Arizona Families for Home Education Convention In Phoenix #AFHE

I had posted this on my other blog last night, but I've made the decision to take the other blog down and just use this one. So here is a re-post on our weekend in Phoenix at the AFHE (Arizona Families for Home Education) Home school convention.

Last weekend we attended AFHE's convention in Phoenix Az. It is a yearly event for home schoolers in the great State of Arizona. We had attended four years ago and were blown away by the amount of people in attendance. This year was no different.

We did bring along our daughter this year, I wanted her to see that she was not alone in home schooling. We also wanted her opinion on curriculum. She has been a bit bored with the repetitiveness of the math she's been working on. She also wanted a different science and history. We had been using the PACE program from ACE (Accelerated Christian Education). It's a great curriculum if you are self motivated. I myself graduated from this curriculum, and we currently have family who are using it. We decided to stick with ACE for English, word building, and creative literature. Utilizing the Young Explorer Series for science, and BJU (Bob Jones University ) for Math.

Enough about curriculum. The convention was awesome. We only had a chance to catch the keynote speaker on Friday morning, Heidi St John. She was an engaging speaker, down to earth, well informed, and had a great stage presence. The wife really related to her presentation on home schooling. It was a perfect way to kick off the conference.

The rest of Friday was spent on the floor of the curriculum fair. We started on one side and walked every booth. Our little one was amazed at the sheer volume of material available for homeschooling. She was really into actively looking at the different items and publishers. She saw a lot she liked and a bit that she didn't. She wanted to go all online, but we are just not into that, give me a good ol' book to hold. We broke down though, and bought a game.

I won't try and give a synopsis of the game, but I will post a link to their site. I will say, that we love the game! The name is 'The Constitutional Quest'. Here's a video to give a little more info.

Not to get ahead of myself, but after we brought the game home, we played two rounds with the grandparents, and had a really good time. We all learned something.

Friday night we attended the Family night entertainment with John Branyan, Let me just say, this guy was funny... I mean really funny... I haven't laughed this hard in a long time, and too see both my wife and little one laughing at the same time, was even better! Here's a sample of his last set... The Three Little Pigs:

We had planned to attend a few more classes on Saturday, but got enthralled with the curriculum fair once again. We had made our minds up Friday night on what direction we were going to go into, then changed our minds at the last minute and went in another direction, but that's how it goes at the AFHE Convention. We had a great time, learned a lot from the vendors we spoke too, and have a new outlook on homeschooling.

This from the AFHE Facebook page... How large was the #AFHE conference last weekend? Try 5200! The Friday night family entertainment? 1500!