All Things Hold Together

For some reason lately it has been so hard to keep up with my blogs. I just have no energy. Everyone here seems to be passing around one cold after another. Add to that the fact that the Spring-like weather we enjoyed courtesy of El Nino has traded with sub-zero temperatures, and we have a serious case of the winter blahs. (Actually, it is in the 20s; I’m just whining.)

I’ve been meaning to do some posts about what curriculum we are using and change my categories around a little to include a “Resources” category. That would involve changing the label on some of my older post, though, so it will be somewhat time consuming.

We just ordered some new science materials. I tried to do science using an unschooling approach, but the kids really like to have a curriculum. Who knew?

We do science together, even though the boys are a grade apart. (I still talk in grades because they were in PS for three/two years. Hey, I just realized that after this year, Big E will have been home schooled as many years as he was public schooled.)

I decided to try the Alpha Omega Life Pacs since I could pick and choose which subjects to buy. (The LifePac curriculum is divided into 10 workbooks for the year.) In my curriculum that I submitted to the state, I had a list of topics we would be covering, so I wanted to make sure I had materials for those topics.

I just hope that I don’t have any problems doing it without the teacher’s manual. I have a background in science, so I doubt it will be a problem.

Since they are in grades 3 and 4, I selected materials from both grade levels. They should be here, hopefully, Saturday.

From Grade 3, we are doing book 1 and 4 - You Grow and Change and You are What You Eat. From Grade 4, we are doing books 1, 2, and 8 - Plants, Animals, and Solar System.

We also have a book on Weather that we are doing; another topic on our curriculum. And I ordered a forth grade science manual with reproducibles that covers Life/Physical/Earth Sciences. We will probably do that for the first half of next year, then we will move into grade 5.

I am doing a sort of split year approach because I don’t want to go to far ahead for E, but I don’t want to stay too far behind for D. Blending ages requires a delicate balancing act, but it has worked out well so far. I might have to change the way we do things when D moves into the high school grades depending where E is at that point.

So far this year, we have been getting books and videos out of the library for science, and performing experiments at home. We learned about trees, sea life, squirrels, the human body, weather, and a few other topics. They really enjoyed making an acid/base indicator using purple cabbage. We did the experiment from a book we got out of the library, but here it is online.

As I mentioned before, I am glad that the kids wanted more structure and written work. I could certainly benefit from more structure and discipline, too.

And maybe next time Not-So-Crafty Daddy stays home because I am sick, I will have an actual lesson plan for him to follow. He was not too impressed when he asked what we normally do and I said, “I don’t know.”

This week’s Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Palm Tree Pundit.

I started the week strong by posting again, but then I kind of trailed off. Sorry about that. I intend to pick back up next week, but we are heading down to visit my husband’s family for a belated Christmas for the weekend. Between sickness and obligations we had here, we are just now making it down there. It is only a month overdue. One year, we didn’t make it down until after St. Patrick’s Day!

Have a great weekend, folks! I’ll *talk* to you again on Monday.

This post has a little something for everyone - a homeschool tie-in, a local tie-in, and a national tie-in, so I am posting it on She’s Right (my political blog) and Crafty Mama’s Homeschool (my homeschooling/crafting blog).

Yesterday, I was reading one of my favorite homeschool blogs, Why Homeschool, and they had a link to an interview with Oak Norton, a father of five from Utah, who is fighting to get good, old fashioned math back in the schools there.

He now publishes a single-frame comic on the website Weapons of Math Destruction.

A little background, from Norton, about the problem (from the edspresso interview):

A few years ago my oldest daughter was finishing up her third grade year and at a parent/teacher conference I asked her teacher when they were going to start learning the times tables since they hadn’t yet and I’d done it nearly thirty years earlier in third grade.

The teacher replied, “Oh, we don’t do that anymore.” [pause for picking my jaw off the ground]

“You don’t do that anymore?”

“That’s right, it’s not part of the curriculum.”

“Well then how do you expect the children to learn their times tables?”

“Well,” she thoughtfully paused, “the smart kids will just pick it up as they go.” This time my jaw cracked hard when it hit the ground and I was off to the principal’s office.

The principal explained that although this method was different from how we had grown up, there were problems with traditional math and all the research showed kids were really excelling under these discovery learning methods. I left with a serious intestinal problem and promptly purchased Singapore math workbooks and flashcards for my children to make sure they knew their basic facts.

I was reading through the WMD archive, I noticed a familiar curriculum: MathLand. Wait. That’s what they use in Burlington.

As it turns out, MathLand is one of the not-really-math math programs that is responsible for dumbing-down our kids here in America.

And they do use it in Burlington. In other words, they want us to approve a spending of almost $11,000 per pupil, but the kids will likely leave without a mastery of mathematics.

Thankfully, for me and my kids, the curriculum we use, Saxon, is one of the programs recommended by the WMD site. It focuses on - gasp! - rote memorization of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts AND the correct answer matters!

Why does all this - My math is better. No my math is better - matter? It just so happens, I came across a You Tube video, called “Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth,” (Hat Tip: Chanman) where examples from two leading fuzzy math texts are given (you won’t believe how profoundly stupid this is) and the real world implications for our children’s future.

The video is 15 minutes long, but you really have to see it to believe it. It is worse than you thought.

It is no secret that the United States lags behind the rest of the world in Math and Science Education. Watch this and you’ll see why.

Both the woman on the You Tube video (which is a quality video - she’s a TV weather woman) and Oak Norton recommend picking up Singapore Math to supplement your children at home.

On a side note: Did you know there is a name for that? Afterschooling. You know American Education is in trouble when supplementing your child’s education is so prevalent that there is a name for it.

The Carnival of Homeschooling is now up at The Thinking Mother.

Stop by for her January Musings and links to lots of great posts from the world of homeschool blogging.

I know I can’t keep my kids young and innocent forever, but my boys just came in from playing with two fourth-grade public school girls in our neighborhood and they told me that tomorrow someone is going to the school to teach the grade 4/5 classes (yes, they do 4 and 5 together in the same class rooms) about “the private parts and where babies come from.”

Blech. I see nothing good coming out of a group of fourth-graders discussing that on the playground.

I understand that I will have to deal with the inevitable at some point in time, but for now I am happy that when my oldest sees a commercial for “The Nature of Sex” on PBS, he shuts off the TV in disgust.

Just so you know, they do know about private parts and where babies come from. Big D even knows how babies are made, but I think he might have blocked it out!

I like to use the Provo Craft Knifty Knitter looms. I cannot seem to knit in a kid-full house without losing my count and I think the looms remedy this problem quite well.

Last winter, I made a shawl from this pattern on the Provo Craft website, using Lion Brand’s Homespun yarn. I never wore the shawl because it wasn’t my style and wasn’t really big enough to be warn around the house to keep warm, so it sat in my yarn box for the past year.

The other day I was rearranging Big E and Little E’s room and I needed a place for Little E’s stuffed animals that wouldn’t fit on his bed. I decided to try and use the shawl as an animal hammock hung in the corner of the room.

It worked!

I now have a place for the extra animals and a use for the shawl.

I am continually amazed at all of the homeschooling resources that are available on the internet. I think when I have some time, I will make a new category on my side-bar with links to some of the ones we use.

For now, I wanted to share with you some links I found on a local homeschool message board.

The first one is Spelling Time.

WHAT IS SPELLINGTIME?

The weekly spelling test is your child’s first encounter with scholastic evaluation in today’s highly competitive environment. SpellingTime.com is an interactive tool designed to prepare children for these tests by utilizing a fun, dynamic and “Mommy Free” approach. Parents or children can enter the spelling words each Monday and SpellingTime.com will create a 4 step, instructional learning program predicated on the marriage between leading edge technology and good old fashion repetition and reward processes.

The kids have not used this one yet, but I checked out the demo and it looks pretty neat.

The next one is Starfall.

The Starfall Method promises to improve reading acquisition by using the Internet to help make it fun for the children and easy for the educators. You may order the printed materials that go along with the website for classroom or home use.

I have not used this at home with my kids yet either, but Big D said that he used this on the computer at his old elementary school and “It was cool.”

I had one more that I wanted to share, but I cant find it! I’ll have to post it when I do.

Is it me or did I say I would post more this week?

Yesterday, I took the kids to see my mom for the day and Tuesday I had to leave for the day, so they could plow my apartment complex.

Today is the day! I have a homeschooling post and (finally) a crafty post planned. Unfortunately, I have to homeschool right now, then we have some housework to do, then I promised the kids we’d watch a move.

I usually blog when they watch a move, but I said I would watch it with them this time. They are pretty excited about that. Since our only TV in in our room, we all snuggle up on my bed when we watch a movie. It should be fun. We’re watching “Over the Hedge.”

I haven’t forgotten about you!

A: The blog Dewey’s Treehouse is hosting the 55th installment in this series, with a theme of Parents’ Meeting Edition.

Q: What is the Carnival of Homeschooling?