Home School Online

While most homeschool  moms are thrilled to be teaching literature, they aren’t necessarily so excited about teaching math to their homeschooled students.

For many students, math produces feelings of dread and anxiety. In the classroom and on tests, kids fear being humiliated if they come up with the wrong answer or don’t know how to solve a math problem. They feel pressured by their teachers, parents, peers, and time constraints. Math anxiety is a common and sometimes serious problem: it causes students’ minds to go blank and their reasoning skills to be blocked by anxiety or even panic.

Use Technology to Overcome Math Anxiety

One way to present math in a non-threatening way is by using the computer. Time4Learning offers computer-based instruction that can help reduce or solve math anxiety.

Specifically:

• Lessons are student-paced, allowing students to repeat lessons as many times as they want until they’ve mastered a skill.
• Lessons are presented in a sequential order in small chunks. Each lesson within a chapter builds on the last, which helps reinforce skills.
• Students have access to one grade above and one grade below, allowing them to flip back to lessons from the previous year if they don’t fully understand a concept.
• Lessons are taught by animated characters in a highly visual, interactive manner. This helps bring the material to life and lets students engage with the material instead of memorizing it.
• Activities provide alternative explanations, so if a student answers a question incorrectly the first time, the activity then will explain it in a different way.

Technology can open doors in a way that textbooks can’t, by creating an interactive learning experience that brings the material to life. And since computers have endless patience and don’t judge, fear of humiliation becomes less of an issue, and a can-do state of mind replaces resistance.

eady to end math anxiety?

When your kids develop a solid math foundation, you’ll be amazed to see the grades improve and the stress disappear. You might even hear that math is fun!

But, when a student has weak math basic skills, math appears confusing and difficult. You’ll likely hear no enthusiasm to learn math or that math is boring. You might even notice that your child starts to develop “math anxiety” and their confidence suffers.

Time4Learning.com is the answer. Build confidence and success in core reading and math skills for kids, PreSchool to Eighth Grade.

I have helped to create the SpellingCity.com website which has become a mainstay of many tens or even hundreds of thousands of students. Sometimes, I’m asked to explain why I think spelling is important.  Here’s  a draft of my rationale for answering this question.   I write this aware that as I type, the computer is prompting me whenever I type in a word that is not properly spelt and where most writing is done on keyboards with built-in spelling support. 

1. Reading:  Learning phonics is dramatically helped by focusing not just on “decoding” but also spelling skills or encoding.

2. Writing: While you can tell students to  ”not worry about spelling, to just focus on writing”,”  that is contrary to many human’s nature. Nobody wants to sound stupid. And bad spelling makes us sound stupid. So it’s natural to think about spelling while you are trying to compose an essay. If you are a bad speller, the cognitive overhead of thinking about spelling distracts the student from writing.

3. Vocabulary skills. Spelling lists are the natural means to focus on word roots, suffixes, and prefixxes. 

4. Grammar. Subject verb  agreement, getting the plural and possessives right, and working with the past, present, and present tense….alll done with spelling.

 SpellingCity has two articles that deal with these questions:

• Research on Spelling Automaticity

A site that many homeschool parents, who like web-based resources, has discovered as the best way to deal with spelling time is SpellingCity.com.   It’s free (mostly, there is a premium membership), full of useful activities and games, and has some great lists. I’ve been thinking of building a lot more literature based word lists.