Suggestions
Just a note of thanks and encouragement to all of you. When you are logged in to myhomeschoolplan.com, there is a link at the upper right called suggestions. We use a service called uservoice and we are very happy with it.
You can add an idea, or vote on an existing idea. Currently, reading list has the most votes.
One request I have is if you could use your myhomeschoolplan user id or include an email address. Sometimes I like to get clarification on an idea and if you submit it anonymously, all I can do is comment on the idea and hope you come back and take a look (which is cool if you do.)
So again, thanks for using the suggestions area, keep those ideas come, we really do appreciate it.
MyHomeSchoolPlan update
Hi everyone. We just got back from two wonderful weeks out west that I’ll post about later but wanted to give an update on MyHomeSchoolPlan.
We have officially launched and left our Beta behind! In the same way that our Beta launch was a ‘soft’ launch, so is this. We will do more of a push as August/September rolls around.
What does leaving Beta mean to our customers? For existing users, as a thank you to for trying us out and giving us such great feedback during the beta, the site will remain free to you! Thanks so much for giving us the confidence to keep this going and improve the site. At some point in the future we may add some major new feature/product that will be an additional charge, but the scheduler will remain free.
For new users, we have implemented a pricing plan based on feedback that we feel is a great value, that will allow us to continue to add features (while keeping the service easy to use) without making price a major issue to customers. On our pricing page you can see the pricing, but essentially we offer pricing based timeframes: monthly, quarterly, and annually. You can skip as much time as you like, i.e. put your account on hold, and all your data will be there when you come back.
Our pricing motto was “a latte a month” and we’ve held to that. If you pay by the month, it is a large latte, $4 a month. If you go with the annual plan, $30 a year, that breaks down to $2.50 a month, less than a latte!
We thank all our customers old and new and hope you find this a service of value. We have lots of plans that we’ll be posting about over the summer. Our next big step that we’re testing now, is the creation of a ‘new’ school year, so you can move your students into new courses and grade levels.
Summer School
I asked this question on Twitter this week and got back a wide variety of answers.
What do you do during summer in terms of homeschooling? Reply via twitter or in the comments.
We keep math going about 3 times per week as well as music practice and some required reading (although our kids love to read so that’s not a challenge.) The reasons we keep math going is that it builds upon previous steps more so than other subjects, and we love NOT having to waste the fall going through the review process. Our first year that we homeschooled, when we jumped from one grade level book to the next in math for my daughter, we couldn’t believe how far into the book we had to go to get past the review from the previous year.
I look forward to hearing what you all do.
Socialization…
When we decided to homeschool, the number one question we’d get would be about ‘what about socialization’. I always just laughed off the question because I felt the question assumed that regular schooling was a good method for socialization (but that’s for another day.)
Now that we’ve been doing this for nearly two years I thought I’d look back at the opportunities for social engagement my kids have had:
- Boy Scouts / Brownies
- Sports – Soccer, Basketball, Track
- Homeschool Co-op classes one day a week
- Science Museum Homeschool Classes (monthly)
- Young Mensan monthly events
- Chess Tournaments
- Tap Dance, Choir, Cello
We are very careful not to over-schedule our kids so this list does not occur all at once nor do we do every event that comes our way. But the point is that there are many opportunities to interact and we feel lucky to be able to take advantage of many of these opportunities, some of which we wouldn’t have if we weren’t homeschooling.
Everyone has to answer that question their own way but I’m curious to hear how you’ve answered (or if you’ve even been asked that.) My standard answer to people who I feel are asking legitimately and not being rude is to say “we have found ample opportunities to socialize, some of which we couldn’t do if we were not homeschooling; so it works really well for us.”
Book Reading Lists
We are going to implement a new feature soon to myhomeschoolplan.com. It’s the number one request on our suggestions page, Reading Lists. I’d like to start a discussion here on what that means to you all.
- Would you like one list total, or one for each child? (I’m thinking one for each child.)
- Have the list be text (like this bulleted list here) or actually link back to amazon.com
- Do you want to tag the books by subject or course? (I’m thinking for the reading lists, no, that’s not the purpose, but I could be wrong.)
- Do you want to use simply for books you’ve read, or do you want to treat like amazon’s wish list where you indicate, ‘I’d like to read’ or ‘I’ve read’?
- Lastly (and this would be a later phase) would you like to be able to share this list with others, and view others’ lists? That way, if you were wondering “what are other 8 year old girls reading” you could see. (and it would be up to you of course if you wanted to share that.)
You can email us or reply in the comments with your thoughts. Any and all responses are appreciated, you all help make this a better product.
Timelines
One of the things we do at homeschool that I love is our history lessons. Jennifer has done an amazing job of balancing the depth levels across our three kids’ ages while yet having them go through the same time period together.
To that end, as we begin a new era, she pulls out a lengthy roll of paper (picture someone rolling out a red carpet and you get the idea). Each child gets a marker and can put in the dates/events of importance. This allows our oldest to go in depth and focus on dates of battles (his interest) while my daughter can focus on inventions.
The other thing that comes out of this is the layering of what was going on around the world. Many books do this in their timelines now as well, but with our size paper roll, we can really play with this, so we can see what is going on in Roman times in Western Europe, North America, and China, for example, in one view.
Give it a try, it’s a low cost way to get your children working together yet at their own pace/depth.
Review: Life of Fred Math books
My wife has graciously agreed to guest post again, and she writes this week on the “Life of Fred” math series. She writes:
All three of our children weren’t as fond of math as other subjects. That doesn’t mean that they were not good at it, but they did not think they were. They would much rather have read a book than do math, actually they would rather have done anything than math.
I heard a recommendation that the Life of Fred math books were good for children who love to read and dislike math. So I figured that I would try them. After all, what we were doing wasn’t working at all. When I first picked up one of the books, I was surprised because it didn’t look like a math book. Stanley F. Schmidt, the author of the books, uses humor and fun pictures throughout the books. Each book is divided into chapters (lessons) that tell Fred’s story and how Fred needs mathematics. In the early books, there are problems that they need to complete in every chapter and at the end of every four or five chapters they have to pass a bridge to move on. In later books, they have “cities” to work through at the end of each chapter in addition to the problems in the chapter. Each concept is clear and easy for my children to understand on their own without any help. The books also explain the why behind many of the math concepts being taught. So my children have a great grasp of the material when they are finished.
When I handed my children their first Life of Fred book, they actually asked me if they could do another chapter. More math? What had happened to my children? I wasn’t sure what to think, but I told them yes! Now as they are doing math, I hear them laughing. And they call me over to them, not because they need help, but because they want to share something funny that Fred did or said with me. We have completed Fractions, Decimals and Percents, and Beginning Algebra. We are getting ready for Advanced Algebra. After that we have Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus, and Statistics. So we won’t run out of math anytime soon! Sometimes, they even choose Life of Fred over a good book.
Website for Life of Fred math books: http://www.stanleyschmidt.com/FredGauss/index2.html
Printing your schedule
Over the last several days we added some new tweaks to make printing the schedule off a better experience for you. Both of these were based on ideas from our users contributing to the ideas area of the site.
Someone asked that we ‘uncheck’ the complete box for the print view, since the complete font for activities was difficult to read. This is a great example of understanding the user’s underlying problem or goal versus necessarily taking the suggested solution. The user pointed out a problem we were unaware of, that the complete view for activities was not as readable. Our solution then was not to uncheck the complete box, but to change the font for the print view so that it looks better and is easier to use.
Similarly, someone asked to remove the weekend days from the print view. I replied back commenting on if the intent is really to not print days with no activities. Someone else replied in the affirmative and it made sense to us so now when you print off your schedule, days with no activities will not print.
Little by little we are making improvements big and small.
New Feature – Drag Your Activities Where You Want Them!
Today, we’re excited to launch some new features that you’ve asked for, that we think will really aid in your daily usage.
So let’s tell a story. Jan creates a schedule this week for her son Jim. Jan wants to prioritize the list each day so Jim will know in what order to work on his activities. Jan holds her mouse over an activity (the cursor turns into a hand) and drags the activity in the proper order. She drags math to the top of the list and is ready to go.
- Drag activities in priority order simply by using your mouse.
Back to our story. At the end of the day, Jan sees that Jim has not finished his History reading. No problem, Jan thinks, I will just drag the history lesson on Tuesday to Wednesday.
- Drag activities to another day.
This isone of those little things that makes the experience for you that much better.
Other Features we’ve added to remind you about from the last couple weeks
- On the Schedule, there is a filter that allows you to switch your view from date driven to a course activity list.
- On the Schedule icons row, we now have a monthly view in addition to a weekly.
Thanks to you all for your contributions. We’ve got some great ideas coming down the road as we get closer to a full-launch. Stay tuned.
Updates and new features added to MyHomeSchoolPlan
Thanks again to all of your feedback we’ve added/updated MyHomeSchoolPlan to make it easier to use and more useful for you.
The first change we made was to take everything related to getting setup and place those links under a “Setup” icon in the upper navigation. This is a minor change but some people were confused with the setup icons being under Homeroom
On a more exciting note, we’ve added the ability to see activities by course on the Schedule page. You will now see a Courses Filter box on the schedule page. Simply choose a course and you can see the activities you’ve done for that course only. In addition, we’ve added a Month View to the schedule as an additional choice besides the Week View.
This is one of the advantages of having the product on the web. As we get feedback from you on ways big and small to make the product better, we can work on them right away.
Thanks as always for using the product and keep the feedback coming!