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Homeschooling
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Nothing makes me angrier than a lie, except when a lie is repeated so often that people believe it to be truth. I'm sick of lies, distorted truth, spin, and revisionist history. Can we just get back to reality? Can we just hold people accountable for their purposeful distortions?
Can we just set the record straight?
In their tiny Brooklyn apartment, Charissa and David are raising and educating their three children. Metrophonus, a pre-teen who plays baseball and is showing great promise as a young writer, can speak in detail about the eight wonders of the world. His knowledge comes from books that he has read with his parents and numerous trips to museums and special events around Brooklyn and Manhattan. Ephrosinia, who turns six this summer, is a ballerina and has been reading chapter books with her parents for over a year now. Ivan, almost three, is mostly focused on becoming a cowboy when he grows up.
Some days I feel like packing my kids off to school. I love baking cookies with my two boys, and listening to my daughter practice piano. Reading stacks of picture books from the library is a treat for everyone. And I enjoy the flexibility. But some days just don?t go as planned.
When a student is having difficulty in school, it is amazing to me how
many times the first position adults take is that the student is not working up to potential rather than considering the possibility that the educational program fits the child poorly. We would rather tweak the student rather than tweak the program. By considering different learning styles, we will understand more about how children learn and how best to work with them.
The seed was planted by a comment Grace Llewellyn made last spring. While interviewing the author of The Teenage Liberation Handbook for my bimonthly publication, Nation Magazine, the conversation drifted to the current unschooling frontiers. Grace was very pleased by the ease with which unschoolers could now gain admission to college. One of the new frontiers for Grace was graduate school; could unschoolers bypass college altogether and still find access to law or medical school? The idea was immediately intriguing and, I must say, a bit compelling. Talking about and trailblazing frontiers require vastly different levels of difficulty, however. So we discussed the literal interpretation of unschooling in college and its consequences without ever linking the concept to my own possible future.
As parents and educators, we have the wonderful opportunity of teaching our children in the best ways possible! We innately know that each of our children are marvelously different. When most of us were young, analysis of the best way each individual child learns was uncharted territory. Most of us experienced classes where subjects were taught in a workbook approach. “Hands on” learning was unheard of.
What do all students need to do before a test or after a lesson or chapter? They need to review! What is review? The word review can be broken into its base or root word, "view" which means to look at, and its prefix "re" which means again. So to review a lesson is to look again at the lesson your student has already done. Of course, in some cases, like with learning math facts, reviewing means you will need to examine the lesson quite a few more times.
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Teaching and Learning
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The first time I was aware of its powerful effect and began to appreciative what had happened was as a graduate student. It was while working on my dissertation with the much maligned laboratory rat. Initially the meaning of what had occurred didn’t register. But then, when over a period of years it happened again and again, I realized that I had witnessed a mysterious phenomenon; one that is peculiar to many living organisms including us humans.
What transpired began on rare occasions when an animal went into shock after having been injected with the test chemical. I could feel the rodent stiffen, and as its blood pressure dropped the fur would lose some of its warmth. But there was no shivering; these effects I soon realized are characteristic of a shock reaction associated with the drop in blood pressure.
Standardized testing is a means to determine the effectiveness of an education. Many parents use standardized tests to ensure that the child is at the appropriate grade level for his age. Standardized testing is also a necessity for college admissions officials to be sure that a prospective student has the skills necessary to succeed at the college level.
You have all seen many articles that give advice about preparing for a field trip. They mention packing lunches, bus, metro, and plane schedules, medicines, comfortable shoes, sun block, and fun things to do while standing in line. There is, however, another very important preparation that is too often overlooked in the hustle, bustle, and excitement of getting on the road. That preparation is called “Building Prior Knowledge.” For me, it is the single most important component for youngsters and adults. As a tour guide and one that teaches new guides at the Library of Congress to give tours to children, one thing is very clear - children with prior knowledge learn more and participate fully in the experience if they have advance information. Children visiting the Library of Congress and other historical places without prior knowledge glean less and miss out on their opportunity to be actively involved.
Parents take pride in their children’s academic and athletic accomplishments, and rightfully so. Setting goals, and working to achieve them despite challenges or setbacks, are vital life skills with applications extending well beyond the classroom and playing field. From childhood on, we use these and other essential “people skills,” to relate with others, strengthen our interpersonal relationships, enhance our workplace performance, heighten our impact on others, and more. While academic prowess and athletic excellence are to be applauded, they shine most brightly when combined with essential people skills.
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Family Life and Parenting
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When we took care of a hay and cattle ranch in northeastern Oregon, started our home schooling, and continued there for eight and a half years, we four lived in a small, old, ramshackle house. The living room, dining room, and kitchen were one, and large, eleven feet by thirty-one feet, for such a small house. We had a sink, a pitcher pump, a wood-fired cookstove, table and chairs, and cabinets in the kitchen area.
We get a lot of strange looks when we tell people about traveling cheap and free. The most common response is that there must be a catch. We explain that the only catch is a little bit of time and effort.
We are starting to hear from so any families who have saved money on their vacations by using the ideas in Have Kids - Will Travel. Even when you don't have time to get free airfare you can use the other tips to save thousands on your next vacation.
I received an email from one family who saved over $1500.00 on their car rental alone. We have helped people eliminate their hotel costs, saved hundreds by switching from using the train to low-cost and free airfare.
Since the age of sixteen I knew I wanted to have children and created a lot of convenient images and fantasies of what that would be like. When I turned eighteen I met a young woman, fell in love and got married, with the complete expectation that children would soon follow. Luckily, that was not in the cards, as we only remained married for a year and then went our separate ways. We were very young and still had a lot of growing up to do.
Seven years later, at the ripe old age of twenty-six (I had remarried the year before) our first child, Darci, was born and the reality of how much attention she needed hit me like an avalanche! Night after night of interrupted sleep. Though it is supposedly women that experience post-partum depression and not men, I swear I had it in spades! The reality that I was now responsible for another person for the rest of my life was terrifying!
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Viewpoints
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When David was 12 months old we moved back to Michigan, believing – rightfully – that David needed his grandparents to play an active role in his life; that his grandparents needed David to be an integral part of their lives. We bought a rural property and so began years during which David has been nurtured, and greatly influenced, by loving grandparents.
To this day David, following in his Grandpa Sneary's footsteps, can repair anything that runs on gasoline, especially his grandfather's 1946 John Deere B.An evening spent playing pinochle at grandmother's kitchen table wins out over the ways in which most 18-year-olds choose to spend their time. Recently, after trying life in a busy city, David hurried back to the slow pace, but personally rewarding nature, of life in rural Michigan. Acknowledging his wisdom, I will soon follow.
His father has always been a woodsman and a hunter so rural Michigan suited him to a T, as well. As a young boy in Iowa, Gene carried his gun to school, stored it in his locker – just as all the boys did then – and headed out to the woods as soon as school was dismissed for the day.
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Resource Reviews
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Nature + Nurture + Motivation = A Super-Functioning Brain
by Carissa Cardone
Chicago, IL - When it comes to developing children's brainpower, it'snot a nature-vs.-nurture debate. Instead, experts agree that nature plus nurture is critical to learning. Cognitive development experts know that whatever inborn intelligence nature has given a child, that is onlythe beginning of the story. A child's learning ability and mental capacity can be dramatically enhanced by nurture, motivation and theright tools.
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