BevK April 28th, 2007
Social workers say teen can remain with family during ‘dialogue’
“The nightmare faced by the Busekros family for the past two months … may be finally over,” Thornton told WND. “In a letter to the family’s attorney, the youth welfare agency responsible for taking her from her home affirmed that they were going to ‘de-escalate’ the situation and allow her to remain with her family as long as they would continue to dialogue with authorities.”
Article at WorldNetDaily.
BevK April 28th, 2007
CBN has posted an article that takes a look at homeschoolers and socialization from a Christian perspective. It has some interesting things to say including the results of testing homeschoolers and public schoolers with the Vineyard Adaptive Behavior Scale. I don’t know what that tests, but I’ll be looking into it.
Socialization: Homeschooling vs. the Schools
92 percent of superintendents believe that home learners are emotionally unstable, deprived of proper social development and too judgmental of the world around them, according to a California study by researcher Dr. Brian Ray .
Questions about inadequate socialization are often brought up as a means to disqualify homeschooling as a viable alternative form of education, but are the arguments valid?
That really is the question. From the article:
So how do these different settings affect children? Dr. Thomas Smedley believes that homeschoolers have superior socialization skills, and his research supports this claim. He conducted a study in which he administered the Vineyard Adaptive Behavior Scales test to identify mature and well-adapted behaviors in children. Home learners ranked in the 84th percentile, compared to publicly schooled students, who were drastically lower in the 23rd.
The article goes on to look at what makes homeschooling different and why homeschoolers would do so well on such a test.
Perhaps the most important statistic quoted in this article, where Christian parents are concerned, is the percentage of Christian youth disowning their faith.
Consistent with these figures, Christian producer and occult expert Caryl Matrisciana reports that 75 percent of public-schooled American youth brought up in Christian households disown their Christian faith by the first year of college. NHERI finds that this is only true for less than four percent of homeschooled youth.
BevK April 25th, 2007
Tomorrow, April 26th, is World Intellectual Property Day. The theme for this year is Encouraging Creativity.
It seems like a good time to promote the new website Copyright for Homeschoolers. The site has a quiz to help you determine how much you really know about copyright and educational fair use as well as many other resources to help you determine what you can and cannot copy as you homeschool.
BevK April 25th, 2007
Follow the link below to an interesting blog post from a mom with intimate knowledge of homeschooling who says she will likely never homeschool.
Here’s a bit of what she has to say.
I put “personal experience” at the top of the list because, although my mother’s homeschooling efforts taught me much about homeschooling, they also taught me much about homeschooling–in particular, about the necessity of really being able to evaluate your situation and determine what will best work in your given situation, and for all parties involved. I certainly do not think that my siblings suffered significant harm as a result of her efforts. I believe that there are things each of them would have changed about the whole situation, but that’s understandable. However, I don’t think the experience inspired a lifelong love of learning in any of them, which is certainly sad, because that is something my mother does possess, and was certainly one of her motivating factors in removing them from the public school environment.
Read the rest at Word, Words.
BevK April 24th, 2007
The Scripps National Spelling Bee will begin charging $100 per participating school next year for any school system that participates in the spelling bee. What does this fee of $100 per participating school mean for homeschoolers? Apparently, the $100 fee will be charged to any homeschool association while individual families will be charged $30.
More information here.
BevK April 24th, 2007
Our family has been studying the comedies of Shakespeare this last year. We’ve combined two sets of Teaching Company lectures with watching movies of a number of the plays. Right now we’re reading The Merchant of Venice.
At the Corner yesterday, Stanley Kurtz wrote a post about vanishing Shakespeare, pertaining to Shakespeare vanishing from the college curriculum for English majors, that was interesting reading. He also goes into why Shakespeare is vanishing, and it’s not the difficulty with language that some might believe.
Read the post and follow his links for more on this topic.
BevK April 11th, 2007
I just discovered a great site for finding out more about those annoying phone calls that you can’t identify who they are from. http://whocalled.us
You can enter a phone number and find out what other people have said about that number. Today I got a call on my cell with no message left. It was potentially from someone I knew, but I didn’t recognize the number. So, I googled…my standard response…and this time found Who Called Us because this number was in their system. I discovered it was one of those annoying telemarketing calls in Spanish. So was the other missed call on the cell phone.
BevK April 10th, 2007
It’s hard to imagine that if the homeschool movement hadn’t taken off that some of these different educational models would have every been tried. I believe that its a good thing that diversity is finding its way into education. The stranglehold that the teacher’s unions have held on it are finally being broken as people see that it’s not the only game in town and that other educational methods can be as if not more effective.
“There are so many children in schools, whether public or private, who are not successful, who are not doing well, and many of them slip through the cracks, or they become labeled as failures, and there’s nowhere for them to go,” Rose said.
“For parents who are looking for something else and either don’t want to homeschool or would like to homeschool some but also would like their children to be in a private school, I feel like we’re offering a very good and needed alternative.”
