HS Blog - Homeschool Blog

BevK July 23rd, 2007

At Mom is Teaching Summer Minor has posted on whether or not homeschoolers can keep every bad influence away from their children by homeschooling.

But it made me wonder if homeschooling can really combat some of the negative things in the world we don’t want our children exposed to too soon. Even away from the peer pressure in schools, the social pressure for women to be thin and beautiful beyond reality is everywhere.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you think there are just some thigns that will creep in no matter how we guard our children? Is that necessarily a bad thing?

The answer is obviously we can’t keep everything away from them. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing or even a goal we should try to attain. I think homeschooling when done properly allows parents to see the influences in their children’s lives more readily because we’re literally there with them more of the time. It still requires open ears and eyes, you can blind yourself to your children’s struggles by deeming it impossible for them to ever engage in or think about something, but that would be foolish. Homeschooling also allows parents to establish better communications with their children. They can still be autocratic and overbearing and blow the opportunity, but most homeschoolers I know can sit down with their children and have serious discussions about serious things. The world is waiting for them when they finally leave your doorstep. Dealing with the things that they encounter at youth group or even while visiting another homeschool friend is part of raising kids.

Hat Tip: Homeschool Buzz

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BevK July 19th, 2007

And the need for better art education.

The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture’s celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young. There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child’s imagination, and we’ve relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.

Dana Gioia believes that we can do better at elevating recognition and appreciation of our living artists, thinkers, and scientists.

The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.

One of the things we’ve tried to do at the Eclectic Homeschool Online is provide arts education resources. But even then, we tend to focus on the masters from the past. Part of the problem is that modern “art” is often unintelligible, dark, or sacrilegious, so we ignore it. But perhaps it isn’t educational resources that are the key. As Gioia notes it’s participation, an area that homeschoolers should have an advantage.

What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens? Curiously, it isn’t income, geography or even education. It depends on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts. These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of individual awareness and social responsibility.

Read the entire article at OpinionJournal.com.

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BevK July 18th, 2007

Parents ‘unschool’ kids to spark love of learning
This is another in the string of articles on unschooling that have been published over the last year or so.

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BevK July 14th, 2007

The SAT got him into Harvard from a small Iowa town. But now, CHARLES MURRAY wants to abolish the test. It’s unnecessary and, worse, a negative force in American life.

His conclusion:

There is poignance in calling for an end to a test conceived for such a noble purpose. But the SAT score, intended as a signal flare for those on the bottom, has become a badge flaunted by those on top. We pay a steep educational and cultural price for a test that no one really needs.

Read the whole article at: American.com: Abolish the SAT

Hat Tip: The Corner

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BevK July 14th, 2007

We’re still in historical mode at the Eclectic Homeschool Online. We’ve gotten the second installment of Loving History and also FrontPorch History. Our focus this update is world history, and EHO has all kinds of world history resources to explore. We’ve also added several homeschool publishers to the section in the Eclectic Homeschool Resource Center featuring specific publishers. These include Memoria Press, Yesterday’s Classics, and Bethlehem Books, in addition to Beautiful Feet Press which was already featured in the section.

Feature Articles

Loving History: Part II
What are the fun extras of history study, and how can you incorporate them into your busy homeschool schedule? Let Tammy Cardwell take you on a history adventure.

FrontPorch History: Telling the Tale
“I close my eyes and drift on clouds of memory. Do I know where I am going? Perhaps. I may return to an oft-visited time, or I may stumble upon a memory long forgotten.” Join Tammy Cardwell as she shows us how to practice the art of remembering to enhance our family history.

Focus - World History

Character Studies in History
Shakespeare had a knack for making history meaningful. True, some may question the accuracy of his portrayals of historical figures and events, but the essential message of good and evil, loyalty and betrayal, and the pursuit of power are a part of his stories just as they are a part of history. I don’t mean to take anything away from the Bard in this article by suggesting that his works not be on your social studies reference shelf. Instead, I hope I can encourage you and your students to imitate his craft by turning a few history lessons into character studies.

Historic Games - Playing History
My favorite resources for adding interest to history stories are those resources that help children imagine what it would be like for them to live in a particular period of history. Games are a part of every child’s life. Learning about the games played in other parts of the world adds a personal dimension to geography studies. Playing games that were played in Ancient Egypt or medieval England will do the same for history studies.

Online History Games
How do you make history fun? Turn it into a game. Here are some online games that will add a pinch of pizzazz to your homeschool history studies.

History of Christianity Unit Study
It is estimated there are over two billion Christians in the world today, and Christianity continues to grow especially in Africa and South America. Christianity began as a sect of Judaism whose followers believed that Jesus Christ was the Jewish messiah. The student of Christian history seeks to answer the questions of who Jesus was, what his purpose was, and whether he achieved that purpose especially as it relates to the doctrines and institutions of the Christian church.

History of Math Unit Study
Although we may think of them as nerds fiddling with their calculators or talking in incomprehensible terms, mathematicians throughout history have made important contributions to the progress mankind has made. Without mathematicians we would not be able to build tall buildings, visit the moon, or email one another on our computers. History buffs and the mathematically inclined will both enjoy the broad scope of the history of mathematics. Ideally, this study should be used with upper level students who have at least a beginning understanding of algebra. How Math Works by Carol Vorderman makes many of the topics accessible to younger students.

Ancient History Art History Resources
Incorporating art history into our history studies is the easiest way to give our children an appreciation of the role art has played in the development of our culture and the cultures of other peoples. Art history resources can be expensive.

Homeschool Art History: Gothic Cathedrals
During the Renaissance, the term gothic was coined as a term of derision for what the cultural elite of the time thought of as barbaric. The term was applied to the architecture of northern Europe, which was considered barbaric compared to the architecture of Greece and Rome. Gothic cathedral architecture is known for its great height with the eye drawn heavenward by the pointed spires and arches. Gothic cathedrals built from the tenth century can be found in greatest number in northern Europe, France and England especially. But there are examples in other countries.

Clothing in the Renaissance - Visual Manna
Can you use your imagination and design a beautiful garment for a Renaissance king and queen? History Through Art

World History Reviews

World History Resources

Homeschool Publishers
Beautiful Feet Press
Bethlehem Books
Memoria Press
Yesterday’s Classics

Science Department

Science Spot
Help Spot Galaxies
Because the human brain is much better at recognizing patterns, astronomers launched a site this week recruiting the public to help identify spiral galaxies on sky photos. Instructions are offered on the site. The first million viewers are promised to see a portion of sky never before witnessed by human eyes.

New Reviews

History Resources
* Ancient India: Custom Designed Project Pack
* Buffalo Days
* John Ransom’s Diary (CD set)
* World War II: A Legacy of Letters: One Soldier’s Journey

Other Resources
* Bedroom Cleaning for Kids: A Fun Step-by-Step System to Clean a Messy Room (Clean N’ Flip chart)
* Big Book of No-Object Object Talks
* Eat Your Way around the World
* Eat Your Way through the USA
* English-Greek Reverse Interlinear New Testament
* The Home Educator’s Tutor: Winter 2006 (Magazine
* Homeschooling with TLC in the Elementary Grades: A practical Guide with Fun and Effective Teaching Tips
* I Just Am: A Story of Down’s Syndrome Awareness and Tolerance
* Selections from The Flower Fables (CD set)
* Time4Learning Online Educational Software
* Zone Cleaning for Kids: A Fun Step-by-Step System to Clean the Kitchen, Bathroom, and Living Room (Clean N’ Flip Chart)

EHO Resource Center

Featured Resource July
100 Top Picks For Homeschool Curriculum: Choosing the Right Curriculum and Approach for Your Child’s Learning Style
by Cathy Duffy
$14.95 - 32% Off
If someone had asked me what ground should be covered in a book designed to assist homeschoolers in selecting curriculum, my list would have included everything Cathy Duffy covers here, and less. Right, no matter how thorough I could have been in my suggestions, she’s thought of even more. The only way you could get better help than this is if you were able to hire a qualified curriculum consultant who could work with you on a one-on-one basis. Cathy Duffy is the perfect guide to chose when venturing into the curriculum world. —Tammy Cardwell, EHO

New Resources

The Best Book of Ancient Rome
by Deborah Murrell
$6.95
With this fact-filled, beautifully illustrated book, young readers can marvel at gladiators and chariot races, meet powerful Roman leaders, and find out about everyday life in ancient Rome.

Caedmon’s Song
by Ruth Ashby, Bill Slavin
$12.00 - 25% Off
Long ago, when hardly anyone knew how to read or write, people recited stories by heart. They sat around the hearth at night, telling of heroes and monsters, great battles fought, and fortunes made and lost. On feast days, they passed the harp around the room so that everyone could sing a poem. But when the harp reached Caedmon, his thoughts dried up. He opened his mouth and nothing at all came out. It was embarrassing. No wonder he hated poetry.
A quiet man who loved tending his cows, Caedmon couldn’t recite poetry because he thought he had no stories to tell. Then after one especially upsetting experience, Caedmon stormed home, fell asleep in the barn, and began to dream. That night, everything changed for Caedmon . . .
With jovial, heartwarming illustrations and beautifully illuminated letters, this tale is based on the true story of Caedmon, the seventh-century cowherd who became known as the first English poet.

The Children’s Plutarch: Tales of the Romans
by F. J. Gould
$9.95
Collection of stories of ancient Romans skillfully adapted from Plutarch’s Lives, with emphasis placed on the characters of the individuals portrayed. Excellent as an introduction to the biographies of Plutarch. Includes three black and white illustrations by Walter Crane. Suitable for children ages 9 and up.

Knight: A Noble Guide for Young Squires
by Dugald A. Steer
$3.60 - 80% Off
What if your father were held captive and it were up to you to strap on your armor and ride valiantly to his rescue? With just such occasions in mind, one noble knight pours his years of experience into this instructive volume. How to train and joust, ride off on adventure into battle, use and care for a knight’s weapons, and live by the code of chivalry–here is everything a knight-to-be could want to know. Girded with pops, flaps, booklets, and even a squire’s board game, this magnificently illustrated book, dressed in a shining foiled cover, gives courageous young squires a chance to fulfill their destiny.

The World Almanac for Kids Puzzler Deck: World History and Geography: Ages 11-13
by Lynn Brunelle
$9.95
The No. 1 selling kids’ almanac becomes a fun educational tool in these portable decks tailored by age and subject. Seventy-five curriculum-based activities encourage children to develop their comprehension of a specific subject reading, math, history, and geography. The decks are packed with all-new brain-engaging games, puzzles, riddles, fascinating facts, and sidesplitting jokes.

Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America
by Andrew Ferguson
Before he grew up and became one of Washington’s most respected reporters and editors, Andrew Ferguson was, of all things, a Lincoln buff — with the photos hung on his bedroom wall to prove it. Decades later, Ferguson’s latent buffdom is reignited. In Land of Lincoln, he embarks on a curiosity-fueled coast-to-coast journey through contemporary Lincoln Nation, encountering everything from hatred to adoration to opportunism and all manner of reaction in between. He attends a national conference of Lincoln impersonators; attends a leadership conference based on Lincoln’s “management style”; drags his family across the three-state-long and now defunct Lincoln Heritage Trail; and even manages to hold one of five original copies of the Gettysburg Address. Along the way, he weaves in enough history to hook readers of presidential biographies and popular histories while providing the engaging voice and style of the best narrative journalism. This is an entertaining, unexpected, and big-hearted celebration of Lincoln and his enduring influence on the country he helped create.

Thank You

Your continued support for EHO by using our Resource Center to purchase your homeschool resources or to buy other things through Amazon.com is an enormous help in keeping EHO online. You help pay the bills at EHO every time you buy through us or enter Amazon.com through our storefront. We receive a small percentage of every purchase, whether the item was listed on our page or not. That small percentage equals a big blessing for EHO. We operate on a shoestring, and our Amazon revenues are a major part of that shoestring. If you find our articles, reviews and resources helpful, please support us by buying through our store. Thank you.
Look for our Shop Amazon - Fund EHO Link posted throughout the EHO website or visit the EHO Resource Center main page at http://eclectichomeschool.org/store/

Eclectic Homeschool Resource Directory

One new listing has been added to our Resource Directory, which brings our new total to 543 listings in 87 categories. If you’re interested in listing your business in the directory, please visit the following page to submit a commercial or non-commercial website.

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The Lord bless and keep you,
Beverly Krueger
Eclectic Homeschool Online
http://eclectichomeschool.org

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BevK July 13th, 2007

Home schooling gives youngsters good start in life

NICOLA Yeo is an educated woman with a background working as a secretary in the City of London, but is the first to say she is not “the brain of Britain”.
Despite that she is now educating her sons Harry (9) and Thomas (8) at home and has seen them make more progress in the last year than they ever did at school.

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BevK July 13th, 2007

Harry Potter Christian Literature or Not?

Nancy Brown says it is.

Homeschooling mother and literature expert Nancy Brown once banned all “Harry Potter” books from her home, having heard witness after witness to the book’s “evil” content. … “This was a story about good and evil,” she said. “The choices that Harry Potter had to make were important. His momentary despairs, his aching feelings for his parents – these things resonated with me.”

“I thought, ‘Gee, these books really do have good themes, although they were couched a story about witches and wizards,’” she said.

Caryl Matrisciana says not.

Caryl Matrisciana, a well-known expert on contemporary cults, paganism and the occult, agrees with Brown that parents should serve as a filter for their children, but she feels they should start by banning “Harry Potter” from the home.

“There is no doubt children are being seduced into believing the dark-arts are ‘fun,’ benign and a positive power for personal enablement,” she said. “But responsible parents must be aware that …the supernatural world is a reality and dabbling with its dark-side is not harmless.”

Read the entire article and draw your own conclusions. My opinion is if the leftover tuna fish doesn’t seem quite right, you don’t eat it. Is it really necessary to have children read a book that is on its surface occult to get to Christian themes (if in fact there really are Christian themes to the books)?

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BevK July 13th, 2007

Reading, Writing, And Regulation
This article is a fine example of how you can structure a story, cherry pick your quotes, and come up with justified conclusion that fits what you wanted to say all along.

Children are falling through the cracks in South Carolina because one method of homeschooling doesn’t require testing. That’s the conclusion. To support this, the author uses an obviously separated family with an 8-year-old son who is struggling with reading to conclude that children are falling through the cracks. The father, who is opposed to his son being homeschooled (oh, and a concerned paternal grandmother), tells us that he has had a reading expert watch a video tape of his son struggling to read a first grade level book. That expert says that the level of the book was frustrating for the boy. Ta da! Educational neglect it is. Of course the reading expert couldn’t say anything about why the boy was struggling. Were their developmental issues? Did the boy have some kind of learning disability? Finally in the second to last paragraph of the article we’re told that the mother is getting professional help for her son’s reading struggle. Oh, maybe it’s not educational neglect.

The article uses this family’s story to support it’s claim that children are falling through the cracks, but it’s not true in this case. The article also spends time discussing homeschool associations and their fly by night character. It seems if the real problem is the reliability of these associations to keep records available to homeschool families, then that should be addressed. The notion that the state is somehow more concerned about children’s educational well-being than their parents is just balderdash. Not all teenagers are hoodlums, those some teenagers are. We don’t treat all teenagers like hoodlums. This is true of homeschool parents. We should not treat all homeschool parents like the few people that lock their children in closets or truly neglect them.

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BevK July 13th, 2007

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is poised to open an investigation into the endorsement of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee by the Homeschool Legal Defense Association Political Action Committee, after email traffic and other materials from the group were passed to the Commission by several rival campaigns.

The HSLDA PAC last week planned to endorse Huckabee, but all of the internal email correspondence and notification of the endorsement took place, not via the HSLDA PAC, which can legally endorse, but the 501c3 HSLDA nonprofit, which is barred from overt political activity, such as fundraising for a candidate or endorsing.

More: American Spectator

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BevK July 3rd, 2007

My husband noticed that he’d gotten what was obviously spam in his inbox, but this time with a new feature. There was a pdf document attached. I found 4 of the same kind of emails in my EHO editor inbox today. Here’s the scoop:

Security experts are warning email recipients of an emerging spam technique that for the first time is attaching PDF files to emails in a new attempt to dodge spam filters.

According to email security vendor Marshal spammers are switching their technique from image spam to PDF attached spam. After struggling to find ways to fool spam filters they are now figuring out new ways of getting their messages across.

“The fact that the message contains a PDF attachment which is a very common business-related file format is designed to lower the recipient’s suspicions that the message might be spam,” said Bradley Anstis director of product management at Marshal.

PDF files can pose other problems, which the article explains. Read the full article here.

As always, don’t open or click on links that are sent to you from someone you don’t know and keep your antivirus software up-to-date.

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