of materials, not just this set. So we flipped through the workbooks and did whichever ones we needed. For example, we did not do the health workbook because I had already done a full year of high school health from Apologia several years ago.

We loved the Introduction to the Kitchen workbook from this set. I flip through some of the pages in this video, so that you can see why we liked it:

There are many black and white sketches and illustrations to show hazards in the kitchen, for example. When my daughter tried to pick out the hazards, we were both laughing hysterically because some of the things, she would never have done instinctively, but other things, she was learning for the first time. We had many conversations we would not have had if we had never gone through these homemaking materials.

We also used another e-book called The Kitchen Primer: A First Textbook on Cooking & Keeping a Proper Kitchen by Martha Greene. We liked it a lot, but it is much more expensive than The Homemaker’s Journal, and most of it is recipes. So in the video, I show this, and I explain how you can use a basic Betty Crocker Cookbook as a textbook for cooking and baking.

We also went through a mother-daughter devotional called Beyond Beautiful Girlhood Plus Companion Guide, where we answered the questions aloud instead of writing it down. It took us a full year to get through the book, even though it only has 7 chapters. We did a little bit most mornings before doing anything else. I loved how the questions were often a springboard for deep conversations with my daughter that deepened our mother-daughter bond. And it had to do with homemaking.

I don’t know if I mentioned the fact that we didn’t write in any of the books or workbooks, but that we went through them together. I love the fact that my daughter now knows how to run a home way more effectively than I ever did at her age! My husband snapped a picture of my daughter’s stuffed bell peppers she made from scratch while I was gone on a two-week road trip. I was delighted to come home to a clean house with laundry all caught up and put away. Home economics is definitely worth teaching your teens!

Best of the School Year | Homeschool High School

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020

best-of-the-school-year

Today I will be sharing with you the “best of the school year,” including some of our favorite activities, field trips, and curriculum that we used for homeschooling high school this year. This will include unique and interesting field trips for geography and astronomy, and some fun psychology skits. Even through the quarantine, I will show you some activities that we did to tie our homeschooling to current events.

Best of the School Year | Homeschooling High School

Watch the following video to hear about some of the most memorable highlights for our 2020 homeschool year:

The math curriculum we are using is Teaching Textbooks because there is no teaching or grading required by the parent, since all of it is done on the computer. This was especially helpful for higher math.

If you want to see all of the curriculum books we used for all the other subjects this year, I wrote a blog post earlier this year to show what we would be using:

high-school-homeschool-geography

We made up our own geography, which I show you in the video. We made a scrapbook for each country of the world, coloring a map, writing a paragraph about the country from a video about that country, and gluing down a flag of each country. We went on a field trip to Canada, and while we were there, my daughter spent a day immersed in the culture of North and South Korea:

high-school-homeschool-astronomy

High school astronomy was also incredibly fascinating. We attended a star party put on by the local Astronomy Society. During that time, we identified many constellations, the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter. We attended a workshop put on by a NASA representative, where we saw a real space suit, Shuttle EVA suit glove, small rocket steering thruster, a Martian meteorite, etc. We looked through a special telescope during the day to look for solar flares and sunspots, and we went to a planetarium. If you would like to see the entire set of books we used this year, here it is:

high-school-psychology

Probably my favorite subject to teach this year was psychology. We used 7 Sisters homeschool curriculum, and we brought it to life in this set of videos and blog posts:

Near the end of the school year (in April and May), while in quarantine, we did a lot of gardening:

We also cooked and baked many delicious foods for home economics. Here is a British cake my daughter made:

British-cake

We went on many walks, too, in order to get out of the house and get some exercise for PE. Here is a goofy walk that my daughter and I went on:

This school year is one of my favorite years of homeschooling. Yes, it can still be fun to homeschool high school!

back-to-homeschool-giveaway

ENTER THE GIVEAWAY:
$200 to spend on homeschooling curriculum at Rainbow Resource!

I’ve teamed up with a group of homeschool bloggers that would like to bless a few homeschool families this year.  We will be giving THREE families $200 to spend at Rainbow Resource Center to buy curriculum, resources, and supplies for their homeschools.

To enter for your chance to win, simply use the Rafflecopter form below.  Now I know this is quite a few entries, but each of these bloggers has generously chipped in their own money to make this giveaway possible, so I hope you will take the time to do all of the entries.  And hey, the more entries you do, the better your odds are of winning!

Giveaway ends July 31, 2020 at 11:59pm ET.  Must be at least 18 years of age.  Must be a resident of U.S. or Canada to enter.  Selected winners will have 48 hours to respond to email notification to claim their prizes or another winner will be drawn.  By entering this giveaway, you agree to be added to the email lists of the participating bloggers (see the Terms & Conditions on the Rafflecopter form for the complete list).

a Rafflecopter giveaway

High School Psychology Series

Friday, April 17th, 2020

high-school-psychology-series

What a fun time we’ve had learning high school psychology! We’ve done so many hands-on activities, including: making a vegetable brain, a play doh brain, and a play doh neuron; placing foods on a tongue map; doing a perception activity involving snapping pictures of being chased by a car; drawing a large colorful chart of our basic needs; moving stuffed animals to re-enact various concepts; and performing many fascinating skits–sometimes involving costumes and props, and in one instance, a live cat.

We have thoroughly enjoyed using the psychology curriculum from 7 Sisters that you can find here: {affiliate link} Introduction to Psychology from a Christian Perspective.

Hands-on Psychology Activities

I thought I would make it easier for you by creating an index or table of contents for all these fun psychology activities you can do:

Psychology Bloopers

We also have some psychology blooper videos, if you need some merriment in your life:

Since homeschool parents need to buy curriculum for their high school students anyway, and psychology is one of your standard half-credit high school electives (it’s a one-semester course), you might as well purchase the curriculum here: {affiliate link} Introduction to Psychology from a Christian Perspective.

Sleep & Dreams: Goofy Skits

Friday, March 13th, 2020

sleep-and-dreams

In this next psychology episode, my daughter and I will explain all the most important aspects of sleep and dreams. Everyone needs a good 8 hours of sleep per night. When you undersleep or oversleep, you will experience drowsiness during the day. We explain why this happens in the following video:

What happens when sleep is interrupted?

In the video, Fuzz and Pavlov’s dog are roommates, and they have different sleep schedules. When Pavlov’s dog hears a bell and eats, he interrupts the sleep of Fuzz, who is sound asleep. Fuzz tries to get back to sleep, but the bell rings again, and he wakes up. This happens over and over again.

When someone is continuously interrupted in their sleep, they are never able to get into the more restorative deeper sleep, so the person will feel groggy the next day. Deep sleep and REM sleep are the stages of sleep that help our bodies to recuperate during the night.

What are the stages of sleep?

We need a 90-minute cycle of sleep to feel fully rested, and we go through these 90-minute cycles throughout the night. These are the stages of sleep:

  • Stage 1: Light Sleep (about 5 minutes) This is the lightest form of sleep, where you can hear people talking, but your heartbeat and breathing starts slowing down.
  • Stage 2: Intermediate Sleep (about 25 minutes) You can still wake up easily from this sleep because you are not in deep sleep yet. Your muscles relax, your temperature drops, and your eye movements stop.
  • Stage 3: Deep Sleep (from 30 minutes to an hour) This is one of the stages where it is difficult to wake up. Your brain waves are slower, as well as your heartbeat and breathing. You can’t feel refreshed if you never have deep sleep.
  • REM Sleep (from 10 minutes to an hour) Your eyes move rapidly (REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement) from side to side during the dream stage of sleep, which is also restorative. Brain activity is similar to wakefulness, but you have temporary muscle paralysis to prevent you from acting out your dreams.

sleep-cycles

Why is oversleeping bad?

In the video, Pavlov’s dog had been sleeping the entire day. Why? Well, our bodies produce melatonin when we sleep, so the more we sleep, the more melatonin our body produces, causing us to become more and more sleepy. This is why oversleeping is actually unhealthy. I’ve also noticed that my muscles feel sore when I oversleep. The stiffness is due to the fact that a body needs to move to feel healthy.

Do our dreams ever mean anything?

Most dreams mean nothing—our brain is just processing random things that have happened in our lives. But according to Scripture, God sometimes communicates to us through dreams. (We are told that dreams from God will increase in the last days. Joel 2:28, Acts 2:17). Dreams from God are often symbolic, like the statue in the book of Daniel representing four kingdoms, and the skinny cows in the book of Genesis that represented seven years of famine for Egypt.

Recently I had a set of three symbolic dreams, all in the same night. All three had the same message:

A Dream in Three Scenes

Scene 1: I look up into the night sky and see the magnificence of God in the Milky Way galaxy, but nobody is looking up. I’m in a courtyard full of people, surrounded by light pollution, and nobody even bothers to look up because when they glance up, they can’t see anything because their eyes aren’t adjusted. They don’t understand they need to GAZE up for a long time and step away from the light pollution in order to see the magnificence of God.

Scene 2: I’m hungry. I’m in a busy London restaurant area, and strangers are wanting to chat about frivolous things. I’m so hungry I might faint. I order food at a counter, and I’m given a plate with too little food on it (one bite of meat, one of vegetable, and one of potatoes), and I am not given utensils. I search and search for basic utensils, but no one cares, not even the people who work there. I realize my food must be cold by then, and I look around and can’t find my food. People keep trying to chat about frivolous things.

Scene 3: I’m crossing a busy London street, and suddenly two of my kids are with me. I know that when I set my foot in the crosswalk, the speeding cars will stop for me, and they did. But I hear a loud cry from behind me. It sounds like my son is on the other side of the street, and I can’t see him because of all the traffic. By this time my daughter is too far ahead for me to take her hand, and she thinks I’m right behind her, so she keeps walking across, but I turn around because all I can hear is the cry of my son. I realize he’s much younger than I thought. I’m standing there with dangerous fast-moving traffic, separated from both my kids, and my son’s screams have stopped and I panic and wake up in a shock.

These dreams are one and the same: The things that matter most get lost in the midst of worthless things that distract our attention.

If you are enjoying our psychology series, why not teach your own high school students psychology with the {affiliate link} psychology course we are using by 7 Sisters Homeschool? We like its no-nonsense approach, and the fact that you can get through the material at your own pace, with no fluff bogging you down.

Have you ever had a symbolic dream that helped you to understand something about your life? If so, please comment below.

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