This year marked a new school adventure for us. I applied as a teacher at our local Christian school and they offered me a job the following day. I accepted it. This past Friday marked week two of our time there and so far we are LOVING our experience. Why the change? COVID forced many of my clients to make hard decisions about my services and their financial well-being. Hours were cut, monthly income was less, but the bills remained the same. I felt the brunt of it as a cons

Summer offers parents a unique opportunity to provide educational growth or setbacks. In my research, most parents have never even heard that there is a summer reading loss unless they heard it from their child's teacher or school administration. I hope to end that by sharing it, talking about it, providing resources, tips, tools, and workshops for parents to feel encouraged and empowered. I truly believe that God gave PARENTS the prime responsibility of educating their child

Consider the similarities between reading and math skills to exercise. What happens when you stop for a considerable amount of time? Those g

I read Elizabeth Bartholet’s attack of homeschooling on Harvard Magazines website, a day after I began writing a four-part blog series...

As parents, we are ALL in a unique position to offer our students the very best education possible. Parents are primarily responsible for

Sight words are the words that a reader should identify by sight. High-Frequency words are the words that appear most often in literature.

The world of curriculum is overwhelming? How a curriculum writer advises curriculum choices.

One of my clients shared Cincinnati Zoo's Home Safari daily Facebook LIVE event with me. My children LOVE it. Due to the fact that I'm already providing reading and writing activities for my little people, my client asked if I'd be willing to share what I do online during this crazy Coronavirus quarantine. THIS is what it means to hire me as your educational consultant! I do my very best to provide opportunities to enrich your educational experience and journey alongside you

Think about how you learn a new word and apply those same principles to your instruction. That is one way I think about instruction, the second (and more important) is through research (more on that later). When it comes to vocabulary, I learn best when I have a dictionary and thesaurus present, find the clues in the surrounding sentences and paragraphs, read an example given to me, break it down into different parts, and then have a variety of opportunities to use it in my d

I created a video about this topic on IGTV as well (you can watch it by clicking here) and I basically took said there and wrote it here. You can either watch the twelve-minute video that has some additional information, or you can take three minutes and read this post. Either way, I hope it helps you understand my answer to this popular question! I get asked all the time, "What curriculum do you use?" My answer usually produces a frowny face because, I don't. I don't use any

I'm going to approach this post as a Q&A session while giving the tools of my writer's (homeschool and tutoring students) favorite writing tools. These questions were asked by moms who needed help with their students writing and each of these products were successfully used to inspire early readers to write what they were learning! Should students learn to write while learning to read? Yes! Writing is proven to boost memory, therefore anyone under my tutelage must write their

When it comes to little minds we are to build a solid foundation in reading and writing. That is our primary goal. Otherwise, the sciences, history, math, and all other subject areas cannot thrive. You may be shaking your head, because you've had success with numbers but reading has been met with difficulty. Here is why I argue this case: in every subject, in every textbook there are text features and writing processes that enable a scientist (for example) to thrive as a self