Interesting news, for me at least, since my daughter has type 1 diabetes.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/glucose-monitor-0809.html

These guys are using raman spectroscopy to non-invasively measure blood-sugar levels e.g. injecting not necessary.

Unfortunately the technique does not measure the blood sugar directly, but instead measures sugar levels within the institial fluid just below the skin. This is less than ideal since sugar levels in interstitial fluid time-lag the levels in the blood. To get around this problem, they measure the rate at which glucose diffuses into the interstitial fluid. Sounds like differential equations, so learn your maths kids!!!!

Educating your children is not something that can be done in a day. Rather, it takes many years of constant input and training to obtain the smarts.

The best way to gradually accumulate knowledge is to do something every day (and or course have a [sun]-day of rest each week) and the most efficient way of gradually accumulating knowledge is to have a strong routine. Yes, hard as that can often be, routines work well and discipline pays off. No pain, no gain, as the saying goes.

We start at 8am each morning. Bible/theology reading comes first, followed by music practice, followed by 50 minutes of maths, and so on.

If you go to this page and scroll down to Science Thematic Units, you should find five free modules. These are short; they would probably provide Jonny or Jane with an hour or two of learning fun!

– animal migration
– bats
– birds of the sea
– butterflies and moths
– electricity

I should note that they have many other modules available for about $2 USD each.

Enjoy!

According to MacRumors.com, the iPad is going to be released in New Zealand on July 23rd 2010.

Yippee!!!

All I need now is some ca$h.

Our kitten-cat doesn’t generally purr. But if he has been outside in the cold, then he comes inside, the purring seems to start immediately. This seems to be a repeatable event.

So, why do cats purr? What is the mechanism that generates the motor-like purring sound? What is vibrating inside the cat to cause the sound? Is it synchronized to the cat breathing, or is it unrelated to breathing?

Well, hop to it then … and remember: Cats purrfur Chef !

Meeooouuuwww……

Training Your Children to Manage Money

“In the days of the Klondike gold rush, two miners struck a huge deposit. Feverishly excited, they unearthed more and more gold each day. Meanwhile they neglected to store up provisions for the winter. Then came the first blizzard. Nearly frozen, one scrawled a shaky note explaining their predicament. Months later a prospecting party discovered the note, along with two frozen bodies lying on top of a huge pile of gold.”

More to read here.

These are not really aimed at home use, but rather for churches of a reasonable size.

From the preacher extraordinaire Dr. John Piper.

http://childrendesiringgod.org/curriculum/samples.php

Enjoy!

The times, they are a changin’ (thanks for that line Bob!). Yes, resources that home educators can use are getting easier and easier to access every day.

They state: “Curriculum Concepts (http://www.curriculumconcepts.co.nz) is a provider of educational resources across all New Zealand curriculum areas for preschool to Year 9 (Age 13) students plus special needs, adult students in literacy and numeracy and English speakers of other languages.”

Curriculum Concepts offer a couple of free catalogues on this page, as well as a huge number of books that you can buy online. Looks like they also offer eBooks (electronic books that is). And if you get on their mailing list, you get offered specials and free stuff!!!

Educational teaching resources – teachers, parents – primary secondary adult – Curriculum Concepts, RIC Publications, Ready-Ed Publications

Enjoy.

Here is your assignment for today.

1. Dig out all your home’s power bills for the last 2-3 years.
2. Put all of your power bills in chronological order.
3. Open your spreadsheet program (Windows = Excel; Mac = Numbers; Free on both = OpenOffice).
4. Enter the month for each bill in the first spreadsheet column
5. Enter the amount of the bill in the second column.
6. Plot a scatter graph of the data.

Months should be along the abscissa. That is the bottom or “X” axis of the graph.
Amounts should be along the ordinate axis. That is the vertical or “Y” axis.

Now you have your data in visual form, you can easily see both seasonal and annual trends !!!

HINT: When using the spreadsheet, you may get confused if you have not used one before. What you should always do is start small and simple. Begin by figuring out how to enter (say) 4 consecutive months and just use some mock values. Then figure out how to plot that data. It is actually pretty easy once you have done it a few times !

A PhD thesis with the above title was written by Leo Roache at Massey University. Issue date: 2009.

The full thesis is available online here: http://muir.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/1227

Here is the abstract:

This thesis reports an investigation into eight New Zealand homeschooling families. It also offers an opportunity, to these parents, to share and discuss the reasons why they chose to educate their children at home and how they went about doing so. The families interviewed were all volunteers and, with the exception of two families, all interviews took place in the family homes. The families, urban and rural, were distributed from Wellington to Northland. All families had an opportunity to review and revise their narratives and my reviews of the narratives which related to them. No attempt was made to verify the stories of why families chose homeschooling but there was good accord between their stated reasons for homeschooling, and the practices they adopted. The reasons advanced for choosing to homeschool were found to be complex. They ranged from parental experiences and philosophical beliefs to concern about teacher behaviour and sustaining their culture. The variations in teaching/learning practices and curricula, which were largely parent designed in consultation with their children, were equally complex. The testimony and experiences of these families bear out the notion of “communities of learning practice”, with all families repeatedly emphasising the centrality of the family. It was evident that the families changed over time, in the reasons for their choice and their practices. One significant feature was that all families elected to teach their children the basic skills of language and mathematics, with the intention of facilitating independent learning. Homeschooling was seen by the families studied as a way of gaining some control over the education of their children, and thereby strengthening the family unit, whilst providing opportunities to cater for individual needs and preferred approaches to learning. Comparisons with overseas studies thus demonstrated some commonalities and some significant differences regarding the New Zealand sample. The study suggested that further research is needed to provide an accurate picture of homeschooling in New Zealand.

This has to be one of the most amazing websites I have come across in a while, and an amazing resource for homeschoolers.

The Khan Academy: http://www.khanacademy.org/

This guy has put together an enormous quantity (1000+) of short teaching videos on chemistry, biology, history, algebra, trigonometry, economics, banking and money, statistics, finance, geometry, and more… and they are all free to watch on his website. His videos are watched about 70,000 times per day, thus he may be the human teacher with the biggest class on the planet.

Enjoy!

During a train trip from Chicago to Texas in the late 1940′s, A.W. Tozer began to write The Pursuit Of God. He wrote all night, the words coming to him as fast as he could put them down. When the train pulled into McAllen, the rough draft was done. Although written in such a remarkably short period of time, Tozer’s passionate classic offers not only a deeper understanding of Biblical Truth, but a personal encounter with the very Source of that Truth.

Get the FREE audiobook at ChristianAudio.com here using coupon code JUL2010, and start enjoying audio books while you work at home or do your chores.

Hi there, and welcome to this website.

We are pretty new to homeschooling; in fact we have just sent off our second exemption form — and had a reply!

One of the biggest hurdles for new homeschoolers like us is to figure out curriculums and source good materials.  This is no trivial task, as we have found, and there sure is a lot of stuff out there.

We are keen to contribute to the homeschooling community in New Zealand, and worldwide — this is why we have put up this website, and we would like you to help us by visiting, getting on our (very low volume) mailing list, following us on Twitter, and by posting feedback and suggestions.

We would like to have people from different regions in NZ post their local events. In the Manawatu, Friday is “gym” day and there is lots of action there.

So, please enjoy the resource that is being built, and let’s make homeschooling the schooling of choice in NZ!

Summit Ministries presents their materials from a Worldview perspective. This is totally great as it bring all subjects into one big picture, or into one coherent whole, under one umbrella.

For Christians, it is essential to learn to think in worldview terms. This empowers thinking by making sense of all of the data. the fragmented bits and pieces that are thrown about every day.

Here is their curriculum page but you really ought to go further and check out some articles too !

This is a great resource for high school students. It includes video podcasts (webcasts) that you can watch and listen to here as well as comprehensive notes here.

Grasping even a small amount of basic chemistry provides such a huge windfall in terms of understanding the world and how it works!

A related resource is the beautiful book THE ELEMENTS by Theodore Gray. Here it is on the Book Depository (FREE POSTAGE WORLDWIDE), but you can probably get in line to borrow it from your local library. The photography is stunning and beautiful as can be seen here.