Featured Blog
6 Useful Tips for Motivating Teenagers
How can a smart parent (like you) help your teen to stay motivated in his or her studies? It comes from your ongoing conversations to help them see a bigger picture.
Critical Race Theory Educational Worksheet
Use this worksheet to organize your talking points then hold a conversation or mini-lesson on critical race theory.
Teaching Self-Reflection Checklist
Join me in self-reflection before each lesson. Experience the value of pausing and engaging in deeper thought before you teach.
Book Review: Uncommon Sense Teaching
Uncommon Sense Teaching explains learning from a neuroscience perspective, but in easy-to-understand terms that you can apply to be a better instructor of most anything.
All Blog Posts
6 Useful Tips for Motivating Teenagers
How can a smart parent (like you) help your teen to stay motivated in his or her studies? It comes from your ongoing conversations to help them see a bigger picture.
Critical Race Theory Educational Worksheet
Use this worksheet to organize your talking points then hold a conversation or mini-lesson on critical race theory.
Teaching Self-Reflection Checklist
Join me in self-reflection before each lesson. Experience the value of pausing and engaging in deeper thought before you teach.
Book Review: Uncommon Sense Teaching
Uncommon Sense Teaching explains learning from a neuroscience perspective, but in easy-to-understand terms that you can apply to be a better instructor of most anything.
Discover Student Journaling
Use this student journaling worksheet to evaluate your study efforts each day. Think how you can work smarter!
Do You Know Your Child’s Learning Maturity? Find Out Now
It is the Center for Homeschooling’s integrative model to visualizing and understanding your child’s learning maturity; it will help you to develop a planned way to improve your child’s ability to learn.
One Big Thing to Improve Your Studies
Many students, along with their parents, don’t appreciate the connection of good study planning to better learning.
Oprah’s Three Questions for Better Homeschool Teaching
What can Oprah teach us about homeschooling? Yes, that Oprah and she has a valuable lesson. Who wouldn’t want to learn from her?
3 Teaching Tips from Aristotle
Here is a three-step technique which shows us why many of the most powerful teaching techniques are also surprisingly easy to do.
4 Rules for Better Homeschool Teaching Every Parent Should Know
Here are four time-tested rules to improve your homeschool teaching. Follow them – they will make your lessons and learning experiences more effective.
Jump Start to Deliberate Practice
Anders Ericsson identified these 5 components of “deliberate practice.” Use this checklist to evaluate your learning or training regimen - then improve it by adding SPICE!
The Journey to Student as “Self-Teacher”
Use this article to guide a constructive and interesting conversation with a different point of view about learning. Introduce the very powerful mindset that your child can become a self-learner, someone who knows how to teach themself. This can help motivate the desire to become more skillful at learning.
The 4D Coaching Model
Bring out the powerful parent coach in you with this four-step process! This summarizes the steps of the 4D parent coaching model as presented in the online Pa 10 course. Use this as a step-by-step to guide for improving the learning strategies used by your child. Start with the Discover step and advance to the next levels only when you have accomplished the step results.
The Power of “Tiny Gains”
Because these ideas have so much potential to improve learning, you will want to consider how you will implement your change strategy. Consider this question - what is the best way to make these amazing improvements?
A fun Learning Exercise: “The Amazing Brain”
One of the major objections that parents face is the self-limiting beliefs your child can hold about their own capabilities to learn hard things. If you have heard statements like, “I’m not smart enough to learn math,” or “This subject is too hard!” or “I wish I was smart like so and so,” then you should recognize you need some supporting information to counter these points of view. Use these points as talking points to counter negativity.
What the Dog and the Frisbee Teach Us About Parent Coaching
How can you convince the child who believes she is a good student to work harder to improve and become an even better expert learner? It’s a motivational problem - we do know the hardest person to change is one who thinks they are already good at something. Whether they really are or not doesn’t matter here, you are dealing with the same problem of resistance to change. When you complete the Center for Homeschooling’s Learning Power course, the question of motivation is something you...
College Readiness – Are You Overlooking These Things?
How do you know if your child is really college ready? The science of learning provides us with useful insight into a key skill you may be missing.
Checklist on How to Learn Hard Things
Learning hard things requires a disciplined approach that will keep you in “focused mode.” We’ve identified seven helpful components–use this as a worksheet to assess what you are doing or not doing now, and then identifying what you need to change to be more successful. Checklist Growth MindsetAdapt what Dr. Carol Dweck has called a “Growth Mindset” to tackle hard things. This starts with the ongoing belief in your ability to grow yourself through your efforts and practice....
Gifts and Choices: How to Have a Powerful Conversation on Learning
Greetings! Children often underestimate their own ability to learn. This can be a big problem when the learning gets hard. Read below to learn how to deal with situations where your child is losing self-confidence and you hear protestations like “I can’t learn this” or “I’m not smart enough to learn math.” We will explore a four-step process with two simple questions you use to stimulate a deeper conversation with your child about learning and growing their confidence in their own...
Critical Race Theory Educational Worksheet
Use this worksheet to organize your talking points then hold a conversation or mini-lesson on critical race theory.
How to Create a Summer Learning Challenge!
Why not center learning on an out-of-the-box learning challenge that has the power to make this summer uniquely different?
Do You Know Your Child’s Learning Maturity? Find Out Now
It is the Center for Homeschooling’s integrative model to visualizing and understanding your child’s learning maturity; it will help you to develop a planned way to improve your child’s ability to learn.
Checklist to Better Learning – Improving Mindsets
Mindset is an important enabler affecting your child’s daily self-dialogue which reinforces his or her intimate beliefs, attitudes, and feelings about their capabilities to learn and grow.
One Big Thing to Improve Your Studies
Many students, along with their parents, don’t appreciate the connection of good study planning to better learning.
Teaching Tip: Stop and Jot
Looking for a great way to encourage more retrieval practice in your classroom? This is a technique you can seamlessly plug into your existing lesson plans and activities multiple times a day.