Yesterday was an exciting and eventful day for Lorena, Kelly, and Christian. They went to camp while the workers continued working on the the house. They had visitors and talked and emailed with lots of people about ongoing events and future plans. I had to work a very long day. It was very interesting work for me. We want to make a piece of equipment that no one else really knows how to make. We are working on the core technologies that will make it possible. It might not be possible, so we are performing science experiments. So, when I got home after a day of oscillating senses of frustration and satisfaction that is inherent to this kind of work, everyone wanted to talk but me. All I wanted was to eat something and go to bed. Nevertheless, it really was great to hear about such an eventful summer day for the family. I think it would have been a hugely missed opportunity to not pay some attention and with a minimal amount of effort on my part, we all went to bed feeling pretty good about life.
Year: 2006 Page 8 of 15
Our good friend, Jeannie is taking a psychology class this summer. She went over to the house yesterday while I was at work to interview Kelly for the class. I was all set to be horrified with what Kelly would tell her about how we do things, but it really sounds like it went well. Kelly described how we do homeschool, what she thinks about a few social issues, and generally had a really nice talk. The fun part was that when she was asked about how much she uses the computer, she said not very much because her dad says computer use sucks down your I.Q. Still, she showed Jeannie the latest issue of Kaktus Kids, the quarterly magazine, she and Christian write. Jeannie acted genuinely excited about it and wanted to get on the subscription list. Of course, that endeared her the more to Kelly, too. We are always looking for people to read the kids writing. I am sure we will give them a copy of the kids’ annual research reports, too. It is always great to have more readers!!!
Gimme a W! Gimme an A! Gimme a Y! Gimme an N! Gimme a E! What does that spell??? WAYNE!!!! Who likes Wayne the Mexican raise your hand. If you read this blog and don’t write any comments (ESPECIALLY about Wayne the Mexican) then you’re not REALLY reading this blog. Come on everyone! We know you’re out there!
This is a special reminder from yours truly, Kelly, the Susie Social Butterfly of the ChapmanKids blog. If you don’t agree with Miss Susie Social Butterfly’s latest post then you will have to actually FACE Miss Susie Social Butterfly, ooooOOOooo (that is a WARNING) O-= , Comments make this blog *SPECIAL* C-:
While I was away in Texas, Lorena and the kids went to Sunday gospel meeting with Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah. They heard a handsome, young (35 years) preacher named Jeremy. They saw him again last week at a potluck for a friend visiting from visiting from Australia while I was in California. We heard yesterday that he drowned trying to save his brother-in-law in a kayaking mishap. The brother-in-law, a 41 year old father of four boys drowned, too. I had never met either man, so it did not touch me so much personally other than in the way it affected Lorena and the kids. Lorena was especially shook up. The thing she remembers most about Jeremy is his smile. She remembers him smiling all the time. He smiled when he met and spoke with her and the kids and he smiled when he preached. It is hard to know the mind of God in these things. The comfort we have is that, in this case, we know these men were trying to do what God had given them to do in the time He gave them to do it. That surely seems to be enough.
I am currently working on a post about socialization in a series of posts about why we have chosen to homeschool our children. There is a great article titled How the Schools Shortchange Our Boys by Gerry Garibaldi in City Journal that does a great job of describing some of our concerns in that regard. I will be posting my article on this topic in the next week or so.
H.T. Powerline
As many of you know, just about every free evening in the summer, Kelly, Chrisitan, and I all sit down at the dining room table, turn on some classical music–usually Beethoven or Chopin–and draw. We have been working our way through Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad. We even posted some work here on the blog a few weeks back. Lately, there has been an added twist to our drawing efforts. First, when Kelly’s friend Skyler came over to spend the night, we had her join us in our drawing. It was really a great way to enjoy her company and learn something new at the same time. A couple of days after her visit, she told Kelly that she really loved our drawing time and would love to do it again sometime soon.
Over the last couple of days, we have had our minister’s, Joe and Dellas staying with us. We really appreciate that Dellas always takes time to play some games like Scattergories or Cranium with the family, or at least with the kids. Christian and Kelly look forward to that very much. This time, in addition to playing some games, we invited him to draw with us. He did that with us a couple of times and drew some awesome pictures–especially for the first time. It gave us a chance to talk and be together in a way that includes the kids better way than when the adults sit and visit about grown-up stuff. Dellas liked it enough that he might get the book and take it with him so he can do it with other people’s kids, too. I will try to post one of his drawings here, if he will give me permission.
It was hot and humid all weekend long in Oregon. That does not often happen here; it can get pretty warm, but usually there is not a lot of humidity. It felt like we were back in Texas or South Florida. We went to a baptism on Saturday at a beautiful spot on a beautiful river out in the woods of the coast range. It was a very encouraging time even though we sweated a little. We had our ministers stay with us through the weekend and went to the last gospel meeting of current series. It was a little sad, because we found that the minister we have had for the last three years will be leaving Oregon for the state of Washington this fall. We will miss him a lot.
Lorena and the kids are running over to the county fair this afternoon. This has become somewhat of a tradition for them since we have been in Albany. It is a very typical county fair for a mostly agricultural part of the world. There are lots of cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, vegetables, a carnival, food booths, clowns, and exhibitions of every kind. They enjoy the fair very much. They like to go on Friday, early in the afternoon because there are generally not too many people there and everyone is fresh and clean, not yet burnt out from too many long days.
Class Size
Note: This is by no means intended to be an exhaustive look at this subject matter. Rather, it is a description of why we found homeschool to be a compelling alternative for our children when we considered the class size issue. The linked resources are a minor, but relevant subset of the available information on how class size influences student performance.
It seems intuitively obvious that as the size of a class gets smaller, a teacher can grant more individual attention to each student. That is true, but in a way that really surprised me. From what I have been able to garner, the correlation between small class size and performance does not really start to improve until class size has dropped to fifteen or fewer students. When the class size drops to that level, the teacher has sufficient time for one-on-one tutoring to improve the performance of the class as a whole. If the class size is larger than fifteen, there is appears to be no such effect.
One-on-one tutoring has been shown in some studies to have a significant effect on performance while very small group tutoring has a less significant effect. This is one such study. This paper describes the effect of smaller class size on improving performance, not only because of smaller group instruction tailored to the needs of small sub-groups, but because of one-on-one individualized instruction and the reduction of disciplinary problems due to the closer relationship the teacher has time to develop with the individual students. These are exactly the type of benefits you would expect to see in a class of four or fewer homeschool students.
One of the largest and most important studies on whether performance can be improved by class size reduction was a four year longitudinal study performed in Tennesse called Project STAR. There is a good deal of controversy about how the report was interpreted. Some say it shows that smaller class sizes improve performance, but others who have looked at the same data argue it shows just the opposite. The bigger point, though, is that the smallest class sizes for which data were reported were classes with between thirteen and seventeen students. That is right at the boundary where we expect the teacher to start having enough time to provide sufficient one-on-one tutoring to cause statistically significant improvements in standardized test scores for the whole class. Here are some additional links to studies and surveys that describe the correlation between small class size and academic performance:
- Does Smaller Class Size Improve Student Performance? A Brief Review of the Empirical Literature
- Do Small Classes Influence Academic Achievement? What the National Assessment of Educational Progress Shows
- California Class Size Report
- The Evidence on Class Size. Occasional Paper.
Conclusion: The abilities of the teacher to provide one-on-one tutoring and to get to know and understand the needs of the individual students appear to be the greatest contributors to improved student performance when class size is considered. Most homeschools have less than five students which provides for a level of one-on-one tutoring rarely available in public or even private school settings. Parents as teachers can know and understand the needs of their children better than teachers in typical public school settings. We view these small class size advantages as very compelling reasons to homeschool our children.
Next: Socialization
The biggest obstacles we faced when we decided to homeschool our children were doubts sowed by trusted friends and relatives. Never having homeschooled nor read the plethora of scholarly literature on the subject, some still expressed strong opinions about the inefficacy of homeschooling, the damage wrought by removing children from the socializing influence of the public school system, and the difficulty of maintaining the level of discipline and interest to do it well. Those of us who have been homeschooling a couple of years and have enjoyed it, often forget the strength of those negative influences in our own beginnings. I plan to write about our own experiences and information gathered from several scholarly studies that helped us overcome those influences to get started and continue in our homeschooling efforts.
These posts will be written for people who are just getting started in homeschooling. To those who have been doing it for awhile, the reasons are readily apparent. I am more comfortable in dealing with most objections about homeschooling than when we started a couple of years ago. People who are around our children know that, while they are not perfect, they are much better off educationally and socially than while they were in the public school system. I think that is the reason we seem to get many fewer objections than when we were just starting. We still get occasional disparaging remarks. It works best for us just not to respond.
There are a good number of scholarly studies of things like socialization, performance on standardized tests, and other criteria by which children can be measured in different academic settings. Many of these measures can be helpful when deciding whether or not to homeschool. For example, there is a lot that is known about the influence of class size on student performance. It is not what many people believe it to be, but it is pretty cut and dried with a variety of studies that do a pretty good job of measuring the correlations. A typical homeschool has four or fewer students. Does such a class perform better than classes of fifteen, twenty, thirty, or forty? Does the level of education of a public school teacher matter when it comes to the performance of their students? How about homeschool teachers? There are answers to these and other similar questions based on studies using solid scientific methods.
While these studies were not the only, nor even the primary reason why we choose to homeschool, they helped us make a reasoned decision about getting started and give us confidence that we can continue to make it work for us and our children.
Kelly’s friend Skyler came over yesterday and stayed the night. They had a great time. Everyone played together really well in the pool and in the clubhouse the neighborhood kids are building under the Biles front porch. It was a pretty usual summer day. We ate lots of frozen blueberries, did our drawing, and just had a nice evening.
The plumber came this morning and put the new pot filler faucet above the Thermador stove top. I called during the process to find out what was happening. Kelly answered the phone and said she didn’t really know what was going on, but Mom had run down stairs as fast as she could with a bunch of towels and there was water everywhere. I just called, now about a half an hour later; everything is OK and the new pot filler looks “fantastico!”
Saturday, we put up the garden block reinforcing wall to keep the dirt in place below the new fence. We put in one yard of dirt behind the wall. We are going to need a bunch more blocks and five or six more yards of dirt before we are through, but it is going to look great. We now have some privacy in our back yard. Ron Williams youngest boy, Darren, came over on Saturday to stain the fence. He really did a super job and we enjoyed having him here.
We really enjoyed having Sandra Ramey over for lunch after meeting on Sunday. The kids did a great job of setting the table, picking up and washing the dishes, and making dessert.
I finished most of my work here in California for this pass. Our plan is to have a brief customer visit this afternoon then head back to Oregon. I should be able to get home by around midnight. Lorena, Kelly, and Christian went to Dave and Glad Christie’s house yesterday to see Chet and Kayleen Nelson and their kids visiting from Australia. I think they had a good time.
My work here in Livermore IS very interesting and the people are very nice, but I miss my family very much. It is amazing how much more I worry about them when I am away from them.
I write this post as I travel to Livermore for three days of work. Last night I stayed at a hotel close to Portland International Airport so I could catch an early flight down to Oakland. I should be to work at the ATS facility in Livermore by 10:30 this morning. We are working on a vial inspection line for which I am doing the machine vision work. It should be quite an enjoyable job.
I cannot believe that we are not even half way through July and I have the bulk of the preparation complete for our 2006-2007 homeschool year. I think we have all the books we need on the right shelves in the bonus room. The first week schedules are pretty much put to bed. I was going to do them in the OpenOffice.org database. After doing a little programming, I realized it was going to be a whole lot more work to do it that way than the way we did it last year in an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet. I made it a little more automatic and plan to do the whole year in one spreadsheet file using one sheet per week for the 36 week schedule rather than do a separate file for each week. Weekly scheduling was really not to bad last week and it is going to be even easier this week.
Kelly will be doing the second year of her two year survey of world history while Christian will be doing the fabulous study of non-Western cultures that Kelly did two years ago. I was very surprised that we did not lose ANY books while holding them for the year between when Kelly finished the program and Christian started it. I hope it is that painless every year.
Today Christian and I are going to go sing at the library’s annual talent show. You can win twenty dollars, ten dollars, or five dollars. We are saving up for a new Nancy Drew computer game OR a rocket OR a new King of the Trees book! Even if we don’t win anything it’ll be really fun! Wish us luck!
Yesterday, we had quite a nice evening. We did our Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad and read a couple of chapters from How to Win Friends and Influence People. Christian read the second chapter. I had not heard him read for six or eight months. It is amazing how much his vocabulary and reading fluidity have improved. We need to have him read more. I need to get my eyes checked again because it is getting to be a strain to do too much reading. It was good to have such a nice evening as I have to head down to Livermore, California for three days for work. I really miss the family a lot when I am gone.
Mark and Clinton have just about finished putting up the fence around our back patio and side yard. It looks great. The only thing left is the wooden gate for the side yard enclosure. Mark put an arbor looking thing over the gate leading into the back patio. It looks absolutely great. Lorena wanted one for the side yard gate, too, but the posts are not tall enough. Maybe we can build a real arbor later this fall after we get our retaining walls in place. I plan to start on that on Saturday.
I leveled out the ground inside our new fence enough to put up the above ground swimming pool. We did not put it up just right, but I think it will be good enough for this season. Lorena took Kelly and Christian to the cubscout rocket day. They both had a great time building and shooting off rockets. The sad part is that it is now raining and pretty cool. I do not think the kids will be able to swim today.
I spent a couple of hours doing homeschool preparation yesterday. I finished Christian’s first week lesson plan using some new methods developed within OpenOffice.org. It came out great. We are going to have a great year this year. There are so many good materials, that I have a little bit of a struggle working out what not to use. I have loaded Christian up pretty good for the first week. We will try it, but if it is too much, I will back it off a little. I will try to put Kelly’s first week together next weekend.
Mark and Clinton have been working on the new fence and it looks just super. We did not really have a very good idea about what it was going to do to the appearance of the house other than we thought that it would make everything look smaller. Now that it is starting to go up, we believe it will have just the opposite effect. It is going to be just beautiful. I will take a bunch of pictures as soon as he has the whole thing done. We made one minor change to our original design. That was to make the enclosed area a little bit bigger. I think we will leave grass in that area for now with the thought of building a one car garage with an office and a little shop there next summer or the summer after that if we can afford it.
With so much family in Mexico, we have been pretty worried that the next president of Mexico might be a socialist. The election was very, very close and, according to all the sources, very, very clean. Probably better than our last several elections. The latest news is that with 99.5% of the vote counted, the center-right candidate Felipe Calderon has a 0.41% lead. Amazing. The hard left candidate Obrador is calling for protests, but most feel that the people do not really have the heart for a big fight; they just want to get on with life. I hope that is all true. Calderon appears to be quite a good man. This precedent of a clean election could be a great new beginning for Mexico after six reasonably good years with President Vicente Fox. Congratulations to Mexico for their clean election. Let’s hope it holds up.