Image via WikipediaI haven’t posted much recently, mostly because we haven’t done a whole lot of homeschooling lately. Mostly just home-playing, which is educational, but playing with Lego for days on end does not a quality blog post make.

But, as many of David’s lessons and group activities close up for the summer, we’ve got a few plans to use the summer learning time.

David’s just finishing up the last 50 pages or so of Mathematical Reasoning Level B, and once that’s done, we’re going to go through the much slimmer Times Tables book from Hodder Home Learning over the summer.

We’re also going to go through Apples, Bubbles and Crystals: Your Science ABCs (published by the American Chemical Society), which has a good mix of outdoor and rainy-day type activities. This spiral bound book combines reading and rhyming with simple science activities that begin with a list of everyday household materials and come with colorfully illustrated step-by-step instructions. Also provided are explanations of the science principles behind the fun. The 26 activities cover everything from making rainbows, rockets, music, fingerprints, and glue while exploring density, thermodynamics, wave transmission, mechanics, shadows and other topics.

We’ll keep reading… Right now David’s only interested in reading books about Batman on his own. Luckily, Scholastic has a fairly good set of Batman readers available, so he should have reading material for most of the summer. We’ve got two more books in the Dragon Detective Agency series to read as read-alouds, and once those are done, I’ll see if he’s ready for Encyclopedia Brown.

A few weeks of day camp, a few fishing trips, camping trips and park time, and lots and lots of Lego ought to fill out our summer nicely.

Paint often wrinkles—but sometimes it cracks. This seems odd, he points out, because in wrinkling, things are pushed together, whereas cracks form when things are pulled apart. What accounts for these antithetical behaviors?

Read about the science of drying paint, elephant wrinkles, fluttering flags and more in this article from Harvard Magazine.

I was surfing before bedtime and saw this. I’d really love to try this, but I’m not sure I would if Scotchguard contains perfluororoctanoic acid. I’ll have to see if there’s an ingredient list on the can.

Yesterday I was surfing the web for Wordpress plug-ins when I stumbled upon PopShops. Its a Web 2.0 way to add a quick affiliate shop to your site in no time flat.

First, sign up with a few big affiliate companies like LinkShare and Commission Junction, then make a free account with PopShops. A free account will let you build ten shops, which seems like enough to start with. You enter your affiliate ID information with each of the affiliate companies you’re a member of when you sign up. You’ll have to join merchant programs separately, though.

The PopShops builder lets you search for any keyword, like Valentine’s Day, and it will produce a list of products that match. Simply click to add the ones you want to your shop, and fiddle with the style, and you’ve a store. They’ve got a widget for Blogger and TypePad, a WordPress plug-in, or you can just plop in the little blob of javascript to put the shop on your site.

I typed “Magic Tree House” and selected Audible as the merchant, then told David to put the audiobooks in order. Once he was done, I created a new page, added a bit of text, and used the plug-in to add the shop. And viola! Here’s his Magic Tree House Audio page.

The store building was so easy, David only needed help when he misplaced one of the books and wanted to remove it. Once I showed him the remove button, he was able to finish the shop on his own.

Seriously easy, and I think it looks pretty neat!

NASA is inviting members of the general public from around the world to suggest a new name for the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, otherwise known as GLAST, before it launches in mid-2008. GLAST is designed to probe the most violent events and exotic objects in the cosmos from gamma-ray bursts to black holes and beyond.

To submit a suggestion for the mission name, visit: http://glast.sonoma.edu/glastname

Anyone who drops a name into the “Name That Satellite!” suggestion box on the Web page can choose to receive a “Certificate of Participation” via return e-mail. Participants also may choose to receive the NASA press release announcing the new mission name. The announcement is expected approximately 60 days after launch of the telescope.

• Read more here

It has been more than a year and a half since I’ve been alone in the house. It seems weird to go to the kitchen and not find anything that needs to be cleaned up since the last time I was in there. I’m startled that the bathroom sink is still as clean as it was after I wiped it down this morning. I picked up all the toys off the floor  this afternoon, and nothing has returned to fill the empty space.

It’s astonishing. And wonderful. And happily it all ends tomorrow afternoon.

I miss my guys.

Back in December I subscribed to the They Might Be Giants video podcast for kids, but I didn’t keep up with it. Yesterday I decided to take a look, and had a laugh at some of the great songs and videos. This was my favorite:

So, this Friday’s meme from Heart of the Matter is to comment on this quote from William Butler Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

It sounds nice, which is what you’d expect from a poet, but that’s about the only good thing I’m going to say about it.

Education is certainly not dropping a bunch of knowledge into an empty receptacle, but, if the fire is supposed to be about creating a passionate interest in something, or everything, that’s not education either.

The fire, if we must keep up with the analogy, is already there. I’ve never met a kid who wasn’t curious about practically everything. I’ve never met a kid who didn’t ask ‘why?’

Your average kid has enough to “fire” to consume a parent’s sanity and then some.

So then what? What is an educator supposed to do with the fire?

At first, I suppose, give it new places to go. The fire has lots of interesting places to stretch within what any child knows from his environment, but the stuff outside that sphere contains fuel for a lifetime. A child isn’t going to immediately know that he’s interested in Egyptology, or botany, or architecture. You need to drop a bit of something into the pail before he realizes that’s even a place for his fire to go, so to speak.

So, there is a bit of pail-filling going on. A bit of flame fanning too. But it can’t end there.

You can’t spend the rest of your life helping your child find more fuel. You’ve got to teach him how to find his own too, and explore each path as far as he wants or needs.

And that too requires some pail-filling. Things like learning to read, how to research, and memorizing math facts and formulas are work, and they aren’t always fun to do. They’re not always what the flame wants to do. But without knowing those things, the child’s fire is severely restricted.

And finally, to finish off with this crazy flame idea, an education needs to teach him to focus the main power of his fire on the things he’s most interested in, to eventually use it as a tool (like a flamethrower or torch) to achieve certain ends.

A very interesting meme from Joyful Chaos by way of Trail Mix.

From What Privileges Do You Have?, based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

Bold the true statements.

1. Father went to college

2. Father finished college

3. Mother went to college

4. Mother finished college

(The education of both my parents was cut short due to the German occupation of Holland in WWII. It may be that under different circumstances one or both would have gone on to college. Many of my mother’s younger siblings were well educated, some becoming renowned in their fields.)

5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.

6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.

7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.

8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.

9. Were read children’s books by a parent

10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
(Organ lessons. I still look back on those lessons with dislike. )

11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18

12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively

13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
(Since this was a result of succumbing to the credit card tables at University registration, I’m not sure it counts. The card had my name on it, but so did the bills.)

14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs

15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs

16. Went to a private high school
This was a big expense for my parents, but they sent me because the high school in my area was bad, bad, bad.)

17. Went to summer camp

18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18

19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels

20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18

21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them

22. There was original art in your house when you were a child

23. You and your family lived in a single-family house

24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home

25. You had your own room as a child

26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18
(Does it still count if I paid for it myself?)

27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course

28. Had your own TV in your room in high school
(I got a black and white TV from my brother when I was sick for nearly an entire year when I was about 8. It wasn’t a great set, but it was very welcome to alleviate the boredom.)

29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college

30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16

31. Went on a cruise with your family

32. Went on more than one cruise with your family

33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up

34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

This Friday’s Heart of the Matter meme is homeschooling tips and tricks.

Reading through some of the tips from other bloggers, I begin to realize how different we all are. I am definitely not the person to come to for scheduling and curriculum tips. We can’t even wake up at approximately the same time each day, much less start ’school’ at the crack of dawn. Reading some other homeschooler’s tips and their schedules from last week’s meme makes me feel like a slacker.

Anyway, here’s my tip: Desecrate an atlas

Buying an atlas to rip out all the pages has been one of my more inspired ideas. We bought a discounted (but still accurate) atlas and an oversized three ring scrapbooking binder. Each atlas page got ripped out (neatly) and put in a plastic sheet that was then placed in the binder. Every time we read a book, we find the atlas page where the story takes place, mark it, and add a page about the book, including  the place and historical period, into our customized atlas.

If a book goes into a lot of detail in one particular city, we print off a Google Map with the general area included, mark off as many landmarks as we can, and put it in our book in the most appropriate place.

We first tried this on a wall map, but found that places like England got lots of marks and became too squished. The ever-expanding atlas is much more functional, even though we can’t hang it on the wall.