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1. Grid Perplexors logic puzzles. “Would you like to know why that is my favorite?” Of course I did want to know. “Because they’re fun! Just. Plain. Fun.” He is zipping through the first book and getting quite good; Laurie Bluedorn of Trivium Pursuit has given us a copy of their fantastic logic course for ages 12 and up, The Fallacy Detective, for me to review. The review is coming soon when I have finished reading all of it. However, as a person who loved formal logic study so much that her university actually created new logic courses for her, I can say to anyone considering purchasing this book that it is a quality logic course for children and adults. I think the age level is a bit iffy, to be honest – I think a mature 9 or 10-year-old could handle the subject just fine – but otherwise, it is blowing me away chapter by chapter, and looks, in Shorty’s words, just plain FUN.  So I am now debating with myself whether I should get him another Grid Perplexors book when he finishes this one, or if I should jump right into The Fallacy Detective. Clearly Shorty enjoys logic as a course of study, as he really loved Critical Thinking Press’s Mind Benders books last year, too.
2. Tangrams. We have a little box of tangram pieces. It comes with something like 80 cards, each with a pattern you can make with the pieces. He’s done about 20 so far “but they’re getting easier and I could handle harder ones.” I’m looking around to see what our options are for more challenging tangrams and tangram-like activities and games. I have my eye on a few games from RainbowResource for Christmas, and in the meantime, I’m thinking he’d have fun making his own set out of craft foam to play with. Adds to list. Yep.
3. Developmental Math (Level 8). This one actually did shock me, considering that before we discovered DM last year, my child literally cried every math lesson, and since I wanted him to be happy and could tell he did like math but wasn’t finding the right approach to it, we tried at least 10 different math curricula prior to it. I asked why he liked it, though, and I thought his response was quite telling: “The way it teaches multiplication is really different than the other stuff we’ve learned math with. It helps me see it like in my head. And they give you examples of how it applies in real life, so you don’t think you’re just doing problems on a page, you’re figuring out real things. I didn’t realize math was, like, you know, useful.”  Cue sheepish look from Mom. And he had more to say: “I like the graphics, too.” Of course he noticed the graphics. What did he like about them? “It has interesting pictures that actually have to do with the problems.”  As opposed to… “Well, the other math workbooks we got with pictures were of things like… the circus and fish and puppies.” I smiled. Illustrations on a worksheet need to be relevant, not distractingly decorative. Of course. Common sense that many curriculum printers seem to miss. “It just makes multiplication easy to understand and I like learning about it now.” Yay! I admire my own restraint, at not weeping for joy at hearing that.  This is our third DM workbook that we’ve worked through, and he’s quite whizzing through it; where before he was horribly behind “grade level” in math (seriously, I’m a big “kids are at whatever level they’re at, and that’s that” advocate, but he was struggling with one-digit addition less than a year ago and begging for me to help him improve), it now looks that, at this pace with DM, he will be ready for pre-algebra by 8th grade. That’s a big leap. This one’s a keeper, for sure.
4. Exploring Creation With Astronomy. I’m pleased, because this was a big chunk of my budget this year. He elaborated: ”I like the experiments and the lapbooks and notebooking projects.” I expressed surprise, because he normally doesn’t like the hands-on stuff. “Well, these are easy and not repetitive, so they’re interesting.” Is it the subject matter itself that he found interesting – space – or the way the material is presented? “Definitely the presentation,” he said, with jazz hands (hee), but conceded, “But space is a cool subject.” I think the physics and chemistry course from the same writer, due out next year, is going to be a natural 7th grade science option, if he is so inclined.
5. All About My Family. This isn’t part of our curriculum, just something I put in his workboxes once a week: a notebooking project we picked up for free from Currclick. He is interviewing one family member per week and finding out a lot about his family on both sides and researching a little geneology. It’s not an assignment, per se; I asked him at the start of the school year if he’d like to do it, and he agreed. “I didn’t know I would enjoy interviewing people this much,” he confessed. It has 30 pages, and he’s doing one page per week, so it’ll take most of the rest of the year, after which we’ll have it professionall spiral-bound as a keepsake

1. Playing on the computer, by which he means playing with GameMaker and PaintShop Pro and making his own little sprites and video game characters.
2. Playing games on the Wii. Also not shocking. Lately he’s gotten a lot of mileage out of Wii Music and Wii Fit, and actually wants a whole slew of Wii Fit accessories and games for Christmas. These are both educational and worthwhile (he has learned a huge amount about composition, rhythm, musical arrangement and musical instruments from Wii Music – it’s amazing, seriously.) And 3 times a week he has a 20 minute PE class with his choice of Wii Sports or Wii Fit.
3. Listening to music. He wants iTunes gift cards for Christmas/ his birthday, so he can download more music. Yes. We’ve officially reached That Age, y’all.
4. Playing music. “I bet you didn’t know that, huh,” he said, looking mischievous. “I didn’t, but I’d guessed!” I replied. I knew he’d developed an interest in playing the guitar again – we tried lessons 2 years ago, but he just wasn’t driven to practice then and it sat there for a year collecting dust before I gave it away on FreeCycle. I think he is mature enough now.  He has a musical instruments bin, but they’re all kid toys, including his keyboard. I’ve long wanted to get him a real keyboard, with real piano lessons, and my grandma is buying him a beginner’s electric guitar and amp for Christmas. The most surprising thing? ”And now that my lip is all better [from the accident 3 weeks ago], I REALLY want to start our recorder lessons together again!” Hee.  Aw.
5. Drawing. I’ve been slacking on the weekly Draw With Children lessons, but even the few we’ve done have considerably improved his drawing ability. He had to draw pictures of his Spanish vocabulary words the other day in his workbook, and I was really impressed with how detailed and proportional they were, even with some attention to perspective. He still hates to color though

I was already not feeling the Ambleside Online Year 2 history books, aside from An Island Story, which, dated biases and all (which are good subject matters for discussions about bias and prejudice anyway), has a surprisingly lively,engaging, kid-friendly writing style.  He’s enjoying The Little Duke and Story of the World Vol 2 quite a bit, but his main interest right now is the Vikings. He’s loving the Vikings, asking lots of questions about them and wanting to find out all about their history. He likes that they “snuck onto” North America 500 years before Columbus, and without all the Indian-cheating, Indian-killing, pillaging, etc. He thinks they’re terribly misunderstood as a culture, and their mythology is inexplicably underrated. Point and point, no? So we are ditching everything but the occasional An Island Story reading, and for now veering into a lapbook and unit study of the book Viking Adventures from HomeschoolShare.com.  “I like all the books. There are just too many of them.”  I can respect that.

He’s still really liking the workboxes, after 7 weeks of use, but I’m starting to have my doubts about how we’re doing it. It’s supposed to foster independence, but all it’s doing for us right now is fostering dependence on me structuring his whole day for him. Unfortunately, due to the autism, Shorty prefers this. So I have been poking around some unschooling lists lately and asking basically how to encourage more self-starting and less dependence on me to dictate his time and energies. I’ve already tried a few tactics, including asking him to fill his own workboxes (I still needed to tell him what to put in them) and taking the numbers off the boxes so he could decide what to do and in what order. None of those attempts went very well; he just really seems to be a Type A plotting kind of personality. But in the meantime, I’m happy to report that most of what we’re doing so far is making the kiddo pretty darn happy, and I guess that’s all that matters.

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Shorty has fine motor delays, and one of the fun ways I’ve found that help him work on them is books and activities from Klutz. I’ve been a big fan of their inexpensive, kid-friendly kits for years. They seem to have stuff tailored for every interest, ability level and age. No, I’m not getting paid to say this

Here is a picture of him threatening to grab my nose with it. LOL.  Next on our agenda is their Potholder making kit.  The nice people at Klutz had the foresight to anticipate the usual “But that’s for GIRLS!!!!!” drama from Shorty and put a little boy on the back cover Somehow I don’t think he’ll be QUITE as enthusiastic about that one, but hey, these are valuable life skills here!

Posted via email from hi, i’m andie.

My son loves maps and state trivia and geography and decided he wanted to learn all 50 states and their capitals by heart. So after a little research, we b ought the Trail Guide to US Geography book from GeoMatters. We’re on week six, and so far, we are very happy with the results. Shorty is learning one state per week instead of cramming two or three states per week as the book recommends. When we get to Florida, our home state, we will spend an extra week or two doing a Florida history and state study lapbook using additional resources as well.

In this way, Shorty will take a little under two years to complete the course, but so far, we’re finding that pace really suits him. He is really digging into each state every day and chatters endlessly about all the cool stuff he’s learning about America.

The book has the same content with questions and activities for three levels: K-3, 4-8 and high school. So you can use the same book for all your kids and do a state study with the whole family, or do it three times with each child and learn totally new information. It also has research skills with atlases, dictionaries, almanacs and other sources, and includes map fun, art projects and other hands-on recommendations. It’s fairly inexpensive for everything you get and you can use the resources for several years.

Here is a link for their online store.

For this curriculum, you’ll need:

- Trail Guide to US Geography – $18.95 – it is $12 on Amazon. This is the spine of the curriculum, with all the daily questions, map projects, and art projects and resources listed for each state, plus an 8-week literature-based study on the fifty states at the end. I don’t know if Shorty will be interested in that.

- Some kind of comprehensive US State atlas – we LOVE the one she recommends, Children’s Illustrated Atlas of the 50 states, which is $10. The author explained to me on the Yahoo! group that no atlas she found was 100% amenable to the questions and approach in her book – all the ones she reviewed lacked this feature or that piece of information, because there seems to be no perfect children’s state atlas around – but that is okay, because a main goal of the course was to teach the child research skills on a global scale, so that if your child can’t find something in the atlas, he knows how to find it elsewhere, or online. I liked that, and so far, I have seen it bear out results.

You’ll also need some kind of access to blank maps. We’ve been really happy with the Uncle Josh book she has for sale – it’s usable for world geography, history, and many other purposes as well, very well worth the $20 on the site, available from Amazon and RainbowResource for $12 or so. I think it’s probably possible to get blank outline maps of each state for free online, but I like having it all there in one place. I make copies on my printer each week. They have all the maps available on CD-ROM for nearly $30, but we found that a little out of our price range. Your family’s mileage may vary, and I think it may be very worthwhile if you have more than one child.

You’ll also need a recent almanac, we got the 2009 paper back almanac from Time Life for about $9, but Time for Kids has a kid-friendly one for the younger set for that much, too. Again, these are resources you’ll use for years and a main purpose of the curriculum is to teach research skills organically. Of course, there are online almanacs and resources which can take the place of a hard copy almanac, but I am really impressed by the do-it-yourself approach to learning research skills.

Finally, they have an 8-week section at the end on learning geography through literature, so for the US geography course, you’ll need a copy of the novel “The Captain’s Dog” about the Lewis and Clark adventures.

There are 2 other recommended resources that are optional from GeoMatters – Geography Through Art, an art project book which can also be used with their world geography curriculum, and Eat Your Way Through the USA, a national recipe book. My son doesn’t enjoy sampling unknown cuisine, so we skipped the recipes, but he has been enjoying the Geography Through Art book’s projects.

It cost me under $50 total, and considering it was for over 2 years’ worth of in-depth hands-on material I didn’t think that was too bad at all! I could probably have cut down on the costs, too, if I had decided to forgo the almanac and the outline maps, yet I don’t regret purchasing either of these. I’m just very impressed with the quality of the materials. If/when Shorty gets done with the US Geography course next year, we’ll definitely consider purchasing their Trail Guide to World Geography materials. They have an additional course, Trail Guide to Bible Geography, which is a survey of geography of the ancient world, but that’s thinking too far ahead for me.

They have a Yahoo! group, on which the author posts quite actively, in case you have any questions not covered by their course samples and detailed FAQs on their main site: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/GeographyTrailGuides/

I should mention that AmblesideOnline has its own literature-based geography studies, using maps and books by Holling C. Holling like “Seabird,” “Minn of the Mississippi” and “Paddle to the Sea.” Unfortunately, for some reason, my son HATES doing geography this way and strongly dislikes all of Holling’s books! So we’re happy with this approach.

We’re on the sixth week of our school year this year, and so far, my son enthusiastically cites geography as his favorite subject, and can tell you all kinds of details about the six states he’s learned about so far, and spends his FREE TIME looking things up on Google and YouTube related to the state he’s studying. I think that speaks for itself!

I have a really good friend of many years, Cybele, who has a little boy Shorty’s age, 11. We’ll call him A11 for anonymity purposes since I’m not sure she’d want me naming her son in public for all the world to see A11 is a highly hands-on, almost exclusively kinesthetic learner who would, if given the chance, spend all his time tinkering with things, learning how things work, building things, etc.

As a highly kinesthetic learner, A11’s best suit wasn’t his organizational skills, and he needed some encouragement and guidance to help him stay on task with more traditional learning, so recently at our parkgroup, I suggested that Cybele might want to check out workboxes as a homeschool organizational system for A11 and her daughter, S9, who loves checklists and is Little Miss Productive   Both because workboxes are a highly visual-kinesthetic method of keeping track of your work progress and because they impart a great and compelling sense of accomplishment to the child, I thought they would be a good fit for her 2 younger kids.

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Here’s a slideshow of the photos we took!

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This message is from a Virgin Mobile user. Enjoy.

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No, not Christmas yet (though I’ve started seeing it in stores!) The fall/ Thanksgiving/ Halloween season!

We don’t celebrate the morbid, scary or macabre aspects of Halloween, and I don’t teach my son to be afraid of death or believe in ghosts, but these little ghosties from FamilyFun were so cute and non-scary, we couldn’t resist printing them out. I gave them to Shorty and he cut them out and taped them to our front door. “The scary one should be eye-level TO SCARE PEOPLE!” he said with a gleam in his eye.

Hee. I can’t imagine anyone being scared by even the growly one of these.

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