A BANNER HANDBOOK FOR HOMESCHOOLERS AND FAMILIES

I have just completed this 238-page book in which I share the numerous materials I created during my thirty-plus years teaching math and English to middle-school advanced and remedial students, and the insights I learned about family values from the parents of students attending The Banner School in Frederick, MD, during the ten years following my founding of this school in 1981.

My enriching, entertaining, and educational experiences for families include:

• Memory Gems for Family Fun and Discussions®
  
• The Big Sit®
  
• Creative Activities for Snow and Extended Inclement Days®
  
• Communicards® a method that measures and trains students' grasp of a variety of English and math elements
  
• A Synopsis of the Mechanics of English Writing®
  
• Grammar's Tenacious Traps®
  
• Figuratively Speaking®
  
• English Fun and Games®
  
• Spelling Remedies for Persistent Errors®
  
• 101 Ways to Attack a Writing Assignment®

This book covers a variety of mathematical functions and measures for the purpose of increasing students' facility with properties, relationship of quantities, currency conversions, and other systems. I encourage children to go from basic measures to grasping our geometric world beyond textbooks and stretching their minds by thinking in terms of today's billions (and beyond), to displaying diverse information on a variety of graphs, and to amusing themselves with Sudoku© and other engaging games. I challenge students with chronograms, mathematical progressions, alphametics/cryptarithms, divisibility rules, math bingo, and other math games.

Various topics inspire children to become climatologists, discharge domestic duties, decode product codes, get familiar with various measurements and their conversions, learn how to become smart shoppers, show data graphically, and to have fun with Roman numerals, divisibility rules, and Math Master®.

I am especially committed to encouraging families to acquire a new language I provide by becoming attuned to their area's building styles and learning the proper names of their distinguishing features. I further call for an awakened eye to all manner of shapes, from rounded shrubs to electrical towers to bridge struts, all of which exist no matter where you live or travel.

One entire section of this book provides detailed information for adults and children on immersions into twenty-four interdisciplinary science and social studies topics with their relevant vocabularies, my insights on the importance of these, and a list of publishing companies that provide materials for these topics.
I expect most of my materials to have "fun" written all over them, because with few exceptions, learning is fun!