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.
Is it just me or is the text on your site white (unreadable unless I highlight with my mouse) And just the links are in blue. Anyway, we are enjoying Betty Blonde immensely!
Thanks Audrey! We can see the text well. I will try it on a couple more browser and get back to you.
Christian
Dad, sometimes I have had that problem with rendering Download.com, but it went away with the update to Fiyarphocks 3.
Christian, why don’t you pop Mrs. G. an email explaining that?
I highly doubt that it was the update that fixed the problem. People are starting to get this same glitch again, even after the update. Maybe clearing your private data (ctrl+shift+delete, or on some computers alt+shift+delete) would do something…
Mrs. G. needs a translator…maybe Mr. G. will be home soon! However I tried both ctrl+shift+delete, and alt+shift+delete with no change…How much does Christian charge by the hour, minute, second…?
Hi Ken,
When I bring up your blog, I am unable to read any of your entries unless I highlight acroo down, then the words magically appear. I can see all of the underlined words, like Fallacy Detective,
and Understanding the Times, etc. but nothing else, unless I highlight. Also, your comment
section is light blue with white words. This happened yesterday, too, and I assumed it
was a problem with my computer, that is until I read the first comment on today’s blog.
Ruthie
*and scroll*
Thanks for the notes on not seeing my website Audrey and Ruthie. Since there are two of these, I better try something. Let me change the font and see if that works. I will leave comment on this post after I have tried it. And THANKS for reading my blog!!!
I have switched to Courier New. Can you read it now? Thanks!
Nope, can’t read it….but, the font on the comments section turns green and is easier
to read when I scroll over it. Have you ever been told that tht comment box will go on
for quite (well, maybe 10-15 spaces) sometime, and if I don’t watch the comment box while
I am typing, my words disappear off the viewed page. I have attempted to keep the typed
words in view so you can see how far it can go.
No thanks needed to read your blog. I am thankful that I happened upon it.
I find it very informative as well as a good read. I would like to
learn how to use OpenOffice.org. I downloaded it, but didn’t know how to find the spread
sheet amongst all the icons. Anyway, I think that it is time I learned how to use Excel
or some other spreadsheet. I have a girlfriend that puts her entire lesson plan on an
Excel spreadsheet.
Thanks,
Ruthie (mother to Emma,Mattisse,Shea and Peyton and wife of 22 years to my bestfriend John)
Thanks for the note Ruthie. It is a great help. I have tried one more thing. If it does not work I am going to do a major overhaul (I have been wanting to do that anyway, but was hoping to wait for a month or two). Could you let me know if you see the website OK. If not, I will dive in and change it.
On another note, there are some absolutely incredible tutorials on how to use OpenOffice.org at http://www.tutorialsforopenoffice.org/ — click here. I use OpenOffice.org Calc to do all of our homeschool planning. It works really well. I would be happy to send you the plan for one of the kids if you would like a sample from which to start. Calc is almost exactly the same as Excel except it is free. I am sure your friend is doing something similar to us.
Congrats on 22 years with John and FOUR kids! My best friend Lorena and I are coming up on 16 years, but with just Kelly and Christian.
P.S. If you want that example spreadsheet, please let me know.
Hi, it worked! Glad to be of service. I happen to have Microsoft Office on
the computer, so I guess that you do not find OpenOffice easier to use….all things
equal except price. Oh, 4 kids is not THAT many. I just went to an Above Rubies
Christian women’s conference, and there were so many families with 9+ kids, that
I found myself answering the question, “So, how many children do you have?”, with
“Only 4.” 🙂 I will give the spreadsheet a try. I always seem to take a little bit
of a different path than I picture at the beginning of the year, so I hate to be locked
into a “schedule”, but with the tougher subjects the kids are getting into, it is much
harder to “wing it”, so I hope to spend a little more time planning this year, and to
stick to the vision of where we want to be a the end of the school year. I will try
the tutorial and will see if I can implement a more sure schedule.
Ruthie
Thanks for the help Ruthie. Four kids is great. My wife and I both came from families of five kids with parents who were from families of 9 and 10 kids. Big families are great.
It sounds like you are at a similar place as us. I do math for a living, but the kids are getting to the point where I really have to work hard to get through their material. Let us know how it goes with the your spreadsheet trials. For the last two years, I had a master plan in my head, but did assignments only a couple of weeks ahead at a time so I could be flexible when we were going faster or slower than expected or an event came up. This year, I am giving a try at doing a first pass plan of the whole year with the idea that I will change it as we go along.
Please keep us posted with how it is going with the spreadsheet and thanks again for the help.