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Use this website with Beverley Paine's Getting Started with Home Schooling - Practical Considerations to help you develop your own educational curriculum to suit your family situation, beliefs and lifestyle. The checklists can help you identify your children's current educational skill level in each subject area, as well as find any 'gaps' in their learning, plan what they need to cover or keep track of what has been learned. As you can appreciate this website is continuously under development... It's our aim to add pages on a regular basis in all curriculum areas: check back frequently. We hope you enjoy the articles and activities and find the links and recommended resources useful. Over the next year we will be working our way through each subject area and writing fresh, new content. |
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"Thank you so much for your wonderful website! I was getting quiet frustrated with finding appropriate information on homeschooling - thanks to your website we are now on the right track... Using your checklists for reassurance helped me to have the confidence to come up with my own programme that suits our needs." Rachael "I'm a frequent visitor to your website... I gain valuable knowledge from your website, luckily recommended in the very early stages of our homeschooling journey." Geradine "I checked out your website today and was incredibly impressed by it. I can tell it will be a great resource for our family for many years. THANKS for all the hard work that has gone into making homeschooling easier and much less isolating for families like us." Cynthia |
Health and Personal Development
Giving Thanks
by Beverley Paine
Through my many email contacts and expatriate American friends I have learned about some wonderful ideas for traditional celebrations. In the USA Christmas is preceded by Thanksgiving. I think it would be a lovely idea to bring the following Thanks-giving celebrations into either Christmas or New Years.
One friend always has an advent tree at her house for Christmas. She makes a banner with a tree drawn on it and twenty four felt circles with different Christian symbols relating to Christmas drawn on them. Every night they ceremoniously get out the circles, read to or tell the children a little story behind that night's symbol, and the children take turns pinning the circle on the tree drawn on the banner. The symbols were a lot of fun to make and helped everyone to focus on the meaning of the holiday season instead of the greedy commercialism.
Encouraged by her children's eager participation and interest in the advent banner and ritual she designed a similar thing for Thanksgiving, pulling the attention away from all the Christmas decorations and toys which flood the stores at this time of year. Instead of a tree she drew a Cornucopia that is filled with felt fruit & veggies. Each piece of felt was cut into a shape, symbolising a different thing to be thankful for... apple- friends, pear - health, pumpkin - family. After placing it on the banner each person is supposed to go around the family and write down all the names or things they are thankful for on a piece of paper. The papers are stored in a basket or box, which becomes the centre-piece for the traditional meal of celebration. After the meal, each person pulls out a piece of paper and reads out what is written.
Another friend retold how she made a "Thanksgiving tree" every November 1. With her children she would go out and look for a many-limbed tree branch, and stick it into a drilled hole in a piece of two-by-four. Then they would cut out paper leaves in autumn colours in the shapes of autumn leaves - oak, maple, ginkgo, etc. Using a hole punch she made a hole at one end, then attached a piece of yarn. Each evening at dinner, one family member would tell one thing they were thankful for and write it on a leaf and attach it to a tree branch. They all took turns putting on leaves, until Thanksgiving Day, when the tree was "done" and served as a decoration or centerpiece.
I think these are lovely ideas, and one that would easily translate into any other occasion of celebration - Christmas, Birthday, Easter - even Anzac or Remembrance Day. Creating rituals and traditions around important occasions are important elements in children's lives. We shouldn't really have to wait for a special occasion to say thank you or be thankful, but having such wonderful and solid traditions binds families together and teaches tolerance and respect.
on this website is of a general
nature only and is not intended as
personal or professional advice.
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