Old Time Summer

Category: Tools

  • Lego WeDo Robotics

    Have a new kit to start this week with. We’ll see how it goes.

  • Know Thyself

    It’s Monday, time for “official” education-ing to be happening. I’m getting “them” to do their Latin on Tues. & Thurs., and every day do their “Grammar” & “Spelling Wisdom” & “Creative Writing” & “Math-U-See” & “Catechism Q & A” (Westminster Shorter) …

    Just for starters, trying to get THESE things happening regularly. Hopefully I can get the rest of the art things I need to employ the Art program I have sooner than later. Also need to get some more things to use the Bible/History stuff I have.

    I’m using the rest of this month to get on track and catch-up the very basics, then begin again in January and February with the other things I don’t yet have.

    I’m also using this month for crafty-ness, creative writing, special audio books (holiday stories) and whatever else that happens and is a “learning moment” or whatever.

    One thing I did for my two eldest in early November, I got them each their own day-timer from Target, the made by Franklin-Covey student spiral bound sort, so it started in August. I’m trying to get them to record things they do, places they went, things they NEED to do, etc. Start getting themselves accustomed to organizing themselves in a book. I like it for a semi-journal recording of what I’ve done. I haven’t had one every year, but I have used different calendars similarly, cramming things in here and there, though I haven’t done it to the extent that I have wished I would have through the years.

    Part of what I want my children to learn is “archiving” what they do, learn, read, like, etc. through the years, on paper.

    I found two things of mine from when I was younger in some things I went through in our storage area last week. One is a “slam book” that I started in 1981. I actually only had one friend “sign in” and log her answers, then the other “sign ins” are all me from 1981 to 1990. I had forgotten about it. I’m going to have my children make their own versions later this month.

    The other thing I found is a small spiral bound notebook with 1-year of my life at a church my friend and I started to attend and decided to join, but waited a year to officially do it. I wrote about the people & things we did for that year. I had forgotten about that as well. It’s funny to look back on these things.

    I never had a “diary” that I kept up with. I found them too emo-stupid usually to be able to write one as was thought of should be in a diary when I was young. Like, I looked back at what I wrote the day before or the week before, and felt embarrassed, couldn’t stand what I had written, how childish it seemed afterthefact. Sometimes I feel like that about blog posts, or forum posts, but I don’t actually post as much as I write, because of that I decide while I’m still writing that it’s too NOT what I want to post, so I stop/delete it. I at times am able to just look at it as an editor and re-write it, but usually I don’t. I find that tedious.

    Many times I do write things and then don’t do anything with it, feeling satisfied that I got it organized in my head by writing it out, and don’t save it. I would like to keep a better record of myself …

    I would like my children to keep a good record of themselves through their life. So the things I like to do and want to do I will start doing and have them do them too. It’s good to know where you are and how you got there. Personal journaling/notebooking of life can aide in that journey of understanding.

  • Learning HTML to build pages plus history

    My 10-year-old daughter had expressed interest in knowing what the letters “H T M & L” stood for a few days ago. When she initially asked me I was so stretched and tired from a very long day and the letters sounded familiar but … hmmm. What was she asking about?

    I put her off, feeling really stupid, and during the night, after some rest and waking up, I clicked on what she had asked. Duh, HTML Hyper Text Markup Lang. gee whiz I must have been really tired. I mean really.

    I grew up with typewriters and fat televisions. My first contact with a computer was this strange box with a tiny window that used “floppies” to save information you typed into it. They were big soft 5″+ black things. That was in college.

    The next few years I had contact with better computing, but in the form of some network shell of WordPerfect, and I immediately grasped how to use it and loved coding nice pages to print out. Others in the office had to go to classes to learn things and they came back telling me this and that and I’d show them easier ways to do things than they had learned.

    Another office where I worked had WYSIWYG computers, in other words: macintosh computers. They were fun, but took the challenge of coding a perfect looking paper to print out.

    Later I worked where PC’s were more common and I transferred my early WordPerfect understanding to PC Windows Word Perfect programs and setup cool forms and made pages for a company I worked at for a month.

    More and more history with computers, usually finding macs as the WYSIWYG sort, and I eventually came to Desktop Publishing for my church. It was using Adobe PageMaker and I got the job never having used any program like that before. I learned it super fast and excelled at squishing everything into the monthly paper and making it look nice.

    That job ended because I finally was expecting my first baby. That happened when I literally just started the job, unknown to me for a month. So once that was known my hubby and I went out and got our very own home PC. An HP Pavilion with 16 MB of memory. 1 Gig hard drive. It was a good computer. Sounds funny from this end of things. Anyhow with that came the internet. Before that we hadn’t gone online ever. Never.

    We had AOL to start with and as soon as I could I was up and running with a web page. I learned HTML from various sources and had different pages here and there … we moved to GA from FL and moved away from AOL to the REAL internet. I had more websites. Things changed here and there, but one constant stayed: we were online and I had websites that I made things for, wrote for, updated.

    Something called CSS started and I took to that. I love CSS but don’t understand it to the nth degree I could. One thing with that is that I started using Blogger in 2002 and then switched to Moveable Type when I had a better hosting situation. I still had my websites I did stuff with besides blogging. I eventually moved to Word Press which was pre-.7 something or other at the time. As it has grown, my site coding has diminished. I used to customize templates to the hilt, but have gone back to the simpler way as I have here, using VeryPlainText fairly stock, with plugins and some hand coding in the sidebar or for pages on the different sites I run.

    So then my daughter started bugging me about something I told her about, a good site to learn HTML from.

    I finally gave her this link: http://w3schools.com

    Yesterday she spent some time on the computer and went through all the lessons for HTML on that site. She told me when she was done, and I helped her to organize space on the computer to create with.

    I had her make a new folder and in it had her make a “new text file”. I had her open the file and coached her through what goes where at the top and bottom and talked about nesting codes and being sure to type them correctly and to always end the codes.

    I showed her to “save as …’ that file and then a new webpage will be in that folder, if she saves it with a .html extension, that is, and the “new text file” will stay there ready for a fresh start every time, as long as she uses “save as …” correctly.

    She made her first webpage, just a simple page, one line of text, no formatting. It was sense of accomplishment that she had though.

    No longer am I the only web author, she is one now too, in training, but definitely a web author.

    I spent some time making a new sub-domain for her and my eldest, Russell, and will setup blogs for them, and they’ll have space to put hand coded pages.

    I have been stimulated through this to start hand coding some things again. I really like simple web sites, they can be very rich to look at really. Simplicity in design. I had a reinventing of myself with this same thing some years ago, and Word Press has made me LAZY! I love WP still and will continue to. I just want to get some other stuff going again as well.

    It’s a decent thing to use software to make something, but it’s like knowing how to drive an automatic car only. Driving a manual car brings greater knowledge of driving to an individual, in my opinion, as does knowing how to build a basic webpage from HTML & CSS.

    So my daughter as taken the plunge in learning a new language. I’ll have my eldest son doing the same soon too.

  • Art products

    I bought an art program, via my homeschool coop (which is online) which is an online program itself. There is a list of products to buy to use for the program, but going to Michaels produced only a couple of things, and not the brand names asked for, and going to Staples, Target and Office Max turned up only one more thing (at the latter) and therefore I cannot start the program until I can get the other things.

    Premiere on the list is PRANG crayons. I know what these are and there are NO substitutes for PRANG crayons. I have used them in the past, but currently have none. I firstly found them years ago in a Staples, have seen them nowhere else, but now that I wanted to get a new set for my own personal use (I love to color in coloring books still …) as well as get small boxes for each child in this art program, I can find no brick store carrying PRANG crayons.

    So I’ll have to go online and find an online store that has everything I need, and next time I need a bunch of art stuff, that’s the only way I’ll do it. Lesson learned, wasted energy of my own and gasoline, time and frustration brought to naught.

  • First use of Artes Latinae I

    On Friday I did use the Artes Latinae Level I program through 108 Frames at least. It is a nice program. My eldest, Russell, worked on it also. On Saturday my second child, Victoria worked on it.

    I’m an adult and found it easy to understand and had to force myself to pay more attention to it so as not to have to go back to find out how an earlier frame had an answer to a later frame and I couldn’t remember what it was. I have relaxed my brain over the years some with study methods, so this is a nice program to make one THINK about that and solidly apply themselves forward from there.

    Russell turned 13 just in the last couple of weeks, and was slower than me advancing through the frames, but did understand them easily and get faster as he went along. Victoria is 10 (and almost 1/2) and struggled a bit here and there, but eventually was on-board and going through it faster. She is the one I was most concerned about using it, and I was hopeful it would motivate faster thinking for her, and already I’ve seen progress.

    The point of the first section of Artes Latinae Level I is to get the user familiar with how the program works and to start using better study skills (remembering what you have read). One does learn some facts of Roman origins and some other things along the way, but they are not to be tested on.

  • New Learning Tools for us

    We ordered a Latin course in April. It arrived today, this afternoon! It’s Artes Latinae … which we got as part of the HomeSchooling Co-op (online) we are members of.

    Also we got an online Art course there, with instant access to it. It looks to be very interesting, adding both these programs to our household.

    The other day I also picked up a “complete works of William Shakespeare” to finally get going on some of that in the family.

    Of all this I am most anxious to start. all of it! It’s all needed and wonderful stuff. Living learning. The best kind.

    I was going to do more with it today already, but our Baby Q is too full of energy to start anything new right now. He’s quite the deterent to actually getting things done, with “What’s that?” coming from him most of the time, over and over. He’s so small it gets in the way of other things for us older folk. Baby Q is in a new phase, and has seemed to outgrow most of his baby toys. That plays havoc with computers, books, disks, anything in the kitchen … So he’s ready for some bigger lessons himself, it’s the fun of juggling three different ages 8 to 13 with a toddler in the mix.

  • The reasons for this blog

    I have been blogging since 2002, but have had a website since 1995. Our first child was born in 1996 and recently turned 13 years of age. We have three more children, ranging from 10 years down to nearly 2 years of age.

    We homeschool in a casual sort of way, and the idea of an old-fashioned summer, the way the summer memories of old feel in our minds is the idea of education I have for my children. I want them to remember their young years from that romantic position. That is, the idea of a Monet painting, a blue sky, seaside classic sort of feeling.

    Learning is to be loved, cherished. Many things are learned in very early childhood, and they are very important. The first thing to be learned once ready to learn more officially though is “how to read”. This can be accomplished through many ways, but the first thing that must be learned is “what is the child’s learning style” and then the right method can be chosen to aide them in reading.

    Some children learn to read easily and others take more time. My first two children learned easily, nearly as easily as it seems to me that I learned all those years ago. It just happened over time, with reading at ages 6 & 7 occuring, but really reading for themselves, longer and longer books, happening once they turned 8 years old. Voracious reading set in at that point.

    My third child is now 8 and isn’t yet reading. Nothing can induce him to actually read, though he’s wildly intelligent and clever, smart and active. He’s coming along slowly with reading, sometimes seeming to get more, it’s 3 steps forward, 8 steps back. He’s fine on learning and understanding and so much, just doesn’t really want to read, isn’t ready for it for some reason yet. I’m not concerned for it’s not totally unusual for a boy to not read until around 10 years of age. I’m starting to do more with vertical phonics with him, and just need to make a date for daily short lessons (Penny Primer/TATRAS) instead of the less often lessons that we never get ahead in.

    My youngest is too young to read, but he’s ramping up in knowledge daily. He’ll turn 2 near the end of June. It’s my plan now with my experience with 2 easy reading learners and 1 hard case that I need to get this last one into the Penny Primer in a few years and keep at it right from the start (though I truly must stress I am not worried about my hard case boy, I know he’ll read when he’s ready, I just have to have him into the groove more to get online with it as SOON as he’s ready, and will do that from the very start with my youngest.)

    My idea of education is semi-Charlotte Mason, though I don’t have the dedication to such rituals and she espoused. I try and try and it’s just more than I’m want to push myself into. I have such a Romantic notion of what education is, something beautiful, full of knowledge and a love of learning everything, nothing in that old rote prussian school model way.

    I’ve had an education blog before, but I lost the host I had it on and didn’t put it back up when I got a new host. It wasn’t much in the first place, it’s more for my own motivation truly, but I want it for a record of what we do well, and it seems like it’s something that will be great, so this is to that end.

    I’ll write about things in our home school here, link to products and sites in posts and on the sidebar and pages. My children will have blogs as well as their own subdomains for web development. I’ll be putting together a front page with sections of fresh info pulled from subdomains later.