07.31.08
Posted in Life, the Universe and All that Jazz at 10:06 am by Meg
For anyone who likes the idea of a well-run award contest where the prize is just the acclaim of your peers….
Alasandra has opened up nominations for this year’s contest. Nominations are being accepted until Oct. 17 in three categories: Adult, Teen, and Group.
So, go check it out, and start checking out the nominated blogs….or make a nomination…
If nothing else, you might find a new blog that you enjoy reading.
Edited later: Just to make it clear, the first link is to a post about a blog award contest that was NOT well-run. To say it had problems is to only look at the surface, their problems are many and run deep. What they have done, IMO, is an insult to the person who started their contest.
Anyway, Alasandra’s contest has no prizes and last year’s winners, can’t compete. Anyone else is welcome.
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07.29.08
Posted in The nuts and bolts of it at 2:17 am by Meg
At least as far as it’s shaping up.
I’m thinking the child will be a tad bit busy; and with taking the ps class, no more slow mornings.
Monday
7 AM catch the bus to the public school - I probably would have considered driving her because the class doesn’t start until something like 8:10, but Datter will be riding the bus and they might as well go together.
9:20 - I pick her up
10:00 - martial arts class
11:10 - pick her up, she goes home, showers and has lunch.
12:45 - she starts her seatwork for us and any homework from Spanish class
Tuesday
7 AM - catch bus
9:20 - I pick her up and we go home. She works on seatwork and can break for lunch when she wants.
2 PM - biology lab at our house (normally)
4 - lab is over and she can finish up anything left hanging or Spanish homework.
Wednesday
7 AM - catch bus
9:20 - I pick her up and we go home. She works for about 2.5 hours on seatwork and then breaks for lunch around noon.
1:10 PM leave the house for the library
1:30 - Global issues class at the library - given by someone ELSE in our group. (Can you tell that I’m happy?)
3:30 - head home where she can finish up anything left hanging or Spanish homework.
Thursday
7 AM catch the bus
9:20 - I pick her up
10:00 - martial arts class
11:10 - pick her up, she goes home, showers and has lunch.
12:45 - she starts her seatwork for us and any homework from Spanish class
Friday
7 AM - catch bus
9:20 - I pick her up and we go home. She works for about 2.5 hours on seatwork and then breaks for lunch around noon.
1 PM - homeschool group activity - gym, swimming, bowling etc…
And for classes it’s looking like:
Biology
Geometry
English (literature samples, grammar, and full length books)
Japanese history
I’ll probably put the Global issues class under something like current events.
foreign languages - Spanish through the ps, a little French literature to keep that from dieing, and Japanese.
Music (which reminds me that her music lesson is at 10:30 AM on Fridays right now and I’ll need to move that to a more convenient time) which will be a combination of her music lessons and a music appreciation text that I picked up a while ago and then set aside. Combined it will give her a nice art elective.
oh, and I mustn’t forget that she just applied to volunteer at the Children’s Museum on a regular basis. She hasn’t heard back yet, but that will have to be added in.
Hubby has expressed concern that she’ll be lonely without her brother around all day; looking at this, I’m wondering if she’s going to have a chance to miss him.
And someone asked me the other day if I was considering directing another play - I just looked at them and asked when would we have time for rehearsals on this schedule?
Then I said that I wasn’t going to even seriously consider it until after October when we can see how busy our life is.
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07.28.08
Posted in Life, the Universe and All that Jazz at 12:54 am by Meg
This has been floating around and I thought I’d take a stab at it.
1. What was your motivation for homeschooling? Was it based on religious reasons? Was is it based on curriculum - did you want more freedom in choosing what your children were being taught? Was it based on socializing - wanting to have more control in the people with whom your children came into contact with? Was it based on logistics - the nearest school being 20 miles away? What made you finally decide to go this route?
We’ve got two kids and the motivation for homeschooling each of them was different. Boy’s beginning story is here. For Girl, she looked at all the fun Boy was having and decided it was better than dealing with a brick and mortar school. I suspect her choice was also motivated by the fact that she was harrassed by some classmates for not being Christian. (She did Kindergarten and First grade in PS; after one month of Second, she decided to come home.)
2. Don’t hate me for asking this. How to you handle socialization? What steps do you take to make sure your children are around other children and adults? Are you active in a home school group? Do you spend a lot of time at church activities? Maybe you utilize the local Y for activities and they meet friends there?
You got the wrong question. It should be how do we fit in any academics around the kids’ activity schedules? They find things that they want to do and I’m left trying to make sure that we get in enough seat time to complete work. They are active in a homeschool group, they volunteer, they do 4H and drama….
3. Do you use the public school system for any part of your child’s routine? Some children here come to the school for band or chorus, or maybe for science class. Do you send your child to the public school to take advantage of any of their programs?
The only benefit of the public school system that we have used in the past was speech therapy to clean up pronunciation problems. It was a pill and I’m happy those days are behind us. OTH, we are about to start a new experience - Girl will be taking Spanish at the local high school this fall.
4. Do your children begin and end school at the same time each day? Do they have a strict schedule, at least as far as waking up and reporting to the school area of your home? If not, when/how will you transition your children into following a more rigid schedule - awaking at the same time each day so that they can follow a routine outside of the home like for college and work?
When my kids need to get up for something, they can usually get themselves up and ready to walk out the door whenever we’ve discussed. With Boy being sick this last year, he has had a few days where he’s missed his alarm, but they are rare. As for doing “school,” everyday is different and while we try to get moving at a reasonable time it’s not always the same time. OTH, we also don’t have a firm ending time.
5. How many spelling bees has your child won? Oh, I’m kidding. We all know most of the recent national spelling bee winners have been home schooled children. I just wanted to throw a little funny in there?
You know, not every child that is homeschooled is a superstar. Homeschooled kids cover the entire spectrum from high achieving to struggling. Homeschooling allows us to tailor an education to a child and hopefully be successful, but that doesn’t mean that they are going to win national competitions.
6. Do you have a sense of humor? It’s probably a little late for me to ask that but…
You probably should be asking that of my family and friends. They are the ones that have to deal with me.
7. Where do you find your curriculum? Do you shop for it and order it? Do you create your own?
LOL - to me, creating my own would be drawing knowledge out of thin air. It doesn’t work that way. That aside, are you asking how I decide what to teach, or how I decide what to use to teach with. To me, at least, they are separate questions.
Deciding what to teach comes from looking at long range goals (getting into college at this point) and deciding what needs to be done to get there. That gives us a framework that is then modified by discussions between Hubby, myself, and the child in question. For example, Girl is crazy about Japan. So, we are about to enter our third year of self-studying Japanese and for history this year she wants to study Japanese history.
Deciding what to use to teach with is trickier. We tend to use regular textbooks as spines for most subjects, so for “normal” things it’s just a matter of browsing catalogs. Something like Japanese History is a little trickier because it’s not something that most public high schools are looking at teaching, so there isn’t an obvious place to start. Then it’s a matter of looking at what colleges use to teach with and see if it will work for us.
8. Do you have any worries at all about teaching your teenagers the higher level math and sciences? I, for one, could not teach chemistry to my children but I could probably teach them calculus. Is this a concern for you?
Well….we just graduated our oldest and he’s about to head off to a top ranked college. Generally, we didn’t so much “teach” him the higher level stuff as find him good materials to learn from and then be here to help facilitate his process. If that wasn’t working, I’d probably look into some of the online/distance learning options that are out there.
9. What bothers you the most about the reputation home schoolers have? What things do you hate to hear people say about you for your choice? I really hope you don’t say that it’s my previous post.
Most things said about homeschoolers I just ignore. I’m not going to change someone opinions by arguing with them. What I do hate hearing are comments about how people hate spending time with their kids, or can’t wait for them to go back to school and be out of the house.
10. Be honest, do you, at least in your mind sometimes, judge those of us who choose public school? Do you ever think we are making a bad choice for our children? Are you vocal about that disapproval?
No, there are so many different ways to get an education and homeschooling is just one option. But it has to be an option that everyone is comfortable with. By everyone I mean you, your partner, and your child. I often tell newbies that they need to remember that family situations change. The reason you are considering homeschooling now, may not be the driving factor next year. The important thing is to always be open to what the choices are and be willing to see which the best one is for your entire family.
11. Is “home school” one word or two? I’ve seen it both ways. With spellcheck, it shows it as ONE word when used as a verb, but two words when used otherwise. Please enlighten me.
I prefer homeschool.
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07.27.08
Posted in Meme, Books at 7:48 pm by Meg
I haven’t done a book oriented meme for a while and I can’t resist books.
I “saw” it at RedMolly, but for some reason she didn’t “do” all the books yet, so I went back to the source.
The RULES - because you know there has to be some.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read (as in the book is bought and sitting on my shelf).
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
So there are 98 books on the list.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - Girl made me read it this year. She loves it, I’m so-so
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - I’ve read some of it? I just couldn’t get into it, though the Hobbit was fine and I LOVED the movies
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - Which one? I read the Tanakh and parts of the new testament.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - We have it, but I’ll probably never read it.
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - I started it years ago when Girl found it and a Christian friend mentioned “the problems” with it, I probably only got a third of the way into it before getting distracted.
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - again, some but not all.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - HATED IT, HATED IT, HATED IT
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - Not something I enjoyed
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - Only a book or two of the series.
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Tried a chapter or two, that was enough. Of maybe I tried number 59…I don’t remember.
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - I really, really dislike John Irving. I tried a couple.
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - Can you tell I was on Dickens kick at one point?
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - It’s one of my favorite musicals (and dramas, but I never seem to be able to get into reading it. Maybe because I know it so well?)
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Again, does some of them count?
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams - Oh, I really, really enjoyed this book as a teenager. I even read the second book. But I never got into his other stuff.
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - I loved the movie from the 70s, and the book was so much more.
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl -
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
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07.26.08
Posted in Life, the Universe and All that Jazz at 9:02 am by Meg
No, not my big baby. LOL, that’s not for nearly a month.
Girl is off today to spend 9 days with one of her friends. I’m dropping her off at their house in Indy this afternoon, and then they are leaving for North Carolina tomorrow. We won’t see her again until next Sunday!
She is very excited. I’m worrying about all the little details.
- She’s not great about sun screen and burns easily - I’m concerned she’ll fry the first day and then not stop and get really badly burned.
- While the pool where they are going has a life guard, the lake doesn’t - I know she’s a fine swimmer, but…who wouldn’t worry?
- She and M have known each other for 4 or 5 years, but this will be the longest time they’ve spent together….and Girl gets very, very cranky if she doesn’t get enough sleep - will they still be talking by the end of the week?
AND NOW I HAVE TO DO THE KITTY LITTER EVERY DAY!!
Bah, face it, I’m going to miss not having her around. She’s going to have a great time and I’ll fret for the entire week.
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