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Joann Burnside Hoyt

2024 IAHE Parenting and Homeschool Conference Featured Speaker

Joann Burnside Hoyt

Joann Burnside Hoyt

Joann lives in NW Indiana. Her real-world experiences as a Christian wife, mother, widow, 26-year home educator, grandmother, small business owner, and now wife once more, all combine to “work together for good” as she draws from her life to bring humor and hope to her audience.

Workshops

 

High School: The Final Frontier

In this session we will discuss why high school seems so scary, what we “think” it should be and what it can actually look like. I will discuss the struggles of parenting and educating teens but also the “cool factor” no one thinks about – when your kids start to get really interesting and begin to form adult plans and ideas. How they can offer suggestions as to what they would like to do and actually help shape their own curriculum and how to work together in planning high school activities. High school is the beginning of letting them soar while simultaneously reeling them back in during what are potentially the shakiest years of your child’s life. Parents will leave encouraged and hopefully convinced that not only can high school be done well through home education, but that it can far surpass other options.

Mapping Out Your Home School; Using SMART goals to make sure you and your children are getting the most out of home education

The homeschool world is full of day planners, curriculum trackers, record books and so on and so forth. However there is not as much spoken of when it comes to setting goals short term and long term for the students or their parents. At the same time many homeschooling parents don’t do well with day timers, minute by minute schedules and all the other things that we feel we SHOULD do but just can’t figure out HOW to do them. Goal setting is a tremendous tool for all styles of home education. It can be a more bite sized, manageable way to plan for the short term and an encouraging and focused way of looking at things long term. In hindsight, I wish I had known much much sooner how much goal setting could help in the home when it comes to lessons, extra projects and even home management.

Raising Articulate Kids and Why It Is So Important

The world judges us on how we speak; that is the plain and simple truth. Job interviews, college applications, ministry opportunities and even making friends are tasks often made easier when you are confident in your speech. The good news is you do not have to be a complete grammar nerd to raise your children to speak well, to be able to present information intelligently, and to be able to have a working vocabulary that will serve them well in all aspects of their lives. It’s as easy as 1-2-3, reading, listening and understanding.

One Stop Curriculum Shopping, aka – Unit Studies

This term is thrown around but many people don’t really know how they work or why they can be a huge benefit in home education. Many parents really don’t understand how to come up with their own unit study approach. I will explain in depth why unit studies can ignite the fire for learning and show how to turn any subject into a multi age, multi subject unit study. This would be interactive with ideas and suggestions thrown back and forth between myself and attendees.