Today we're going to start seeds!
This is something I've wished we could do for years...but our apartment didn't have a place with sunlight for them (unless we'd placed them next to daddy's side of the bed, and you know where that would've led - theyd've been kicked over and ground into the carpeting the first night!)
THIS year we have our sunroom at the new house with a ready-made ledge for our seeds!
AND the dollar store (Gosh, I love the Dollar Store) had seed trays & starter soil for $1 each AND their seeds are 10c a packet! If you have a DOLLAR TREE near you I highly recommed!
I also got some spring bulbs (never knew there were such things!) to plant which are supposed to pop quickly!
I'll post photos & details later & we hope to track our growing progress here on the blog!
Until next time, the immortal words of Robin Williams:
"Spring is nature's way of saying LET'S PARTY!"
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
InHome Conference Recovery
WHEW!!!
It's been over a week, and we're just starting to feel like we're "back to normal"...although "normal" isn't really a term to be tossed about lightly, is it?
Not sure if you saw the WONDERFUL article about our conference in the suburban DAILY HERALD - front page spread, too! Here's a link http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=277380 check it out!
Today we're baking a Guiness Cheesecake and making Guiness bread to take to Daddy-O's aunt's annual St. Patty's Day bash. After the baking we're going to play with our Thomas Jefferson Ed group at the park & enjoy the 70-Degrees-In-March temperatures while they last...Tomorrow is only forecasted to be in the 40's - that's Chicagoland!
I have lots and lots of post ideas bouncing around in my overloaded brain...and shall attempt to eke out some computer time in the very near future...
Happy St. Patrick's Day!
It's been over a week, and we're just starting to feel like we're "back to normal"...although "normal" isn't really a term to be tossed about lightly, is it?
Not sure if you saw the WONDERFUL article about our conference in the suburban DAILY HERALD - front page spread, too! Here's a link http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=277380 check it out!
Today we're baking a Guiness Cheesecake and making Guiness bread to take to Daddy-O's aunt's annual St. Patty's Day bash. After the baking we're going to play with our Thomas Jefferson Ed group at the park & enjoy the 70-Degrees-In-March temperatures while they last...Tomorrow is only forecasted to be in the 40's - that's Chicagoland!
I have lots and lots of post ideas bouncing around in my overloaded brain...and shall attempt to eke out some computer time in the very near future...
Happy St. Patrick's Day!
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
It's the most wonderful time of the year!
We'll be off to our annual family "mini-vacation" tomorrow...The INHome Conference!
This year, I am once again making all of the signage for the event...Plus teaching three workshops, so I'm a very busy woman today & tomorrow finalizing all of the signs and getting my materials ready for my workshops.
I'm teaching "Eat Your Art" - a cake decorating workshop for ages 10 & up
"Breathe & Relax" - breathing exercises & relaxation techniques for adults
and "Crafty Knitting" for teens & adults - knitting using unusual materials!
The kids are almost as excited as they are the day before Christmas :)
This year the girl is doing these workshops:
Barn Building & 1800's Chores (the boy did this one last year and LOVED it)
Wrap Around Bracelet & Necklace
Colorful Face Art
Making Funky Frames
Paper yourself at the DIY Spa
Silly Science
The boy:
Breaking Secret Codes
Build a Model Car
Science Jim's cork-flinging catapults
Silly Science
As a family we're going to have Animal Encounters & build Fairy & Gnome Houses, and experience the duPage Valley Settlers... I'll hope to blog about the workshops daddy-o & I attend after the conference...and I'm trying to make a point of taking more photos this year...
You can check out the conference web page at www.homeeducatorsconference.org
Maybe I'll see you there!
This year, I am once again making all of the signage for the event...Plus teaching three workshops, so I'm a very busy woman today & tomorrow finalizing all of the signs and getting my materials ready for my workshops.
I'm teaching "Eat Your Art" - a cake decorating workshop for ages 10 & up
"Breathe & Relax" - breathing exercises & relaxation techniques for adults
and "Crafty Knitting" for teens & adults - knitting using unusual materials!
The kids are almost as excited as they are the day before Christmas :)
This year the girl is doing these workshops:
Barn Building & 1800's Chores (the boy did this one last year and LOVED it)
Wrap Around Bracelet & Necklace
Colorful Face Art
Making Funky Frames
Paper yourself at the DIY Spa
Silly Science
The boy:
Breaking Secret Codes
Build a Model Car
Science Jim's cork-flinging catapults
Silly Science
As a family we're going to have Animal Encounters & build Fairy & Gnome Houses, and experience the duPage Valley Settlers... I'll hope to blog about the workshops daddy-o & I attend after the conference...and I'm trying to make a point of taking more photos this year...
You can check out the conference web page at www.homeeducatorsconference.org
Maybe I'll see you there!
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Trenton last night
So...once again, here I go turning this into a pet blog...Seems like the only thing I have a minute to type about lately!
Yesterday I bought the dog a new stuffed tiger. He guts them pretty quickly, but he just loves 'em, so we generally pick a couple up at the Dollar Store - this tiger was a splurge at $2 at Walgreens...Anyhow - I was lying on the sofa reading a mag last night, and Trent came up to join me, and was lying near my feet...I got up, and when I came back into the living room 10 or so minutes later - he was like this...
I think he likes the toy, no?
Yesterday I bought the dog a new stuffed tiger. He guts them pretty quickly, but he just loves 'em, so we generally pick a couple up at the Dollar Store - this tiger was a splurge at $2 at Walgreens...Anyhow - I was lying on the sofa reading a mag last night, and Trent came up to join me, and was lying near my feet...I got up, and when I came back into the living room 10 or so minutes later - he was like this...
I think he likes the toy, no?
Monday, February 09, 2009
Underground Railroad Resource list
The little girl is currently doing a unit on the Civil War with her Thomas Jefferson Education group, The Liberty Belles. The book they are currently reading for the club is Runaway to Freedom by Barbara Smucker, which is out of print, but available used on Amazon.com. We are really enjoying the book, which I imagine may be out of print due it being "politically incorrect" in this day & age(mainly the derogatory term used by the white folks in the book). I definitely recommend the book if you're kids are ages 6-11 and are interested in learning about the slave experience with this age appropriate, fictional tale.
I've also accumulated a pretty nice list of web resources for studying the Underground Railroad, as I've coordinated a field trip on the URR for the last several years running. If you're in the Chicagoland area, I HIGHLY recommend this event, which takes place annually at Pilcher Park in Joliet. It's been a child and family favorite each time I've coordinated. Plan a field trip for your group next year, or attend the family event which takes place one weekend only. These events take place in January and February. You can check out ALL of Pilcher Park's field trip opportunities by clicking HERE
Anyhow...I thought I would list my resources here, for those of you who may be interested in learning more about the Underground Railroad this February, in honor of Black History Month. Enjoy!
Later this week I intend to post a list of our favorite books and music related to the URR and Black History, and hopefully a list of field trip opportunities in the Chicagoland area, too!
The Underground Railroad in Illinois
Freedom Trails to Legacies
Underground Railroad Paths & Trails, Illinois
Wikipedia list of Underground RR locations
National Geographic's
EXCELLENT interactive Underground RR site
PBS's African's In America, another EXCELLENT resource, including teacher guides
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center website - an extremely comprehensive resource site, also covers slavery today
State by state list of nationally registered URR sites includes one in nearby Ottawa Illinois
Scholastic's interactive Underground RR - love this one!
Comprehensive google book list
Smithsonian's amazing list of downloadable (FREE) lesson plans - this page has some slavery-undergroundRR items
I've also accumulated a pretty nice list of web resources for studying the Underground Railroad, as I've coordinated a field trip on the URR for the last several years running. If you're in the Chicagoland area, I HIGHLY recommend this event, which takes place annually at Pilcher Park in Joliet. It's been a child and family favorite each time I've coordinated. Plan a field trip for your group next year, or attend the family event which takes place one weekend only. These events take place in January and February. You can check out ALL of Pilcher Park's field trip opportunities by clicking HERE
Anyhow...I thought I would list my resources here, for those of you who may be interested in learning more about the Underground Railroad this February, in honor of Black History Month. Enjoy!
Later this week I intend to post a list of our favorite books and music related to the URR and Black History, and hopefully a list of field trip opportunities in the Chicagoland area, too!
The Underground Railroad in Illinois
Freedom Trails to Legacies
Underground Railroad Paths & Trails, Illinois
Wikipedia list of Underground RR locations
National Geographic's
EXCELLENT interactive Underground RR site
PBS's African's In America, another EXCELLENT resource, including teacher guides
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center website - an extremely comprehensive resource site, also covers slavery today
State by state list of nationally registered URR sites includes one in nearby Ottawa Illinois
Scholastic's interactive Underground RR - love this one!
Comprehensive google book list
Smithsonian's amazing list of downloadable (FREE) lesson plans - this page has some slavery-undergroundRR items
Saturday, February 07, 2009
The best collection of homeschool/unschool quotes...
I came across this collection of quotes while surfing around the net...Enjoy!
"It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry."
-John Taylor Gatto
"I never have let schooling interfere with my education."
Mark Twain
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
Albert Einstein
"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself."
George Bernard Shaw
"School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, and brutal violations of common sense and common decency."
H.L. Mencken
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
Albert Einstein
"What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook."
Henry David Thoreau
"How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it."
Alexandre Dumas
"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you."
John Updike
"I do not believe much in education. Each man ought to be his own model, however frightful that may be."
Albert Einstein
"My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school."
Margaret Mead
"I loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school. I like to be taught to read and write and add and then be left alone."
Woody Allen
"Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
Oscar Wilde
"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all."
Paul Simon
"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."
Ivan Illich in his book Deschooling Society
"Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind concieves of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessable only to those who carry the proper tags."
Ivan Illich
"Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know."
G K Chesterton
"I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom"
Sigrid Undset (Nobel Prize winner)
"The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school." George Bernard Shaw
"There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school"
George Bernard Shaw (Nobel Prize winner)
"Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities."
Seymour Papert
"It is much easier to condemn a child than to understand a child."
Jiddu Krishnamurti
"One who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman." Gandhi
"I have not the least doubt that school developed in me nothing but what was evil and left the good untouched."
Edvard Grieg
"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."
Gertrude Stein
"Our aim in education is to give a full life. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking - the strain would be too great - but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest."
Charlotte Mason
"In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it...and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself."
Grace Llewellyn
"Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mundane educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom, go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts." - Frank Zappa
"the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions."
- Noam Chomsky
SOURCES :
(1) http://www.school-survival.net/quotes.php
(2)http://www.homeschool.co.uk/resource/homeschooling-and-education-quotes.html
(3) http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6529/index3.html
(4) http://www.nyctophilia.net/unschool/quotes.html
___________________________________________
BOOKS :
- An Underground History of American Education, by John Taylor Gatto
- Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto
- If You Want To Be Rich & Happy - Don't Go To School, by Robert Kiyosaki
- Teenage Liberation Handbook, by Grace Llewellyn
- Field Day, by Matt Hern
"It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry."
-John Taylor Gatto
"I never have let schooling interfere with my education."
Mark Twain
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
Albert Einstein
"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself."
George Bernard Shaw
"School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, and brutal violations of common sense and common decency."
H.L. Mencken
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
Albert Einstein
"What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook."
Henry David Thoreau
"How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it."
Alexandre Dumas
"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you."
John Updike
"I do not believe much in education. Each man ought to be his own model, however frightful that may be."
Albert Einstein
"My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school."
Margaret Mead
"I loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school. I like to be taught to read and write and add and then be left alone."
Woody Allen
"Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
Oscar Wilde
"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all."
Paul Simon
"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."
Ivan Illich in his book Deschooling Society
"Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind concieves of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessable only to those who carry the proper tags."
Ivan Illich
"Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know."
G K Chesterton
"I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom"
Sigrid Undset (Nobel Prize winner)
"The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school." George Bernard Shaw
"There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school"
George Bernard Shaw (Nobel Prize winner)
"Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities."
Seymour Papert
"It is much easier to condemn a child than to understand a child."
Jiddu Krishnamurti
"One who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman." Gandhi
"I have not the least doubt that school developed in me nothing but what was evil and left the good untouched."
Edvard Grieg
"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."
Gertrude Stein
"Our aim in education is to give a full life. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking - the strain would be too great - but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest."
Charlotte Mason
"In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it...and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself."
Grace Llewellyn
"Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mundane educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom, go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts." - Frank Zappa
"the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions."
- Noam Chomsky
SOURCES :
(1) http://www.school-survival.net/quotes.php
(2)http://www.homeschool.co.uk/resource/homeschooling-and-education-quotes.html
(3) http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6529/index3.html
(4) http://www.nyctophilia.net/unschool/quotes.html
___________________________________________
BOOKS :
- An Underground History of American Education, by John Taylor Gatto
- Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto
- If You Want To Be Rich & Happy - Don't Go To School, by Robert Kiyosaki
- Teenage Liberation Handbook, by Grace Llewellyn
- Field Day, by Matt Hern
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
John Taylor Gatto
I'm currently reading the latest of John Taylor Gatto's EXCELLENT books on schooling, Weapons of Mass Instruction. It's, as are all of Mr. Gatto's books, an excellent and mind-boggling look into the history of compulsory schooling in our nation. I found this nice piece of video with Mr. Gatto, and though I'd share it here...For those of you who might be unfamiliar with Gatto, he was a 3 time New York City teacher of the year, and also won Teacher of the Year in NY state...He retired from teaching on the OpEd page of the New York times - you can read that letter HERE
Re-familiarizing myself with John's writings always seems to give me a great booter shot in the arm when I may be having those "now, WHY are we doing this?" moments...
Re-familiarizing myself with John's writings always seems to give me a great booter shot in the arm when I may be having those "now, WHY are we doing this?" moments...
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