Homeschooling Arguments We Should Retire

I have been homeschooling for a decade now. In that time I've rarely been challenged about my decision in real life, but have battled with some people online about our homeschooling. I've morphed from the eager mom who wants to convince everyone to the brilliant wonderfullness of home education to the seasoned homeschooler who feels comfortable simply shrugging her shoulders and saying, "it's what we do. Pass the bean dip please." In that time I've seen a lot of arguments from fellow homeschoolers about why homeschooling is a good thing and honestly, even though I used to put forth some of them myself, I think a lot of them stink.

Like, really stink. Like really, really stink.

I'm sort of hoping to go through some of the worst offenders in a series of blog posts (we'll see, you all know how consistent I am with posting these days). On to the post.

"But no one can teach my kids as well as I do because no one loves my kids as much as I do."

I was at a meeting last year when this one came up. A lovely woman with younger kids said that and went on to explain why homeschooling is superior because we simply love our kids more then any teacher could. I stayed quiet. It was hard.

One, love is no guarantee of anything aside from warm feelings when you look at or hold your kids. There are parents who love their kids who also beat their kids. Their are parents who love their kids who, between work and other activities, barely see their kids. Love, modern love at least, in and of itself can mean very little.

Two, love does not mean the magical acquisition of skills. I loved my kids from the moment they were born, but I was not a very consistent or attentive parent for the first few years of my first-born's life, and there have been many times (many, many times) when I've realized how little I knew about parenting, healthcare, nutrition, homeschooling, etc. Although love was definitely a factor in why I learned more about some of those things, it also never interfered with me coming up with some pat justification for why I didn't need to learn more. Maturity and experience was much more useful in that regard.

Three, love of a child is not a necessary prerequisite to being an effective teacher of that child. I have no doubt that, although most of my teachers liked me in my school years, none of them loved me. The things the most effective had in common were a) subject knowledge, b) teaching skills and c) some concern for my success. Indeed, had Mr. Garden or Mr. Whidden loved me, that would have been quite a problem. Parents tend to frown on that sort of thing.

Four, love can often get in the way. Since most of us feel and express love as something squishy and rainbowy these days and don't really submit it to a hard examination, it tends to get away with all kinds of crap. It can distract us from the fact that our joy with a certain math program and our dreams for how it will turn our daughter into the next Einstien doesn't match the reality of what that daughter really needs in a math program. It can cause us to dramatically change course in our homeschooling when things seem too difficult for our little darlings when the truth might be that they need that struggle to get to the next step in understanding. It can cause us to be too timid, too restrained, too over reaching, too demanding...

Love, in the context of homeschooling, is a start. It's a hint, an intuition, a timid guide. Just a drop is sufficient and only then when paired with patience, discipline, creativity, skill and so on. And maybe that's how we should talk about love when we're discussing homeschooling with others. Otherwise to the outsider it's, "love is all we need," and it sounds like we don't even understand what goes into helping a child learn let alone have any of the skills and knowledge that are required. So, I propose we ditch that argument. Let it be a given that we love our kids and then move the discussion on to something else.

As long as it's not long lists of famous dead people who we claim were homeschooled. But that's the next post.

Extreme Homeschool Makeover, Part 1

10 years in and homeschooling can get a little stale. It's largely become a matter of picking curriculum and then finding time in the day to do it with the kids. Or rather, with Harry, since Catherine works, by and large, independently.

But we departed from the norm this week when I chucked aside all of Harry's English stuff and started winging it. I had bought one last writing/grammar program, Story Grammar, a few weeks back and as I read it I realized there was nothing in it I couldn't do on my own now. If Story Grammar has kids chunking and rearranging model sentences, why couldn't I? And why couldn't I take it a bit further?

So on Monday, Harry and I talked about a sentence I had printed in his English binder.

"The Big Friendly Giant took out a book, very old and tattered."

We discussed it, rearranged it, parsed it. He copied it. Then he wrote an imitation sentence.

"The Huge Angry Troll took out a club, very large and bloody."

A little gory, yes, but not bad. And the troll was interesting. So we took the sentence and had an impromptu art lesson. He designed the monster, I drew the basics and he did the details.

Yesterday we had a sentence that, in his imitation, turned out to be excellent for introducing a troll-defeating hero. In the sentence the hero is carrying a dagger so in the afternoon Harry and I worked on designing and building a toy dagger. It's still in the process of being built but should be done tomorrow so I'll be sure to post pics.

I'm sort of wondering if we can't keep the theme going and slowly build a larger story.Or maybe fold more subjects into the Fantasy theme. Or maybe make the homeschooling itself a story or roleplaying game with his subjects as elements of that. I'm trying not to get ahead of myself with this because I tend to get carried away with an idea, go off the deep end and end up burning out. So I'm holding back and trying to take it a step at a time to see what evolves. 

Hopefully, it will be fun.

Homeschooling With a Toddler? By Jove, I Think I've Got it!

He looks so peaceful when he's asleep. You'd never suspect the chaos he's responsible for when he's awake.

It's been over two and a half years since he started affecting our homeschooling, first with the pregnancy, then with his wonderful self and it's been a battle to find our homeschooling groove. More so this year because he's more mobile then ever. Add in a Grade 10 student with the extra work that demands and a boy in Grade 6 that's prone to focus problems and I've been on the edge of crazy for far too long.

How to make it work?

Well, after some talking with the kids we think we've found a solution.

We dispensed with scheduling and replaced it with routine. I had been using Scholaric (an excellent planning site for homeschoolers) to schedule the kids' work. Once I started doing that I started micromanaging my daughter's workload. Where she used to just do the next thing, I was dividing up her work into specific blocks, adding videos and assignments to be done on specific days and taking away all her discretion. I also began to control subjects that had previously been led by her interest. She prefers days spent with school work but she does not like that work when it's dictated by someone else and turned into a joyless grind.

So although I still use Scholaric, it's much looser. Some subjects are back to being led by her interest and any assignments, like papers, flow out of the discussions we have about those subjects. What this has meant is that she has a little more time in the day that I can add into our larger daily routine.

Once that time was freed up we came up with the following plan:

7am to 8am - breakfast and chores.
8am to 9am - Harry plays with Lauchie. I do housework and prepare. Catherine practices fiddle and does her Latin.
9am to 10am - Catherine looks after Harry while I work with Harry.
10 am to 12pm - Catherine does her math, Harry does all his independent work and Lauchie has some time with me and then goes down for a nap. I get time to myself and am available if either child needs help.

The afternoon stills remains to be sorted but so far Catherine has retreated to her room after lunch to work until supper and Harry and I hold down the fort, maybe do the odd activity together when Lauchie is occupied with blocks or Mary Poppins.

I think this is probably a strategy that requires older kids but it's been wonderful for us. Hope it's helpful to someone else out there.

The Obligatory Start-of-the-School Curriculum Lineup

Whoooosh!

Another school year and lots of stuff to plan and do and record. More then ever in fact because I have a high schooler in the house and university to think of. So without further ado, here's the run down.

Catherine, Grade 10

Planning for Catherine was a roller coaster ride this year. I posted some time ago about how we were going to send her off to school for science. Ha ha ha! Didn't happen. Putting a part-time student in an institution designed for full-timers is challenging to say the least.

Mathematics
Geometry 2nd edition, Harold Jacobs. I choose the second edition rather then the third because it's heavier on proofs.

Science
CK-12 Chemistry - Second Edition. I know I had chosen Zumdahl's World of Chemistry and I do have the answer key on my bookshelf but the actual text never arrived so I just decided to cut my losses and go to CK-12.

History
A Brief History of the World. I've abandoned the 4 year history cycle. We're doing a survey course of history this year with supplemental readings.

English
English Composition I. 
Poetry. We'll use the Norton Anthology of Poetry with this.
Assigned readings.

Latin
Lingua Latina

Epistomology
Theory of Knowledge for the IB Diploma.

Study Skills
Study is Hard Work

Other
Fiddle lessons, Home Ec. skills, Art.

Harry, Grade 6

Math
Knowing Mathematics, Singapore Primary Math.

Science
Classic Science, Elementary Chemistry

History
Story of the World 2

English
Grammar Voyage, World of Poetry, assigned readings.

Philosophy
Philosophy for Kids

Other
Piano Lessons, Art, Home ec.

On To High School

Well, in the space of a weekend our homeschool has changed radically.

In June, Catherine attended a science retreat put on by WISE, Women In Science and Engineering. Despite her usual introvert misgivings about spending the day with a bunch of public school kids she didn't know, she had a great time and came home talking about possible careers in molecular biology or computer science. Eep. My plan for grade ten science had been Zumdahl`s World of Chemistry with labs from a book by Robert Bruce Thompson. The lab bit was doing my head in in regards to planning and cost but no big worry, right? After all, she wanted to be a writer or linguist so science wasn't a huge deal.

Right.

Now science had to be rigorous. Not just that but Catherine wanted more structure then I generally provide and wanted to be taught by someone who, "knew what they were talking about." The nerve of that child. We talked and high school was an option we were both willing to explore.

Fast forward a bit and now my little girl is registered for two courses in the fall semester at the small local high school. One is an integrated General Science course (foundational for the next five semesters of science) and the other is a visual arts course that she thought might be fun.

She'll be fine. She's got the kind of confidence and self assurance you don't often see in teenagers today. And she was adamant that she still wanted to do the rest of her subjects on her own or with me. I think she'll have fun and hopefully meet more of the local teenagers. It's just me that has to adjust. I need to remember that she's capable of this and that choosing to homeschool is not a choice that means always schooling at home but rather centering the decisions about education in the home.

Besides, is only one semester.

So far.

The Best Laid Plans...

I went shopping for Zumdahl's Introductory Chemistry Tuesday night and ended up with his World of Chemistry. The difference? IC is apparently more of an Honours high school book while WoC is regular chemistry. Also, many tens of dollars. I've seen syllibi online for Honours Chemistry courses that use WoC so I'm not too concerned that I've chosen something with less rigor so the money became the deciding factor.

Besides, the cover is prettier, don't you agree?

Also...*sigh*...Robert Bruce Thompson is no longer selling his most excellent lab kits to those of us in the Great White North. It is an understandable considering shipping costs and cross-border paperwork but Istill want to cry.  I will now have to put together my supplies all by my lonesome and the prospect is NOT thrilling.

Housework With Lauchie

Today's discovery: when stocking toilet paper with a toddler there is no such thing as moderation.

And So I Find Myself Planning For Grade 10

Here it is, high school. Here in Nova Scotia, high school officially starts in grade 10. Universities don't generally look at anything earlier then that so next year is the big one for me. Thankfully, it doesn't seem that difficult and much of what we've done this year is leading nicely into our selections for next year.

Math
Geometry by Harold Jacobs.

This is the second edition rather then the current third. I choose the older book because the third gave up some of the work with proofs in favour of some discovery activities. Discovery math is not Catherine's great joy in life. Logical proofs, that's Catherine to a tee. I had some worries about finding an answer key but Alibris came to the rescue and I got the text and answer key for under $60. Score!

Latin

Lingua Latina

Why yes, that is Catherine's Latin text from this year. Thing is, as wonderful as it is to have a text that's focused on fluency rather then translation, LL really demands a knowledgeable tutor or a student willing to read, review and review again in order to really get to know the grammar otherwise a person could finish the text with only a superficial understanding. Catherine is that disciplined, review obsessed student but as a result it is going rather slow. It's a text that often gets broken up over two year anyway but I think Catherine might go three. That means Latin costs me nothing this year. Fine with me!

English

Catherine will be reading Medieval and Early Modern literature. She may continue with vocabulary as well but that will be because of her interest in it, not my insistence. Formal grammar and writing instruction are both finished. I'll buy her a good grammar guide and she'll be writing papers on her reading, history and science but other then that it's now all spit and polish. My one hope is that I can find a mentor who can critque her writing as she needs someone with a lot more knowledge then me.

Science

 I am thinking we'll do Chemistry next year. Catherine's eyes lit up when she was telling me about a chapter from Natalie Angier's Canon on molecular biology but I think Chemistry is the foundation we'll build the other sciences on. CK12's Chemistry Flexbook was the top runner. It is free and, I've been told, of good quality. But then I saw this site where a homeschool mom has planned out a whole year of Chemistry using Zumdahl's Introductory Chemistry. Jeepers! How can I pass up on the opportunity to have everything planned out for me? Especially when she's even using the lab book,IIllustrated Guide to Home chemistry Experiments, that I'd been intending to use? And I'd been intending to use that lab book because the author sells affordable lab kits to go with his books! How much better can it get? This will be the expensive course. Just the kit will cost me over $200 and I haven't even started researching the price of the textbook.

History

Catherine has enjoyed Susan Wise Bauer's History of the Ancient World so we will likely continue with History of the Medieval World. We'll also add in some primary sources and Stanford's Reading Like A Historian lessons. I either have the stuff or it's free. Easy.

Theory of Knowledge

Aha! A new course! When a retired educator heard I was homeschooling a girl that wanted to be a writer he recommended some epistemology and pointed me towards texts for the IB Theory of Knowledge course. After some poking around I think I've decided on the Cambridge University Press text (it was that or Oxford. Who knew I'd ever have to decide between the two?). It's cheaper then the Oxford book, has some recommendations from a few fellow homeschoolers, and there are resources available for free online. 

I think that's pretty much the meat of her year. She'll continue with programming Python on her own time as well as violin lessons. She also wants to learn how to sew and I intend to teach her more cooking skills but I think I've got the core figured out. 

Now I just have to go spend all that money.

It's Tadpole Season

Several weeks ago I finally got my hands on a QX3 digital microscope. It's a hard thing to buy in Canada but thankfully, someone local had one listed on Kijiji and after years of lust, I picked it up.

So what to do? Get a good look at the brine shrimp for one.

Now that the tadpoles are out we had to examine them as well. We scooped a bunch of eggs out of the ditch in front of our property and deposited them in an aquarium. Then we took out a couple and examined them before returning them to the water.

Now there are two local amphibians that are laying eggs right now, Wood Frogs and Spotted Salamanders. Since frog tadpoles don't have external gills, we're guessing we have the salamander tadpoles. Both kids did some drawings and took notes on their observations. We later looked up egg identification, went back to the ditch and realized that most, if not all, the eggs were salamander eggs.

This was an especially nifty discovery because just a week before, while doing some spring cleaning in the yard, we found a Spotted Salamander under a bit of debris. I previously mentioned the find here.

In a month or two we should have Leopard Frog and Green Frog eggs from our pond but in the meantime we'll enjoy watching the salamanders develop.

Activities: Observation, drawing, setting up aquarium.
             

Resources: How to Hatch Frog Eggs at eHow
                 Egg Mass ID at Field Herp Forum

Switching Up Science

   What homeschooler doesn't switch approaches and programs midstream on a regular basis? Seems to come with the territory. So it shouldn't be surprising that despite the fact that we're now halfway through our school year I've gone and taken a new approach to Harry and Catherine's science.

   I was browsing the Well Trained Mind forums when I found a reference to Aha! Science. I went to the website, took a look around and decided that it looked interesting. Harry really likes Creativity Express Online, his art program and another online subject, so I thought it might be good to try him with Aha! Well, it's only $15 for a year and turns out it's right up his alley. He enjoys it, retains what he's learned and I have the added bonus of having a website that tracks his progress and grades so I have something to stick in his records. Wonderful!

   But that wasn't the only change I made. We own a little over 2 acres on the edge of a forest. We have laying hens and raise meat chickens and turkeys in the summer. We have a large pond that hosts everything from toads to a muskrat. Certainly we can do a fair bit of science just by walking out our front door, no?

   So the kids are starting a blog where they'll record observations, pictures, experiments, etc. that have to do with our property. We have some microscopes, a water test kit, fertilized chicken eggs, an old aquarium and other tools to help in that. Over the next 12 years they'll record a year in the life of and on our land. I'll post the blog as soon as they get it up and running, hopefully by next week.

   Meanwhile we got a start last week taking some pictures of the pond and today we were outside again playing around with some of the remnants of yesterday's work and enjoying the beautiful weather.

The burn pile yielded lots of charcoal that Catherine and Harry (yes, he is in his pajamas and housecoat) used to draw with. 

Catherine spent some time writing at the edge of the pond.

Lauchie and I chased, and were chased by chickens. No pictures of that though!

Spring Cleaning

Yesterday was brilliant. Not too cold and lots of sun. We decided it would be the day, after we finally got the yard cleaned up.

First order of business when cleaning up rural property is the burn pile.

Old cardboard, christmas trees, old pallets and branches get chucked in the pile and set alight. The wood in the foreground doesn't. It's firewood for next winter and it will be stacked when we get some new pallets to stack it on.

Lauchie had a great time, although he never cracked a smile. It was up and down and up and down and up and down the back stairs for him.

Much of the work was picking up garbage that had tumbled out of the car or been dropped by the kids or picked out of garbage bags by crows. We got a fantastic surprise when we picked up a small pile of stuff on the lawn.

Its a Yellow Spotted Salamander. I hadn't seen one in years and was a little taken aback by how big it was (hence my fingers for reference). They hide under logs and such during the day so to make sure he was okay we put a few things back on top of him that we'll clean up today if he's moved. 

Resources I'll be using: Harry - Salamander printout from Enchanted Learning

                                      Spotted Salamander Facts

              Catherine - Yellow Spotted Salamander

Spring!

It's springtime. I have a new smart phone and a Blogger app. Wheeee!!!

Expecting More of the Kids

   I am constantly expecting too little of my children and they are constantly proving that I can safely expect a lot more from them.

   Catherine is reading ancient great books this year. She whipped through Gilgamesh (she thought the bit where Gilgamesh and Enkidu behead and disembowel the Bull of Heaven was hilarious) and then moved on to a good slice of the Old Testament. I gave her a choice between the Good News Bibles and my huge Oxford Annotated NRSV. I thought the Good News Bible was a better choice for a first read because it's written in plain language and the Oxford one is dense and filled to the brim with even denser foot notes.

   After a quick review Catherine choose the Oxford.

   Turns out she found the plain language of the Good News Bible flat and uninspiring. I let her know she could skip the foot notes and off she went to read.

   A couple of hours later I went to check on her progress. She said it had gone really well and her eyes lit up as she told me that she loved the foot notes. They had made the stories much richer and given her connections between Genesis and Gilgamesh that she might not have noticed otherwise. She was also greatly surprised to learn details like the fact that, absent a Christian lens, the serpent was likely more of a mischief character then an evil one.

   So lesson learned yet again. I should never limit my children by what I think they might be able to handle. I should never hesitate to push of offer materials even if I think they might be a bit beyond my children.

And Now For the Grade Five Line Up

   Yesterday I outlined the programs and resources my daughter is using for Grade Nine. Planning for my son has been a little easier as we're simply continuing with many of the things we had success with last year. I've finally learned what I think is probably one of the most important lessons in homeschooling, it's not the curriculum, it's the commitment. I can be swayed by all the fun and fancy programs out there but ultimately the ones that bring the most success are those I simply keep puttering away at and refuse to give up on even when they get boring and hard for Harry and I.

   English is finally starting to feel like a real subject. Harry is finished the Dancing Bears reading series and is now a confident and capable reader. He's still working through Apples and Pears spelling from the same publisher and will likely finish the last two levels during this school year. For grammar it's back to KISS. Yes, the site is hard to navigate and yes, there's a lot of printing but it's free and probably one of the best grammar programs out there. So far he's enjoying it. For writing It's Writing With Ease which he definitely isn't enjoying right now but I don't care. I've learned the virtue of pushing him through things he's not found of because he eventually reaps and enjoys the reward.

   Math became a bit of an issue because I was skipping back and forth between Singapore Primary Mathematics and Math Mammoth. Harry liked both but I kept running into issues where one would work for one concept but another was better for something else. I solved it this year by going with the Key to...Series. Since Harry understands arithmetic we'll keep it fresh with drills and occasional worksheets but otherwise he needs a more specific and in depth program for each of the concepts that are starting to pop up in math.

   History may finally get done this year. I'm back to Gombrich's Little History of the World. It's a magical book that seems to work well for Harry. Bringing Up Learners offers it's Mosaic World History program for free and LHotW is one of the two spines you can use. I'm modifying it quite a bit as it's a bit young for Harry but it's still a great outline for us to follow.

   Science is, as always, the toughest subject for me. There's nothing out there that is really written for homeschoolers from a secular perspective. With Harry I'm simply going to read lots and have him do some notebooking.


 

Grade Nine Line Up for This Year

   Another year, another lineup of programs to use with the kids. So far this school year has been a doozy because on top of the planning I had to do for my two older children I also have a 10 month old on the verge of walking who I have to chase and a husband who's incapacitated and out of work until sometime in the new year due to a shoulder injury. I am busier then I've ever been at any other point in my marriage but despite that, or more probably because of that, I'm more focused and productive then ever. So on to the show...

   Catherine is in Grade 9 this year and we've simplified English a great deal to cope with the increasing workload (hers and mine). Instead of the multi-year writing program she was doing last year, Writing With Skill, she'll be going through The Lively Art of Writing. After that her writing will simply be the reports and essays she'll have to produce for other subjects. Later in the year she'll also complete Jensen's Grammar to put the finishing touches on her grammar skills and any practice after that will come from editing her work and possibly her brother's. She's still doing Jensen's Vocabulary and the MCT 4 Practice book but those are ten minute a day things that will have to fit in around the more fundamental work. She's reading ancient literature as well (just finished Gilgamesh) a la The Well Trained Mind.

    For math we're working with Foerster's Algebra 1. In Canada, as with most of the world, our math is integrated and not portioned out into sections like pre-algebra and geometry, but Foerster's fit so well with the no-nosense, clear, sidebarless texts that Catherine likes that I choose to use it and follow the American math sequence. There will be no fun add-ons, no supplementation. Foester's is it and it seems to be working well so for.

    History will consist of Catherine reading The History of the Ancient World by Susan Wise Bauer. She will learn to take proper notes and finally keep an honest-to-goodness timeline. We've tried them before but never found a method that really worked. Either we were dealing with a Book of Centuries that would get put up and forgotten or something along the wall that was hard to access and inevitably fell down. I've got a new method now that works like a charm and I'll give details in a further post. She'll likely also be listening to Teaching Company lectures, I haven't got the details around those sorted out quite yet.

    Science will be Hewitt's Conceptual Physical Science. It's a college level texts that should provide a good introduction to some of the science she will be studying in later grades. I decided to keep it as simple as possible, have her read a chapter and take notes, discuss it and go over the review questions. I could do all sorts of neat labs and supplementary activities but science is one of those subjects that always seems to slip away on me to I've reverted to a Keep It Simple Stupid strategy for this year.

    Latin is Lingua Latina which I've owned for awhile now and has turned out to be perfect for Catherine. It's a program which, aside from the College Companion book, is written completely in Latin. The goal is to have her be able to read Latin as if it's her first language rather then to have her translate as she goes

    That's the core of her year. Beyond that she'll have her violin practice and lessons and she wants to continue learning how to program in Python but beyond scheduling a bit of time for violin I'm not going to be pressuring her on those two subjects. With those, she can start to learn to set aside some of her leisure time to pursue those interests.

    Simple and straightforward work best with Catherine. She doesn't appreciate too many rabbit trails in a program (in discussion afterwards is another matter) and all of my picks this year seem to match with that preference and provide her with a good fit. I am really hoping that this will be the year that we end with everything we started with. Tommorrow...Harry's Grade 5 line up.

Homeschooling When Your Kids Surpass You in Grammar...

One problem I have in homeschooling these days is what to do when my children start surpassing me in subjects. In math, this has meant passing teaching off to my husband. I held to the idea for a very long time that I would simply learn alongside my daughter, but I recently had to face the reality that I was holding my daughter back. We learn at the same pace, but it is hard to pass on an understanding of something when you have only just tackled it yourself. Grammar has been another challenge. Although I spent many year believing my kids could learn it by osmosis, we have tackled it as a formal subject in the last few years. It has been good for Catherine but has emphasized my limitations; however, I am not passing grammar off to the husband. Partly because as tenuous as my grip on it is, his is worse and partly because there are excellent resources out there for people in just my position.

First let me go on a bit why I don't hold to the idea that grammar is something you can pick up by simply immersing yourself in good books. The simple fact is that you don't know what you don't know. Often I will write something that sounds wrong but I won't have the knowledge to strip it apart and analyze exactly what is wrong. While reading good literature will give you a sense of good grammar, that's a very limited tool. Imagine walking down a forest path with a general sense of danger but not the specific knowledge to discover if you are, in fact, being followed by a hungry mountain lion.

Another great reason for formal grammar study is to develop style. How you use wording, phrases and punctuation all affects how exactly you communicate your message. The more familiarity you have with the tools required to write clearly, the more flexibility you have when it comes time to construct something with those tools. Whether my children pursue writing as a career or simply need to write a clear and intelligent letter to the editor of a local paper, their formal grammar training is going to come in handy.

So how do I assure they get a firm grounding in grammar when my own grasp of grammar is shaky?

Good direct instruction grammar programs with answer keys are a great start. I have tried more informal approaches but I find that when you aren't intimately familiar with a topic then generally the best approach is a scripted program. No surprises. No struggles to find out how to describe something.

When kids are old enough there are a lot of good programs that are self-directed. I have no qualms at all about being taken completely out of the loop. The bulk of my daughter's work in foreign languages and English is independent now (I sometimes suspect that's why those are also her favourite subjects).

Of course, I can't completely get away from having to check grammar and style and that's where I'm often a little lost. When my daughter completes a writing assignment, how do I give her specific and accurate critiques when I'm operating with just a sense of good grammar? Thankfully, I was recently told about an online grammar checker, Grammarly.com, that looks like it might be a huge help in this area. All I have to do is enter text (copy and paste does the trick) and it gives me a run down of mistakes and issues to address. I copy and pasted this post and was thoroughly embarrassed by just how much work Grammarly suggested it needed. Embarrassed and amazed. Grammar seems like a rather loosey-goosey thing at times but here's a website telling me I need a comma there and that sentence isn't properly balanced. It's not free (between twelve to thirty dollars a months depending on the length of your subscription) but if you're heading into middle school or high school with your kids and find that your lack of knowledge is holding their grammar and writing back, I think it's probably well worth it.

None of this is to say I'm going to give up on learning grammar myself. I already know much more then I did just a year ago (go ahead, ask me what a gerund is), but I can't hold the kids to my pace. Especially not my daughter who, when it comes to writing, seems to exceed me not just in skill but also in talent.



Note: I was compensated by Grammarly.com for this post. They probably didn't need to though - the site is so darn nifty I would have been raving about it anyway and likely will again as I discover more ways to incorporate it into our homeschooling.

Baby is Here

Lauchlin James arrived at 4:15 pm on Nov. 4. Yes, I'm quit late but although labour was quick (just 2 hours - no time for an epidural!) and, in the words of the nurses, was the most beautiful and controlled delivery they had seen in awhile, his actual trip down the birth canal did some major damage to me. I lost about half my blood and have more stitches then Frankenstein's monster and have spent the last 3 weeks mostly resting. My backside is now sufficiently pain-free enough to let me sit here and post a picture of our absolutely beautiful new addition so here goes!

He's Not Here Yet

Oh yes, the baby is a he. :) Found that out at a late ultrasound a couple of weeks ago.

He's due on Friday but there are no signs that labour is imminent. I had an OB appointment today and the doctor has me scheduled for one more ultrasound Monday (I have big babies. They keep wanting a sneak peek into how big this one might be) and at that point I'll probably be scheduled for an induction. That's absolutely fine by me. My other two were both induced and I rather like the predictable nature of inductions.

Anyhow, hopefully there will be pictures of the new arrival for everyone sometime next week!

Odd Ideas About Math

I was in the hospital Friday. Thought the baby might be coming but it turned out to be a false alarm. Like any good homeschooling mom I took along a new Algebra text I'd picked up in a thrift store and wanted to look over. New is relative of course; the text was published in 1945.

I had it sitting beside the bed on a table when a nurse came in to take some blood. She noticed the book, asked about it and I explained I was looking it over to see if we would use it in our homeschooling. She said it looked like something she would have used in school so I told her how old it was. She decided it must be outdated.

Outdated? Algebra? Huh?

I said that I didn't think it could be but she assured me that the math kids do today is very different from what she did as a teenager and the implication was that a 65 year old text book simply couldn't work in 2011. I disagreed. Catherine even spoke up and said she prefered her current older text (of the same vintage). I will admit, some terms might be a little dated but that's an easy and quick fix when faced with more modern terms.

I then made the mistake of mentioning that my daughter doesn't use a calculator for her algebra. Oy. Apparently she translated that to mean I will never teach my kids to use calculators and she then educated me about how essential calculator skills are. Yes, I know this. But no 8th grader needs a calculator for basic algebra. *sigh*

None of this was nasty of course. She was very pleasant and I did think the conversation was interesting but this idea that math from the 40's is somehow fundamentally different from math today is a puzzling one. What would she have said if I mentioned that many homeschoolers like Euclid for geometry? Goodness.

Homeschooling History Deal of the Decade!

The World in Ancient Times set, a collection of books on Ancient history published by Oxford University Press, is on sale right now at Amazon.com and the publisher's site for just over $35!


This is a set that is wonderfully well written, has a volume of primary sources and usually costs over $200. I own the other set in the series, The Medieval and Early Modern World set (bought on sale as well although not nearly as good a sale) and can certainly vouch for it's quality. Even the husband, a history buff, has enjoyed reading through the set.

Use it as spine, as an extra resource or just put it on a book shelf and let the kids explore it but for gosh sakes, don't let this deal pass you by!