Welcome to the Carnival of Homeschooling!

Liberty, and especially the freedom to parent our children as we choose, is something that can’t ever be taken for granted. After hearing this week about a family in Spain being sentenced to jail for successfully homeschooling their child, it was a pleasure to see homeschoolers fighting for their rights in Illinois. Dave  at Home School Dad is rejoicing It’s done! It’s done! The home schoolers won! After all, the research proves Homeschooling Works! as Barbara Frank of Cardamom Publishers says at Barbara Frank Online.

Pamela talks about those Grumpy Mornings we all have at Blah, Blah, Blog. Enjoy those lazy days while your children are little, seriously, they pass so quickly. Annie Kate on her Tea Time blog encourages us all to use these Four Record Keeping Tips for Homeschools so we don’t forget these times.

Letty Brown of The Bold and Fabulous shares her moving story of God’s intervention in her plans for her life with lessons we can all benefit from in My Arms Were Too Short to Box With God.

Robin Phillips lays out some awesome, simple ideas for Home School Writing Kids: Three Techniques For Writing Fiction at Crack the Egg and Amber has a Book Review: The Wheel on the School (And a Read Aloud Tip) posted at The Mommy Earth. If you are interested in other books set in the Netherlands, we loved Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates (get the unabridged, there’s a lot more to this story than the Disney-fied version) and Scout: The Secret of the Swamp.

At The Sloan Homeschool, TaMara shares a photoessay of India and Butterflies as their children do some hands-on homeschooling. Sara’s family is not only doing, but “Watching Geography” — she tell us about using NetFlix to see the world at Small World. Speaking of hands-on homeschooling, Dena Wood has a lot of great ideas for Food Learning! posted at PJs All Day. Love that blog title!

I think everyone is worn out with winter, because this week is full of great activities like Makita presents in GEMS :: Bicycle Breakdown at Academia Celestia. We have got to do this one. Jennifer shares her daughter’s Apologia Young Explorers Zoology project’s Completion at a glimpse of our life.

Rational Jenn tells about A Day in the Life with young children posted at Rational Jenn, while Miss Nirvana, of Nirvana Homeschooling, teaches a cool Noncontact Method of Painting with Watercolors to her young child. You can get more art ideas from Dragana, who posts Every Child is an Artist from an art school in Hungary. This week they have Pictures with straws. Then check out the art lesson Cindy shares with us, and it includes math, too(!) in I Spy Shapes in Art (Math + Art = Fun!) posted at love2learn2day.

Susan had an insight in understanding her son being unwilling to show his math work in Two Steps Back? Or a Big Leap Forward? posted at Homeschooling Hearts & Minds. Denise enters the Blog Carnival Math Teachers at Play #35 posted at Let’s Play Math! for fun math ideas. Andrea Hermitt tells us about Tapping Into Their Genius and a program to accelerate children she just found out about at Notes From A Homeschooling Mom.

ChristineMM really breaks down some of the advantages and dis- advantages of community college classes in Dual Credit for Homeschoolers Leads to Thoughts About Our Family posted at The Thinking Mother. Janine Cate of Why Homeschool is using community college classes for her daughter. She lays out her plan in Homeschooling to College. Makes me glad we’re in North Carolina, where the colleges are very homeschool-friendly. And a homeschool graduate studying at Oxford University (our son, John Calvin) shares his visit to The Tower of the Five Orders at Further Up and Further In. Don’t miss the “About” on his blog. BTW, the picture in the margin is All Souls College, Oxford, the original ivory tower, where dons have no duties but to think!

At Successful Homeschooling, Carletta’s Homeschool Mom’s Dirty Little Secret #1 – The Unhappy Marriage is a not-to-be-missed been there/done that. This is an issue we all need to be talking about more – how can you make your relationship stronger in the stress of homeschooling. In fact, Hal and I are about to come out with a new book on marriage. Hey! If you have any great ideas for a title, please share! It’ll be a lot like Raising Real Men: a comprehensive look at the topic with a lot of real stories, a good bit of humor and a Biblical foundation.

And finally, our own contribution to this week’s Carnival, Bad Company & Good Morals, in which, Hal after a sojourn on an oil rig, talks about what you can do when you can’t avoid bad company. Thanks so much for stopping by Raising Real Men! We hope you’ll look around a bit while you are here and  join us on Facebook, too. It’s been great getting to know you!

Submit your blog article to the next edition of carnival of homeschooling using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page. Oh, and if you posted something to the Carnival that didn’t get posted, be sure to let us know how your entry relates to homeschooling, if it’s not obvious – are you a homeschool family, is this interesting information for homeschoolers? We’re getting more and more link-farm  entries and completely unrelated entries. Help us help you!