Posts filed under 'Uncategorized'
As I wrote in a post long ago, but maybe not too many posts back, we started a radio station featuring “kindie rock”. It has been a great adventure and a wonderful homeschool experience.
I’ve been asked to run a contest to give away tickets to see Ralph’s World in the upcoming House of Blues tour. I’d love to see the contest be successful, so if you could enter and spread the word among your various lists, I’d really appreciate it.
Details are on our Gooney Bird Kids radio blog.
Thanks for your help.
January 9th, 2007
After the crazy, overshceduled Thursday, I need time home on Friday to recover and catch up at work. Camille worked on her “Classical” stuff: Singapore math, SOTWIII, etc. She also spent time reading a science book by Isaac Asimov and looking at her Girl Scout book. She called it a boring day, but I call it a recovery day. We all suffer when we try to pack too much in, too close togheter.
Tomorrow and Sunday we have a number of activities scheduled, so I suspect Monday will again be a “boring” day.
December 1st, 2006
There have been lots of changes around here….I started a new job in July that has really taken most of the creativity that I possess (not a lot). On top of that, we started a streaming kids’ music station which has grown to take a lot more time and energy than I expected it to.
My 8-year old has rebelled at the tedium of Classical education and has become an unschooler. She reads every second of the day (except when she’s doing projects). I have little fear that she’s not learning enough, but it is really difficult for me to let go of the reins. She’s a bright, motivated kid, and I know that she can learn what ever it is she wants and needs to know. But giving up control is something with which I struggle….
November 30th, 2006
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.
August 27th, 2006
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:
Live365 broadcastGooneyBird Blog
August 26th, 2006
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!
August 12th, 2006
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.
August 4th, 2006
Well, after my series of posts, I have been left speechless. I spent a lot of time working on the various topics about which I wrote, but now have so little of substance left to say. We have been spending a lot of time traveling and will continue to do so for the next few weeks, so I will continue to have little time to formulate my ideas into coherent posts for a while.
I’m glad that I said what I said and I hope that it will help others to stat thinking about the topics which I find to be interesting. For now, I am decompressing and studying about the places we are headed to visit. When we come back (or while I am gone), I plan to read Climbing Parnassus. I hope to have something fun to say about classical (home)schooling after reading it!
One place we hope to visit in the next weeks is one on which my daughter insists, based on her studying Latin from Minimus….how’s that for a teaser?
July 6th, 2006
There’s much I need to be doing to prepare for the next year of homeschooling, but it is not going to happen until next week. But in the meantime…
Yesterday I ran into an old LLL friend. She asked my youngest (almost 4) where she goes to school. I remarked that we are still homeschooling. She said, “Well, I’m starting a new Montessori school!” I’m sure she’s probably just excited about her new venture, but I had the feeling that she was implying that I was homeschooling because I hadn’t yet found the right school.
How perfect would a school have to be for me to consider school over homeschool? I can’t even imagine. Though I’m exhausted by the end of the day, I love spending my days with my kids. Perhaps if there were a local (no drive) part-time school with awesome teachers and great kids, I would consider it. I bet if I thought long enough, I’d figure out a huge lists of cons for it though.
This brought me to the question “WHY am I homeschooling?” I have a huge list of reasons, but I’d like to condense it and have a little speech at the ready instead of stumbling and mumbling through my list. This is my challenge for the weekend. I can spend time next week looking up supporting facts for my surely bulletproof reasons.
June 2nd, 2006
When my oldest daughter was younger, I assumed we’d be unschoolers. Somehow, that was just too difficult in practice. I need more structure and more tangible goals. I also worry that if something were to happen to me and we could no longer homeschool, that unschooling would leave her way ahead in some areas and way behind in other areas. Thus, we have a minimum of structure in that she has to keep up with math, spelling, and grammar.
I’m really interested in Classical Homeschooling. I want my daughter to have wonderful logic and rhetoric skills. I find that many folks today lack an ability to reason and fall for strong opinions. I want her to have a strong background in the classics (and not American Idol).
However, I find that _The Well Trained Mind_ seems to be very dismissive of creativity. Build the skills first, then allow for creativity. I really do not like that approach. I will not follow their guidlines very closely, though we have used many of their texts and recommendations.
I’m still searching for a good fit, and I suppose I will always be searching for the right fit at any given moment.
May 26th, 2006
Previous Posts