Do You Homeschool During the Holidays?

This Christmas brought two sneaky homeschool gifts to my son: one which he himself asked for and one which was given to him as not per see as a “gift”, but just because DH was going through a box of old things. Both though have caused DS to “do work”.

My F-I-L thought my son was insane when asked what he wanted to for Christmas, the answer was two three ring binders and plastic inserts. My F-I-L asked quizzically, “Are you sure?” and DS surely was. He was thrilled when he opened his box at our Christmas dinner and this was certainly one of the first gifts that he used (aside from his Nerf Gun).

DS’s plan with these books is to create a Cast Iron Cookbook and to start putting together his Eagle Scout Book. DS loves cast iron cooking, but is frustrated when pushed to think quickly and plan a menu for scouts. His plan is to begin compiling his favorite Cast Iron recipes so that he can just grab his cookbook for both planning meetings and for campouts. This has encouraged him to read carefully to choose the recipes; use the computer to cut, paste, and alter the recipes to the proper size; and to use his organizational skills to put the book together.

The other “gift” was my DH’s old palm pilot. DS has been addicted to it; putting in emergency phone numbers, writing to lists, and filling in the calendar. DS has been checking his spelling on every word he types in. This boy that I have to force to write a sentence has to have the stylus taken away in order to eat dinner. If I had known it would be this easy, I would have bought one of these machines for him. Now, I’m thinking, perhaps I’ll set him up on Facebook too. If it is technology that intrigues him, then I’ll find a way to use it.

So needless to say DS enjoyed his Christmas and mom is feeling a little better about the “time off”.

Samuel Clemens Who?

Trivia question: Who was Samuel Langhorne Clemens? Hint he is one of the greatest American writers of all time. . . He is well known for his quips and quotes like:

“A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining,

but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.”

If you haven’t figured it out it is our dear Mark Twain.

Isn’t that ironic – Harriet Beecher Stowe and then Mark Twain. Here in Hartford, they were neighbors. The Mark Twain house is one of the most beautiful houses of the time. To take a tour of the house online at http://www.marktwainhouse.org/thehouse/floormap.shtml .

Mark Twain authored more than 30 books, many of which are required reading in schools today. Several which have been made into Broadway plays.

Sadly, this year has brought many financial hardships and the Twain house was almost closed. If you are interested in ensuring that this historical building survives for generations, consider donating to the Mark Twain House & Museum.

Here are some lesson ideas.

Field Trips:
Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT
Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, MO

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Today’s quote is by one of the great authors of my home state of Connecticut, Harriet Beecher Stowe. One of her homes is right here in Hartford.

I did not really know much about Harriet until I attended a fund raiser tea by a local library. At the tea, the curator spoke of woman who I would have loved to have met: a writer, an abolitionist, a feminist. She shared a few pieces of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of Stowe’s most memorable writings. As I sat and listened, I pledged that I was going to read this classic. I believe that we may have read excerpts in high school, but never the whole novel. That summer as we traveled to Kentucky, I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin as I had promised. As Eliza escaped across the broken ice of the Ohio, so I drove across it. It was truly surreal.

Later that year, I dragged the kids to the Harriet Beecher Stowe Museum. I was absolutely in awe of this woman. She would have been a force of nature in any era, but in her lifetime, her feats are even more amazing. I encourage you all to get to know her a little better. Here are a great way to do that:

Visit one of her homes:
http://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/index_home.shtml
http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/places/sw18/index.shtml

Read about her:
http://www.sparknotes.com/biography/stowe/

Read her works:
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/s#a115

New Gadgets

You will notice that I have added a couple of gadgets to try out on our site. As I've mentioned before, I think half of homeschooling effectively is surrounding our children with interesting information. I was inspired to add these gadgets and will be looking for others after a discussion at a recent Holiday party.

We were talking about historical events and it was clear that Nagasaki meant nothing to one of the guests. Several of us tried to fill in the blanks so that she understood and mentioned Hiroshima, Atomic Bomb, World War II, but clearly it still meant nothing.

It got even worse when we chided one of the guests for using EID stamps on their Christmas cards. People were mixing Muslim and Hindi ideas. They had never even heard of Ramadan. Only one other guest, knew and understood what was being said.

I am hoping that by including such things as these gadgets, by subscribing to History Channel's newsletter, and generally having good conversation in our home will help my children from being this guest in the future.

Frank Llyod Wright Designs

"Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities."
-Frank Lloyd Wright

Ok, you have to check this website out . You can actually learn and design like one of the greatest architects of our time Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright is a great person to study as he was also a homeschooler. His unique view of the world revolutionized the way houses and their surrounding landscapes interacted.

Here are some other websites with background about Frank Lloyd Wright:

http://www.pbs.org/flw/buildings/

http://www.delmars.com/wright/index.html

http://www.planetclaire.org/fllw/timeline.html

If the kids really get into it and you would like more information about architecture for your children, check out some of the links on http://www.loggia.com/designarts/architecture/kids.html .

Once in a Blue Moon - A Homeschool Conversation

A typical homeschool conversation:

As we opened Christmas cards, the kids asked who one of the senders was. I explained that it was a parent of a old Girl Scout whom I hadn’t seen in many moons.

“Many moons. Why do people say that?” DS asked.

“It just means I haven’t seen her in a while,” I responded thinking that would suffice.

“Wouldn’t many moons just mean a couple of days?” He continued.

“No, they mean full moons, so they mean months.” Of course, then I had to add, “except for those blue moons.”

“Blue Moons. What is a blue moon?”

“The second blue moon in a month.”

DD piped in, “How often does that happen?”

“Daddy?” I had used up my knowledge of the moon cycles. He plugged “Blue Moon” into his laptop and came up with www.obliquity.com/astro/bluemoon.html“The average interval between Full Moons is about 29.5 days, whilst the length of an average month is roughly 30.5 days. This makes it very unlikely that any given month will contain two Full Moons, though it does sometimes happen.
On average, there will be 41 months that have two Full Moons in every century, so you could say that once in a Blue Moon actually means once every two-and-a-half years.” He read from the website.

Then we digressed into when the next blue moon was, why they are called blue, and other great astrological facts.

Then dear son brought us back down to his crazy thoughts, “Well, when will four blue moons happen in the same month?”

I thought for sure he had missed the whole concept of what we were just saying. I started waxing on about 29.5 days in a cycle, you would need more than 30 days in a month . . .DD added that we’d need more than one moon and have to be like on Jupiter. But no DS, explained God could cause a miracle and align the moon cycles to his desire. Ok, who can argue with that? I just rolled my eyes. . . “I guess you’re right!”

Now for those states that require reporting - where do you put such conversations? Should homeschoolers try to write all of their digressions down? This was not on our science plan for the day, but certainly is a valid lesson.

Today in History

As homeschoolers, we are always looking for ways to ignite curiosity. One of the ways to do that is just keep lighting the fire in as many different directions as possible and see what areas take light. As interesting way to do that is by starting your day with "Today in History" type ideas or math problems of the day, or some of these interesting daily tidbits.




You may also want to add some of these websites which can give you great jumping off points for daily learing:

Today in History - Library of Congress
Today in History - Yahoo
Today in History - the History Channel - they also have a way to subscribe to a daily newsletter of this day in history
Today in History - History Net

Not only may your kids find this interesting, but you may learn something yourself.

I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
-Albert Einstein

Writing Rubrics a tool for you and your children

I think that I have mentioned that ironically I am working on at a site that trains teachers for public schools. Tonight, the speaker is talking about rubrics. I know that you are thinking what does this have to do with homeschooling, but I am sitting her listening, thinking that this would work wonders especially for my older child on larger projects. A rubric is a preplanned, objective driven assessment tool that helps teachers greade assignments but also helps students prepare their work to meet the stated goals.

Websites Related to writing Rubrics:
http://www.carla.umn.edu/assessment/VAC/Evaluation/p_7.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_2083034_create-rubric.html?ref=fuel&utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=ssp&utm_campaign=yssp_art

http://health.usf.edu/publichealth/eta/Rubric_Tutorial/default.htm

While obviously these are traditionally used in schools, I can see how we can use such a tool especially for some unique work like computer presentation, etc. The benefit to the homeschooling community is not the ability to “grade” our students; frankly, many of us who homschool have moved away from the grading idea anyway. As homeschoolers we can use rubrics as a tool to help our children clearly understand what is expected of them and help them arrange their projects so that the subject / objective is clearly covered. Rubrics can also be a great tool for the kids themselves to evaluate their work before they even turn it in. After completing a project, give them the rubric to review their work and determine if it meets the goals and if they need to adjust something before they consider it finished.

What other “school” ideas have you adapted to homeschooling?

A Good Book For Reluctant Readers

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, my DS is a reluctant reader. Yesterday, however you would have thought differently. He took the Scholastic Book of World Records 2009 and refused to put it down. He pummeled us with questions: What is the place with the world’s fastest winds? What is the loudest mammal? What country eats the most potato chips? We almost could not get him to put the book down. It is a good combination of words and pictures. The captions are catchy and he loves trying to catch us on the answers. Although, I think he is surprised at how many answers we came up with.





FYI – Mt. Washington; Blue Whale; United Kingdom

Igniting your Child's Interests by Exploring Your Own

As homeschooling parents, it is important to stay interested and excited about the world too. By keeping up our interests, we may inspire our children or learn something that may interest them. Today, my find came from The Know-It-All.

Have you ever heard of a gnomon? I had not, but in learning about it the whole idea of square roots suddenly made sense. Interestingly, DD is working with square roots in her math – not the simple kind but some of the more advanced which include variables and rational and irrational numbers, but I thought she too would find this very interesting. He explains and illustrates the idea very simply using dots. If you can put evenly spaced dots representing each number, evenly such that you create a square, you have found a number which is a perfect square. The bottom row, or root, when counted is the square root of this number. Wow, that is amazing! Suddenly, strange mathematical terms made sense to the kids and to me.

Of course just like any other homeschooling home, this spurned us off into questions about the beginning of numbers and who created mathematics? I think truly we have discovered how curiosity killed the cat - - -he got so side tracked trying to satiate his curiosity, he forgot to stop and eat.