Tree Valley Academy provides secular educational resources for homeschooling parents or teachers of elementary aged children.
Math, french, spelling, and word puzzles are the most frequent topics. You will find a lot of free printables. The goal is always to make learning fun!
Tree Valley Academy is the name we have given to our homeschool. We live in the country in an area filled with forests, valleys and lakes so I thought the name was fitting.
About Me
Hi there! My name is Melanie Thomas. I’m a single mom, homeschooling my 10 yr old daughter.
I love being a mom, but being a single mom is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. To be fully responsible for someone else’s well being in every respect, and have to provide financially and maintain a house, is truly a lot sometimes. There’s not enough hours in a day. And I worry everyday that I’m not failing my mom duties in some way.
Besides that, I love everything about dance, hanging out with my best friend, camping, nature, summer, reading and math.
I’m very left brained and have loved and excelled at math since I was very little. I was the kid that read books on math tricks, and did geometry workbooks for fun. And mental math is sort of a hobby.
Our Homeschool
We’ve included learning as a part of our daily way of life since babyhood, so homeschooling has very naturally suited us.
In Kindergarten, we partially homeschooled. During the day she went to an all french public school. My goal was for her to learn french while playing. So she played at school, came home, and got to play some more. But math and reading were 2 subjects I did with her regularly. And we did a variety of educational activities together.
We homeschooled grades 1, 2 & 4. She went back to french public school in grade 3. This coming year 2020/2021 we will tackle 5th grade.
As a single mom, it can be quite a challenge to homeschool. But we’re taking it year by year.
About my daughter
She’s a smart kid, that does well in her school work, but would choose to do no school work ever if that was an option.
Computers
My daughter currently loves online games like Roblox & Minecraft. She’s a little bit obsessed and would play in the virtual world all her waking hours if I allowed it.
This is one area I hope to lessen a great deal, and my current challenge. However since she’s an only child, and this is the only way she can play with her friends lately, it’s very hard to keep a lower limit.
She is trying to teach herself how to code and create online games.
Animals
She loves animals and thinks every animal (even a bug) is the cutest thing ever. She loves watching any type of animal show and knows quite a bit about different animals..
Music
She loves singing and creating her own songs.
Math
Although she doesn’t share the same love of math that I have, it is a subject she does really well in and probably averages about 98%. She’s quick to see the pattern in numbers and will come up with her own math tricks to solve things. We’ll be doing 5th grade math this year.
Art
I feel naturally she has a talent for drawing and arts and crafts, and I hope to develop this talent.
Reading
She doesn’t like to read too much and reads only because I tell her to, but I still hope to be able to encourage and foster a love for reading with her.
Even tho she was an early reader, she is at a 3rd grade reading level, so this is one area I’m working on with her.
Science
She loves science, and I feel would excel in this area if I, her non-science mother, can manage to do this subject justice.
She didn’t like science in public school because it was just reading and doing work in a workbook. She prefers more hands-on experiments.
She will be doing 6th grade science this year.
Social
She’s a very social kid that makes friends very easily. It’s this characteristic that helped her to learn to speak French. She would love it if I allowed her to have her own YouTube channel.
Tactile Sensitivity
One thing I have discovered in only the last few months is that she has tactile sensitivity.
She has never liked to touch paper when writing, and often pulls her sleeve over her hand so she doesn’t have to touch the paper too much. I always thought it was a phase and that she would grow out of it, so tried not to make a big deal out of it. But I recently learned it is actually a thing. Now that I’m aware of it, I will be doing more research to learn how to help her with this.
After, discovering this issue, a few other things started to make more sense. Like the fact that she never has liked her hair being brushed, or has always complained about different textures or tags with clothing. Or how she refuses to touch the dirty part of a dish or use her fingers to help with rinsing her own dirty dishes after eating.
