Yippee!!!

All I need now is some ca$h.

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 !

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!

The Swedish Government is trying to pull the rug from underneath the home-educated children in Sweden, in their proposal for a new School Law.

Those behind the website are requesting signatures from people outside of Sweden who would oppose the proposed law changes.

I will offer a thought about this sort of proposed legislation: I am a home schooler, and value the freedom to have my children learn in such an excellent environment, But, being a part of society means that post-education, we all contribute in some way to the function of our society. Being a contributor to a modern 21st century society means that our contribution will often require having some sort of good basic education. It greatly concerns me therefore when I hear of homeschool families putting minimal effort into educating their children well. Likewise, I am grieved when I hear of homeschool children who are badly behaved and disobedient to their parents. To be quite honest, I think some of these children may be better off in school than being schooled at home.

Of course, discussions such as this are far more nuanced than my offering of the above few sentences. Still, consider how excellent it would be if homeschool children were excelling well beyond their public-educated peers. If this were achieved, society would have no gripes against us, Swedish politicians may desire home-schooled children, and people may instead look at us positively due to our fantastic education system.

I wonder then — are the Swedes making a case against home schooling on the basis of academic performance, or is there some other (perhaps philosophical) reason for the pursuit of such a law change?

You can sign the petition here.

Young children should not watch any television because it sets them up for obesity and poor academic performance at school, say experts commenting on a new study.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10642599

I have long advocated the ditching of the personal Idiot Box; now it seems the experts want to undergird the obvious with scientific research.

As Bob Dylan wrote: “The times they are a changing…“. Indeed Bob! The internet has made online learning a real possibility, and online learning is something we are pretty certain to see popping up in our porridge more often as the times indeed change.

From here:

“A unique Christian school launching this fall offers an alternative for parents who want to pull their children out of public school but don’t have local access to private education or the capacity to homeschool.

WND reported last summer Liberty Christian School Online’s plan for a full-time accredited program that enables students to interact with their teachers and classmates through the Web.”

Yet another article, this time from the Times of the New York variety, asking: “What are (the) boys up to?”

I reckon there will be plenty of opinions this topic, so I will throw in my 20 cents worth.

I have two daughters and one wife (and one female cat, and until recently two female sheep) and from years of observation I have concluded that we just don’t think the same — the different genders that is. Yeah, yeah, I can hear you: “THAT’S A SWEEPING GENERALIZATION”, and of course it is, but that does not mean there is not a large dose of truth in it.

So here is my theory. I reckon that girls are, by nature, generally much more compliant, and generally much less philosophical, than boys. I have seen this in the school classroom, and in philosophy in general. So if my theorizing has any worth to it, then let’s apply it to the modern secular worldview that is forced upon us from every direction, and to the life of (post)modern boys…

CHILDREN ENTER CLASSROOM… AND TEACHER BEGINS…

Good morning boys and girls. Today we are going to talk about how life came from non-life by an unguided process of Darwinian evolution. That’s right. You are the product of time + chance + the struggle to survive against all odds over eons of time. Before that, did you know that the universe that you live in came from nothing … by nothing … and for no reason. That’s right — it just popped into existence, totally meaninglessly. Indeed, a very big cosmic accident! Wow, isn’t that great?!

As you sit there, children, consider that point of it all. Everything. The universe. Life. Love. Dreams. All this came from a cosmic accident followed by a bloody survival game where the fittest made it and the rest were erased. That’s us children. We made it!!!

And how many of you children like icing on your cake? Well, the news is good. One day in the future, the universe will become uninhabitable. All the stars will be burnt out and the universe will experience a heat death. Yes, that is the icing on the universal cake — a slow cold death. Totally pointless and without meaning. But at least it is icing!

Oh, that’s the bell children. End of lesson. Now, off to psychology class where you can learn about self esteem and about how to feel good about yourselves.

When I was growing up, this is the worldview that I shared. By 17, I had decided to make my first million by 30, then live for pleasure until my body broke down. At that point I was going to terminate my life. Sad eh! But this thinking, as far as I can tell, is entirely consistent with the secular worldview, and makes very good sense of the data. If life is ultimately meaningless, then why live for anything other than pleasure?

Indeed, most boys may not think through the logic of this until they reach their mid to late teens, but the seeds are there, ready to be watered. I suspect deep down many boys may believe this, so they are sitting there saying: “what’s the point of all this schooling stuff? Why should I care about it. It’s a waste of time…” I certainly did.

What do you think? Where are your boys heading regarding their schooling?

There is no doubt that methods for learning have changed in recent years. Just go into a school classroom and you are likely to see computers running Mathletics or Wikipedia or Comic Life (Mac & Windows).

And that is not to mention that many parents now use TV as a baby sucker (a.k.a. a dummy) and churches use DVDs to teach (or entertain?) children on Sunday mornings.

In addition there are podcasts (some of us live on them), daily Bible readings that cane be sent directly to your inbox, and now the Apple iPad.

Oh yes, I would love one of these. I have an iPod Touch, and was amazed at how good it is for daily Bible study and email, because the touch screen technology and user interface design is sooooooo outstanding.

So, here is my question … what is the Apple iPad going to do to homeschool teaching? Would you buy one at $500 USD (about $800 NZD) and use it to help teach your children if they had really good application available to buy at low prices like $10 USD?

And another question … how many homeschool kids are going to be writing applications for these devices? Just consider: you can work from home, to your own hours, use few resources other than your own intellect, and stand to make a small fortune in the process!!!