Old Time Summer

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  • Wisdom and Chores

    Education isn’t only book learning, and also isn’t just stuff that is in a book that says must be taught. It’s all of life and that’s my focus this week, getting stuff DONE, and getting the children to see that it can be done as a team, each doing their part makes it all go … where it is supposed to go.

    We have issues with our house, it’s too small, little place for putting things. There are finishes that need to be applied to the walls, the floors, and other places. Some we have things to do with that, some we need money to get things done. Some of it (“cleaning and organizing”) needs to happen to make these other things happen. Make it more likely to happen, at the least.

    A lot of it is day in and day out stuff. It takes work and thinking of it to make it get done, and no one wishes to dwell there, which makes it hard on me since I hate living like this, being the one saying what needs done all the time, pushing, pushing, pushing, while all along I’ve tried to motivate each one to do something on their own, to be “in charge” and do it without being told every day/week or whatever it happens to be. It’s partly that on the whole none of us are very keen on cleaning. We like things clean, but find it hard to make it happen. I make a mess when I cook or do craft stuff. To limit one self to not making a mess or stopping the event and cleaning up is beyond my desire or wish to force on myself or children. Making a mess is OK, somebody else can help to clean it up. It’s the “your room doesn’t have to be spotless but I do want our living areas to be more clean than dirty, I need help from everyone to keep the kitty litter clean, keep the floors swept, the steps too, dishes done, table in order, couch clean, baby toys picked up now and then …

    Certain people have particular chores, and starting this week I am fully implementing earning blocks of computer time/game time for getting chores done ISC, which is the deal that was supposed to be how they acted at home and out & about. ISC stands for Instant, Sweet, Complete.

    They understand it, but are too lazy to make it happen, and bank on that being what will get me to stop bugging them, just go with the flow, as crazy as it is.

    So the other thing that goes with this is a lesson I have on Manners, and also getting the Westminster Catechism going full force. These things are simple yet take time and forethought. Can be thought of as ‘complex’ but that’s just the wrong view. Simple things are picking up toys. Putting dirty clothing in baskets. Putting things in the hall closet in order not chaos. Animal chores are for us and them, not just a chore. We like the animals, so keep their areas cleaner. Makes us all happier. So do it ISC. Learning one or more Catechism Q&A a week isn’t hard. Some are easier and some are harder. Just like most things. They better us to understand them.

    Which brings me to all of life, lessons are for this: to come to wisdom in full age.

    First is Knowledge.

    Then comes Understanding.

    Lastly comes Wisdom.

    Wisdom in many areas, how to know the right way, thing, common sense that is smarter than plain on common sense. Wisdom’s way, wise sense.

    One reason for things being as they are here in our house is because my husband travels for business a lot, and is fairly busy with work on phone/computer at home otherwise. In a small house that needs work done on it besides the normal daily needs of keeping a house up, it’s difficult to get much of anything done like needs done. It is hard.

    So the push for “schooling” is not going to happen now. It’s gonna be the earning of block of time for computer/games when chores and things are done ISC, and getting manners and Catechism going fully. Getting things clean and ready for moving, painting, installing, etc.

  • 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.

  • Reading Struggles

    Our 8 year old isn’t reading still, though he does recognize some letter/word combos … but just stays frustrated about not reading, that it doesn’t magically appear, I think.

    My frustration is high as well. We have had this and that and that other and this other thing to aide him. Me working with him, he working alone with a program. Nothing works.

    Reader Rabbit really helped my eldest, Russell, move forward in reading. He didn’t have RR at first, it was something we got later. Asa, the 8 year old, “grew up” having RR around. So what did he do after he got through with one of the RR dics? “I beat it” was his comment. Game mentality.

    We got the new TAG reading system from LeapFrog in order to have an interactive book experience that wasn’t fully electronic, and give him a new challenge. He uses it, but won’t USE it. I sit with him and he just dullardly looks on, or loses it.

    So if I just talk about it other times he says “I’ve gotten all the rewards I can get, I can’t get more, it won’t give me more” is what he says. Game Mentality.

    Now as games go, it is beneficial to be able to read, but it’s quite the phenomena that most games can be played without reading. I mean, others can aide the non-reader through “HAVE TO READ SOMETHING” parts, and depending on what game it is and the non-readers desire to play that game … it can work. I’ve seen him play Wii or PS3 or PS2 or internet games, and he just goes, goes, goes. As long as it moves, he can do it, and just blusters through any words, never trying to read.

    It’s a game mentality, which I’m not trying to break, I just want to add reading onto his skill set. I want him to read, I want him to want to read. I just need him to read so he can read anything in life that he comes in contact with. I would like him to love reading, but I can’t make him be a great lover of reading.

    My first two children love reading and read, read, read. Both started their massive reading ability by the time they were my Asa’s current age. I’m not looking for that in him. I know it’s taking longer, and I’m only looking for some progress in understanding that learning a few words and phonograms is step 1, and step 2 is an easy step, but even step 1 seems to disappear, as if he’s looking for an easy ramp to reading, not wanting to climb steps. Even a whole word approach isn’t working. There is no ramp up to the spot he wants one. He’s stuck in the nether-regions of “It’d be so nice if I could read, I’ll think about that tomorrow.”

  • Summer “School”

    For us “schooling” never ends. Even when it’s not “official” of course. All life is education.

    I’ve been very slack with the children of late, but since the 4th of July is now past I’ll be ramping up more and more as the summer goes on. There’s much to catch up on since in 2007 we had a new baby and things have been light ever since really. (My eldest born was 4 years old in 2000 when the third was born, and not officially schooling until he was 6/7, so we never “had a baby” during our official homeschooling years until 2007.)

    Unofficial education has occurred every day, but it doesn’t count towards any saved information as a whole, just fragments that apply to many things here and there, they count but not in that “official” way, in other words.

    There is much freedom in the whole year for homeschoolers who don’t “set up” an actual classroom experience in their home, so I don’t feel bad about doing school stuff during the summer. I remember how summer felt for me when I was young, but that was a different way of life, and my children don’t have that overbearing feeling of life most of the year that I had. Summer was freedom, and that’s what homeschooling is too. Freedom to learn whenever, and to get more done overall as well.

  • Prang Soybean Crayons

    I’ve been looking for the crayons I love to get for using in our Art Program (haven’t bought them for a very long time) and finally started looking online when I couldn’t find them in any brick stores. The manufacturers website doesn’t list them as discontinued, but there is talk of it on some other sites and hardly anyone has any stock of them, I found some 8-color, 24-color boxes on some seller websites, but found that they were ALL Canadian sites. I did find another product that I need to look into, Crayon Rocks. More for younger people. I have also seen that someone (or more) make Beeswax crayons. I’ve also thought of finding resources and making my own and actually marketing them eventually.

  • 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.

  • Catching Up

    We haven’t done any super official schooling this week, trying to catch up from last week’s sadness still, and getting paid, going out for errands over the weekend. Couple all that with my glasses breaking and getting a new eye exam to get contacts/glasses (since my prescription was overly old) suddenly … and things are in disorder more than usual. Additionally add to that the regular out-of-town stuff with my husband, and also that there are new kittens under our crawlspace (which just turned 4-weeks old) and are too much for words to describe in cuteness how they look and act now … things are just a bit too “whatever it is” to get anything done enough to sit and do much schooling.

    I’m not opposed to summer schooling at home, it’s not like it’s SCHOOL, where a summer off is so very important. 😉

  • 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.

  • Mourning

    On Saturday it was noticed that our eldest cat, Princess Sonia, 16-years old, wasn’t doing so well, and then seemed to do a bit better and then on Sunday morning was the same and progressed then to worse and eventually died.

    We all had heavy hearts, with Victoria and me being outwardly emotive and overwrought over her leaving us. She was my dear cat for over 16 years, and Victoria is an emotive sort of person. I am not. But things that are deep with me do cause me to emote. So I wasn’t able to get any schooling done this week, and am only now trying to catch up with thinking about what to do, get the house back on track and such.

    I have more motivation now than I did a couple of days ago, but still it’s far from the norm for me, which isn’t too very high in the first place most days in and of itself. FWIW.

  • Installing Artes Latinae

    I’m currently installing  Artes Latinae – Level I on our desktop computer. It looks to be quite a heavy install, saying 30 mins. to an hour for installation, depending …

    This computer isn’t the most modern, it’s not bad,  just not super recent, an Athlon 64 processor, no dual or quad … but it’s faster than a lot of peoples computers, probably. At any rate, it took about 1/2 an hour, I got taken away from writing this post for awhile.

    Something that DOES bother me about this program is that now it says that it runs under a specific version of Mozilla-Firefox and that if I use the currently running version it I could have problems with bookmarks, playing sound clips, etc. … so I have to re-start … hence finish this post to be able to shut down this instance of Firefox to start the Artes Latinae program. Just a little quibble here, if it’s only … if it doesn’t interfere with using Firefox generally day in and out. FWIW I just think the wording is not explicit enough and only talking about instances, but doesn’t state that.