Beverly Hernandez from About Homeschool has asked for nominations for the seven wonders of the homeschooling world.

My first thoughts ran through John Holt and Susan Wise Bauer as possibilities, but then I figured out my #1 wonder, and it’s got to be the World Wide Web.

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I didn’t say anything when their youngest son (about 6 or 7) sat at the bottom of the slide at the playground and started throwing sand. The playground wasn’t full, so I just took my son to a different area to play for a while.

I didn’t say anything a while later when we saw the same family at the Dairy Queen, where their kids were standing on the tables. Yes, standing on the surface where other people expect to eat.

I held my tongue when the oldest boy told his father to shut up. And the father just accepted it.

I cringed when the mother approached my son and asked him what school he was going to go to this fall, but I let him answer for himself.

But when she turned to me, after hearing  that he was being homeschooled and said,

“Aren’t you worried that he’ll grow up unable to interact properly with other people?”

all I could say was “You have GOT to be kidding!”

Now, I’m not paranoid about school safety, and potential violence in public schools is a reason way, way down my list of reasons to homeschool, if its even in the list at all.

But the fact that there’s even a market for this makes me wonder…

What could be more fun that flying a kite? What about flying one that you built yourself, with ordinary materials that you’ve almost certainly got around your home.

We made a simple kite today out of one 8.5X11″ piece of paper, some tape, a plastic straw, and a small plastic shopping bag. Also needed was a string. We used a kite string from a free kite that was given to us on Canada day. That kite was never able to stay off the ground for more than 3 seconds, and when it did get up momentarily, it immediately dive bombed the person flying it. So, it was no big loss to cut the string for our paper kite experiment.

Here are the directions and a pattern, if you want to try it yourself.

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Pirates of the Caribbean!

Reading:
Pirates are popular around my house, and stuff about pirates litter every imaginable surface. We’ve got pirate pop-ups, pirate costumes, pirate puzzles, pirate swords, pirate ships and who knows what else. I do have a few favorite books about pirates that I prefer over all the others.

• What If You Met A Pirate? by Jan Adkins is a good place to start. The book begins by describing the popular stereotype of a pirate, then proceeds to show how a peg-legged, one-eyed pirate bogged down by cutlasses, swords, guns, jewelery and a parrot isn’t likely to be a very successful pirate at all. In the rest of the book Adkins explains what pirates were really like, what they wore, and what they did all day.
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