One-Sixteenth

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March 30, 2007

About that socialization thing ...

So let me get this straight: My homeschooled kids are presumably not "properly socialized." However, the two little boys at the park who ran around asking all the other kids, "Do you think we're idiots?" are presumably fine.

It's probably a good thing they didn't ask me. We'd have had to leave the park.

Posted by lynx at 3:03 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Science

Previously, on My Blog ...

(Sorry, too much BSG.)

I mentioned, in my What We Do and How We Do It post, that we don't do much formal science. I said that at the elementary level, science is really just reading and playing; you can't really get into meaty science until you have the math.

And Dave responded, in the comments:

You wrote, “However, science at the elementary level is just reading and playing - you can't really delve into most branches of science until you have the math to do so.” I think this is slightly too pessimistic. Have you looked at Hoagland’s “The Way Life Works”? Bright grade-schoolers can understand this, and I myself am learning some biology too going through it.

Of course, you cannot really fully grasp physics until you know calculus: indeed, although I have a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, I’m not sure I, or anyone else, _fully_ grasps phyiscs!

But science is not primarily plugging and grinding to calculate. The math and the calculations should follow upon conceptual understanding. After all, Galileo did not have calculus, and I think we can fairly say that he grasped some aspects of physics. (There were a number of serious but conceptually oriented books on math and physics written decades ago by Irving Adler: I find “The Wonders of Physics” and “The Giant Golden Book of Mathematics” particularly useful. Adler had a gift for explaining sophisticated ideas in terms bright grade-schoolers could grasp.)

I agree with you, Dave, but gaining a conceptual understanding falls under my category of "reading and playing," and you don't need any kind of formal program to do it.

We read a great deal of science - at least two of our kids have asked for our Kingfisher science encyclopedia as bedtime reading. We watch science documentaries. We go to science museums - that's one of our favorite things to do, as a family. We go on nature walks. Our family passion is space flight and exploration. But that's all informal - it's playing. A traditionally schooled person might very well look at what we do and conclude that my kids are lacking in science, because it's all informal.

Have you looked at the various science programs and curricula that are available at the elementary level? Gag me. With a spoon. There are a couple that are good, but most turn my stomach, at worst, or just seem silly and unnecessary, at best. Chemistry is the worst. I had to look long and hard to find anything for elementary chemistry that didn't send me screaming off into the night. Honestly. Most of what I found were "ooh and ahh" programs, designed to be fun and not to teach anything. (For the record, there are two programs I eventually found to be useful: Real Science 4 Kids Chemistry, and the material at How to Teach Science. We did use the Pre Level 1 RS4K chemistry, and are about to spend a few weeks on Level 1. A few weeks is all it takes, and it doesn't assume that kids are idiots who can't understand chemistry. How refreshing.)

Occasionally I find something good and we use it, like the programs I mentioned above, but mostly we just read and go to museums. And through doing so, I think they are actually getting a good grasp of concepts. We're a little light on biology, so I'm going to check out "The Way Life Works," that Dave references above.

As we head into jr. high I'll do something more formal, as a prep for high school lab courses. I do want them to have a very good conceptual understanding before high school. But at the elementary level, I can't waste time on formal science if "formal science" means dumbed-down information, coloring pages, cutsey crafts, and combining vinegar and baking soda AGAIN ... nor if it means "read and outline/fill in the blank."

I bet we're really on the same page here, Dave.

Posted by lynx at 7:17 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 28, 2007

Would you believe it?

In an attempt to solve some ongoing health issues, my new doctor (I love my new doctor) has taken me off dairy.

Okay, fine. It's annoying, but I can do that. I've had to throw out most of what I normally eat: Who would have guessed that my lunchtime turkey burgers have dairy in them? That the veggie burgers have dairy in them? So does the bread.

The last straw, though, was the soy cheese. Soy cheese is pretty disgusting, but it will do in a pinch. I checked the ingredients label today, before I ate some, and guess what? It has dairy in it. What on earth is the point of having dairy in soy cheese? Don't you eat soy cheese because you can't eat dairy? I refuse to believe that there are people out there who actually like fake cheese made out of beans.

It's just sick.

Posted by lynx at 12:57 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

March 23, 2007

Musical Interlude

New Rush Oh, that's nice to hear.

On another note, we've been trying to schedule our summer vacation(s) around getting to an Asia show. However, a recent update on their website says that not all of the original lineup will be with the band this summer. They don't say who will be missing.

How typical of Asia - they couldn't even stay together through their own reunion tour.

Posted by lynx at 8:35 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Ooh, ooh, look!

I'm getting the hang of this:

This took me about three hours, total.

Posted by lynx at 8:00 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Good Customer Service Kudos

1). The folks at The Art of Problem Solving. I ordered a book and solutions manual from them. They sent me the wrong set. I emailed them and almost immediately they apologized, sent out the correct set, and told me to keep the one I already had. They suggested I donate it to a library, if I didn't want to use it.

2). ProForm. My elliptical machine is broken and still under warranty. The service person has deemed it unrepairable. I was anticipating a hassle in getting it replaced. However they called me the day after the service person was out, to get the replacement process going.

Posted by lynx at 6:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 22, 2007

Pysanky

We color our eggs this week, for Ostara, or the spring equinox. This year we tried our hand at psyanky, the traditional Ukranian form of decorating eggs. You can learn about the art here and here.

We're beginners, remember. Beginners. Looking at the samples of eggs online, we must be the worst beginners ever. Still, it's fun to do. Time consuming, but fun and challenging. I can't figure out how to do non-wiggly lines, and so far the dyes seem to often seep into my white areas.

Here are our first tries. Note, please, the traditional Ukranian Enterprise design. Actually the two top eggs are of traditional design, and the two bottom designs are my own, one of which was done at the direction of my son. Obviously.

Posted by lynx at 7:01 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 20, 2007

Carnival of Homeschooling

The new Carnival of Homeschooling is up, and it's pretty. Nice job, Dana!

Posted by lynx at 5:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 17, 2007

What We Do and How We Do It

Greg Laden, an anthropology professor at the University of Minnesota, is curious about homeschooling. I thought I'd answer his questions here, rather than dump all of this into his comments.

Let me introduce my family, Greg. We have four sons, none of whom have ever gone to school. I have a degree in English; my husband studied aerospace engineering and computer science, and works in IT. I also have several undergraduate and graduate credits in education (teaching and curriculum design). We are Pagan. Politically we are libertarian and conservative. We move and travel frequently with my husband's job.

We began homeschooling because I felt that my oldest was too young to spend most of his day at a school; I thought he was better off at home until he was older. I was also concerned about the quality of public school education and thought I could do better.

Now we continue to homeschool largely for the same reasons Chris does: "It’s really not about education with us anymore. It’s about the freedom not follow an arbitrary schedule that controls our lives." Exactly. That, and I believe that schools waste too much time, and focus too much on irrelevancies. I believe that schools more often train kids to not think.

We attempt a form of classical liberal education. We place importance on learning Latin (we'll start ancient Greek next year), classical history, math, and logic. We're pretty relaxed in our actual approach. Like Chris said - it really only takes two or three hours a day.

I'll address Greg's comments, one by one:

First, he's interested in learning about some of our typical days. My kids get up around 8 am, and we start school by 10. In the mornings we work on math, Latin, and writing/grammar. During or after lunch I read to them, a different subject every day - classical studies (mythology and ancient history), world history, literature, math/science, etc. Tuesdays and Thursdays, that's all we do. Tuesday afternoons we spend at homeschool classes, where my kids take Lego Engineering, a P.E. class and an American history class. Thursday afternoons we spend at karate classes. Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon we work more on literature, or art, or history projects, or science. Or, we might go on a field trip (museum, orchard, state park, organized field trip, playdate), or work on project for Scouts. They also have assigned reading every day, and are required to read a book of their choice every day. Their Dad reads to them some more at night, anything from "Harry Potter" to "Alice in Wonderland" to "Hunt for Red October."

In the evenings and weekends they are involved in Scouts and First Lego League.

I have kids who would be in preschool, 1st grade, 3rd grade, and 5th grade. The 1st grader's schoolwork is completed in about half an hour, not counting read-alouds. The 3rd grader takes an hour to an hour and a half. The 5th grader has 2-3 hours of work a day, not counting reading.

Greg says: "It seems to me that one of the great advantages of the traditional system is that courses divide the topics into a certain size range of material, and individual classes, with assignments, periodic tests or quizzes, etc. keep everyone on track (both teacher and students) to get a certain amount of work on specific topics done over a specific time."

It might help to think of homeschooling more as a tutoring arrangement. I might find it helpful to divide topics into a certain range of material, but then again, we are not as controlled by schedules as a school is. A course does not have to fit into a semester. We can spend as long as we need to, or desire to, on any topic.

Tests and quizzes are generally unnecessary, because as my child's tutor, I know exactly what he understands and does not understand. We do review work in math, and if a child reveals a weak spot, we go back to that topic. I do give quizzes in Latin, and if a child reveals a weak spot, we go back to it. Tests in the other subjects are simply not necessary, at least not at our level. We discuss history, science, and literature; if they don't know the material, they can't keep up with our discussion. It becomes obvious. We do a great deal of teaching by Socratic questioning, as well.

"Nonetheless, “courses and classes” provide useful structure, or at least a useful framework. How do you get these benefits in a home school setting?"

Usually by going outside for them. It is useful for the kids to become used to that structure and framework, as it is what they will be expected to deal with in college. So we take outside classes. When we reach high school level, they will more than likely take community college classes.

Do home schoolers use textbooks? What do you think about textbooks? What are the alternatives?

We use a textbook for math, along with supplementary materials. We will eventually use textbooks for science. In general, we prefer to avoid textbooks. Textbooks at the elementary level have the side effect of training the child to think in bite-sized nuggets, and are often biased, bland and boring. I would have no problem using a textbook that is thoughtful, interesting, well-written and engaging, but I have found very few of them. We sometimes we use textbooks written pre-1970s, where the information is not time-sensitive (such as Latin or English grammar, or math).

How does teacher training work in a home school environment? In other words, how to you determine when there is an area of knowledge that you want to develop with the child that the parent(s) are not comfortable with, and then what do you do about it? Learn it? Seek outside resources, and if so what? With older kids, do you send the kid off on their own with the task of coming back and teaching the parent? (That’s a technique we use for graduate training that sometimes goes very well!)

Very often, I learn it. I did not know Latin before I began homeschooling. My math education was abysmal, and I feel as though I'm learning math for the first time. I can learn anything and, in fact, that's one of the most important pieces of knowledge I can pass on to my students - that they can learn anything.

That said, soon my oldest will be at or beyond my level in math, and then he (or we) will go to my husband for teaching. If his Latin ability outstrips mine, he (we) will either take classes online, or seek a local tutor. He may well take science classes at a community college. If he develops an interest that is simply not within my desire to learn, he can go learn it himself or I will arrange a class or tutor.

Since we began homeschooling I have spent countless hours researching what I need to teach, how, how best to do so.

Do some home schoolers develop and use highly advanced IT resources, while others avoid these things, figuring that kids will have a huge amount of exposure to electronic gadgetry in this society anyway?

We run our own web server out of the house, and our kids have their own computer. I'll be teaching them HTML this summer.

Are there specific useful IT resources (software, hardware) that everybody else should know about because they are so good? Is there a sense or knowledge of OpenSource resources in the Home School community?

Not really. Many homeschoolers like to use planning software, but there's a dearth of that for the Mac. In fact, often curriculum publishers do not publish for the Mac.

Are there themes that work their way through all (or many) aspects of what you do, over the years? For instance, in my family, we are interested in birds, so birds get woven through a lot of different areas of exploration. Birds have shown up in my daughter’s science fair projects in a couple of places, we have a collective family level knowledge of bird behavioral biology and evolution to which we can refer. In some families this kind of thing may gravitate around horses (COD?) or some other theme. Is this common?

Yes, it's common! For my family it's space flight and certain periods of history.

I’m sure testing has it’s uses. But what about in a home school setting? (Other than having the home schoolers take standardized tests, etc.) How do you handle evaluation?

Testing is very useful when you are teaching a class of students. It is difficult to know exactly how much each student out of 25 has retained. Again, since I teach one on one, I don't have that problem. Nor do I grade. We simply don't move on until they've mastered the material.

For evaluation purposes, I look ahead to college. What skills, and what knowledge base, will they need to get into a good college? Are we on track for that?

Many homeschoolers do test. I just don't see the point.

In my opinion, a large amount of what is learned in a traditional setting is lost within weeks or months. In other words, just because a student got a passing grade in algebra last year, the calculus teacher cannot assume that the student has algebra knowledge …

… Other than saying “home schooling is better therefore the students learn more….” I’d love to hear how this works in home schooling. How is knowledge developed for the longer term, how do you review, how do you know what the kids know, how do you integrate earlier with later learned materials?

First, understand that I divide knowledge between skill areas and content areas. I am not particularly concerned with retention of content area subjects (such as history, and, at this level, science). How much history do you remember from high school? None of us remember much, if any, and yet we've still gone on to do well in college and be productive citizens. Strike that - productive members of society. "History retention" and "citizens" is a whole other rant.

Skill areas include math, foreign languages, grammar, spelling, writing mechanics, etc. First of all, we do not adhere to a traditional school schedule, so we do not have a lengthy summer break. That helps. Our math program incorporates regular review sessions. Our Latin and English grammar programs are cumulative; if they flounder, I go back and re-teach the area they're having trouble with. Avoiding a lengthy gap means that we don't have to waste as much time on re-teaching.

For everything else, we read and discuss, read and discuss. No, they don't remember everything, but that's okay. If you can read and discuss well, you can learn. Don't make the mistake of thinking this means that we think history and science are not important. We place a high value on both. However, science at the elementary level is just reading and playing - you can't really delve into most branches of science until you have the math to do so. You don't need tests and quizzes to learn history - you read, read, read and discuss, discuss, discuss; you watch documentaries, you travel, and then you read and discuss some more.

In the content areas, kids will remember what interests them. It is my job to engage them, to make the subject as relevant as possible, and to give them as much of a broad overview, a framework, as I can. But then, they take off. For instance, I take all the kids through a four-year cycle of world history. My oldest loves history, has been through this cycle once already, and reads our history encylopedia for fun. This year he has begged to be let out of the regular history rotation (we're doing ancients this year) so that he can study World War II instead. And so he is. You can bet he's going to remember a great deal about World War II, because that's his current passion.

And, of course, whatever else you think is interesting and important that I have not mentioned.

Now that I've answered your specific questions, your general question was about methods, what do we do and how do we do it. As I mentioned before, I've done a great deal of research into education, into what I think they kids should be taught, what I think constitutes an excellent education, and how we can give them one. I developed a general philosophy of education, and then from that made some more specific goals. Keeping both my goals and college in mind, I drafted a tentative plan of education for the kids. Tentative! Maybe my plan won't be a good fit for one child. Maybe it won't be enough for one, or too much for another. As they get older and want more say in their education, perhaps my plan won't fit their needs. Education wears many different faces.

Every year I review the plan, and make note of where we are in relation to it. Based on this I make a more specific plan for the upcoming year, but again, it's always flexible. However, this way I know if we're "on track." A flexible plan, and year-round schooling, means that we have the freedom to chuck the plan here and there to do something else - to travel, to play, to follow other interests.

I generally use programs specifically made for homeschoolers, at least at the elementary level. However any program, any curriculum is a tool. I never use any program as written, but always adapt it to our needs. I might use two or three different programs for any subject, pulling from each what we need and ignoring the rest.

If you, or anyone else, has any questions, I'm more than happy to answer.

Posted by lynx at 6:57 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 16, 2007

The Gret Quizz of Medievale Trivia

Ouch. My minor was Medieval Studies, but this quiz is hard core. (From Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog)

Posted by lynx at 4:40 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 15, 2007

Well, of course we did!

We tried to go to class. We really did. It all fell down when we walked outside to the car. It was sunny, and warm, and ... you know. The Tetanus Tot Lot was just a short walk away. We played, we swung, the boys walked on the ice floes in the swamp. We came home and did ... nothing. Pretty much. All day.

Last night it snowed. The weekend highs will be in the 30s. Spring is not quite here yet. The birds are back on the pond, though, and we're ready. I am tired of being in the house all the time.

Posted by lynx at 8:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 13, 2007

Hmmmm

It's going to be nearly 70 degrees today, and sunny.

Today is the day we drive an hour each way, so that the older boys can have three hours of classes and the little boys and I can kill time.

Or, we could blow off the whole thing and go to the park.

Or, I could make the boys go to their classes, and the little ones and I could go to the park. Decisions, decisions.

After today, it will get cold again. Surely the day should be siezed? Right?

Posted by lynx at 7:53 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 11, 2007

When Technology Bites

We started watching the new Battlestar Galactica in November. We became quickly hooked, and devised ways to watch the entire series up to the current shows. Yesterday we watched last weeks' episode, which got us completely caught up.

So tonight, we eagerly turned to our TiVo for the new episode, only to find that TiVo was blissfully unaware that it was supposed to be recording anything. Wha-?

Oh, yes. They changed the definition of Daylight Savings Time. Our TiVo is modem-impaired, and hasn't called in to the mother ship in nearly two years. It didn't get the memo. It's recording everything an hour earlier, and there's nothing we can do about it tonight.

Thank the Gods for iTunes. Remember when if we missed a TV show, we were just out of luck?

Posted by lynx at 8:15 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 9, 2007

Catching Up I: Birthday Edition

We had more birthdays, it being January and February. In the space of just over two weeks, my oldest turned 11 and my youngest turned five. Wow. Five. Now I can go on all those field trips that specify "not for children under five." If they went to school, then in the fall they'd all be in school.

Okay, I admit, some days that's tempting. I'd better not let my inner introvert think about that too much.

The 11 year old did not have a particular choice of cake, and so I just made a cake. His brothers decorated it. I know I took pictures, but I can't find them. I bet, though, that you can imagine a cake decorated by a nine, six and almost five-year-old, can't you?

His big present was Ogre. He's a happy, happy kid.

The five year old specificed a cake FROM THE STORE. Oh, fine. But he was happy, and that's what it's all about:

Posted by lynx at 10:15 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Mom My Ride

I will blog again, I promise. In the meantime, laugh 'til you cry.

Mom My Ride.

It's funny 'cause it's true.

While you're at it, if you still haven't seen this, you can laugh at how movie titles don't always translate: March of the Emperor

Posted by lynx at 12:25 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack