Moonshadows

Article, first draft

We stumbled into children’s music when Chloe was a baby. Rob had found some very bad and some very good children’s music on eMusic.com. We all really enjoyed the music from “Ralph’s World.” Wen I saw he was performing at our Border’s, the girls and I went and had a fabulous time. Ralph Covert was an engaging, fun entertainer; it is no surprise that he was nominated for a Grammy Award this past year. We became instant groupies after that show. So much so that we’ve had him to play at our house a couple of time and taken numerous roadtrips and even flown to see him and his band perform in many different cities.

After listening to almost exclusively to Ralph’s World and Ralph’s adult band, The Bad Examples, for three years, we started to find other kids’ muci that we liked. Justin Roberts, Dan Zanes, They Might Be Giants, and so on. We listen to some weekly streaming radio sations to learn about other bands. One, called “Spare the Rock” is hosted by father-daughter team.

When I stumbled across Live365,a streaming radio provider, I thought that it could be a lot of fun to have our own station. Tey had a five day trial, so I signed up and worked on creating a program. It was a little frustrating at first since there are many rules about how often songs from the same album or artist can be played. With some tweaking, we had a small program that worked. Camille recorded some readings and Chloe told an original story to add some interest.

I am not yet clear on the “copyright” side of the broadcasting, but it is my understanding that Live365 takes care of any royalities that are due to the artists whose music we play.

One pleasant surpirse is that even after only one week broadcasting, I received unsolicited offers from bands to
send me free music to play on the station. We’ve had a few more offers come in since then too. I am still working on creating a system to make it easy to update the station, but right now updating the playlist is a bit time consuming.

I can see the station being a wonderful homeschooling tool as we go along. Recording and broadcasting makes poem recitation much more interesting! We can broadcast interviews and other fun things as I figure out how to be more efficient at updating our radio station’s playlist.

2 comments August 27th, 2006

Our Very Own Radio Station

The radio station is coming along great! I still don’t have a great procedure for updating, but I am working on it. We tried to change some songs every day, but I’d like to change the whole playlist every day if I can figure out how to do it efficiently.

There are some readings and story telling by the girls in the lineup. How’s that for homeschooling!

If you’d like to learn more:

Preparing

I spent some time last week ordering new books and supplies for this year. We’ve taken it slow during the summer, but now that the majority of our traveling is over, we are getting back into the daily process of homeschooling.

The first package to ship was the Story of the World Volume III audio CDs. I found last year that I didn’t learn as much as I wanted because my daughter did the reading on her own. So this year we bought the CDs to listen to in the car so I could keep up.

Imagine my surprise when we opened the package and found the book Finding Ms. Right and a pair of scissors. Oops. I managed to print a mailing label from amazon’s site. I hope they will get this little mistake straightened out!

2 comments August 12th, 2006

Settling In

I’ve been away for the past few weeks. We’ve had wonderful expereinces in Massachusetts visiting various degrees of cousins, in Chicago visiting the Museum of Science and Industry and hearing our favorite rock band perform, in England visiting a castle where parts of Harry Potter were filmed and the archaeological site on which the Minimus Latin progam is based, and in Scotland visiting Loch Ness, fantastic castles and fun museums.

After all this busy-ness, home is starting to sound relaxing. I’ve placed Amazon and Singapore orders and made menus in preparation for our return to “normal life”. I’ve also been keeping up with the recent events in state homeschool laws and forms and am preparing myself for the onslaught of legal tangles that I hope to avoid, while still not giving more infomation than is required by law.

Even with being away, I’ve tried to keep up with the list of inclusive homeschool groups that I maintain on behalf of the UUHomeschool group. If your inclusive group is not listed here and you would like for it it be, please submit it using the form and I will update as soon as possible.

Add comment August 4th, 2006