Homeschooling Year 6 + Technology

Summer is in full swing here, complete with heat indexes above 100F (40C.) So we are basking in the comfort of our air conditioned home, each engaged in our own activities. The youngest is practicing her music skills on the keyboard, the middlest is practicing her gaming skills and the oldest creating her writing masterpiece.

All jesting aside, my mind is fast forwarding to the fall and planning what we need to be working on and with for the upcoming school year. Our 7th year of homeschooling is fast approaching and this year we will add preschool (3), split 1/2, and 6th grade to our skills list. I didn't blog much last year, due to distractions and learning how to teach all three at once, plus Facebook was a major distraction and life, the blog fell by the wayside, apologies! I'm hoping to better plan my year this year, and actually have time to blog more of our adventures.

The usual line up of suspect subjects will be on the roster for the fall, including Language Arts (reading, phonics, spelling, grammar, writing -pen and creative), Math, Science, history, geography, Spanish, art, Music etc. But this year, we are hoping to add a little technology to our repertoire.

Earlier this summer my oldest and I managed to read the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins on our iPads, iPhone and iPods. This got me thinking about how we use our iDevices and how we could make better use of them. This morning I found a blog about a middle school teacher who encouraged her students to use iPads for the year. They seem to have used them in every subject and for a variety of purposes from making stop motion videos for various projects to math on whiteboard type apps while recording lessons as the teacher was explaining it!

While I think the technology is still in its infancy, it is hitting potty training pretty quickly and with great success. People are seeing the potential, both as a portable knowledge share that the internet provides, but also as a tool for teaching with specialty apps designed to suit a purpose, giving students and businesses more creative freedom than they have ever had before!

My hope  is to investigate apps that will cover our current grades, and future grades. I'd love to get involved in beta programs for review of apps that might be useful to homeschoolers.   But most of all we're looking to use these cool tools for more than videos, Internet, books and personal reminder systems.


I plan to make a better effort this year in keeping our homeschool blog a little more up to date, and hope to do a few features on the materials we are using and maybe a little R&D (research and discussion! LOL!) on the apps we find to enhance our studies.


So to my readers out there in blog-land, if you know of apps, programs or other blogs that will help us focus on our goals, I'm all ears and would love to check out your suggestions!

(the next few updates will include our grade level plans for the coming year.)