E•vent Library

So often, learning style materials pour all their time and energy into finding the right label for your child's learning style. While there are many different tools for assessment, too often these same materials are light on just what you should do after you find a "label" for your child. How do you teach history so it sticks? What if she can't understand fractions? What if he loves language but hates to write? Self-acclaimed “Delightful Speaker, Entertaining Author, Adequate Wife, Pitiful Housekeeper” Carol Barnier goes beyond learning styles to answer "What do we do now?" Come away from Carol’s refreshing session with lots of ideas you can use Monday morning!

At “such a time as this,” every moment counts... especially during the formative years of high school. With so many beneficial opportunities available, homeschooling parents need to be very wise in designing their students’ high school curriculum track. The challenge can be daunting. The problem is not that there is a shortage of choices, but, rather, that there is an over-abundance of good choices! Dr. James Stobaugh shows how to plan an educational curriculum that will make this time of life fruitful and productive for your high schoolers.

Do you find teaching mathematics to your children one of your greatest challenges as a homeschooling parent? Do you want your child to not merely “do” math, but to really understand mathematics? If so, this webinar with Dr. Fred Worth, professor of mathematics at Henderson State University in Arkansas might contain just the answers you’re looking for! Dr. Worth’s down-to-earth, practical approach and insightful tips will help all homeschooling parents—regardless of their own mathematical background— to teach math more effectively.

As we travel through this life, we see signs or guideposts that give us direction, warning or encouragement. Children need those guideposts. They need positive, godly guideposts. Parents are God's agents for setting up those guideposts. In this workshop, Dr. Fred Worth will discuss the different kinds of guideposts that are needed and how to intentionally set them up for the protection, guidance and encouragement of our children.

If any topic generates controversy among homeschooling parents, it is grading. From a somewhat rebellious “Why do I have to do this, anyway?” to a despairing, “I can’t do this! I don’t even know how!,” the task of evaluating our own children elicits a strong emotional response. Beneath the wide range of reactions lurks a common feeling: inadequacy. How do parents evaluate their own children? Classroom grading models do not always apply to the homeschool, so we throw up our hands in despair. What an impossible task, we think. No, not impossible. We just need the right tools. This workshop will introduce you to some practical methods you can use to honestly and ethically grade and evaluate your own children.

What is an educational philosophy? More importantly, do you know what your educational philosophy is? According to veteran homeschool parents and leaders Chuck and Pam Geib, your educational philosophy is the long-term goal underlying your homeschool program. It should be the foundation of why you home educate. It becomes the filter you use when making decisions regarding methods of teaching. It influences your annual curriculum selection and personal goals for the year. In this workshop, Chuck and Pam share how their family developed their educational philosophy and help you formulate your own.

Attention Obsessive-Compulsive Perfectionist Control-Freaks: Rachael wants to help you C.H.I.L.L. O.U.T.!

Are you tied to your plans? Do you shiver at the idea of change or adjustment? Are you missing out on significant moments because you are focused on the trivial? Do you think that your homeschool has to be perfect?

A self-proclaimed obsessive-compulsive-perfectionist-control-freak herself, Rachael discusses in this e-vent how, many times, she is her own worst enemy when it comes to taking advantage of the freedoms of homeschooling. She uses the acrostic C.H.I.L.L. O.U.T to help you give control of all the details to God—He is faithful!

You can have the best homeschooling year ever! Your vision will in large measure determine your success. In this session we will explore three topics that lay a vital foundation for the success of your homeschool adventure and that will bring out the best in your children as well.

First, we will discuss the power and purpose that God has invested in your home and family—and in you as a parent. We will also consider the importance of helping your children establish a strong identity, which will enable them to withstand peer pressure as they grow older. We will consider the topic of identity within the context of being image-bearers of God, and ways to develop a strong family identity.

Next, we will identify some simple but dynamic guidelines for strengthening the relationships in your home to provide a strong foundation for both teaching and learning. We will discuss the importance of investing ourselves in the lives of our children—looking at the importance of time and personal presence.

Third, we will learn how to discover and recognize the gifts, strengths, learning styles, and special purposes God has placed within your children. We will also discuss ways to minimize conflict in your home and school day.

These first three tools lay the groundwork for providing stimulating and creative academics in a supportive and loving environment. Our goal is to train children who love the Lord, know how to engage their culture for Christ, and can use their gifts to serve those around them while bringing glory to God. (This webinar is based on Zan's book, 7 Tools for Cultivating Your Child's Potential.)

Is there any way to fit lesson planning, housecleaning, teaching, keeping up with the laundry, and getting dinner on the table into the same day you homeschool?

As a mother to a household of ten, HSLDA's Early Years coordinator Vicki Bentley understands the unique challenges that face a homeschooling mom. If you're feeling frazzled, join Vicki for some practical ideas that helped her manage her busy homeschool family in this uplifting webinar.

Join Carol for a special session designed to help parents of children who have trouble focusing! If you have a highly distractible or fidgety child, don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to channel an impossibly short attention span and wiggles into a successful teaching experience. As the mother of such a child herself, Carol will share tips for using motion to enhance learning and offer advice for decreasing distractions. God made your child gifted and unique—come find encouragement and practical help for homeschooling, served up with a generous helping of Carol’s trademark sense of humor!

If you would like to organize and streamline your homeschool—but have no idea where to begin—this is the webinar for you! HSLDA’s Early Years coordinator Vicki Bentley will help you determine what is most important to your family’s home education and where you need to focus your organizational efforts. Along the way, she’ll discuss some of the organizational challenges unique to homeschoolers. Gain practical suggestions from the expertise of a mom who homeschooled 17 children.

We all want our children to catch the vision for God and grow up to serve Him. But how do we begin?

Home education pioneers who started teaching their children 30 years ago, Rick and Marilyn Boyer believe the Bible contains the best plan for bringing up wise and competent children. By seeking wisdom from God’s Word and applying it to their own lives, they have trained and discipled their 14 sons and daughters, some of whom are now parents and passing on the vision to their own children.

Come hear from Rick and Marilyn, along with several of their adult children, as they explain a scriptural method for passing on the vision of powerful Christian living from generation to generation through family discipleship.

After 21 years of teaching her children at home, Zan Tyler knows that homeschooling is more like running a 26-mile marathon than the 100-yard dash. A marathon can seem daunting. To run successfully, we need to develop some training strategies that build our stamina, confidence, and vision, enabling us to persevere until the end.

As we consider the long-term goals of homeschooling, we will break down the process into smaller “do-able” segments to help alleviate stress. One of the aims of this webinar is to “unburden” homeschooling parents. We will look at ways to make the school year more enjoyable for our children and ourselves.

Zan’s advice and encouragement can assist us in completing our God-given task of homeschooling, help us “run with endurance the race that lies before us”, and enable us to enjoy the journey.

Homeschooling one child, one grade at a time can be difficult, but adding more children and more grade levels can make home education feel like a zany plate-spinning act! With a little advice and support, you can keep your act spinning smoothly. HSLDA’s Early Years coordinator Vicki Bentley shares ideas for keeping your homeschooling “plates” from crashing to the floor in this encouraging webinar. Discover practical tips to achieve unity and cooperation in your home from an experienced mom of 17 homeschooled students, seven school-aged children at a time!

“Visual memory is far superior to auditory memory,” says Peter Russell, author of The Brain Book. Half of the population is right-brain dominant and half is left-brain dominant. If you have more than one child, you likely have a right-brained learner in your midst. Auditory learning doesn’t come as naturally to these wonderful children as it does to their left-brained siblings. Rather, they store information in their long-term memory by using pictures, color, story or emotion attached to the facts they need to learn. Unfortunately, many traditional curriculums are designed for auditory learners. In this workshop you will learn how to identify the right-brained child and incorporate simple teaching techniques, such as visual spelling strategies, that cause the words to “stick instead of slip.” You can easily train your child’s all-important photographic memory—it’s one of the best learning gifts you can give him. Help your child get in touch with the “smart part” of himself.

Before mass compulsory schooling, students learned to investigate, reason, and form independent attitudes. Discover the exciting ways that today's home educating parents are getting beyond packaged curriculum to help their children experience real books, real experiences, real relationships-real learning!

Once you have identified your right-brained learners, become an expert at training those children to use their superior photographic memory. Teach them how to efficiently use the Universal Memory Storage System. Your child will develop the lifelong skill of studying for tests by taking a picture of the contents of a chapter. (These memory techniques are commonly used by Cambridge University students to reduce studying time.) And you will learn techniques for teaching Right-Brain Math—you’ll be able to show your child how to visually store math facts by putting “velcro” on these processes for easy storage and retrieval. No more math phobia! Using these powerful strategies, your right-brained children will truly “learn how to learn,” and confirm to themselves that they are smart! Learning doesn’t have to be so hard!

As a homeschooling parent, you want to teach your kids to cultivate big dreams and aspirations for the future—but you can’t get that kind of education from a textbook! In this webinar, homeschooling mother and veteran volunteer Billie Jo Youmans shares how your homeschool program can benefit from a “service learning” approach. By incorporating intentional volunteer activities, you can give your children hands-on learning experiences that will not only cultivate Christ-like character, but also expand their future educational opportunities. Billie Jo walks you through both spiritual and academic considerations and shows you how to practically implement this approach. Help your students achieve predetermined learning objectives, acquire core skills, and enhance their educational portfolio through service learning!

Are you considering homeschooling for the first time? Or are you a veteran homeschooler, struggling with burnout? From parental qualifications to socialization concerns, questions from without and doubts from within can leave you desperately looking for encouragement that you are doing the right thing.

All around you, the number of families choosing to homeschool continues to grow each year. Why?

In this session, Davis discusses the moral, academic, and practical reasons to homeschool, helps dispel the myths we all tend to believe, and encourages both prospective and current homeschooling parents on their journey. When you finish this workshop, you will know that if there was ever a time to homeschool, it is now!

Are you a single parent determined to homeschool your children? Or are you looking for ways to encourage and help your homeschooling single-parent friend?

While homeschooling as a single parent can seem like an overwhelming challenge, the growing number of single parents who are homeschooling testifies that it can be done. But how? And how can we help?

Join single homeschooling mom, author, editor, and speaker Mary Jo Tate to find the answers as she shares her story of God’s faithfulness and offers hope, encouragement, and practical tips for single parents who want to homeschool, as well as suggestions for how others in the church, community, or family can help them.

Is your high schooler thinking about college? While homeschoolers may be better prepared for it than many other college-bound teens, that doesn’t mean they should automatically get sucked into the “college conveyor belt.” If college is not in the plan, what do we do with our right, well-educated, well-socialized homeschooled students? And where do we find resources and apprenticeships to help guide homeschoolers through this process of vocational preparation and calling? Find out the answers to these questions during this e-vent with HSLDA attorney and homeschooling father Michael Donnelly! Join us to learn practical tips and hear insightful apprenticeship advice to aid you and your student in planning his unique future.

Do you struggle with finding the most effective methods to help your children learn? Are you searching for the optimal way to nurture each child’s talents and abilities? Have you heard the terms “mastery learning” and “ability development” but are unsure what they are or how to apply them to your homeschool education? Join us to find the answers! Author, teacher, and homeschooling father Andrew Pudewa shares the answers to these questions along with insight on how to create an effective learning environment for individualized education. Speaking from his experience as a student under the well known violinist and music teacher Dr. Shinichi Suzuki, Andrew explains how you can apply Suzuki’s ability development model to your family’s educational disciplines to achieve success. Even if your children have struggled in the past, you can initiate a turnaround and draw out the best in each child!

Homeschool curriculum choices should reflect the unique needs of each family and child as much as possible since one size definitely does not fit all in homeschooling. Curriculum might need to reflect the level of experience of the teacher, his or her preferences for specific teaching methods (e.g., Charlotte Mason) or religious elements. Likewise, it should take into account individual student needs and preferences, such as learning styles, a penchant for independent study, or a desire for computer-based instruction.

In this Webinar, curriculum expert Cathy Duffy will explain and demonstrate Home Ed Expert, an exciting new, online tool that helps homeschoolers choose the right curriculum for their students. Using Home Ed Expert, teachers can capture information about their own capabilities and teaching styles, as well as their children’s needs and learning styles. The tool then uses that information to identify the best educational resources for your homeschooling out of the vast array of options available.

There will be an opportunity to ask questions via interactive chat.

A free, three-month trial subscription is being offered to all HSLDA members. For more information visit http://homeedexpert.com.

Having problems with uncooperative learners? Do you feel like your curriculum may be as much hindrance as it is a help? What about all those publishers who claim to have the best curriculum? How can we sort through all of this to figure out what will really be best for each of our children?

Understanding learning styles helps us overcome many of the problems we encounter in home education. In this @home e-vent, Cathy Duffy will help us first identify our own and our children’s learning styles. Then she will discuss methods of teaching to our children’s strengths and overcoming weaknesses using examples from various math programs. Bring your questions for the special Q&A portion of the presentation!

In these difficult times—with the economy in recession and unemployment rates and inflation on the rise—just providing basic necessities has become increasingly challenging for many families.

If, like a majority of homeschooling families, your household relies on a single income, you may be especially hard hit by the economic downturn. When the primary wage earner loses his or her job or faces under-employment, families need to find new ways to balance earning enough to support themselves with still providing the best education possible for their children.

Join HSLDA President Mike Smith for “How Can I Afford to Keep Homeschooling with a Reduced Family Income?” and learn real-life strategies for meeting your income needs and the legal implications of a double-income household for your homeschool program, along with practical suggestions to help your family continue homeschooling through these hard times.

We understand the financial constraints that your family must consider, and that those who need the information in this e-vent the most may be able to least afford it. To that end, this e-vent will be offered at a special reduced rate (below our cost) to make this encouragement and information available to as many families as possible.

Johnny is a constant motion machine. Tom cries in frustration over minor matters. Susie forgets what she has just learned. These behaviors leave you drained and with little to show for your efforts. Are you at your wits’ end about how to help a child who seems lazy and unmotivated? “He’s so smart, but it takes him forever to complete his work!” You’ve tried all the focusing “tricks” from the books you’ve read, but you still use much of your teaching day coaxing the minimum required work out of this child.

This @home e-vent will present a totally different approach to children with attention and focus issues. Find out how to identify the cause of the behavior and target your strategies. Begin to detect the physical clues that your child is presenting and explore the physical causes of attention/behavior issues. Is it really a character issue, or could something else be going on? Let Dianne, a certified nutritionist, help you explore simple ways to help your child at home.

If you or a friend are interested in giving homeschooling a try, or if you’re tired of hearing from family members that you’re crazy for giving it a shot, check out this e-vent with HSLDA Attorney Mike Donnelly. You, your friends, and your loved ones can finally get some answers to see why homeschooling may be the best option for you and your children. Mike Donnelly shares from his years of homeschooling experience to show you why homeschooled students excel in academics and debunks the myths you’ve heard about homeschooling families. As a special gift to you, HSLDA is presenting this e-vent completely free!

Starting homeschooling is exciting, but can leave you feeling overwhelmed by the options. Not sure where to begin? Sign up for this e-vent and HSLDA Toddlers to Tweens Consultant and homeschool mother of eight Vicki Bentley walks you through a planning checklist to help you prepare for the homeschool adventure! Topics of discussion include research, goal setting, supplies, and schedules, plus Six Tips for Success. This e-vent is perfect whether you are new to homeschooling or would like to invite a friend who is considering homeschooling. The information is appropriate for teaching any grade level, plus this e-vent is free and open to the public!

As a homeschool leader, do you ever wonder how IRS regulations may affect your group? Homeschooling mom and CPA Carol Topp offers this informative webinar for homeschool leaders. She will discuss homeschool groups and the government, when you will have contact with the IRS, the pros and cons of 501(c)(3) tax exempt status for your group, and when your organization should consider becoming a nonprofit corporation. After the presentation, you will have a chance to ask Carol your questions. Current and potential homeschool group leaders will find a wealth of knowledge in this e-vent, so sign up today!

This e-vent is FREE for Discount Group leaders! Simply use the coupon code found after logging in to your Discount Group account!

Learn how to meet the needs of the newer families in your support group-without losing the veterans! Do you know what a mentoring group is? Hear how some support groups have mobilized their veteran homeschoolers to help pass the baton to new homeschool families. Vicki Bentley discusses various types of mentoring programs available, practical ideas for success, and the benefits to your support group. Sample materials will be available.

This e-vent is FREE for Discount Group leaders! Simply use the coupon code found after logging in to your Discount Group account!

Grades, grade levels, graduation--they all play a part in your child's education. But do we have to think of these concepts in traditional terms, or can we as homeschoolers view them more flexibly? Can grades be a constructive part of your school's evaluation system? HSLDA Staff Attorney Mike Donnelly explores out-of-the-box methods home educating parents can use to approach academic, spiritual, and emotional progress for your classroom of one . . . or twelve!