Amazon announced rentals of books for students which can help save quite a lot of money. What I found especially interesting is that Amazon will keep the notes for students even after the rental is over.

“Normally, when you sell your print textbook at the end of the semester you lose all the margin notes and highlights you made as you were studying. We’re extending our Whispersync technology so that you get to keep and access all of your notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, available anytime, anywhere – even after a rental expires. If you choose to rent again or buy at a later time, your notes will be there just as you left them, perfectly Whispersynced.”

Why, because I’m Italian, and it mattered to me. I wanted to know about my tribe, know that others before me in my tribe had done great things.

But I didn’t equate what that would mean to my daughter. I never understood the need for her to do the same thing with her tribe, girls.

I get it now. She loves to hear about women who have done great things. Even better, girls. She is an athlete and loves to see women’s soccer or basketball, especially at the college or high school level. And recently when tpt (Twin Cities Public Television) launched the SciGirls show, I knew she’d pay attention. SciGirls hits two tribes for her, the show is based in Minneapolis, put on by Minneapolis Public Radio, which is where we live. And the SciGirls are a group of upper middle school to high school girls, who love doing math and science, or more appropros, STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math). Each episode deals with a particular storyline, and a set of four girls typically meet up with a woman in the appropriate field who helps guide them to either solving a problem or simply learning about a new thing. The SciGirls have gone on archaeological digs, learned about pollution, and how to build a movable model for a parade (teaching them to start with prototypes), to name a few. It is a terrific show.

We’ve also discovered Danica McKellar’s Books on math. These books, with titles like “Math Doesn’t Suck” and “Hot X – algebra” are meant to demystify math and make smart ‘cool’, especially for girls. If you recognize Danica, she was Winnie on “Wonder Years” which was a great show when I was growing up. Well, Danica went on to major in math graduating summa cum laude from UCLA. She has devoted herself to helping young girls succeed in Math. While the anecdotes sometimes are too girly for my daughter, e.g. stories about shopping or boys aren’t my daughters thing, Danica takes a casual in tone yet serious in learning approach to math that has resonated at our household.

I recommend both the show SciGirls, and the books by Danica. Just as important, I recommend you pay attention to whether your kids will learn more and be more interested if you can point out members of their ‘tribe’ who have come before.

Links:

Danica McKellar’s books

SciGirls

]]> http://blog.myhomeschoolplan.com/2010/06/in-my-tribe/feed/ 0 http://blog.myhomeschoolplan.com/2010/04/update-on-site-outage/ http://blog.myhomeschoolplan.com/2010/04/update-on-site-outage/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:19:18 +0000 Dave http://blog.myhomeschoolplan.com/?p=83 First and foremost, we are really sorry about the site being down this week. We are going to add a month to every paying customers activation period. And if you were in a trial period this month, we will extend the trial an additional month.

What happened: Our web host provider made a change on the server and platform that our site is on this past weekend. The change which would be ‘invisible’ obviously caused a lot of pain. Not only was our site down but our developer was unable to even login to the site to try and troubleshoot.

What are we going to do: This is the second time we have had an outage based on our provider so we are going to look for an alternative provider if we can find one that is more reliable. If we stay with this provider, there are still some options we can take technically to try and minimize this from happening.

This was especially troubling this week as we were unable to get a message out to you all about the problem, so we are going to make some changes there to, so that if the site it down we can still let you all know the status.

As always, thanks so much for you support.

I recently read The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold and wrote a brief review on my personal blog.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.