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.

Scheduling Blogs for Wednesdays & Fridays

I swear I do some of my best thinking when I am not i.e. in bed and in the bathroom. Don’t even ask about the second that is worthy of a whole other post. Suffice it to say that whenever I was stuck on a problem at work, if I broke walked away to go to the restroom, I undoubtedly would come running back to my desk with the solution. My secretary just thought that this was weird and would often send me to the ladies room if she heard me grumbling at my desk too much. Anyway, last night an idea came to mind for this blog. Fortunately, I have learned to keep a pen and paper by my bed stand so that the idea did not evaporate into the night. I have decided that on Wednesdays and Fridays we will have a reoccurring theme: Website Wednesdays and Fact Filled Fridays. I will post on these days, but I hope that you too will comment so that we can share some great ideas.

Website Wednesdays can include Blogs, educational websites, or any intriguing information on the web that can help us all homeschool better. Maybe it is a site for a great curriculum or a site with lots of information about current events. Perhaps, it is a blog of a fellow homeschooler or a place to get great worksheets. I look forward to hearing about some of your favorite sites.

A Friday of Fun Facts will be like no other. I don’t know about you, but I hear facts all week long that I find fascinating and I want to tell someone, so let’s share them with each other. This idea came together because of the Olympics last night. As our family tried to figure out what order the countries were coming in in the announcer explained that what seemed random to the Western world actually made a great deal of sense in Chinese. The counties were put in order of the number of strokes needed to write their name. Also, the NPR show “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” has always piqued my current events interest. Facts can be fascinating. And I think most homeschoolers are fascinated by them by nature. So let’s collect our interesting facts and then share them on Friday.

I hope that these sound like interesting ideas and that you will join me in creating Website Wednesday and Fact Filled Fridays.