While we may not have had 20/20 vision going into this year, I’ve found that hindsight really is 20/20. In today’s show, I am sharing three lessons I learned and Bible stories to flesh those lessons out! Let’s take the lessons we learned in 2020 with us into 2021!

Sometimes learning seems harder than it should be. Both parent and student can feel frustrated, not knowing what to do. Join Kathy Kuhl and me as we talk about reading, writing, and learning, and ways you can help students who struggle.

Today we are talking with the author of Screen Kids, Arlene Pellicane, about the boundaries we can set around our children’s devices (and our own).

Step away from the Yuletide unit studies! Put down the glitter and the glue guns. You can’t add “making merry” to a homeschool transcript. Why try? One of the best things about homeschooling for the holidays is...you don’t have to! But if you insist, listen in for my Christmas tips for seasonal sanity, and ways to to get the kids involved without ending up as nutty as a fruitcake.

One of the most puzzling situations a mother finds herself in is when she has a child who can read the words in a book but cannot answer the questions or tell her what has just been read.   These moms frequently hear the phrase, “I don’t remember,” when queried about the reading material.

When working with bright, hardworking 4th through 8th graders in my reading class,  I realized that these students were not proficient at converting the words they were reading into a “movie” in their head, as the rest of us do when we read.  They were merely doing “word calling” much of the time.  I found that “movie making” was a skill that could be developed in them, using an easy fifteen-minute a day exercise.  This exercise did not involve paper or pencil, but only the use of their brain.  “Word calling” is a left-brain auditory task, while creating a picture or movie of those words is the responsibility of the right brain hemisphere.  I merely showed them how to create a seamless flow of words to pictures as they were reading.  You can do this at home, very easily.

In this episode, Jessica chats with her sister, Julie, about making memories over the holidays. They cover food traditions, entertaining, Advent traditions, and centering your holiday around Jesus.