“The teacher is crazy; I love that”
My kids are giving me such rich material to write about lately. Today I asked my oldest how he’s progressing on biology. We are trying Thinkwell’s online biology course. My son replied, “Dad, you don’t have to worry about me doing my biology, the teacher is crazy and I love it.” We were in the car and I laughed, turned to look at him with a crooked eyebrow, and before I could ask him to explain, he expanded upon his statement, “he’s really excited and passionate about biology. He gets so excited sometimes he trips over his own words. It gets me excited about it.”
Wow, just wow. I can’t say whether the teacher is faking it or not, I have no idea, but what I will say is what a testament that my son basically said ‘I got this course taken care of dad’ because he enjoys it, in no small part because the teacher is having a good time teaching the material.
Hats off to Thinkwell and to the biology teacher George Wolfe, you have new fans, my son and me!
“Latin doesn’t feel like work!”
My 9 year old daughter just said that as she put The Critical Thinking Company’s “Word Roots” software in the computer. She went further, “it feels like a totally awesome computer game,” (okay, my daughter likes hyperbole, but still.)
This is what a parent loves to hear, a child diving into learning, knowing it’s learning, but loving it like a game. My daughter loves Indiana Jones, and this game helps her pretend she is an archaeologist, but she’s digging up words instead of treasures.
From the back of the CD box:
In the late 5th century A.D., many Roman cities are destroyed by earthquakes. The ruins are buried and lost for centuries. A brilliant archaeologist (your student) comes along and finds documents written in Latin that explain how to rebuild city. Your student must learn Latin word parts, assemble words from parts, and apply words in context in order to decode the documents and rebuild.
This is our first product from The Critical Thinking Co. and surely not our last.
Activity Scheduling
A prospective user asked via email about creating a schedule in myhomeschoolplan.com and I thought the answer was worth sharing. (If you have tips on how you schedule activities please post in the comments.)
1. Generic Recurring Activities: There are activities where the description does not vary. An example would be “Reading for fun.” We create an activity called “Reading for fun”, make it a recurring activity Monday through Friday with an end date of the end of the quarter, and assign to all three kids.
2. Recurring Activities with Specific Descriptions: My wife creates a recurring activity for the quarter, for instance she will create an activity called “Life of Fred Math”, Monday through Friday. Then on Sunday night, she will go to the list for the week, and edit the description line for each day with the specific assignment, e.g. read chapter 1 (Monday), read chapter 2 (Tuesday) etc.
3. Specific Activities: On Sunday nights, she looks at the week and inputs any non-recurring activities. Perhaps we are going on a field trip, or there is a show on TV or a DVD she wants someone to watch.
We have found this to be a good method to make the most efficient use of our time. Anyone else have any tips?
Adding A New School Year
Have you been using MyHomeSchoolPlan.com since the spring? Getting ready to start a new school year?
Click on the School Years link and you can add the new school year. We’ve also added a ‘title’ so you can name the school year (we like to call it the 2009/10 school year for instance.)
Once you have added the school year and clicked save, you will see the ‘Edit Terms’ link, as well as ‘Add Existing Courses to School Year.’ The terms link will allow you to set up your calendar (quarters, semesters, etc.)
The courses link displays all of your courses from the previous year. Simply select the checkbox for any course you wish to add to this new school year. NOTE: You still need to enroll your students in the new courses, so after you have done this go to the enroll screen.
This is our first “new school year” so please let us know how it goes, and how we can make this better.
Here’s to a great new school year for you and your children, we hope in some small way we can aid you in having a terrific year.
PS and to new users who are using this for the first time, just go to the settings page and it will walk you through the set up process.
Starting a new school year
We are working on how users move from one school year to the next in myhomeschoolplan.com and would love your feedback. You can @ reply me on twitter, use the suggestion area, or the comments area in this blog post.
We want it to be super easy, and we want to remove clutter. In other words, we don’t want to automatically move all of your courses from the previous year. What are other key considerations you have for creating a new school year?
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.
Suggestions
Just a note of thanks and encouragement to all of you. When you are logged in to myhomeschoolplan.com, there is a link at the upper right called suggestions. We use a service called uservoice and we are very happy with it.
You can add an idea, or vote on an existing idea. Currently, reading list has the most votes.
One request I have is if you could use your myhomeschoolplan user id or include an email address. Sometimes I like to get clarification on an idea and if you submit it anonymously, all I can do is comment on the idea and hope you come back and take a look (which is cool if you do.)
So again, thanks for using the suggestions area, keep those ideas come, we really do appreciate it.
MyHomeSchoolPlan update
Hi everyone. We just got back from two wonderful weeks out west that I’ll post about later but wanted to give an update on MyHomeSchoolPlan.
We have officially launched and left our Beta behind! In the same way that our Beta launch was a ’soft’ launch, so is this. We will do more of a push as August/September rolls around.
What does leaving Beta mean to our customers? For existing users, as a thank you to for trying us out and giving us such great feedback during the beta, the site will remain free to you! Thanks so much for giving us the confidence to keep this going and improve the site. At some point in the future we may add some major new feature/product that will be an additional charge, but the scheduler will remain free.
For new users, we have implemented a pricing plan based on feedback that we feel is a great value, that will allow us to continue to add features (while keeping the service easy to use) without making price a major issue to customers. On our pricing page you can see the pricing, but essentially we offer pricing based timeframes: monthly, quarterly, and annually. You can skip as much time as you like, i.e. put your account on hold, and all your data will be there when you come back.
Our pricing motto was “a latte a month” and we’ve held to that. If you pay by the month, it is a large latte, $4 a month. If you go with the annual plan, $30 a year, that breaks down to $2.50 a month, less than a latte!
We thank all our customers old and new and hope you find this a service of value. We have lots of plans that we’ll be posting about over the summer. Our next big step that we’re testing now, is the creation of a ‘new’ school year, so you can move your students into new courses and grade levels.
Summer School
I asked this question on Twitter this week and got back a wide variety of answers.
What do you do during summer in terms of homeschooling? Reply via twitter or in the comments.
We keep math going about 3 times per week as well as music practice and some required reading (although our kids love to read so that’s not a challenge.) The reasons we keep math going is that it builds upon previous steps more so than other subjects, and we love NOT having to waste the fall going through the review process. Our first year that we homeschooled, when we jumped from one grade level book to the next in math for my daughter, we couldn’t believe how far into the book we had to go to get past the review from the previous year.
I look forward to hearing what you all do.
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.”