Search Results for: blog school scare

“Weirder School” Gets Weirder and Weirder

Just when you thought a snake-wearing zookeeper, who encourages elephants to paint and helps fish a kid out of a lion’s cage was a bit too wacky for comfort, along comes another installment of My Weirder School, which features a tech-loving teacher, who headlines an action-packed adventure that includes no less than 45 references to popular Beatles’ tunes. Get ready for another Dan Gutman page turner. Book 2 in the My Weirder School series is aptly titled: Mr. Harrison Is Embarrassin’! And if you are part of Gutman’s target audience (first through fourth graders) you will definitely agree that Ella … Continue reading →

The Brave Homeschooling Parent

Being a parent takes bravery, and a homeschooling parent is a perfect example of this. We’re pretty brave just to make the decision to homeschool in the first place, but then we add an additional layer of courage as we allow our children to experiment. Experimentation is a fantastic way to learn. It’s how all the great inventors accomplished the things they did. Can you imagine if Thomas Edison’s mother had forbidden him to play with electrical sparks? No significant amount of progress is made without some element of risk, and no real discovery is ever made without stepping into … Continue reading →

My Daughter’s Transition to High School

How is it that dropping my daughter off for her first day of high school almost felt like the first day of kindergarten? How is it that I spent more time awake in the middle of the night than she probably did…worrying about the transition? I was doing pretty okay about all of this until we attended her Open House the night before. All of my kids brought their supplies to put them into their lockers. No one had any trouble opening their locks. We then took their schedules and went to each class, meeting the teachers. But with my … Continue reading →

Back to School Anxiety & Emotions

Do a Google search on this topic and you’re likely to come across a ton of news stories, blogs, opinions, etc. I thought I better throw my hat into the ring, so my readers would not be left out. The person quoted the most on these various sites is Samuel Gladding, who is a professor at Wake Forest University. He offers 6 tips for helping with back to school anxiety and is summarized by Bradenton.com. The fact that these articles keep popping up on my alerts daily was funny to me, as I think I have more anxiety than my … Continue reading →

School Scare

Optional title: First Grade Fear For me, not my kid. I am thrilled that my 6-year-old has fully embraced being a full-time first grader. However, the 7.5-hour school day does yield a litany of potential hazards. For example, last week, one of my daughter’s classmates fell from the school’s monkey bars and broke her arm… in two places. Then, a couple of days ago, another kid from her class had to go to the ER after she was hit square in the eye with a wood chip, which was thrown at her by some other student on the playground. Life’s … Continue reading →

Super Halloween Read: Scaredy-Cat, Splat!

Want to get a bunch of six year olds to laugh like hyenas? Two words: Mrs. Wimpydimple Those two words set-off an explosion of side-splitting laughter that echoed throughout my daughter’s school. Being guest reader has never been so rewarding. Thanks, Scaredy-Cat, Splat! I have a feeling that author Rob Scotton imagined a scenario very similar to the one I experienced in my daughter’s first grade class when he wrote the latest addition to his extremely popular SPLAT the SCAREDY-CAT series of children’s books. Still, nothing says “thanks for taking time off from work to read to 20 wiggly, squiggly, … Continue reading →

My Homeschool History

People often ask me how I got in to homeschooling. The answer is simple –it’s how I was raised. My parents started their home school when I was a baby. My sisters were having difficulty in their public school settings. The two oldest were getting propositioned in the hallways, and the sister next in line was struggling so much in her third grade class, she was getting ulcers. Each day when my sisters came home from school, they were nervous wrecks, and my mom was at her wits’ end to know what to do. She began to notice a pattern. … Continue reading →

My Last Blog

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This is going to be my last blog as the Adoption Blogger for Families.com. I’m looking forward to spending the summer with my kids, possibly working at their school, and taking on new writing projects. I may well guest blog occasionally for this or other Families blogs. It seems the Adoption Blog will continue, so I hope this blog, along with Families’ forums, can be a source of information and community for adoptive parents, adoptees, and birth parents. Yesterday I could think of a million things to say in my last few blogs and wondered how I would fit it … Continue reading →

Now I’m Scared

As a parent, what scares you more? A. Having your child flunk out of school B. Having your child imprisoned for criminal behavior C. Having your child get sucked into a life of drug use D. Having your child get regular bikini waxes to please her boyfriend Up until a few days ago some of my greatest nightmares involved A, B, and C. Then, I received the following comment on a blog entitled: “Would You Allow Your Teen Daughter to Get a Bikini Wax?” and I was forced to add “D” to my list: “From a teens point of view, … Continue reading →

Parenting the Sensitive Preschooler

My daughter is a lovely and sensitive soul. If you also have a preschooler who is easily over-stimulated and sensitive to her physical and emotional environment, here are some ways that we’ve worked to make life good for all members of our household. Have a designated talking time, a quiet time when you are not distracted by anything else and can focus completely on your child. For us, this is right before bedtime. Sometimes it’s in the car, too. Having that focused, quiet snuggle time is essential for her and for me, if I want to stay in tune with … Continue reading →