On another note, Kelly did quite well at her very first Bach Festival. She was chosen as an alternate to perform in this years regional Bach Festival. More than that, she is inspired to do a very difficult piece next year so she might be able to go even further!
Those of you who read this site know that, during the school year, I have a progress bar at the top of the page that shows how many days we have been in school relative to the local government schools. I wrote a Windows program to generate one or two bars with whatever text, progress and completion values, colors, image size, and orientation (horizontal, vertical rotate left, and vertical rotate right) you might require. I used several open source libraries and released the program under the GPL 2 (GNU General Public License). This is the first time I have done such a thing, but you can download a Window binary installer here and the source code here. I know, it is kind of embarrassing to have released a Windows program as my first piece of open source code in as much as I am a Linux guy, but I have a couple of cross platform projects that are of a significantly larger scope that I should have ready to release in six months to a year. This was a small little program that was kind of fun and that I use every day so I just thought I would put it out there. At any rate, I will keep links to the binaries and the source code on our homepage.
Here is the story of why I wrote the thing. When we started homeschooling, we decided that we would try to stick to the same schedule as our local government schools so our children could play with the neighborhood kids on their normal days off. We have found that to be fairly difficult for a couple of reasons. First, the government schools are in session a full two weeks less than us. This year actually might be even less than that depending on whether they decide to make up any snow days they missed. At any rate, I was going to do a program that compared the number of hours the students were actually studying, too. Like a lot of homeschool kids, Kelly and Christian get up, read their bibles, do some memorization, and practice their instruments before breakfast. The other neighborhood kids are usually just getting on the bus when Kelly and Christian finish breakfast. The bus gets home in the afternoon about the same time Kelly and Christian finish studying for the day. They go out and play for awhile, then we do a couple of hours of corrections, reading aloud, and project work in the evening. All in all, I think our kids are studying at least a couple of more hours per day than the government schools, but I think that would be a little too much to put on a bar graph.
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