By this time of year you will likely have developed a pattern or routine in your home-school day to accomplish your selected program of studies. Your children engage themselves with the various subjects that you assign them, most often with the help of a text book or other written resource. Depending on your child’s age and ability, the reading in these books may be done by your child, or you may be the one to read and explain the material to your eager learner.
What's the difference?
"What's the difference between parent-led and teacher-led? Why do some families get different homeschool funding than others? I hear about 'aligned' or 'blended' or 'school-delivered' or 'teacher-led' or 'parent-led'... are there really that many kinds of home schooling?"
We hear questions like this frequently, and hope that the following information will help you to make an informed decision in your own educational journey. All learning-at-home options in Alberta fall under one of the following categories.
Many students are thinking about the spring-times of their future careers, or summer jobs, or 'after school' jobs.
But with that thought comes anxiety: as a home school grad, what do I put on my resume and what do I say in a job interview? What will I say when they ask “do you have your high school diploma?” I have some ideas…
(Note: this article isn’t a comprehensive list of everything you should put in a resume or say at an interview, but simply a few ideas for you to consider and get you thinking).
Happy Home Schooling! This eLetter (Terry’s Terrific Learning Connections or Terry’s Tender Loving Care) is meant to encourage and inspire families homeschooling their children. (*If you would like to opt out of receiving this email, simply click the button at the bottom of this eLetter to unsubscribe.)
Christmas is just about here. No matter what year it is, time marches along. Christmas is a relatively short season – as is Summer. I try to appreciate each and every day.
Often, history education consists of a short study of ancient history and several years of study about the time since the discovery of the Americas. There is so much information about the last 500 years that the sheer volume overwhelms earlier history. This emphasis is what most of us of the last generation experienced in our schooling.
There is a danger in this. We begin to think that the time before 1492 is in the same realm as myths and legends. Biblical stories, and perhaps Christ himself, are not seen as historically true. But if we have a more complete picture of history, preferably chronologically from the oldest known civilizations, we can see how God prepared the world for His coming, and how mankind responded. His Incarnation can be seen for what it is: the central event of all history.
Terry’s Terrific Learning Connections (OR Terry’s Tender Loving Care)
As this home school year draws to a close, I hope you have had a great year home educating your children and that you have some fun (and / or) relaxing plans for your family this summer.
I was somewhat thrust into home schooling without a great deal of preparation. About all I knew was that I had the right to teach my children at home, and in my first year I simply brought home all our daughter’s textbooks from school. It soon became clear that importing the school into our home wasn’t going to work very well so, in our second year, I copied both method and curriculum from another home schooling family. This whole time, in an effort to research what other options might be available, I spent a lot of time reading books on education in general and some on home schooling.
Marriage has taken a beating, and it has more than a bleeding nose.
We have all known of marriages that seemed doomed from the beginning, and sure enough didn’t survive the test of time. But something has changed. Many strong and healthy mar-riages that have been an example to others have collapsed. Christian matrimony has not been immune to attack. What is going on and why now more than ever?
Committed couples are suffering the same difficulties that are afflicting our world. As Christians, we may think ourselves separated from present culture, but we are ill affected, aware of it or not. We are living in a world where pleasure, entertainment, and the avoidance of suffering are top bill. Man is at the center of this worldly culture. We live in the “disposable society”. Cultural forces and destructive spirits have the marital camp surrounded. But isn’t the devout Christian immune? Doesn’t faith insulate us and protect us?
It should be noted that some solutions for signing a PDF are about putting your actual, visual signature (or something that is good enough to be one) on the file, while others are about adding a digital "signature" in a different sense to the file to show that it was you who signed it. Sometimes one or the other is what's needed and you'll want to make sure you've picked the right one.
On computers
While Adobe Reader might be treated as an industry standard, there are other options.
- Foxit has a free reader with signing capability.
- On macOS, the built-in Preview app, which is the default app for opening a PDF file, has an option add visual signatures and few handy ways to create them that are easier than clicking and dragging with your mouse.
- Open the file
- In the menu bar, go Tools > Annotate > Signature.
- From there you can pick an existing signture, or add a new one with a simple webcam scanning process to digitise one written on paper, or finger-draw one on the laptop trackpad or a connected phone. (This is also where you'd remove existing saved signatures.)
On mobile phones & tablets
Here are a few suggested apps for filling out and signing PDF documents while on the go!
iOS
- pdfFiller
- PDF Expert (a bit more advanced/complicated)
Android:
- DocuSign
- Adobe Scan (thanks Peter!)
It seems to me that home schooling is a lot like swimming across a lake.
When you are out in the middle, the lake sometimes seems to be a lot bigger than it looked when you jumped in, and unlike a swimming pool, it has no lines painted on the bottom to keep you swimming in a straight line. When you are fighting to make it through the waves without inhaling too much water, pushing yourself to keep going stroke after stroke when you are exhausted, and blinking to see in spite of the water stinging your eyes, it is possible to lose perspective.