I think David first became aware of ancient Egyptian history from a Little Einsteins video, “Disney’s Little Einsteins - The Legend of the Golden Pyramid,” we rented one weekend. It was there that heiroglyph and sphinx were added to his vocabulary. Serendipitously, his Grandma gave him a computer game called “Scooby-Doo: Jinx at the Sphinx,” at about the same time as I purchased a cheap damaged copy of Ancient Egypt Dot-to-Dot (Connect the Dots & Color) at the local bookstore.

So, when we first got around to reading Mummies in the Morning, David was already excited and familiar with ancient Egypt. We must have read this one five or six times in a row before he was ready to move on to the next Magic Tree House book. It’s still one of his favorites.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was pointed to this article written by a retiring public school teacher today. The article basically asserts that testing in primary school, as required by the No Child Left Behind act, sucks the souls out of young kids.

Gosh. Ya think?

I’ll count this as another good reason to home school. Though I’m absolutely certain that if you proposed home schooling as a solution to the author of the article, she’d complain that there’s no state control of home schooling, so it couldn’t possibly be good.

Speaking of reasons to home school, I was browsing the Ontario Ministry of Education website because someone told me they had a fairly helpful curriculum posted.

I found an interesting page called, “Who’s responsible for your child’s education?” on the Ministry’s site which contained a long list of people and organizations involved in education. Browsing down the list, I discovered what my benevelent government thinks my role in education is…..

It turns out that a parent’s responsibility is limited to “ensuring their children attend school.”

Call me crazy, but I think my responsibilities extend a little further than that. Ok. A lot further than that.

For the last few months, David’s bedtime ritual has included a few chapters of what he calls, “Jack and Annie stories,” more commonly referred to as The Magic Treehouse books by Mary Pope Osborne.

After picking up books in no particular order from used bookstores, we finally decided to fill out the rest of the series from Amazon.com, so we’ve got a full set up to #34. There’s more to collect, I know, and it appears that the author has not yet run out of ideas, but 34 books is a pretty good start, in my estimation, so we’ll leave it at that for now.

David has decided that he wants to read the entire series, in order, this summer — partly because we discovered the official series website and printed off the “passport“. So, we’re starting with #1, reading a book every two or three nights, and of course, collecting the passport stamps along the way.

I decided, after reading the first part of Dinosaurs before Dark this evening, that I may as well find related coloring pages, books and activities for David to work on during the days and mornings to expand on the event or place in the Magic Treehouse books. So, every few days I thought I’d post a Magic Treehouse tie-in to the book we’re at.

The first, of course, is Dinosaurs Before Dark

Dinosaurs

Reading:

• Pteranodon: Winged and Toothless- In Dinosaurs Before Dark, Jack and Annie are saved by a Pteranodon. This page from the Enchanted Learning Center is all about those flying reptiles.
• Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs by Sabuda and Reinhart– This amazing pop-up book is worth buying as a work of paper engineering. The text is also quite informative, and serves as a fantastic way to explore the world of dinosaurs.

Printables:

• Dino Word Search - Go digging for Dino words in this printable activity!
• Dinosaur Worksheets - a variety of printable dinosaur worksheets and coloring pages from Learning Page.com
• Dinosaur Who Am I? printable from the Magic Treehouse Website

Games and Online Activities:

• Match the Bones — Choose the dinosaur each bone belongs to.
• Dino Saurs! — Prehistoric winds have blown pterodactyl eggs out of their nests in this dinosaur game and it’s up to you to find them! This arcade-style game with a dinosaur-theme is a great way to get kids excited about these amazing reptiles.
• Dinosaur Dig — Future paleontologists can do their very own Dinosaur Dig. This is a fun exercise in mapping coordinates that also ties into earth science, rocks and minerals as well as exploration.
• Dinosaur Egg Hunt — Play the Dinosaur Egg Hunt to learn about the great lizards that once roamed on Earth! Kids will find this concentration-style memory game to be a fun way to keep their brains limber.
• Dinosaur Quiz Game — Test your knowledge of dinosaur trivia with this short online quiz.
• Dinosaur Playground - A collection of simple online dinosaur games and puzzles.
• Palaeo Pursuit –As a junior palaeontologist, find your way to the dig. On your journey, you will encounter rocks, questions and discoveries!

More Stuff:

• Teaching Ideas page for Dinosaurs Before Dark - from Teachers @ Random
• Vocabulary, Questions and Activities for Dinosaurs before Dark — Activities for each chapter from Mountain City Elementary School

What mother’s heart wouldn’t warm at that particular phrase?

Well, there are others more heart-warming, I guess, but I this was the one my “2+2 year-old” son handed me this morning.

So, after a long time away from the workbooks, we spent this cold, rainy day finishing up the K-1 Mind Building Math book together, followed by an hour or so of him working on a Power Mathematics workbook on his own.

It initially amazed me that he so loved the Professor B workbooks, since I can’t think of anything more unimaginative than a page full of equations, but I realized that, even when he was unable to read, he could still work entirely independently solely using the language of numbers. It must give him a great sense of accomplishment to go through pages and pages of a workbook without ever having to ask me what a word is or what it means.

He didn’t get the math-loving gene from me, but I love that he has it.

I’ve been taking advantage Education Week’s ‘Open House’ period where all their articles are available without subscription. While most of the articles just have me shaking my head at the futility of seeking the magic silver bullet that will teach all children all things at all times equally, there are a few gems on the site.

One article I read this morning struck me as particularly interesting. Robert Epstein, former Editor in Chief of Psychology Today, proposes abolishing High School.

He says, while our society sees adolescents as angst-ridden, unreliable and irresponsible, the exact opposite is true. In fact, there is next to nothing that adolescents cannot do that their adult counterparts are capable of.

The problem with adolescents is that we’ve created them at all. We’ve put so many restrictions on young people that they can’t live up to their potential. In fact, they can’t do anything except be the kids they’ve already grown out of being. Epstein writes:

Surveys I’ve conducted suggest that teenagers today are subject to 10 times as many restrictions as are mainstream adults, to twice as many restrictions as are active-duty U.S. Marines, and even to twice as many restrictions as are incarcerated felons.

One thing I’ve noticed about the homeschooled teens I’ve encountered, is that they blend into the adult world seamlessly. They have no problems conversing with adults in a mature manner, and no problem dealing with ‘adult’ problems and issues on their own.

These kids, compared to the local public and Catholic school students I’ve interviewed for summer job positions, are radically different. And I mean radically.

I’m sure there are exceptions in both groups, but my limited experience leads me to agree with Epstein that, instead of forced attendance until a certain age, a competency-based limit would be far more effective.

Lets let intelligent, motivated teens move on with their lives. Let them do more than hang around the skate park trying to injure themselves. Let them pursue jobs that involve more than asking, “Do you want fries with that?”

The social-emotional turmoil experienced by many young people in the United States is entirely a creation of modern culture. We produce such turmoil by infantilizing our young and isolating them from adults. Modern schooling and restrictions on youth labor are remnants of the Industrial Revolution that are no longer appropriate for today’s world; the exploitative factories are long gone, and we have the ability now to provide mass education on an individual basis.

I’ve read a lot about how some homeschooling moms do X, Y and Z to supplement their family’s main income while homeschooling. Some of the advice is sound, other stuff is just crazy.

But I recently heard from an Internet marketer who follows a simple plan to make an affiliate revenue of nearly $30,000 a month. What I’m suggesting is a variation on his plan that won’t necessarily make over six figures a year, but it will begin to bring in revenue almost immediately, and it fits in quite excellently with homeschooling.

This particular marketer creates small content sites. He picks a subject — say migrane headaches — and does three things 1) he finds about 20 affiliate programs that are related or that have products he can sell to his new market, 2) he creates a small site with between 5 and 20 articles about the subject and a sign up form to an email newsletter about the subject on every page, 3) then he builds a series of at least 50 short emails to send to that list once a week. In each email, he promotes one affiliate product.

Once the 50 emails are written and set up in an autoresponder, he does a bit of promoting of the site, then lets nature, or Google, take its course.

And then he begins on the next site.

For homeschoolers, this would actually work quite well if each site was a unit study. For example, if you’re studying weather, you could sell weather stations, books from amazon, all sorts of stuff from ebay, etc. Most of the research for the article pages and emails is going to be done in the course of the unit anyway, so why not take advantage of all your research and make a site out of it?

Other topics might not lend themselves so well to affiliate sales, so perhaps just a small site with adsense ads on it would add a few bucks a month to your coffers.

Now, I know this isn’t so far off from what many other people suggest doing, but what I’ve seen in the online homeschool community is that when homeschoolers build informational sites, their target is other homeschoolers. I’m suggesting that if you’re learning how to write short stories, that you target your site “how to write short stories” site to writers and aspiring authors, not people teaching their kids how to write. The market is bigger, longer term, and more willing to spend money on the subject.

I made my first site in this vein a few weeks ago, and, although it’s not on the most marketable topic, it has made enough in amazon commissions from the first 40 subscribers that I will be able to buy a couple of books with the gift certificate they’ll send me at the end of the quarter.

PS. Although this might sound like putting the cart before the horse, if you’ve got older kids hoping to make a bit of spending cash over the summer, they can use Niche Inspector to find profitable topics, and spend their summer researching and writing things you probably wouldn’t otherwise cover in the school year.

This has been a difficult area for me. I went to a Christian school for most of my formative years ,which left me with a skewed view of religious training, if not an outright phobia.

While the Christian education was not exactly faith-affirming for me (I think the turning point for me was praying in biology class: “Bless this frog which we are about to dissect. May its body edify our minds.”), I do appreciate the high level of biblical literacy I gained from that education.

In fact, I believe that it’s impossible to completely understand the culture and history of the Western world without knowing the stories of the Bible.

But, for me, all those stories are so wrapped up in my “Christian” education, I find it much harder to teach them than to teach the stories of the Greek or Norse pantheons, for example. While David has been getting steady diet of stories about Zeus and Odin, he’s had very little exposure to the stories of the Bible.

A short-cut, I thought, would be to take him to a local church Sunday School, but apparently Sunday School isn’t what it used to be, and the bible stories weren’t taught at all. Not in the main sanctuary either, now that I think about it.

And searching through Amazon, the only secular books of Bible stories I could find were graphic, sarcastic, and definitely meant for adults.

So, I’m left to my own resources, I guess. So this weekend I spent some time re-writing some stories from the Bible. Some are definitely easier than others. Noah’s ark, for example, is easy to write with no mention of a deity at all. Others, like Moses and Pharoah, are a little more difficult. I’ve found, though, that referring to the Christian God as “Yaweh” rather than “God” gives him a name rather than a title, and makes it easier to see where I’m going with this project.

I’ve also purchased a book called, “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know–And Doesn’t” by Stephen Prothro that I found mentioned on this blog ( I bought from his affiliate link. I hope he’s not too mortified) in hopes that it might point me to some places to prioritize.

Incidentally, I ran myself through the test on this page on religious literacy from USA Today, and only missed two: I only got two of Buddhism’s four noble truths, and I missed out on holy orders as a Catholic sacrament. I did, however, remember all ten of the Commandments. Eleven, actually, if you can get points for listing the Catholic and Protestant versions. Yay for me!

Continuing my research on various educational resources for homeschooling in the coming years, I found a site called LinkOnLearning.com.

Since the site said that the lessons were designed around the Ontario Ministry of Education curriculum, I was intrigued and signed up as a parent to see what I could discover about the program. Once I had finished the registration process, though, I was faced with the following sentence:

Since you has been refered by Default-Referral Do Not Delete, you can get 10% discount for all plan you seleced.

Now, this is right before you’re encouraged to enroll a child and throw, at the very least, $34.95 at the company. I probably would have signed up for a month just to peek around and evaluate what was available, but that particular sentence threw me for a loop and I clicked away.

Even though I realize that the error is probably due to some outsourced programming that wasn’t tested, I just couldn’t get past it.

I found this awesome satire of the question about socializing home schooled kids, based on the “If you Give A Mouse a Cookie” books.

I am severely tempted to send the link to my sister, who is an elementary school teacher, and who is horrified that I’ve chosen to homeschool. She also gave David a copy of “If you Give a Mouse a Cookie” book, along with every other book in that series for his birthday a few years ago.

That fact just made the post more amusing for me.

Check it out at Principled Discovery

I was looking for a map of Canada to use, since David is beginning to ask a lot of questions about we live, and where Grandma lives, and where our city is, and what Canada is, and what a country is… there are more questions than I can count, and some visual help in explaining was needed.

Through another blog, I found this Sheppard Software, which not only has a downloadable, printable map David and I can color, but it has cool flash tutorials and games to help kids learn the provinces and capitals.

What did people do before the Internet anyway?