Homeschooling Page at the National Gallery of Art

Very cool. At least the US Government thinks homeschooling is valid!

http://www.nga.gov/education/homeschool.shtm

Homeschool Resources: Owl Language at Purdue

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/

Very cool online writing lab, with sections for parents, teachers, students, and the rest of us.

Homeschool Resources: Complete Unit on Online Research

http://www.classzone.com/books/research_guide/page_build.cfm?state=none&CFID=41983748&CFTOKEN=42628837

More cool homeschool resources

Clickable online atlas
http://go.hrw.com/atlas

Current Events for Kids
http://www.hmcurrentevents.com/

Homeschool Resources: Higher Ed Online Learning Centers

This one is a little complex to find at first, so bear with me.

Go to the Higher Ed Page on McGraw Hill's website:
http://catalogs.mhhe.com/mhhe/home.do

On the LEFT side there is a box labeled "Browse Catalogs". Go there and click either main or specialty and choose a category from the bulleted list that opens.


That will open a list in the main center box on the page. Choose a sub-category. This should open a list right there below the subcategory. The number in parentheses tells how many books are in that subject. Choose a subject from the list. A list of books with cover art pops up. Choose a book by clicking on the title. Now look at the left side, below the "browse catalog" box. For some (but not all) textbooks, there will be an additional box that says "supplements and resources". For some (but not all) textbooks, on the list of supplements and resources is an "Online Learning Center". Click there. (don't click on "Online Learning Center" on the right side of the page. That link takes you to a page teaching teachers how to make OLCs)


The Online Learning Centers vary--some books have AWESOME ones full of useful resources (like the Astronomy one: http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072482621/student_view0/ ). When you click on Online Learning Center, it will take you to a home page for that textbook. On the left side will be a box. In that box, choose "Student Edition". That's where the good stuff is.


Once you click Student Edition, you'll get a mostly blank home page. On the left is a tab, sometimes big and sometimes quite small, with content links in it, including a box that says, "Choose a chapter." Do that. Choose a chapter and check out what's available--quizzes, web links, animations, activities, etc. Very cool and useful stuff. The Astronomy section, for example, includes a chapter summary that, combined with the web links for that chapter, are a complete astronomy course for children. It might not be sufficient for a college course without the complete text book, but it's great for pre-college work.


You have to explore some. Some of the textbooks have GREAT online learning centers, others have interesting ones--an American Music text's OLC includes a listening library with links to songs on iTunes and complete listening guides in Word format--again, not, perhaps, a complete college course in American Music, but more than enough for pre-college and introductory courses.


This is an incredibly valuable free resource for homeschoolers, even if it takes a little exploring to find the good stuff.

Homeschool Resources: Humanities Studio

http://www.mhhe.com/HumanitiesStudio/


This is an incredible site. If you want to teach your children about the humanities, I recommend you explore it thoroughly. There are e-book guides to film, theater, and museums, visual illustrations of concepts from dance, art, music, etc.


Go see.

Homeschooler Resources, sent in by J. Max Wilson

The kids might enjoy learning about computer programming with these free tools:

Scratch
A visual programming language to create and share interactive stories, games, music, and art developed by MIT for teaching children the basic concepts of computer programming.  Oriented toward 8 years old and up.
http://scratch.mit.edu

Alice
Is like Scratch but designed for more advanced object oriented programming techniques and produces 3D animations, games, and videos.  It is geared toward middle school aged children.
http://www.alice.org

Homeschool Halloween Activities

What about bats?  Why do we trick or treat? Wanna write a mystery?

Here are LOADS of educational activities that go with Halloween!

http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/collection.jsp?id=106

Homeschooling Resource Recommendation

Netflix.

It's a great resource for homeschoolers.

How can a movie service be useful for homeschoolers?

Sign up for their basic package (about $10/month), and you get access to hundreds of "Instant play" movies online, including bunches of educational children's programming (LOVE "Cyberchase"--teaches math skills, problem solving, and working together) and tons of documentaries.  TONS of them. All that play instantly on your computer or TV (here, the TV is set up as a second screen for the computer, so we play stuff through the computer onto the TV). Also, we can watch a lot of the movies that go with the books we've been reading ("Princess Bride" anyone?), which is both fun and educational, along with classic films.

So now, to supplement our Language Arts, Arts/Music, Science, and Social Studies curricula, we're watching documentaries on mammals, mayan linguistics, history, jazz, etc. Fun fun stuff. I love NOVA, and now we can have it instantly, any time of day or night, to add to what we're learning.

Science Songs for Kids

Time for Learning's demos for the playground have a "Hurricane" song that Anda just loves. So today I googled "science songs for kids" and found the source: a series of records full of science songs for kids, with music reminiscent at times of the sixties folk song tradition and at times of the title song of "the Blob" (click below if you haven't seen it--skip to 1:10 for the vocals--they're the good part!)



The Science Songs for kids can be found here: http://www.acme.com/jef/singing_science/


I am generally opposed to pirating songs (since I'm married to a musician), and I don't know the legal status of these. I suspect they are the equivalent of "abandonware" (software that is technically still owned by the company, but it no longer produced or supported by them and is only available by "pirated" download or purchase at a thrift store), or books that have gone out of print and can't be found anywhere but are still under copyright (so they can't be republished and distributed by, say, a fan society).

This is really fun stuff. We especially were smitten with the song about how to make heat, and the hurricane song, and....well, just go listen. It's a riot.

Mensa for Kids

I didn't know kids could join Mensa. I'm not going to pay the membership fees for any of us to be tested and possibly join, although at least when I was a kid I qualified (who knows about now!)

But you have access to their site even if you haven't joined. This is the site that I was particularly pleased with:

http://www.mensaforkids.org/

It has games, links to other cool sites, a feature of the month (on Pi this month), and a true understanding of what gifted kids are like. For example, you can click on a game link and play a word-unscrambling game, and then also color the picture on the page. That's cool. Often "advanced" stuff forgets that kids are still kids.

So this is definitely a go look. The adult mensa site also has games you can try. I am going to pass or I'll get addicted, but there are lots of word games. Very cool.

Yahoo Group for Gift LDS Homeschooling Families

Here (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Gifted-LDS-hs/#ans) is the link to a Yahoo Group for homeschoolers with gifted LDS kids.

I don't know how good the group is, but I thought I'd pass the word along that it's there.

Home School in Nevada

People told me home schooling in Colorado was great--it was easy, the laws were lax, etc. I went along, not knowing there was any difference. In colorado, homeschooled children are required to do 4 hours of school a day, and their parents are required to keep records of what was done. The parents have to take attendance every day, keep samples of work, and agree to have their records examined on demand. Their children have to place over the 17th percentile (or something like it) on standardized tests every 2 years (when the public school kids have to take them), and the kids have to take the tests in a public facility (which is not really ideal for the kid, since many homeschooled kids are not accustomed to the rules and 'norms' of test taking--ie many have never even seen a scantron, much less had it drummed into their heads that they must "completely fill the circle, like this"--so they can easily fail for non-academic reasons). The law lists the subjects that must be covered, and it's a fairly long list including US Constitution. You have to report to the district every year that you are homeschooling, and they can't talk to you or even recommend books for the kids, or even tell you what the kid might learn if they were enrolled in the public school because there are "non interference" laws, which apparently mean they can't help you, but they can evaluate and check on your homeschool any time they want.

Then we moved to Nevada, which just passed new homeschooling laws last July. They are laws written largely, in part, by the homeschoolers.

Now I know what good for homeschoolers means, and I will never go back to cyberschooling.

In Nevada, you report ONCE that you are homeschooling, and not until the child is 7 years old. Then you have to turn in an educational plan, which must include English (reading, writing, speaking), Math, Social Studies, and Science, but you can't be disallowed to homeschool because anyone disagrees with your plan, and the plan can be as simple as "We plan to cover English (reading, writing, and speaking), Math, Social Studies, and Science" or giving the name of the curriculum you are going to use, if you homeschool that way. Religion is expressly ALLOWED. You don't have to prove your curriculum is "equivalent" to the public schools. You sign up, turn in your plan, and you're done forever. No updating them except of your address if you move (so the new district can be notified you are home schooling). What's more, the home schooled child is allowed to participate in any activity or class in the public system, provided they qualify the same way other kids do (for example, they have to audition for the high school play just like public schooled kids do). For systems that require academic qualifications (like the kid has to have a B-average gpa to play football, or whatever), a letter from the parent is sufficient and not to be questioned. The kids don't have to take any kinds of tests, but if they do happen to want a high school diploma (which most states deny home schooled children), they have to pass the same High School Proficiency Exam that other high school students have to pass to graduate here. Then they have a diploma.

It's a very "Let them be" philosophy, which is nice because for all their saying, "We're just requiring them to do the same thing as public school kids have to do" in Colorado, they weren't really. Public school kids are not kicked out of class, held back a grade, or forced to switch schools if they miss a day of CSAP testing. They can get the flu that week and not take any of the tests and still stay on their educational course. And, sad as it is, I think that LOTS of kids who aren't in the 17th percentile are moving on with their classes. Otherwise we wouldn't need reading remediation teachers in 8th grade who are working with the illiterate kids who fell through the cracks.

So now we're homeschooling, joyfully, and I have discovered that the kids have a good feel for the best ways for them to learn. Everyone is now signed up for Time4Learning.com, and we've discovered that they have TONS of resources available, produced by CompassLearning, that Cdela didn't give us access to! I'm very upset about that, or would be, if we hadn't moved on. They have lesson plans, activities (including cross curricular ones that are really fun), worksheets, and answer keys for the parents, all available for download as pdfs on the site. Cdela gave us math and language arts worksheets, but only because they are available from the activities page on Odyssey, so they didn't have a choice. Then Cdela provided monthly "calendars" of lesson plans that included some of the same topics, but not taught nearly as well as Odyssey's materials.

So I downloaded the k-3 stuff, burned it to a cd, and am printing it. I'm sticking the pages into sheet protectors so that the kids can use dry erase markers to do their worksheets and then just erase them to do them again or to let someone else have a turn. Also, if we need to, say, cut and paste on one, we can just print it and stick it in its right place again. It gives the kids some flexibility if they don't feel like working online one day, and it gives me ready-review pages if I think someone might need more help on a topic.

We are having a lot of fun with the freedom we now have to work with our kids the way they need.

The kids have a good sense of when they best learn, even at their young ages, so I have told everyone as long as they do one lesson in each of their subjects online every day, I don't care when they do them. Anda very happily finishes everything right when she gets up; Caleb works best right at bedtime, so he does his then (which is wrecking our schedule again, but he's happily learning. Finally.). And they are enjoying it so much, they usually do several lessons instead of just one.

Hooray!

Review of Time4Learning.com

We couldn't enroll Anda in kindergarten this year because Colorado State Law says that kids have to be 5 to start school. I understand this--the schools would be overloaded with kids who really aren't ready for the structure of school because their parents wanted free daycare. Even five year olds often aren't emotionally and socially ready for school.

But Anda recently figured out reading and took off with it. I watched her successfully answering the questions Caleb was working on for school, and she is comfortably on a first grade level, even though she's only four.

I really didn't want to waste any more time with her. We wasted a lot with Caleb and then had trouble convincing anyone to let him go ahead (although his teacher is fabulous and she finally said he's working at least on a third grade level, so let's go there). Anyway, she really wanted to start school, but I didn't see how I could possibly do a traditional home school with her because I was already supervising Caleb constantly to keep him on task with the extra lessons his teacher assigned (for first grade, not the ones on his level) that he thought were boring (they were, for him. Anda thought they were great), plus I have four kids and the oldest is six. I was already struggling with balancing schooling, making meals, doing laundry, and writing my book. The house was so far down on the list that my mother hired someone to come pick up for me because I had to let something go. I can't juggle that many balls at once.

To complicate things, Anda had been watching Caleb doing the Compass Learning Odyssey curriculum online, and she wanted to do that. But Compass doesn't contract with homeschoolers.

But they did recommend a solution to me: Time4Learning. (I told them I'd be reviewing their site, and they said they'd pay me for it and if I wanted to help them with SEO stuff, could I please put multiple links to their site in? So if you find lots and lots of links, it's just a favor to them--it helps them move up in the search engines online so they're easier to find).

So we looked up Time4Learning.com.

They are a company that makes the CompassLearning curriculum (plus some math logic curricula for gifted kids--'gifted' apparently means math gifted to them; my kids are profoundly gifted, but in language arts more than math). The curriculum is extremely affordable--as of this writing the subscription costs $19.95 for the first child and $14.95 for an additional child (I don't know about more than two--Dan's not ready for school yet). Plus they have a two-week money back guarantee so you can test the program (they asked me to mention that).

We were already sold on the program before we contacted them because Anda wanted to use the Compass curriculum. I like Compass--it is considered "challenging" by lots of people. I have found that it's just right. (The other curriculum Caleb uses repeats everything ad nauseum so he can hardly stand to do it for beating the subject to death in the name of educating him). We love Compass.

The things that Time4Learning have added to their access to Compass that are really valuable are the "playground" and the "Lesson Plans."

First, the playground: The Playground is a page FULL of over a hundred links to fun, non-addicting games and websites for kids, several with "one computer-two player" games that I love the kids to play together. It links to things like Brainpop (most of which is only accessible with a subscription, which Caleb's school has), PBSKids, and classic games, puzzles, and activities. The thing I like about the playground is that the link is disabled until the student has done their lessons. The parents set the timer for the amount of lessons they want done, and when the timer counts to zero, the playground is activated. There is not a ding or notification, though, so Anda actually finishes her lessons instead of quitting as soon as the playground is "open." Then, even more valuable (and what I've often wished Caleb had), the playground also has a timer on it, which the parents can set to any amount of time up to 59 minutes. Whent the timer runs out, the playground shuts off until more lessons are done. This is great--nobody gets too into their games because they know the games are going to shut off automatically!

We do sometimes circumvent the playground and just open another browser window for "recess", though, like when the kids want to go to Brainpop for recess. I personally don't consider BrainPop recess--so why would I want to stop them?

The other really valuable thing that Time4Learning provided me was the "lesson plans", which are actually the "scope and sequence", or list of activities, for the entire Compass program, from pre-k all the way through 8th grade.

This has been like gold for us. The lessons include the activity numbers. The way Compass works is the child is placed on a level. For Time4Learning, the parents can request a level and have their child placed there without justifying it. (With Caleb's public cyberschool, we have to justify everything and can't just move him up, even if he's ready.) Whatever level you are on, Compass gives you access to one level up and one level down (so Anda has Pre-K, K, and 1; Caleb has K, 1, and 2). With the scope and sequence available to us, we can skip ahead to any lesson we want, on any level, in any subject, including subjects where there are a few lessons but not a whole curriculum available yet (like Social Studies). With compass, if you have the activity numbers, you can access any lesson from the home page, so I've been able to set Anda to work on some third grade lessons, and Caleb, too.

For kids who are self-motivated and love learning, this is fabulous. I printed the scope and sequence, and I mark off activities on the list as they are finished or excused because I see no reason to do every activity Compass offers, which messes up their system of always showing you what lesson to do next.

Time4Learning makes homeschooling easy--even with my four kids under 7 years old. The thing I like about the system is I tell Anda what activities to do (I stick a post-it note on the screen each day with the activity numbers), and the computer does the teaching. I keep an eye on things (and you can get reports on the child's progress to help this) and answer questions, and we re-do activities where she doesn't get 4/5 or more on the quiz at the end, but I don't have to teach every lesson to both kids. I don't have to come up with worksheets (they're included as printables) if they need more work on something, it's easy to repeat lessons, and the kids can go as fast and as far as they want.

I don't have to teach, I don't have to be the bad guy, I don't have to decide what to do next (other than to say "yea" or "nay" on each activity--I'd suggest you skip the level 2 lesson on hygiene that openly teaches that you get colds from dirt and worms, which just plain isn't true, but that's the only really awful lesson in the three grades worth of lessons we've done), I don't have to wonder if we are meeting State Standards, I don't have to keep the attendance records and portfolios required by Colorado law (it's automatic!), and I don't have to worry that we might not be covering the stuff other kids that age are supposed to know.

It's also comforting to me that this is not a Colorado program, so no matter where Tim gets a job and we move, one or both kids can get a good, self-paced education. And, since Compass is used by 90% of schools in the nation (or so they say), if the kids do decide to go public eventually, I can take the reports in and prove that the are on an advanced level using something the teachers can accept, since they don't like to take my word for it.

Most of all, the kids love it.

I know a lot of homeschool moms think I'm nuts for going cyber(when you have only one kindergartner, and they are functioning close to grade level, homeschooling is easy and the materials are cheap), but Time4Learning is worth checking out. There are even free sample lessons on the website, and a forum for parents for support.

The only downside to the entire system that I've found so far is that the website is designed poorly so that instead of looking classy (and, therefore, trustworthy), it looks a little like a scam--too many words per page, too many testimonials, just like ads for nutritional supplement snakeoil and chiropractor ads in magazines. But my experience with the site has been good, the curriculum is so fun we have to stop the kids from playing, and the parents forum and scope and sequence are great resources (and accessible, at least partially, even if you don't join).

Periodic Table of Elements for Kids

A few months ago, Caleb became fascinated with how things can combine to make other things. Tim told him about hydrogen and oxygen making water, and Caleb thought the whole concept of "elements" was cool.

So today he started asking more about it, and we decided to introduce him to the periodic table of elements.

There are a lot of college-level tables of elements available online. But we did find some that are kid-friendly. This site: http://elements.wlonk.com/ has the very best periodic tables for kids I found. Not so oversimplified that they're useless; each square includes the NAME of the element, not just the symbol (rare, suprisingly); there are pictures and words showing where a kid might encounter something that uses that element (like Arsenic is in LEDs), and bunches of interesting information. All in a PDF that you can download and print for free. Go look. Very cool.

We also found http://www.starfall.com/n/N-info/download.htm , where you can download reading and writing worksheets free. Their reading philosophy is like the "Bob Books" philosophy, so my new readers love it. They can actually read a whole book--with a plot--by themselves.

http://people.howstuffworks.com/index.htm is for the perpetually curious about stuff. It's not just mechanical--they cover stuff like the CIA, and "love".

And http://www.intute.ac.uk/timeline2.html is one of the better, more accessible timelines of world events, for those who just want to know what was going on in the world at the same time as the British first ate bananas. It is a UK site, so the American experience is somewhat slighted. This is not a problem before 1630 anyway. Very informative.

So there you go. Some of our favorite resources for answering kid's questions online.

Of course, the first thing we usually do for specific questions (like "What is pepper made from?") is go to Wikipedia. Then Google it. Those are great sources, direct, and include pictures.