Cool Links to Help your Home School

I was listening to the Ultimate Homeschool Expo last week (the one put on by CIndy Rushton previously, and was hosted by Felice Gerwitz this time). I actually purchased a ticket, but you can listen to a lot of the sessions for this type of thing for free if you can listen at the time it is taking place -- very challenging to do with a busy life. The normal price for the expo is $39, but it is still on sale as I write this for $24.95 (not that that is a small chunk of change, if you weren't planning for it). I love the HSE, and so I was saving for it. I was actually pleasantly surprised to get the sale price, because last year I paid full price!

I like the UHSE because I miss a real home school convention.  I used to live in a state that had a great convention every year that was three days long and had speakers and seminars galore. You had to pick and choose. I haven't had that for ever so long, but now that I have the home school expo (which cost me less than going to a convention), I don't have to miss ANY of the seminars, because they are all recorded and provided to me in download form! My biggest challenge becomes making time to listen to them, and then that's another story.

Anyway, I heard about some websites I hadn't visited before, and I wanted to share them here.

• My Audio School is a subscription site, but the site also has lots of stuff that is free. The nice thing is that it is a "safe" site, so you know the kids are not going to unexpectedly see something objectionable. Yesterday I really enjoyed watching a video put out by Scholastic about Martin Luther King, Jr., and I'd have to say that I learned stuff myself about him that I hadn't known.
• Another website I learned of and subscribed to through the UHSE is one put up by Lorrie Flem called Eternal Encouragement. When you first get to the site there is a pop-up for a free newsletter -- that is what I subscribed to.  As it's title suggests, Lorrie has a heart to encourage the moms. At the expo she gave a wonderful talk. I haven't had my coffee yet, and the content of the talk is niggling at the back of my brain, but I really couldn't give it justice if I tried to tell you what it was about right now. I need to relisten to it. At the time I was listening to it my household was being very loud and I was having difficulty hearing her...

Those were the two links I had saved from the USHE, but in addition to that I daily get new links for free stuff available on the internet, so I will blog about some of them here and let you know how you also can get links to good stuff sent to your email daily.

• SCIENCE: Aurora Lipper, from SuperChargedScience, sends me letters regularly with free science experiments in them.  This week she sent a link to a page full of summer fun science experiments: e-camp Activities and Experiments . 
• Free Flight on the Young Eagles 'Learn to Fly Day' on May 21st (US, Canada):   On May 21st, the Young Eagles program welcomes your family to a free flight at a local airport for International Learn to Fly Day.  Why would they do that?  Here's their reason: "International Learn to Fly Day was announced in 2009 as an effort to increase interest in flying and to encourage the aviation community to get others involved in Aviation." [This information provided by Lori Seaborg on her Freely Educate blog, to which you can subscribe.]
• FREE TEACHER APPRECIATION KIT:  This free Teacher Appreciation Kit can be sent to your e-mail inbox monthly. The above links to a sample page which shows an idea of the materials they will send you for free every month.  At the top of the page is a link to subscribe (look for "ADD"). I'm about to subscribe myself; looks "yummy" for my homeschool! This information came to me from Jacquelyn at the "WherecanIfindit" Yahoo Group.  
• MUSIC APPRECIATION: Piotr Tchaikovsky - Music Appreciation posts by San Francisco Smyphony on their "Keeping Score" website. The home website (just linked) has a great selection of major composers. This looks like a real "keeper" of a site.  "Keeping Score" is apparently a PBS television show -- I didn't know that, not having cable and barely watching television at all myself. This information provided to you by Diane Keith Flynn, who sends me a daily e-mail which you, too, can subscribe to. Go to her website, ClickSchooling, and subscribe in the upper right-hand corner.  

Well, I guess that's it for links for today. I will still be trying to post about narration later today.

D

Narration

Wikipedia defines narration as "he act or process of telling the particulars of a story".  I would further expand that definition to include the retelling of the particulars of any reading assignment, be it history, science, biography, etc.

I first heard of narration when I began to learn about the Charlotte Mason method of education. Charlotte Mason was a British school marm in the late 1800's to early 1900's. She never had children of her own, and she dedicated her life to her students. She developed her own philosophy of education that was very counter-cultural at the time, and to a large extent is still counter-cultural.

There is SO MUCH I could say about Charlotte Mason, or the various aspects of her methods, but since this post is supposed to be about narration I will stick to that for now. From the Simply Charlotte Mason website, when you ask a child to narrate you are "asking him to tell back in his own words what he just saw, heard, or read. The narration can be oral or written or drawn — whatever. Because the child must think through the information and determine how to present it, mixed with his own opinion and impressions, this method of evaluation requires a much higher thinking level than mere fill-in-the-blank or answer-the-posed-question-with-a-fact methods."

The above linked Charlotte Mason narration section has a further section on "more ideas for  narration" that I encourage you to puruse if you are interested in this topic.  It gives "narration" ideas for speaking, writing, drawing, and building!  They are very good.

One thing I come away with from Charlotte Mason that I would pass along to you so that you do not get discouraged. Reading Charlotte Mason's ideas is like reading Proverbs 31: it can be encouraging, or it can be discouraging and feel unattainable. When I read Psalm 31 I can see a goal to shoot for, or I can see a super-human woman who was able to accomplish more than I can ever hope to. When the latter is my mindset I try to remind myself of the verse that says, "She rose before light and gave food to her maidens."  In other words, she had servants. How much more could I accomplish if I had servants?

When reading Charlotte Mason's ideas, likewise I can read some really incredible ideas for helping my child to learn, to liven up my homeschool, and to make learning fun again. OR, when reading her idealistic ideas I can feel that there is no way possible I could ever accomplish what she suggests I should be doing with my child -- and I am only homeschooling ONE! I can imagine the overwhelmed feeling a mom of three, five eight, whatever, might feel when reading some of CM's writings.  So, if I am feeling overwhelmed I try to remind myself that Charlotte Mason never had children of her own.  She became well-off financially because some of her writings were published and became popular. She spent most of her life teaching other women how to teach children, not actually teaching them herself. She did not have the combined complication of teaching multi-grade levels simultaneously, and figuring out how to juggle that with keeping the home with a large family clean, shopping and cooking for that family, possibly sewing or shopping to keep them clothed, etc. From where I sit, it appears that she was almost clueless.

And then also, she didn't have media. Media can be a good addition, and it can be a bad addition. It ever vies for our time. We can use a great dvd or television show to teach our children about elephants in Africa while the temperature outside is -5 degrees, but we can spend our time also ever battling our children who would rather be watching a dvd or playing an electronic game than go outside when it is 74 degrees to look at ants or stink bugs or clover... It becomes necessary to turn off a good/bad thing and find a way to turn their attentions to the great outdoors.

There is also the battle that goes on in my psyche, when my son is outside creating an elaborate village in the dirt (where I would like there to be grass, but he keeps digging). It has cobblestone streets (great! Now I'll have to pick up individual stones before the grass will grow).  It has a moat or a canal that weaves through the town ("Turn off the water! You're turning the yard into a mud-pit!")  It has cool bridges that go over the canal, that have supports and cross beams... (more clean-up before we can seed...)

Plus, is this school work and learning? (Of course it is!) How can I document it? (Take a picture, dummy!) But we're on a schedule! He needs to come in and do his math! (He's going to finish three weeks early, already! He can skip a day.) The neighbors are going to see him and call Social Services and tell them that I'm not really home schooling him. (I have plenty to shoe them that proves that I am, but I'll just call HSLDA if they knock at my door.)

All that said, you can see that embracing a counter-cultural educational philosophy can cause you to do battles in your brain. Nevertheless, Narration is a tool that is not truly counter-cultural. Every time a public school student does a book report, it is a form of narration. The beauty of the CM method of narration is that they retain more, because they narrate small chunks, not entire books.  CM does not require that they narrate everything that they read, but they should be taught to be prepared so that they read at a deeper level, ready to narrate anything they are assigned.

And Notebooking, from a previous blog entry, is an excellent form of narration because it includes drawing and writing (or you can paste a clip-art on the page). The more senses you hit, the better they will remember, and having a hard-copy of work they have done gives them something they are apt to review, which further cements learning.

So narration is a home schooling practice that is a good tool for any home school, whether the general philosophy embraces the Charlotte Mason method or not.  If you have any further questions, feel free to post a comment. Have a great day!

Cool Links to Help your Home School

I was listening to the Ultimate Homeschool Expo last week (the one put on by CIndy Rushton previously, and was hosted by Felice Gerwitz this time). I actually purchased a ticket, but you can listen to a lot of the sessions for this type of thing for free if you can listen at the time it is taking place -- very challenging to do with a busy life. The normal price for the expo is $39, but it is still on sale as I write this for $24.95 (not that that is a small chunk of change, if you weren't planning for it). I love the HSE, and so I was saving for it. I was actually pleasantly surprised to get the sale price, because last year I paid full price!



I like the UHSE because I miss a real home school convention.  I used to live in a state that had a great convention every year that was three days long and had speakers and seminars galore. You had to pick and choose. I haven't had that for ever so long, but now that I have the home school expo (which cost me less than going to a convention), I don't have to miss ANY of the seminars, because they are all recorded and provided to me in download form! My biggest challenge becomes making time to listen to them, and then that's another story.



Anyway, I heard about some websites I hadn't visited before, and I wanted to share them here.

• My Audio School is a subscription site, but the site also has lots of stuff that is free. The nice thing is that it is a "safe" site, so you know the kids are not going to unexpectedly see something objectionable. Yesterday I really enjoyed watching a video put out by Scholastic about Martin Luther King, Jr., and I'd have to say that I learned stuff myself about him that I hadn't known.
• Another website I learned of and subscribed to through the UHSE is one put up by Lorrie Flem called Eternal Encouragement. When you first get to the site there is a pop-up for a free newsletter -- that is what I subscribed to.  As it's title suggests, Lorrie has a heart to encourage the moms. At the expo she gave a wonderful talk. I haven't had my coffee yet, and the content of the talk is niggling at the back of my brain, but I really couldn't give it justice if I tried to tell you what it was about right now. I need to relisten to it. At the time I was listening to it my household was being very loud and I was having difficulty hearing her...

Those were the two links I had saved from the USHE, but in addition to that I daily get new links for free stuff available on the internet, so I will blog about some of them here and let you know how you also can get links to good stuff sent to your email daily.

• SCIENCE: Aurora Lipper, from SuperChargedScience, sends me letters regularly with free science experiments in them.  This week she sent a link to a page full of summer fun science experiments: e-camp Activities and Experiments . 
• Free Flight on the Young Eagles 'Learn to Fly Day' on May 21st (US, Canada):   On May 21st, the Young Eagles program welcomes your family to a free flight at a local airport for International Learn to Fly Day.  Why would they do that?  Here's their reason: "International Learn to Fly Day was announced in 2009 as an effort to increase interest in flying and to encourage the aviation community to get others involved in Aviation." [This information provided by Lori Seaborg on her Freely Educate blog, to which you can subscribe.]

Monarch life cycle

A couple of years ago, a friend gave us a monarch chrysalis to watch and wait
until the monarch emerged. From that we learned a bit about monarchs, and that
the monarch eggs are always laid on milkweed plants. We learned to identify
milkweed, learned where there was some near our home. We learned that the
caterpillar lives on the milkweed, feeding night and day until it goes into its
chrysalis, and later emerges as the Monarch. I think the butterflies feed on
nectar of any of a number of plants, the butterfly bush being one of them, maybe
the bee balm plant too. It stays near the milkweed to later lay its eggs.

So, this year my son, on his own initiative, began searching for monarch
caterpillars on milkweeds, wherever we were. The first one he found died before
he got it home. (He's a boy; maybe he was too rough, I don't know. He was with
his dad at the time, and I was at home.) Later, on the way home from church, he
was like, "Stop the car, Dad! There's milkweed on the side of the road!" So Dad
stayed in the car and son and I searched for caterpillars. He found one.

We brought it home and fed it a fresh leaf daily. In about five days it formed
its chrysalis!

 Sorry it is blurry--caterpillar was on plastic wrap over the container, and that is where it formed its chrysalis
. 
After about a week, one Sunday morning before church my son detected that changes were occurring in the chrysalis. Sure enough, when we got back from church the little beauty had emerged!

So we fed it sugar water and flowers for a couple of days, enjoying its beauty, and then we let it go. Before leaving, though, it clung to my son a bit and we got one more cute photo:

We had a lot of fun. So, plan to have your own life-cycle experience in the spring next year! It was very "Charlotte Mason" and engaging!







Thanks for reading!

Organization

I don't love organizing and I am not accomplished at it, but I am trying. But I have been homeschooling for 20 years, and I have to organize just to stay in the game. In my 20 years I started with First Grade Learning at Home, by Ann Ward.  From there I transitioned into KONOS unit studies, still staying very inexpensive, using lots of library books. I kicked around eclectic for awhile, buying yearly whatever publisher I could afford that year. Then I used Tapestry of Grace for eight years as each of my daughter went through four years of high school.

During my Tapestry years I bought books, lots and lots of books. For four years I bought (and borrowed from the library) books and books and books. And then daughter #2 got to high school, and the Tapestry book requirements changed, and again I bought books, lots and lots of books. She graduated, and the year she graduated my 3rd child started kindergarten.

For JD, as he was such a young child, Tapestry didn't work. I knew I would eventually return to Tapestry, but for one year I started (K) with Sonlight, and somewhere along the way transitioned to  Ambleside Online, with more book purchases.  Now I'm finally ready to transition back to Tapestry, but no longer own the editions I started with (known to the TOGlers as "Pre-Publication edition" and "Classic", but have purchased a digital edition (DE) which I believe is also known as "Redesign".  So, once again, the books called for have changed. (Books go out of print; new books are published...)  In addition, being a book lover and a member of Paperbackswap,  I have every intention of keeping track of reading lists from Ambleside Online for the titles they are using that I might plug into TOG, as well as keeping an eye on other publishers' lists, like Sonlight, Beautiful Feet Books, Winter Promise, and eventually probably Veritas Press.

But I digress. This post is about organization. Here is how I organize.

First, Tapestry books:
On my Tapestry bookshelf wall I have two (I wish I had 3 or 4, but not enough room) bookshelves that are 72" high, 18" deep and 36" wide.  The shelves on each unit are set at the same level so it looks like one continuous shelf at each level from left of left unit to right of right unit.

Top shelf contains my TOG Y1 binders and all the books for Year 1. I currently have only an 11 year old, so all the rhetoric books are actually at the back, as are the dialectic, with the LG and UG at the front.  Shelf 2 contains Year 2, same thing. Shelf 3 on the left contains biographies; on the right always ends up containing non-TOG items -- family photo albums, sewing books, old year books, Time/Life books, National Geographic books -- heavy stuff -- cause those shelfs are the heavy-duty, can-hold-a-lot-of-weight shelves. shelf 4 holds my Year 3 binders and books, and shelf 5  holds all my Year 4 binders and books. Now remember, these are two rows deep! I have all four levels. Notice -- no hard copy of TOG on the Year 3 (4th) shelf...

I will be teaching Year 3 in the fall, so I have begun to go through my Year 3 books that have, predictably, gotten into no particular order as the years have gone by since I used them last for TOG.  I sit at the bookshelves with my reading list ready and go back and forth from booklist to books, putting the books in order from Week 1 to Week 36. I have orange dots on Year 3 books, and I have tried to mark "Week 1" or whatever on the dot in sharpie pen before I taped it to the book to keep it there.  I am scurrying right now because my books for UG/D are the books called for in "Classic" or "Original" or "Guinnea Pig" TOG, and they don't match my copy of "DE", and I really need to plug in, substitute, and remark the dots on the spines and such. (We originally did "Old Yeller" in Week 3-4, when the story actually took place around 1860, so it should definitely be more around Week 20 or just before the Civil War books.) I also am making notations on my reading list printout of books I am reading instead of what is on the DE, cause I just can't see buying new books for a new edition when I already went through this once for the guinea pig co-op of TOG, a second time for the Classic design of TOG, and am now using the Redesign when I already had the books for that level for that year plan for two previous versions... Can't do it...

Out in my less-than-organized family room (a room away from the bookshelves), I have another set of two bookshelves that are beside where I sit when we do school. They are also 72" high, 14" or so deep, and 36" wide. On this set of shelves I keep the current school books (for Math, Science, Handwriting, Spelling, Health, Art, etc., blah, blah, blah).  There is space on these shelves for current reading books to be stored when they are not being used (weekends, end of day, etc.). Those shelves currently need to be sorted, but the contain books we've been using in the school year we just ended (were using Ambleside Online), and books we are in the process of reading (summer reading).  I have actually nailed nails into these bookshelves (old shelves, prefab wood), and I have a white board hanging over the top shelves of the left unit that I use when explaining math, phonics, etc. I can easily take it down when I need to get to stuff behind it, but that is where I store used college texts that I have listed on Amazon (daughter is in college).

Beside these two bookshelves is another unit, narrow (18") wide by 72" high, and same depth as the other unit (I'm thinking 14").  In it I store a hamper full of lincoln logs, plastic snap-shut storage containers for things like markers, crayons, colored pencils, ...educational games and things like Math Mouse, Cuisineaire rods, etc., and I actually am using a flower pot as a pen holder there as well.

In another spot in the family room  I have a 36" high narrow bookshelf that has some of my AO read-aloud books that I might integrate into my various TOG years, as well as other misc. books that are not TOG but we can't live without. Atop this unit is an electric pencil sharpener, an plastic storage bin (11" x 5" x 4") that holds sharpened pencils, and between the bin and the sharpener are pencils waiting to be sharpened.

My stored books are in a doored cabinet in a corner of the utility room until they are needed. My son is entering 6th, and he's my last, so that cabinet contains 7th grade and up materials for math, science, ...that type of thing, stuff I used with my daughters that I will use again when his turn comes around.

Just so you know, in case you were wondering, here is a picture of less than half of the books stored in my family room:

My friends who know me are nodding their heads, "Yeah, that's right!"  The other wing of my family room is too messy to photograph right now, but suffice it to say the only places without book cases in my "L" shaped family room are the door, the fireplace, and the stairs, plus one wall that has the sewing machine and the treadmill. To the left of the sewing machine is a bookcase, then the sewing machine, then the treadmill, then a bookcase!

A major goal of my life for the next ten years is to reduce, reduce, reduce the amount of books in my life. I do this by listing on Amazon.com.

Well, I'm having trouble getting some of my pictures to download from my phone, so I'll go ahead and post this now with the photos that I've gotten downloaded. Maybe I'll get the other photos loaded eventually...

Blessings, y'all!

Summer Art Project Plans

Art

I've long considered myself a creative-type person, one with lots of ideas swirling around in my head, and lots of clutter in my house. [Creative types tend to accumulate clutter -- everything looks useful, so why throw it away! ::sigh::]

However, the truth of my past ten years has been that, combined with an accumulated sense of being buried in my clutter, I just avoid art in my home school like the plague! Why? ...Because I don't want a mess! I don't want to have to clean up the project, let alone any unexpected spills...

The net effect is that I feel I have neglected art this year in my home school.  So I have made plans to do art during the summer.  This will not only fulfill my intentions of covering "Art", but will also give my little guy art to enter this summer at the County Fair.  I would love to plan a project a day for two months, but I know that won't happen. I'll start with some potential plans, and we'll go from there. So, here are some of my plans:

1. Ceramic Mosaic - I originally saw an art idea about a ceramic wall mural. It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, so I looked again using different search terms and came up with a ceramic art project that looks close to what I am trying to accomplish. There was a real good "how to" at this link. There was a pretty idea for a garden stepping stone as well. I also really liked the clay-tablet method of mural described on the Deep Space Sparkle blog. I wonder if I can think of a way to make the mosaic out of small clay squares...

2.  Koi Fish Art - For the Koi Fish Art Lesson you want to start with a sheet of paper either 8-1/2" X 11" or 9" X 12 ". Using chalk pastels, have the artist draw either one or two koi, using the sample illustrations from the Deep Space Sparkle lesson page. The student will then paint in the fish using either water color, tempera, or acrylic paint. Let dry, then mount to mat board.

3. Chalk Bird Art Project - The Chalk Bird Art Project starts with  letting the student see some black and white bird photos (I wouldn't mind color, either). Then, using a standard sheet of art paper, the artist draws a black outline picture using black oil pastel. Then the student uses chalk pastels to color in. It is helpful to have a sheet of paper to set on the artwork for the child to rest the drawing hand on so the oil pastel doesn't smear. After coloring in, a fixative needs to be applied to keep the pastel from smearing.

4.  Abstract Acrylic Painting Project - This is one I think we can do, that I found on a website called Art Made Easy.   It's a link to a page called My Cool Homeschool for Abstract Fun. I found searching about Abstract Painting to be very helpful, because I wasn't sure what that fair catelog entry was asking for. It can be anything from art where you blow the paint with a straw, to splatter painting, painting with the wheels of a car driven through paint... Lots of possibilities...

5.  Calligraphy Art Project - I was looking for lessons on calligraphy so we could maybe do a project for the fair.  I found one five-day caligraphy lesson page here, but it didn't give real concrete ideas of what to caligraphy...  But it gave some suggested links which I followed.  The first link led to Calligraphy Lessons On-Line, which may give more calligraphy information than the average homeschooler would ever want... So I finally found some samples of framed calligraphy art here.  That looks achievable. I'm just not sure if it would still be considered calligraphy if it were like a painting of a geisha girl (to the right on the link), or only if it is the words. I think only the words. Like one could do a trio of faith, hope and love...

6.  Acryllic Painting - Building - There was a promising lesson plan on this at How do I Paint With Acryllic Paints (E-How)

7. How to paint Portraits in acryllic -  on e-How - this is excellent! A video series! She instructs you to paint this one on canvas, so I did a little more research and learned you are supposed to prepare your canvas. I had no idea! So there is something called Gesso that you paint the canvas with before you do your painting. Then Jacklyn LaFlamme teaches you about different types of brushes. If your child is interested in painting, follow through this woman's series. She is a professional artist, and these videos are well done.

8.  Charcoal Drawing Project - I really loved this reverse charcoal technique. Look low on the page to where it talks about starting with a simple subject to draw, like an egg.

Well, that's a start anyway. Think I'll post this entry and do another list next week. Hope you try some of my ideas. Let me know how they turn out! I'll try to post pictures too.