Homeschooling with Brainline.com

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"Mighty Mama" is asking for advice on her 7 year old, already being taught by her mother, but the mama is wanting to know more!

I did write about homeschooling quite a bit already on my blog, so if you want to read more, please scroll down to older post, with the heading homeschooloing! But I can carry on about it, anyway!

Marco is boatschooling now since gr. 2! He is already in gr.6 this year, and I do not know if he would ever go back to a normal school, but of course that will absolutley be his own choice. I will even give him the opportunity to go for a term or more, just to try it out!

But let me come back to homeschooling! Let me start with Brainline! I use this program because I wanted Marco to still do a program that is friendly to the South-African culture! By the way, my older children Joe and his sister, Janlie, also used this program for gr 9 and 10!

The program is very user friendly, and easy for a mom to use and for her child. Marco enjoyed working on his own computer! The work is divided into lessons, so you know exactly how much work to do, to finish the term. We spend about two hours a day, doing school work, and we do not work every day.  If Marco has some friends on other yachts, I refuse to let school interefere with his fun! By now, Marco is so used to the program, that he learnt to summarise all his work since last year. I still keep an eye, but he is almost totally independant. Mathematics, we still do together, because he thinks he knows it all, and he will skip work to get to more interesting work!

I do have a lot of friends with homeschool children on yachts, and we love to compare. I will not name the programs, but most of the moms complain about all the reading their kids have to do, and some complain about all the books they have to sail around! With Brainline, it is easy, they only send you a CD, and all the work is on there! As soon as a new term starts, you just download the new work. I did print out quite a bit of work in gr 2 and 3, to let Marco practise his writing skills! At the end of gr. 2, he could already write in cursive!

Exams! Your little one is not going to write exams until she is in gr.3, I think. But I will tell you how Brainline works. All the tests are done on the computer, and then the response is send back via internet. Only the mathematics paper is printed by you, completed and then you have to scan it in, and send it back to Brainline! No projects are done, nothing has to be mailed by you all the way back to SA!  I`ve seen how mothers stood in lines in a post office somewhere in the world, trying to mail their childrens work to an institution. I`ve seen them standing at post offices, trying to find their childrens books on time. I`ve heard so many fathers complain about waiting at a bay, waiting for school books, preventing them from sailing.

Last year we sailed the Pacific Ocean, with vast distances and no internet, and even then, Brainline accommodated Marco and me. We also had a problem not having internet, and not being able to download his material, but again Brainline send us everything via email!

I hope I have been of help. You can email me directly if you need more information. marlene@juralands.com

Brainline Learning World Website : http://www.brainline.com/welcome/