Christian, Kelly, and I are reading two non-fiction books aloud this summer. Actually, I do the reading while they work on their cartooning. Understanding the Times is quite a bit of work, but educational and rewarding. I am glad we chose to read it this summer because it is a great book to prepare us to read Understanding Intelligent Design and Explore Evolution. I tend to want to read straight through a chapter, but the material is sufficiently provocative that the kids want to talk about it as we read. My impatience can be an impediment to some pretty amazing discussions, so I have decided that I need to be more responsive and liberal in allowance for such interruptions. I need to remind myself that the goal is to learn, not to accomplish a certain number of pages read. The other book, The Thinking Toolbox is not only educational and rewarding, but way fun! It is the companion book to The Fallacy Detective that we enjoyed so much last year.
On the cartooning front, Kelly had a cartoon almost ready for scanning and upload last night when I got home. I thought it was really good, but she said she really needed five frames to make the thing flow right and make sense, so she decided to do another, just in the evening. She was able to draw and color the cartoon in the time we sat on the couch and read aloud–about twenty minutes. If she can do that regularly, she should be able to get a pool of cartoons completed so that we can post them regularly. Christian has about a three week story going that we will scan and post after Kelly does a complete week next week. I need to get a cartoon webpage set up here on ChapmanKids.net so we can have a home for all the cartoons and a way to step through and view previous cartoons.
The final large box of books for the 2008-2009 school year arrived yesterday from Sonlight. There is a big swim meet in Raleigh tomorrow, so I am looking forward to spending the time between events to work on the plan for the year. Every year I think it is going to get easier, but every year I think of some new or different way to write and manage the plan so it feels like I do about the same amount of work now that I did when we first started homeschooling even though I have a ton more experience. It is going to be a very cool year. We have always used an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet to manage the plan and we will do that again this year. I am trying to figure out a good way to “webify” the whole process so we can get to it anywhere. The best we did in the past is either email the spreadsheet to our self via Yahoo or Google so we could always get to it via webmail or ftp it up to a private directory on our web site, but neither of those solutions is very satisfactory. It would be great to have a Firefox extension that would allow us to upload, download, edit, and view the plan from our webbrowser. Maybe that is too ambitious given all the other programming projects I am investigating, but it would certainly be useful for a lot of us distributed homeschoolers.