(spoken in the voice of the Wicked Witch of the West, of course)
Supposed to hit 90 today, and tomorrow (a little hotter, even), and the day after.
I start to suffer when it gets to the mid-70s.
Whew, what are your best tips for keeping cool?
Will recount some of mine in the next post.
(off to go grocery shopping–hooray for air-conditioned stores!)
The new Schoolhouse Planner is available, and it’s even bigger and better than last year’s generous helping.
Summer days, lazy days, sitting on a blanket in the shade or by the pool while the kids splash (our community pool is only 8 blocks away and we budgeted for a summer family pass this year), thoughts of autumn are far away.
…until I realize that tonight it’ll be time to flip the calendar over to a new month. Summer is whizzing by!
If you stick to the traditional school year, now’s a good time to do your planning! Get it done in the next few weeks, and you can relax the rest of the summer knowing that you’re ready to jump in when it’s time to take up the books. If you’re a year-round schooler, well, you probably take planning breaks periodically during the year. In either case, now’s a good time to consider the 2009-2010 Schoolhouse Planner!
For homeschoolers, by homeschoolers
The Planner was put together by homeschoolers, for homeschoolers, with a plethora of forms–40 more than last year’s Planner–for household management as well as academic planning and record-keeping. Flexibility is built into the system. You pick and choose which forms will fit you and your family. Some of the forms (like chore charts, student assignment pages, and grocery lists) appear in more than one format. Some of them will fit right in with what you’re already doing. Some won’t apply, and you’ll skip past them with barely a glance. And some–you’ll look at them and say, “Where have you been all my life??!”
Easy navigation
The Planner e-book is huge (375 pages in PDF format), and takes some time to load when I open it up. However, navigation is easy! The Table of Contents is interactive–that is, you click on an entry and the next thing you know, you’re looking at the page. On my computer I can use Adobe Reader’s navigation features (bookmarks and thumbnails or little tiny images of the pages) to jump instantly to any page I want.
Personalize it
One of the best things about the Planner is that you can personalize it! You can type right on the pages and save the information. (I choose the “Save as” option and give it a new name.) I haven’t been able to figure out if you can change the font, which is set to “Courier” (old fashioned typewriter style) as the default, but when I do, I’ll let you know. Edited to add: Nope, sorry, Courier is the only font available.
Bonus features!
The Schoolhouse Planner is not just a planner! Yes, there are four years of at-a-glance calendars, plus monthly calendars that go from July 2009 to June 2010, plus blank planning calendars and other planning pages that you can customize to suit your needs.
Every month has a theme, complete with a helpful article written by a knowledgeable author (such as August’s article on teaching math from Math-U-See’s Steve Demme) and a reference page (since August is focusing on math, a multiplication chart is included, ready to print out for reference or a child’s mini-office–more on that in another post), plus a page of links at the Schoolhouse Store. Each month includes yummy recipes from the TOS Crew and TOS staff, just the sort to inspire you when you find yourself serving spaghetti for the third time in a week, or hitting the drive-through window too many days in a row.
Monthly themes touch upon a variety of areas in the home and academia, including math, Language Arts, history, social studies, science, Bible, lapbooking, even disaster preparedness!
There’s also a section of “Miscellaneous Educational Information” that pulls together all the reference pages from the 2008-2009 Planner, lots of good stuff: composers, artists, historical documents, U.S. Presidents, states and capitals, conversion tables, and more.
If you’d like to see the six-page Table of Contents, click on this link, thoughtfully provided by Traci of the TOS Crew. (Thanks, Traci!)
The Schoolhouse Planner is available at the Schoolhouse Store for $39.00, and if you order before July 12, you’ll get a free 2008 Excerpts e-book with all the articles and recipes from the 2008-09 Planner (a $9.95 value)!
2008 Schoolhouse Planner Excerpts
The Excerpts e-book reads like a list of greatest hits. Like the articles in the 2009-10 Planner, these excerpts span a variety of homeschool topics. Some of those I’ve found most helpful include tips for bringing history to life, planning for high school, and teaching writing. As for the recipes… some of these have been added to our list of favorites over the past year. (mmm, Maggie’s Easy Chicken Enchiladas. Fast and Yummy Lasagna. And for breakfast meetings, Amish Breakfast Casserole!)
To see other TOS Crew reviews of the Planner, plus screen shots of some of the pages, check out the TOS Crew blog!
Aargh. Summer is here, with warmer days and occasional sun (supposed to rain all weekend, though). There are strawberries begging to be picked in the U-pick fields not far away, and special events at Fort Vancouver, and get-togethers with other families to plan…
…and all three of the girls are down with this nasty fever-and-cough bug. I hope it clears up soon or there are going to be a lot of long faces around here.
How’s your summer going?
(Okay, it’s not technically “summer” until the weekend. But the public school summer break started this week, and there are kids around all the time, with all the associated blessings and problems. More on that in another post.)
Our first year homeschooling, we made several mistakes.
Well, okay, we make mistakes every year, but hopefully we’re learning from them and not making the same mistakes over and over again! (Like Eldest likes to say, “I might make lots of mistakes, but I don’t make the same one twice.”)
One mistake was to do school-at-home. We ordered an entire 2nd grade curriculum from a well-known Christian curriculum company. We tried to do everything in the Teacher’s Manuals. We tried to stay on schedule, a lesson a day in each subject. We were sitting at the kitchen table from just after breakfast until well after dinner. We were exhausted!
At least we didn’t go the whole route and buy a little school desk for Eldest, and set up a schoolroom with chalkboard, flag, etc. I know homeschoolers who’ve done this but it seemed kind of excessive for a single child. Also, considering we abandoned the textbook route some time later, we saved ourselves some expense, when you consider the cost of a teacher’s desk, student desk, chalkboard, flag, etc.
When summer came, we took the summer off, just like the schools did. (Our second mistake, did you guess right?)
We had worked through the previous summer (i.e. the summer before we started homeschooling) because that was our test: Our dd had gone all the way through first grade and couldn’t add 1+1. I researched and settled on (Happy Find!) a math curriculum that sounded good. It was advertised for struggling learners and gifted learners and everyone in between. This was the test: If I could teach Eldest addition all the way up to 9+9 over the summer, I could continue homeschooling in the autumn.
By the end of summer, she’d learned not just up to 9+9, but she could add six-digit numbers and columns of numbers and do word problems like adding up all of a family’s menu items at a hamburger place and being able to figure out the bill!
However, we took the summer off after our first full year of homeschooling. We needed it. She did. I did.
When autumn rolled around again, she’d forgotten a lot of what she’d learned.
How most math textbooks are designed
Sometime during this period I heard a homeschool dad talk about math. He said that math textbooks (specifically a certain brand, popular with homeschoolers, but those from other publishers as well) were designed in a way new homeschoolers (who tend to go through a textbook from start to finish) didn’t understand.
The first third of the textbook would be review of the previous year’s material, counting on the fact that the students would have forgotten a lot during summer break. The middle third of the textbook introduced and drilled the new material for that grade. Your average math class didn’t get more than 2/3 of the way through the text. The last third of the book was for advanced classes so they wouldn’t run out of material if they went through the text at a faster rate. This material was repeated in the first third of the next year’s textbook.
Thus, this father opined, you really only had to use the middle third of the book, if you never took a break longer than about two weeks! His children went very quickly through that whole math series as a result. Only if they struggled with a concept did they work the “review” lessons in the first third of a book.
Breaking free from convention
It wasn’t until our third year, I think, that we decided to break free from the institutional school schedule and keep on through the summer. We modified our schedule, to be done by 11:00, and let the neighbor children know not to knock on our door before then.
We cut back to the bare bones: Bible reading, half a lesson of math per day, and fun-but-educational readaloud, things like the Burgess books (Bird Book, Animal Book, Flower Book, Seashell Book, Old Mother West Wind, etc.) and Hillyer’s history and geography books.
We read aloud on a blanket in the front yard, and what do you know? The neighbor children began to join us for our readaloud time! They liked our fun-but-educational books just as much as we did!
Benefits of not taking the summer off
Benefits of keeping a modified schedule through the summer:
- better behavior
- no boredom
- less fighting between siblings (we started homeschooling an only child and added two more along the way)
- easier to ease into a heavier academic/activity load in the autumn
- able to add special activities like swim lessons or swim team, or take a week off here and there for camping
We haven’t started our modified schedule yet. The Parents in the household (yes, dh and myself) have decreed this week a clean-up-the-house week. Our house has gotten pretty trashed from the busyness of the end-of-the-year madness (recitals, plays, Outdoor School, and the like).
Let’s hope we can get it done in a week…
Your children don’t stop reading just because it’s summer, do they?
(Perish the thought!)
In our family, it’s anything but… we follow a more relaxed schedule in the summertime, which means more free time. (Yes, we still do some academics during the summer–more about that in a later post–math, for one.)
More free time means more time for fun reading! (Along with all those other summery things, like setting up a lemonade stand, swimming at the neighborhood pool, riding bikes, inline skating, teaching the dog new tricks, camping, and more. But I digress.)
We’ll be signing up for our library’s summer reading program today, but with the way our girls read, they’ll zip through the reading logs in just a fraction of the summer. The way the reading logs work, you get to fill in a shape for every 30 minutes you read. After every 10 shapes you get a small prize. After about 40 shapes you’re done! I have to say that 20 hours of reading is something one of our girls could do in a week, and another could do in less time than that, even.
Though I try to keep them busy and active during the day, there’s always reading by the light from the hallway after bedtime, or in a pinch they can fall back on that old standby, the flashlight under the covers. And even during the day I’ll find them in various corners, curled up with a book. After all, there’s just so much inline skating a person can do!
The Old Schoolhouse is sponsoring an online reading contest this summer. I read through Splish’s blog just this morning, and found giveaways and book lists submitted by readers (parents, too!).
The Summer Reading Splash is a 10-week program, and at the end there’ll be a great book giveaway! (Someone said you can never be too rich or too thin… I’d add to that to say you can never have too many books… can you?)
Anyhow, even if you’re planning to take a long summer vacation, don’t let your brain (or your students’) dissolve into dust and blow away on the wind–pick up a good book or two along the way. You’ll be glad you did.
There’s less than a week left to RENEW your subscription to the Old Schoolhouse ™ Magazine and get 2 years for the price of 1! For just $25 you’ll receive 2 full years of TOS! But you must subscribe by June 2nd to get the summer issue!
I just got online for the day–it’s been hectic catching up from the holiday (Is it Monday today? Or just feels like it)–but for you night owls out there, here’s a deal:
The Old Schoolhouse is offering this great promotion:
- Take $10 off a subscription to The Old Schoolhouse Magazine; subscribe for only $15 for a one-year print subscription. In addition, get five (yes, FIVE) WeE books of your choice for FREE!
Your subscription starts with Summer 2009. You can also find a link to get the Spring issue, as well as give a gift subscription, at the link above.
Update 5/27/2009:
You can read updates about Jessica’s condition here:
http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/jessicahulcy/journal
From 5/19:
Just read in my email that Jessica Hulcy was in a serious car accident. Here is what I know:
Dear family and friends,
Jessica’s Ford Explorer was broadsided in Melissa, TX about 11:30 on Monday morning. We think she was hit by a volunteer fire truck responding to an accident. After a 25 minute extrication process she was Life Flighted as a level 1 (the most severe) trauma case to Parkland Hospital in Dallas.
She is still in critical condition. Here is what we know so far:
1. She is still unconscious but is moving all four limbs and attempting to pull the tubes out of her throat which is encouraging to the doctors.
2. Major Lung trauma, punctures to both lungs. Both were collapsed. One is now working well and they are still draining the other. Doctors are checking for possible damage to wind pipe and trachea.
3. Head trauma. Medium amounts of blood on the brain. Closely monitoring
this to see if it improves. Surgery not necessary now, but possible to come.
4. As of now multiple broken ribs on both sides, broken left wrist, broken
left arm in 2 places. Will require surgery. Possible broken left leg and right
wrist. She has undergone 4 hrs of X-rays, over 1000 X-rays taken so far. They
are working the broken bones in the order of most life threatening so there is a possibility of more discovery of broken bones.
We will be sending out another email as soon as we know more. Thank-you for your prayers.
Jordan Hulcy
And an update, found at homeschooling.about.com
Friends and Family,
Thanks so much for all of the kind texts, calls and emails. It is wonderful support during this tough time.
I was just in to see her and she was awake. She was squeezing my hand and could show 2 fingers upon command. She has always had a fear of not being able to breathe, more than the average bear, so please pray specifically for her to be at peace with her condition, as much as possible. The right lung is still draining blood but to my untrained eye it looks like less. The broken bones are making it hard to get X-rays of the back walls of her organs and chest cavity. We are told that she will most likely undergo surgery to repair the left arm so that she can be rolled over in order to X-ray her from the back. She might have some injuries to her neck, but we are not clear on that for now.
Will be sending more updates as info becomes available.
Here is a homeschool chemistry course that lives up to its name; it really is friendly.
In comparing Friendly Chemistry to other courses available to homeschoolers, we’ll be looking at the meat of the matter; in other words, the content, not the packaging.
Just a brief note on the packaging: The course materials are put together in a way that looks somewhat rough and homemade, with the purpose of keeping costs down for the publisher and buyer.
I don’t have a problem with that. Over the years I’ve used a number of “jewels in the rough” — after all, I’ve seen lots of glossy covers concealing poor content over the years, while at the same time using “rough draft” materials that did a brilliant job of helping me to teach our children (or helping them to teach themselves!).
Good Stuff
There’s good stuff in Friendly Chemistry. The authors’ background lends itself to an understanding of the subjects of chemistry, homeschooling, and teaching. From the Friendly Chemistry website:
Joey and Lisa are the homeschooling parents of 10 children, aged 1 year to 21 years. Joey has a doctorate degree in veterinary medicine and a masters degree in secondary and higher education curriculum and instruction. Lisa has a bachelors degree in veterinary science, a masters degree in elementary curriculum and instruction and has completed coursework towards her doctorate in education. Joey has taught science courses at the middle school and high school levels for over 20 years, as well as at the local community college level. Their children have been homeschooled since early childhood through high school.
The student text is written directly to the student, with a conversational tone. The teacher, doing lesson preparation, will also be reading the student material, which I’m told contains all the necessary information to learn the written material. The Teacher’s Edition offers notes on how to present concepts in class, building upon the reading material in the student text, as well as instructions for labs.
Innovative Games
Innovative games and group activities help students to grasp theoretical and abstract concepts in a concrete way. The format of this curriculum lends itself to co-op classes. As a matter of fact, it would be pretty hard to play the group-oriented games with just one or two students.
Manipulatives
Included student materials are simple but effective (a “Doo Wop” board, flash cards, a bag of little clear plastic disks — I don’t know what they’re called, but they remind me of the game pieces in a Tiddly Wink set, and work well for Bingo counters, among other things). The “Doo Wop” board helps students to learn about the concept of electron orbitals, something I learned in college chemistry, and which is a foundational concept for later work with ions, formulas, and chemical reactions.
Lesson Map
The Teacher Guide gives a “game plan” for each lesson, a suggested map of how a lesson should go, starting with review (after the first session, of course), notes on presenting material the students have read about in their reading assignment, assignments for the following week, and finishing with a test for the week.
I really like the extra suggestions aimed at giving students a better visual understanding of a concept. The authors are very good at coming up with visual aids made from commonly available items; for example, the teaching tip for illustrating a “mole” uses disposable drinking cups, packing peanuts, and another item easily found in your kitchen.
Fun, edible, doable labs
Labs are fun, and many of them are edible!
Friendly Chemistry is designed to provide all the information you’d find in a high school Chemistry 1 course. It’s a great way to fulfill a high school lab science credit, especially for those students who are not science-oriented. The course also works well as a supplement or introduction to chemistry (alongside or preceding a more rigorous textbook-based course) for those students who are heading into science-based studies such as pre-med or engineering.
Multi-level learning; co-op friendly
Even though it’s based on high school chemistry requirements, the course can be adapted to suit younger learners, making it a multi-level addition to a homeschool family’s studies. (Our middle schooler was able to do the work; our hands-on, energetic, very active 10yo especially enjoyed the games.) However, where the course really shines is in group settings. A number of the exercises that illustrate basic concepts in chemistry study are best suited to group endeavors. This makes Friendly Chemistry a logical choice for a homeschool co-op; the more, the merrier.
Cost (free shipping within the U.S.):
Student edition (330 pages, 3-ring binder): $75
Teacher edition (300 pages, 3-ring binder): $60
Note: this is not a course where you can get away with just the teacher or just the student edition. You need both.
Visit the Friendly Chemistry website for more details and ordering information.
To read more TOS Crew reviews of Friendly Chemistry, click here.
Apologia is something of a byword in Christian homeschooling circles.
I remember when our eldest was approaching seventh grade (a decade ago!). I asked a friend what to use for science, and she loaned me a copy of General Science to look through.
I’d been homeschooling long enough to be able to tell the difference between a textbook… and something else. Yes, General Science looked rather like a textbook, but when you started reading… The text was engaging, the experiments interesting and designed so that you could do them at home, with easily obtainable materials. You didn’t need a fully equipped lab to learn science in the homeschool.
Though money was tight, I invested in General Science. It was well worth the investment.
Since that time, Apologia has come out with a full range of Creation-based science curriculum, from elementary through upper-level high school, maintaining or exceeding their earlier level of quality. The books are thoughtfully written, beautifully illustrated, and contain a practical approach. Nowadays you can also buy a number of “helps” for their courses, such as audio CDs, containing the entire text of the book read aloud, and multi-media CD-Roms with pronunciation audio files and video clips.
Exploring Creation with Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day is the first in their series of zoology-based elementary science texts.
Right away, you know where the author’s coming from.
“Fifth Day” refers to the fifth day of Creation, as in the Genesis account from the Bible.
This being Zoology 1, you’ll also find a few science basics. The first chapter, “What is Zoology?” introduces such topics as nomenclature, classification, habitats, instict, extinction, and then some specific flight-related concepts that would apply to birds, bats, flying reptiles, and insects.
There are fourteen chapters total, and if you take about two weeks for each the course will last you an academic year. Five chapters treat with birds, one with bats, one with pterosaurs, and the rest studying insects in general (with a whole chapter devoted to butterflies).
Though it looks like a textbook, the text is written in a lively, conversational style directly to (but not down to) the student, and colorful illustrations grace the pages.
The author, Jeannie Fulbright, subscribes to Charlotte Mason’s methods of education, so you’ll find a great deal of observation and thinking about what was observed, along with narration prompts (time for the student to “tell back” what was read) and notebook assignments. There are also lots of practical, hands-on projects, activities, and explorations or experiments. You’ll make a couple of bird feeders, for example, fill each with a different kind of food, and watch to see what kinds of birds prefer what kind of seeds. You might build a birdbath, create a “fossil egg” while studying flying dinosaurs, build an insect zoo to facilitate observations.
If you study just flying creatures for a year, in-depth, aren’t you missing something? Actually, there’s a whole lot of learning going on! This sort of immersion into a topic lends itself to retention and learning how to learn, as opposed to covering a whole gamut of subjects in a quick and shallow manner, regurgitating information for a test, and then forgetting soon after.
Apologia’s Young Explorer series is a kind-and-gentle introduction to science that will prepare your young student for more challenging learning in later years. Each volume in the series is available for $35. You can also find lapbooking ideas and notebooking pages related to these books, some free and some for sale. Just do a search on the name of the textbook and “lapbook” or “notebook pages” to find resources. There is also a password-protected webpage (password in each textbook) to find web-based related material.
Exploring Creation with General Science is the first of the “grown up” science courses intended to follow the elementary-level courses. Recommended for seventh grade, this course requires no special math knowledge to complete. “General” is the title and general is the theme, an overview of science beginning with a brief history of science from ancient times to the present day, followed by an introduction of the scientific method and conducting experiments. Next you have a smorgasbord of science: physics (simple machines), earth science (archaeology, geology, and paleontology with further topics in the fossil record and evolutionary theory), and life science (DNA, classification, and systems in the human body).
There are sixteen chapters (called “modules”), each designed to go through in about two weeks, for a total of thirty-two weeks of school, give or take some. It’s taking us longer to go through the book with our 7th grader, actually, because we’ve been interrupted by illness a lot this winter.
Text: I like the conversational tone of the text. My 7th grader is something of a reluctant student who would rather read adventure books than anything else. She says the text is “okay” and probably better than other textbooks she’s seen. (This would not be many, but we do keep a shelf of science textbooks from a major Christian educational publisher, for reference, and she’s read in these when a topic has stirred her interest.)
I’m very impressed with the experiments. They are practical and use easily obtainable items (things you have around the house, for the most part, and maybe a visit to the hardware store or drugstore, for the most part). The instructions are clear and written with safety in mind. Some of them are even fun! (from the perspective of a student who would rather be reading adventure novels) …like the experiment in growing crystals, which has a variation that results in rock candy.
To my student’s annoyance (and my satisfaction), review is built into the course, and a lot of independent learning is built into the design. A motivated student will find “On Your Own” questions at intervals in the text, which stimulate thought about the topic at hand. Ideally the student will take time to answer the “On Your Own” questions and then look at the back of the chapter for the answers. This student will also take time to write down the bolded words and their definitions, creating their own glossary, stop reading when an experiment comes up in the text, perform the experiment, and then go on in the lesson.
Each module ends in a study guide that you can use as an open-book test, preparation for the “real” chapter test, which is in the Solutions Manual. More on that in a minute.
The way the Study Guide works in our house: I do an oral quiz. Anything my student can’t answer has to be researched and written out. Since my 7th grader hates to write (would much rather type) this is a great motivator to be thorough earlier on. There’s also an appendix with a Summary for each module. These summaries are just that: They summarize the information in the module, with strategically placed blanks just waiting to be filled in.
Other reference material: a glossary, an appendix which collects major figures from the modules in one place, a complete list of lab supplies, organized by module, and an index. Icons appear in the text where a related video or audio file is available on a Companion Multi-media CD-Rom (available from Apologia for $15), to supplement learning. The book begins with a list of contact information for students who need help (I’ve always been impressed with this feature of Apologia science), “Student Notes” about how to attack the course, and (as with the elementary courses) a password to get you into a protected website with web-based materials related to the course.
Exploring Creation with General Science, the student text, is $65. An audio CD ($15) is available containing MP3 audio files of the text and on-your-own questions, for students who struggle in reading. You can get the full course on CD-Rom (I think this includes all the text from the textbook, the multi-media files, and the solutions and tests) for $65. See the Apologia website for details.
Back to the Solutions and Tests for Exploring Creation with General Science. This $20 book is well worth the investment. Not only does it contain all the answers to the Study Guides and Summaries in the student text, but also end-of-module tests for each module, along with cumulative exams (and answer keys) that can be used as quarter or semester tests, or a final exam for the course.
Exploring Creation with General Science is an excellent, solid, creation-based science course, even if you have a student who has been spoiled with too much reading for pleasure. It’s one of the first real textbook-type books we’ve used with our 7th grade student, and while it was something of a shock to our systems, it is so well-put-together that we’re making it work. That’s saying a lot!
To read more TOS Crew opinions of Apologia Science, please click here.
