Year: 2005 Page 7 of 12

Dad and his wall to decorate the electrical services on our lawn

My wall might not look like much, but I got a health dose of much needed exercise putting it up. We cannot do much on the side of the services other than put some netting to prevent weeds and a layer of rock to spruce it up a little. We plan to backfill the side away from the services to form a fairly long slope where Lorena can plant her flowers, shrubs, special grasses, and that sort of thing. We were quite fortunate to get a strong rain last night with more on the way. It is not so fun for the kids to have that kind of weather during their summer vacation, but it will be great for our new trees.

The list of books from the previous post was an outgrowth of our effort to clean up and organize the books we read last year. I was amazed that we were only missing one book that I am confident will show up as soon as Lorena finishes her math class and has a little more time to organize her house again. We printed out a list of all the books and checked them off as we put them into two boxes, one for Christian’s third grade year and one for Kelly’s fifth grade year. Then we filed all their schoolwork that had not already been filed into the big filing cabinet in the bonus room. The kids need to take their State of Oregon test tomorrow and we will have completed everything.

Christian has been wanting to get something he can do on the airplane when Lorena, Kelly, and Christian travel to Mexico later this month, so we went to Trump’s Hobby store in Corvallis to pick him out a small airplane model. He picked out a model of the Wright Flyer. I talked to Kelly about what she might like to do and she thought that it might be nice to do a knitting project. I do not know whether I can get her up to speed by the time they fly out, but I will certainly do it when we get back home. I am going to try to get them set up to listen to Tolkien’s The Return of the King audio CD book and some drawing materials. That should keep them well occupied for the trips down and back.

Lorena is studying hard for her test tomorrow afternoon. I think she is just about ready. She can study today and then again for four hours while the kids are doing their testing tomorrow. It will be a great relief if she can get through this class successfully.

For those who are interested, the following are lists of books Kelly and Christian read as part of their Sonlight homeschool program last year. These books were combined with library, internet, and encyclopedia research to cover history and literature. Of course, this does not include their RealScience-4-Kids chemistry program, Easy Grammar program, Singapore Math program, Spelling Power program, and Writing Apprentice program. In addition, they both took a year of piano and swimming lessons with a few gymnastics and alpine skiing lessons and some field trips thrown in for good measure. They take their nationally standardized tests on Tuesday, so we will soon know how they stack up against their peers.

The books Christian read
———————————–
Secret of the Andes
The Sign of the Beaver
The Witch of Blackbird Pond
Johnny Tremain
Toliver’s Secret
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch
Paddle-to-the-Sea
Walk the World’s Rim
Justin Morgan Had a Horse
Calico Bush
The Journeyman
Swift Rivers
Classic Poetry: An Illustrated Collection
What’s the Big Idea, Ben Franklin?
And Then What Happened, Paul Revere?
If You Were There When They Signed the Constitution
Winter at Valley Forge
Incans, Aztecs & Mayans
Imprisoned in the Golden City
Can’t You Make Them Behave, King George?
Pedro’s Journal
The Landmark History of the American People (partial)
The Erie Canal
American Adventures, Part 1
North American Indians
The Story of the USA Book 1
The Story of the USA Book 2
The Lewis & Clark Expedition
The Story of Eli Whitney
Pocahontas and the Strangers
The Matchlock Gun
Meet Thomas Jefferson
Phoebe the Spy
Meet George Washington
Robert Fulton, Boy Craftsman
Sarah, Plain and Tall
The Courage of Sarah Noble
The Cabin Faced West
Squanto, Friend of the Pilgrims
The Bears on Hemlock Mountain
Sarah Whitcher’s Story
A Lion to Guard Us
The Skippack School
The Thanksgiving Story
Om-kas-toe
Usborne Science Encyclopedia
The Magic School Bus Inside the Human Body
Mysteries and Marvels of Nature
Introduction to Biology
Listening to Crickets
Martha Washington
George Washington
Naya Nuki
Vostaas: White Buffalo’s Story of Plains Indian Life
Tikta’Liktak
Stone Fox
Ben Franklin of Old Philadelphia
Mr. Revere and I
The Corn Grows Ripe

The books Kelly read
———————————–
Seabird

Island of the Blue Dolphins
The Master Puppeteer
The House of Sixty Fathers
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
The Horse and His Boy
Journey to Jo’burg
The Hobbit
Tales of a Korean Grandmother
Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze
Seven Daughters and Seven Sons
The Land I Lost
All the Small Poems
Daughter of the Mountains
Shadow Spinner
Ships, Sailors and the Sea
Eric Liddell
Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun
Torches of Joy
Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?
Teresa of Calcutta
Gandhi
A Glorious Age in Africa
The Mongols
India: The Culture
India: The People
Arabs in the Golden Age
Faces: Australia Through Time
William Carey: Obliged to Go
Escape to the Jungle
Exploring Planet Earth
Mary Slessor: Forward into Calabar
Genghis Khan & the Mongol Hordes – Landmark
Water Sky
Henry Reed, Inc.
Call it Courage
The Kite Fighters
The Big Wave
The Cat Who Went to Heaven
God’s Adventurer: Hudson Taylor
Silkworms
Just So Stories
The Incredible Journey
Rascal
Beat the Story-Drum, Pum-Pum
Star of Light
Homesick
King of the Wind
Aladdin and Other Favorite Arabian Nights Stories
Around the World in Eighty Days
Ali and the Golden Eagle
Li Lun, Lad of Courage
Mission to Cathay
Red Sand, Blue Sky
Louis Braille
Born in the Year of Courage
The Rat Catcher’s Son
Sadako & 1000 Paper Cranes
Almost 12
Food and Nutrition for Every Kid
Improve Your Survival Skills
Usborne Guide to Rocks and Fossils
Dry Bones and Other Fossils
The Human Body
The History of Medicine
Blood & Guts: A Working Guide to Your Own Insides
Usborne Young Scientist: Human Body

My lunch with my accountant, Dean Sartain, got cancelled yesterday, so we are going out to have Indian food today. I had a good long talk with my Quality Corners partners, Ron Voorhees and Grandpa Milo. We have decided to go ahead and start looking for another building as we will probably need it pretty soon if we keep going at our current rate. The machinery is all working well, the orders keep arriving, and we have lots of new prospects as we increase our capacity. We have lots of hope for our company.

The kids are getting a little stir crazy in the house. The neighborhood government school kids will be in school until just after we leave to visit Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita in Mexico. Fifteen minutes each of Marvis Blinkin and piano are all we have planned for them, so when they finish those things and get their rooms cleaned up, they do not have much else on their plate for the rest of the day. They have been doing a lot of art and reading to fill up the time between when they finish their work and the other kids get home from school.

Lorena’s final is next Tuesday. The mad scramble to get ready to go to Mexico will start when she finishes her test.

Christian and I spent about an hour and a half working on his radio last night. We got all the amplifier circuit put together, but did not have the right kind of battery, so we could not check it out. It is a joy working with him. We went to our bible study last night, too. Emma Raun was there and talked about her many, many years preaching in Japan and the many orphans there after World War II. She is a very nice lady. We always have great conversations on the way to and from our bible study in Jefferson. I am amazed that the kids are not complaining a little more about boredom. The government school kids do not get out for summer vacation for another couple of weeks, so there is no one with whom to play until around four in the afternoon. The are doing extremely well.

Grandma Sarah found an article on an amazing tax break for companies like ours in one of Grandpa Milo’s trade magazine. She is amazing that way; always doing research and finding useful stuff. I am glad she is so good at it and enjoys it. She sent me several copies of the article, so I am taking it to our accountant, Dean Sartain today at lunch time. Dean and his wife, Phyllis just got back from vacation. They take great vacations and I always enjoy getting together with him to talk about it after the fact.

This is the third in a series of posts that describe how the our family uses a Linux computer as a tool for education and administration in our homeschool. We believe a Linux computer is a great option for people who would like their children to have access to the very best tools available even though they do not have a huge budget. The intent of this series of posts is to provide clear, step by step instructions for those who do not necessarily have an abundance of computer skills.

Viewing DVD’s – The ability to play a DVD checked out from the public library or rented from Blockbuster is a lot easier than it used to be. My thinking is that this functionality should be available out of the box without additional installations or modifications, but that is still not the case. Draconian legal issues still make it more hassle than it needs to be. Our discussion here will center on the setup and use of the Xine multimedia application.

Streaming audio – We mentioned in a previous post that we liked to listen to the Adventures in Odyssey radio theatre program over the internet. We use the RealPlayermultimedia streaming program from RealNetworks to do that. The RealPlayer program is a closed source program. Rightly, the Ubuntu Linux project does not include it as part of their Linux free (as in freedom) distribution. We will discuss how to install that program and provide links to some of the streaming audio content we use in our homeschool.

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Grandma Sarah and her twin sister Janet

I took this picture of Grandma Sarah and her twin sister Janet and just thought it was great. Janet is one of my favorite people in all of the world. I know I get fairly obnoxious about my kids, but when I ask her if I can tell her something about Kelly and Christian, she always says, “I wish you would!” and, best of all, she really means it. She is just a great lady. She came over to Newberg on Memorial Day for dinner at Grandpa Milo’s house. He cooked us an absolutely great steak dinner with corn on the cob and a salad with the special dressing he learned how to make from his mother Great Grandma Chapman (Ethyl). Grandpa Milo is working too hard and we are all trying to get him to slow down, but he keeps going.

I talked to my cousin Neil (Aunt Janet’s son) with whom I spent many, many hours as a boy growing up. We played together all the time at Grandma Jenkin’s (Ida) house. Grandma J was our little Finnish grandmother that we all loved so much. Janet told me that he did not have the address of my blog anymore, so I called him and we had a nice chat. I also called my little sister, Aunt Jean. We talked for about an hour. I have always loved to talk to both of my sister’s. Back when I was working at Motorola in South Florida and Jean was working for Mentor Graphics in Portland we used to send emails back and forth. Email was just brand new and we almost used it like a chat server. We felt very high tech and had some great talks that way. It was just super to talk to both Neil and Aunt Jean for awhile.

Christian working on his AM/FM radio kit

We really did not do much over the Memorial Day weekend. On Saturday we did not do much other than go out to eat, get the sprinkler system to start working automatically, go to the library, and watch the Two Towers DVD with Warren Bone. The kids had read the book and I promised them they could watch the DVD when they finished so we watched it. I thought it was going to be too scary for them, but it did not phase them at all. On Sunday, we went to our fellowship meeting at the Waldo’s, then just hung out for the rest of the afternoon. Christian and I started in on assembling his AM/FM radio kit. That was a LOT of fun. On Monday, we went up to Washington Square for a couple of hours then on over to Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah’s house. Grandma’s twin sister, Aunt Janet was there. I have some pictures I want to post, but my gallery is not working right now. The wonderful people at eChristianWebHosting.com are working on it, so I will put the photos up as soon as that is fixed.

Playing in the sprinkler

It was a hot day yesterday. After school, the kids played in the sprinkler for the first time. Today is the last day of school for the year, so Kelly and Christian spent yesterday evening cleaning up the bonus room where we have the computers and do a lot of the school work. They really do not have much academic work left. Kelly has piano, some math corrections, reading, and logic. Christian has piano, some reading, and some science. After that, they will take all their books and materials for the year down from the shelf so that I can start archiving them to make room for next year. We really need to put up a ton of good, permanent bookshelves so we can keep all the books out and available, but we do not have the resources yet.

We started getting ready for the stuff we will do this summer, too. I had Christian load up the Mavis Beacon version 16 typing tutor on the computer last night. They will start doing 15 minutes of Mavis Beacon every day now along with 15 minutes on the piano. In addition, they are going to continue on their memorization, both so that I can film it for our archive and so that we can quote it for Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita when we visit Mexico. The other project we will start sometime this weekend is assembling the AM/FM radio kit. I will need to get a new soldering iron and an ohm meter to be able to do that properly.

I am going to get both Kelly and Christian an end of the school year gift because they have done such a great job. I am so proud of them I can hardly stand it. The gift will probably be an art kit with pastels or something like that. I will put picutres of that up as soon as I have them.

Kelly and Christian both finished their research reports yesterday. Kelly’s is posted here. Christian’s is posted here. This was their capstone project for the year. They were very dedicated to doing these reports in as professional a manner as possible. Keep in mind that Christian is in third grade and Kelly is in fifth grade. The process I gave them was this:

Do preliminary research to get a general idea of what to put in the report.

Make and outline based on your idea.

Take notes on notecards with one fact per notecard.

Adjust the outline based on the fact gathering.

Right a rough draft of the report from the outline.

Type the rough draft in the computer as your first draft, making improvements as you go.

Add the bibliography based on where you got the information on the note cards used in the report.

Dad will edit the first draft for grammar and spelling only.

Write the second draft making the appropriate corrections.

Dad will edit the second draft for grammar and spelling only.

Produce an illustration and make a cover page.

Write the final draft.

Make three copies, putting them all in their own professional clear plastic binders.

We will file one of the copies as part of their permanent record, take one copy to Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita in Mexico and one copy to Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah in Newberg. They really did an awesome job.

Lorena got her College Algebra test score back last night. She is on track to get through the class just fine. She only has to get a passing grade on the final and she will be able to move on to her last math class this fall. Even though this is not her favorite subject, she has worked very hard and I am proud of her. Kelly and Christian continue to finish up their final projects. Christian finished his research report for the year yesterday. Kelly should finish hers today. I will put them up on the internet in PDF format as soon as they are both finished. I sprayed the lawn with what is supposed to be a really good clover killer last night. Now we are supposed to have several days of hot weather her in the mid-valley. We will see if the stuff really works. I will have to put it down one more time in about a week. I am looking forward to working on the lawn this coming, three day, Memorial Day weekend.

Update: A very homeschool friendly was just bill passed in the Oregon State House of Representatives. It is a bill that, if it ever gets signed into law by hour homeschool-phobic governor, Ted Kulongoski, will reduce the requirements imposed on homeschoolers by our the State of Oregon. Currently, homeschoolers have to notify the Educational Services District (ESD) that they have removed their child from the public school for the purpose of homeschooling, then turn the results of standardized tests into the ESD four times over the course of the child’s education. The new bill would keep the notification requirement, but remove the requirement to turn in the test results.

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Kelly and Christian are both getting very close to finishing their annual reports. Kelly has to do just a few corrections and a title page while Christian has only to do the illustration for his title page. Today, I will try to go over to Staples at lunch time to buy a couple of professional, clear plastic binders. The reports are really quite amazing. There are only four days of homeschool left. I will probably have Christian install the Mavis Beacon program on Thursday. Lorena has class tonight and I am hoping she gets her test back today with a high score.

All of the trees we planted appear to be growing very well with the exception of six red maple trees. They look moist and green under the bark, but now leaves appear to be forming at all. I hope they come out OK. I used the QCAD program on Linux to draw up a design for the area around the telephone and electrical services at the far corner of our yard. Tonight, I am going to spray the whole yard for clover, but after that, I am going to to work on that relative unattractive corner of the yard.

Digital Cybermation called from Pittsburgh yesterday to say the new CNC router would ship in a day or two. It has been disappointingly late, so I am not holding my breath. Everyone is looking forward to getting the machine, both here and at Quality Corners in Idaho. I have high hopes for what we can do with it.

The big event of the past weekend was Kelly’s and Christian’s spring recital. They both did super. There is one more piano lesson before the summer break. Kelly is going to work on her piano concerto during the summer. Christian has a piece on which he wants to work, too.

Kelly at the Spring Piano Recital

Christian at the Spring Piano Recital

You can see some additional pictures here.

Christian finished putting together his model submarine yesterday. He did just an incredible job. Here is a picture of the finished product:

Christian’s model submarine

There is another one here.

Kelly’s sleepover at the Doolittle’s house was a great success. She stayed up until about 2:00 AM with all her little buddies. They are going to try to get together again sometime this summer. Maybe we will be able to do it at Grandpa Milo’s house.

Curt Nichols is coming over to stay with us tonight. He is going to some event at Oregon State University and we will be glad to have a chance to spend some time with him. We will try to invite Warren Bone over, too. It will be old home week. We can listen to some music, eat some barbeque, and talk about the good times. Curt was going to bring his youngest daughter, Marlena, but she will stay with her Grandpa and Grandma in Sisters instead. I hope she will come next time because the kids will love to have her.

Homeschool is really starting to wind down. The kids are working ahead a little so things are falling off the list. They had plenty of time yesterday to do other stuff, so Christian worked a bunch on the model submarine his assembling and painting. Kelly drew up a cartoon. Next week will be a very light week with emphasis on making a video recording of the verses the kids have memorized and finishing the annual reports..

Kelly is going to her sleepover with her homeschool buddies at Mike and Louise Doolittle’s house. We will have our dinner tonight with my old college buddies. Then tomorrow, we are planning to go do something in the morning with Christian. I will probably try to mow the lawn and get some better pictures of our new trees if the weather cooperates. Finally, we have the big spring piano recital at Jefferson Baptist Church on Sunday at 4:30 PM. Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah are going to be up trying to help Uncle Bill and Aunt Betty get taken care of after their recent illness.

Lorena took her second College Algebra midterm last night. She thinks she did well. It will be great if she gets through this class. She has only one more math class before she has all she needs to get the kind of degree she wants. She will still have to take a couple of statistics courses, accounting, and some other stuff like that, but none of them will be as rigorous as the math. I am proud of her for studying so hard. Christian, Kelly, and I went out to dinner at Carl’s Jr. and then on to our Wednesday night bible study in Jefferson without Lorena. It was nice, but it does not feel so good not to have Lorena there.

The kids are finishing their school work earlier every day as we wind down. They have gotten a little stir crazy because it has been raining pretty hard since the day after we planted the new trees almost a week ago now. It is great for the trees, but a little hard on our sanity to be cooped up in the house. After tomorrow, we only have one more week of school. In the next couple of days, I need to stop by Staples to buy some “professional, clear plastic binders” for their research reports. Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame put his report on bats — the famous Bats = Bugs report — in a professional, clear plastic binder with absolute confidence that the teacher would give him an A+. It is kind of the family joke now, so we are very much looking forward to our professional, clear plastic binder.

Today is the last piano practice before the big, year end recital on Sunday after church. I will make sure and get some photos to post here along with a report. This will be our first big event to record with our new camcorder, too.

Entropy really takes hold when Lorena has to dedicate her time to getting ready for a test. She has the second mid-term for her college algebra class on Thursday and she is studying hard. I am very, very proud of the way she has gone about this. She is learning a lot and it will pay off in the end. What a great wife and mother.

The kids had a great day of homeschool yesterday. They buckled down and went right to work in the morning. They were able to finish everything up shortly after lunch. It was a rainy day, so they stayed in and played their Nancy Drew Mystery computer game on the computer. We have two of them. We are getting to the end of the first one and having a ball. Today is a swimming lesson day, so they might not finish so quickly, but the level of work is really ramping down, so the day should not be too hard.

We took a couple of pictures of the trees — well, kind of. Kelly, Christian, and I took pictures of each other standing on the front porch looking out at the trees. They are pretty small in the background. I took what I thought would show them a little, but then Christian arranged Kelly and I in such a manner as to get Mom’s hanging flower basket in the picture as well as the trees in the background. I really think he has that artistic flair that must have come from his Finnish Great Grandma Jenkins. Here is the shot:

You can see the pictures I took here for comparison.

Kelly got invited to a sleepover at Malia Doolittle’s house on Friday night. That is the night Curt is coming, possibly with Marlena. So we are looking forward to a nice weekend with him. I will try to barbeque something up if the weather cooperates. Homeschool continues to wind down. I am starting up a series of posts on how we use technology in our homeschool. It mostly has to do with how we use a Linux computer to administer the homeschool as well as facilitate participation with extended family and friends in other states and countries.

We planted 17 new trees at our house on Saturday. Cayatano did most of the work while I did most of the running around. He planted ten Autumn Flame Maples between the curb and the sidewalk along the two exposed side of the property, one Pussy Willow out by the services inside the sidewalk, and six Red Maples between our yard and the house of our neighbor behind us. In addition, we gave a ton of trees to four other neighbors and to Tony and Martha. Grandpa Milo supplied us the trees and we were quite thankful for them. All this was going on at the same time as our annual neighborhood garage sale. It all really went quite well. Lorena sold an old microwave oven and a turkey deep fat fryer. The kids sold a bunch of little things. A great time was had by all. I will try to put some pictures of our new “look” as soon as I have a chance to take some.

On Sunday night, we went over to a friends house for dinner and to see some pictures of Mexico. The man who showed the pictures is someone we have known for a long time. He pretty much blasted us for homeschooling our children. He mentioned another man with whom he had a discussion about homeschooling and how they thought it was such a bad thing. The thing that was truly odd was that neither of these men had children of their own, but were willing to paint the entire homeschool movement with a very broad and negative brush. It was an amazing and blatant display of bigotry. Oh, well.

We are down to the last two weeks of homeschool. The only big things we have left are finishing up the annual research reports, attending the big spring piano recital at the Baptist Church in Jefferson, and taking the standardized tests for the year in June. We will not turn in the tests this year as the law only requires that we start sending in test results after 18 months of homeschool. We hope that silly law gets changed. Why do people who cannot even teach the people for whom they are responsible need to have the tests scores of my children?

This weekend is looking like it will be quite busy. There will be a neighborhood garage sale on Friday and Saturday to start things off. Then, on Saturday, the guy that helps Granpa Milo keep up his house and grounds, Cayatano, will bring over a whole pickup load of trees Grandpa Milo got for us (for free). We will not be able to use them all, so we will give the ones we do not use to our neighbors. Cayatano will plan our trees for us. Hopefully, he will be able to come back in the next month or so to put in our fence for us, too. Dad was able to get a bunch of redwood boards for building it at a cheap price.

Kelly and Christian got all their homeschool work finished yesterday before I got home. We are really starting to finish things up now, so they will have less to do every day between now and the end of the school year on May 27. Last night, we went through only the multiplication flash cards with which Christian is struggling. It is mostly the eights, sevens, and sixes. We did them ten times. I believe that once he gets those under control, we will be able to get through the deck in less than two minutes for each side which is the overall goal. I imagine we will get all this done within a month or two after the beginning of the school year next year.

I downloaded the software to run the CNC router that should be getting here before too long. One of the first things we want to do is to make a Lone Star shaped rosette for Texas. Here is an image of how the surface of the rosette should appear when we finally get the machine to make it:

Ron is meeting with our big customer today with the hope that we can negotiate a long term contract to produce MDF rosettes for them and possibly grow the number of rosettes we are producing by helping them move into new markets. A contract of a couple of years would certainly allow us to do some things we cannot do right now because we are not sure how long the orders will keep arriving. It will allow us to get additional equipment to go after new markets with less risk.