Happy New Year
A very Happy and safe New Year to all of our myhomeschoolplan customers. This has been a great year and we hope 2010 will be even better.
The Annotated Turing
I generally don’t cross-link from one of my blogs to another but the audiences overlap in this case so I’m making an exception.
I recently read The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold and wrote a brief review on my personal blog.
Slow down and enjoy…
It is very easy to get caught up in holiday planning and get stressed out about the details. Homeschooling parents are no different in this regard. And when you finally look up, you’ve missed the actual holiday. I saw this cartoon today, and it struck me how appropriate this message is for this time of year.
Happy Holidays to all, make sure you take time to enjoy them.
Thanks for a great year at myhomeschoolplan.com, I hope we’ve added somewhat to your ability to be great homeschool teachers.
kevin
Field Trip!
One of the things I love about our homeschooling journey is the field trips. Tomorrow, we are going to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts where they are hosting “The Louvre and the Masterpiece” from through January 10, 2010.
From the site:
Marvel at superb art objects from France’s great museum. Drawing from each collection area, this fascinating exhibition explores why some artworks are considered masterpieces, while others are runners-up. Feast your eyes and get art smart by looking at side-by-side comparisons of objects spanning 4,000 years. And find out how the Louvre used science to spot a forgery in its midst. A once-in-a-lifetime event!
I am very impressed with how museums are leading other companies to having an integrated experience. The website posts images to get a preview of the exhibit. In addition, you can download an audio guide and map for the exhibit.
As an added bonus, for our family of 5, they cost of an annual membership is only a couple dollars more than the cost of this special exhibit. Hopefully this will encourage other families to go with the annual membership and visit the museum more often. I’ll post after the event with a review.
Podcasts for Tolkien fans
My kids are huge J.R.R. Tolkien fans. My oldest has read everything including “The Silmarillion.” I often forget to check on itunes for podcasts but checked this past week.
The best way to find good podcasts on itunes is to go to the itunes store, and in the right hand side of the page select ‘power search’ in the quick links box. Then, in the drop-down that says All Results, choose iTunes U so it will filter just for items on iTunes U. In the description area type Tolkien.
Corey Olsen has a series on The Hobbit, and a website, http://www.tolkienprofessor.com/ ; and we downloaded the Tolkien at Oxford podcast, two sessions about Tolkien and language.
Enjoy.
Socialization…
When we decided to homeschool, the number one question we’d get would be about ‘what about socialization’. I always just laughed off the question because I felt the question assumed that regular schooling was a good method for socialization (but that’s for another day.)
Now that we’ve been doing this for nearly two years I thought I’d look back at the opportunities for social engagement my kids have had:
- Boy Scouts / Brownies
- Sports – Soccer, Basketball, Track
- Homeschool Co-op classes one day a week
- Science Museum Homeschool Classes (monthly)
- Young Mensan monthly events
- Chess Tournaments
- Tap Dance, Choir, Cello
We are very careful not to over-schedule our kids so this list does not occur all at once nor do we do every event that comes our way. But the point is that there are many opportunities to interact and we feel lucky to be able to take advantage of many of these opportunities, some of which we wouldn’t have if we weren’t homeschooling.
Everyone has to answer that question their own way but I’m curious to hear how you’ve answered (or if you’ve even been asked that.) My standard answer to people who I feel are asking legitimately and not being rude is to say “we have found ample opportunities to socialize, some of which we couldn’t do if we were not homeschooling; so it works really well for us.”
Timelines
One of the things we do at homeschool that I love is our history lessons. Jennifer has done an amazing job of balancing the depth levels across our three kids’ ages while yet having them go through the same time period together.
To that end, as we begin a new era, she pulls out a lengthy roll of paper (picture someone rolling out a red carpet and you get the idea). Each child gets a marker and can put in the dates/events of importance. This allows our oldest to go in depth and focus on dates of battles (his interest) while my daughter can focus on inventions.
The other thing that comes out of this is the layering of what was going on around the world. Many books do this in their timelines now as well, but with our size paper roll, we can really play with this, so we can see what is going on in Roman times in Western Europe, North America, and China, for example, in one view.
Give it a try, it’s a low cost way to get your children working together yet at their own pace/depth.
Printing your schedule
Over the last several days we added some new tweaks to make printing the schedule off a better experience for you. Both of these were based on ideas from our users contributing to the ideas area of the site.
Someone asked that we ‘uncheck’ the complete box for the print view, since the complete font for activities was difficult to read. This is a great example of understanding the user’s underlying problem or goal versus necessarily taking the suggested solution. The user pointed out a problem we were unaware of, that the complete view for activities was not as readable. Our solution then was not to uncheck the complete box, but to change the font for the print view so that it looks better and is easier to use.
Similarly, someone asked to remove the weekend days from the print view. I replied back commenting on if the intent is really to not print days with no activities. Someone else replied in the affirmative and it made sense to us so now when you print off your schedule, days with no activities will not print.
Little by little we are making improvements big and small.