Month: February 2009 Page 1 of 2

Last night, our little friend, Jenna from next door came over and spent the afternoon with Lorena and the kids.  She went to Christian’s guitar lesson and the YMCA with them.  When they got home, Kelly was supposed to dissect a big (about 10″) worm for her Biology class, but was a little squeamish.   It is a good thing Jenna had experience at such things.  It turns out she had dissected a frog and actually enjoyed the experience.  So, the three of them went out onto the back porch, dissected the worm, took a lot of “interesting” pictures, learned a lot, had a great time, and are now looking forward to doing the crayfish (a big one, too), and the frog they have in their science kit in the next few weeks.  I will spare you the photographs here (Kelly put them on Facebook).

After dinner, Christian and I went up stairs to finish the radio.  He actually did all the work while I did a little programming, scanned in the Betty Blonde comic, and looked on.  We have to get some resistors to simulate the antenna load before we can turn it on, but it looks very cool.  The pictures below are of the finished (but not yet tweaked) radio.  While we were doing that, Lorena was rifling through some old pictures and found the two above shots of the kids drinking hot cocoa.  I think We thought we should share them.

Tonight, the kids and I are going to work on homeschool math catch-up and the ham radio.  Hopefully we will have a picture of the radio in its case by tomorrow.

Making the world a better place. That was the gist of Dad’s epiphany last night, and it sort of goes hand in hand with the whole narcissism thing.  We’re not here to help out ourselves! We’re here to help out other people!  Imagine that. 🙂

OK, so on a more self-centered note, I’ve been stressing out about my birthday lately. I am one of those people who enjoys stressing about things like birthday parties and get-togethers.  Every year around early February, I begin planning and worrying and such. Don’t worry! It’s a happy thing*.

Anyway, this year I’m really, really, really stressing out! Woot!  I have no clue what I want to do, but I made a list of options:

• Murder Mystery party. I’m thinking of making it a boy/girl party because I know a maximum of 5 girls who are at the appropriate age to enjoy this, and I need at least 8.  This option would be really fun if everything went off without a single hitch, but it rarely does.   There are a LOT of things to consider when doing it.
• Normal Party #1: Invite a bunch of kids over to play games and eat food and roast marshmallows and stuff.
• Normal Party # 2 Same as above, only with a theme
• Normal Party #3 Meet at a roller-skating rink or a bowling alley and then go home for dinner
• Sleepover : I’ve done this every single year since I was 10, and I want to do something different this year, but it works! So I just might do it. 
• Individual Thing: This is where I have just one person over and we do cool things all day then go out to dinner.
• Skyler Party: I had this friend named Skyler, who’s birthday was two days before mine. She would always wait 4 or 5 months before having her birthday party, so she could do it in the summer and take her friends to the pool.  It was a good plan.

Desicions, desicions.  I think that’s all that I’ve thought of. Does anyone know of any unique and fun party ideas? I’m running short.

*I am not speaking for the rest of my family here.  They don’t really understand what it’s like to be anal-retentive.

When I got onto the blog this morning, I noticed that I had a couple of hits from a Sonlight blog.  I was a little skeptical about a comment we had received from, Luke Holzmann, the author of the blog, but I am beginning to think he might have actually read what we wrote.  Even though we are big fans of Sonlight, yesterday’s post about their Core 100 US History program was anything but positive.  I am quite impressed because they linked to our post anyway.  All that got me to thinking about what could be done to improve the program.

We have a problem.  We have homeschooled for just about six years now.  Over that time we have met and continue to communicate with a good number of homeschoolers on both coasts and a bunch of places in between (Oregon, California, North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Indiana, Arizona, Kentucky, and probably a few others I am forgetting right now).  Many of them have the same problem.  There are good solutions to the problem, but we have found no one who has put such a solution together and offered it as a product in the way that Sonlight has offered their very effective “soup to nuts” solutions for grades 1-8.  Somehow, they and others are missing the boat in high school.

The problem:  Many, if not most, homeschool children perform at an academic level that is significantly higher than their peers in traditional schools.  That is rarely true because they are more intelligent than their peers.  It is because they received individualized study plans and tutoring by people (their parents) personally invested in their success.  Many of them can perform college level work by the time they are freshmen in high school.  There is a common discussion I have with other homeschool parents with kids in this boat.  How do we keep our kids at home, but give them a study program that challenges them and for which they can get college credit for their work.  There are as many ways to approach this problem as their are homeschool parents.  We have arrived at a solution that we like very, very much.

A solution:  We have found that our children respond well when they have three things.  First, they have to have materials that are engaging and that thoroughly cover the required subject matter.  Second, there has to be a measurable goal that can demonstrate that the subject matter has been mastered.  Third, there has to be a way to receive college credit for the work.  An example of how we put a program together that works for Kelly is one that started with the absolutely stellar Apologia Biology program offered by Sonlight.  This year Kelly is working her way through that program.  We have read through a several additional books that complement the program.  These included Understanding Intelligent Design and Explore Evolution.  Finally, we purchased the REA CLEP Biology study book that Kelly will use to prepare for the CLEP test which she will take toward the end of the year.

This mechanism has worked well for us so far.  We used this exact same approach with Spanish (Rosetta Stone combined with REA CLEP Spanish–12 semesters of college credit earned), College Composition (Easy Grammar and other books combined with REA CLEP Freshman College Composition–6 semester hours of college credit earned), and US History (this was described in an earlier post titled U.S. History: Deciding not to use Sonlight.  Even though we were not very happy with the material, Kelly earned 3 semester hours of credit).  With this approach, Kelly plans to prepare for and take CLEP tests in Psychology, Sociology, Biology, and US History II this year.  Christian is in preparation for several of these same tests.  He will take his first test, Freshman College Composition, next month.

The benefits:

• The kids study the material at a depth that is much greater than what is generally available.
• There is a mechanism by which they can know when they are ready to take the CLEP test (The REA study book practice tests).
• They receive college credit for their work when they pass the CLEP test.
• They can finish their associate degree at a local community college early–sometimes a year or two before they would graduate from a traditional high school.
• The CLEP tests are super preparation for college entrance exams like the ACT and SAT.
• And, probably the greatest benefit, it inspires the kids to receive college credit for their work and study at a college level.

The opportunity:  Why wouldn’t Sonlight or some other homeschool curricula provider package some CLEP study books with some in-depth college freshman level texts for those (many) homeschool kids who are ready to take on that kind of material.  I would have bought all of these if they were available to me.  I know a lot of others who would do the same.

On another note:  Last night, Christian and I finished assembling the printed circuit board for the ham radio.  It is very, very cool.  We should have it all in the case and buttoned up for a photograph by Thursday evening if things go right.  Then we start work on tweaking and tuning.  Christian has done almost all the soldering, winding, and assembling.  He is certainly improved his skills in all that since we started.

We are big fans of the Sonlight curricula.  Last year, Kelly studied their US History.  Of course, the literature books were fabulous as usual, but we struggled mightily with their choice of Joy Hakim’s A History of the USA.  Sonlight acknowledges weakness in the Hakim books, but we felt those weaknesses are understated both in terms of the depth of coverage and the political correctness of the books.  Kelly studied for the US History I CLEP test at the same time she studied the Sonlight curricula.  We bought her the REA study book, History of the USA I, for the test.  Even though the CLEP study book was not designed to be a history course, it provided a much more thorough coverage with somewhat less bias in the coverage of the material.  Kelly is using the REA book, History of the USA II, to get ready for the next test.

Now, it is time to think about a US History curriculum for Christian.  We know we do not want to use the Joy Hakim series, but we do not think the CLEP preparation books are adequate either.  I am thinking about combining A Patriot’s History of the United States:  From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror by Larry Schweikart and Michael Patrick Allen as a read aloud for the whole family, John J. Newman’s United States History:  Preparing for the Advanced Placement Examination as a study text, and the Sonlight books from Core 100 as accompanying literature.  I think that will give Christian (and the rest of us) a good overview of US History as well as prepare him to take the two CLEP tests.  Of course Christian will also use the REA books for specific test preparation.

UPDATE:  Found a VERY cool computer here.

MOM FOUND MY KNITTING!!!! I’d been looking for it for the longest time! The half-finished scarf was stowed away in a plastic bag in a drawer somewhere, but the important thing is that she found it!!  I was totally blah on knitting for several weeks because I had spent a lot of time on that scarf, and it was very pretty, and I had no idea what else I wanted to knit.  But now I’m back!

Today I did something that I should have done a long time ago.  I got out my CLEP History book to read for twenty minutes, but then I remembered all those study books that Dad got.  Simply reading a book for twenty minutes is not the best way to retain information!  So I pulled out a notebook, pencil and highlighter, and flipped all the way back to Chapter 1.  I skimmed the chapter and wrote down all the treaties and amendments and such, and the dates that went along with them. I also wrote down two sentence summaries of the important events, a list of Resconstruction Era vocabulary words, a list of the presidents in office between 1865 and 1877, and two timelines.  All on one sheet of paper! After reviewing the sheet for a little while, I decided to try to do even better than that! I got out a stack of notecards and wrote down dates, vocabulary words, presidents, and amendments (and such) on the fronts of all of them, and then wrote down information on the backs. Instant flashcards! 

I feel like a genius. 🙂

We had a wonderful weekend.  As is usual on Fridays, we had our family night together at home, complete with pizza and clever repartee.  I wrote a previous post about how the hard drive on our Linux/Homeschool computer went bad, so Christian and I worked through all that.  Actually, it was mostly Christian who did the computer recovery and reassembly work because I worked on some programming projects.  We wanted to finish up the ham radio project this weekend, but that pretty much went by the wayside with our computer problems.  One of the good parts of the weekend was that Lorena found a great deal on a table for the computer that she bought with the furniture money she has been saving.  I will put a picture of her and her new purchase up here a little later today.

Kelly hung out with her friend Jenna quite awhile on Saturday.  I think they were doing crafts, looking at dresses, and other girl stuff that is beyond the scope of my understanding, but I think the had a lot of fun.  We wanted to have Jenna over to draw with on Sunday afternoon, but we never really got around to that.  We HAVE to start making that a priority again.  I think I am going to start looking for a book on watercolor or something like that to move our art forward.  We really have not done anything yeet with color.  It is something I would certainly like to try.

Jenna stuck around for dinner when Troy and Youngin came (bringing the food, too–how good is that?) over on Saturday.  We had a ball with them even though I think we kept them way to late because we did not have an Ubuntu disk ready to install on Troy’s computer when he came.  What is awesome is that, when his screen went blank after he got his newly installed Ubuntu computer back home, he called us, but our phone was turned off so he got onto the internet on Youngin’s computer, found Ubuntu Forums and figured the thing out himself.  No problem!  Actually, the problem was a fairly non-trivial X-Windows thing, but he figured it out anyway.  Christian and I were both impressed.

We had a ton of stuff we wanted to do today, but the hard drive on our Linux computer went bad.  We had almost everything backed up, but I decided we ought to take this opportunity to get out backup situation a little better under control.  Troy has been talking about what he is going to do in terms of archiving stuff.  We bought a computer online from Dell, then ran down to Staples to buy a terabyte external drive to perform backups.  Then, while I worked on the program I owe to my buddies in Oregon, Christian, archived all the stuff we had on our old backup drive to the new one, consolidated two smaller drives onto a single drive so he could use the other one as a replacement for the one that went bad, and installed Linux Mint onto the computer that previously had the bad drive.  In the meantime, Lorena found a table on sale and bought that.  So now we have a new computer table for the living room, a new setup for Lorena to browse Facebook and for me to administer the homeschool, a much better disk backup plan, and a new computer to look forward to bringing on line a two or three weeks.

I am going to revamp the homeschool system later this weekend, too.  I have a much better plan going forward now that the kids have finished with the ACT.  I have been looking into the local community college catalogs, trying to figure out what is the best program and classes for them to take so I can figure out which CLEP tests would be the most appropriate.

A couple of days ago I finally finished Teaching Textbooks Geometry, and finally started Teaching Textbooks Pre-Calculus.  Phew!  Normally, I would not be jumping-up-and-down-excited over starting a new math book, but this time it was different.  All I can say is that Geometry is not Algebra. It does not give me the same comforting, logical feeling that Algebra does. And yes I know Geometry is very, very logical. It just doesn’t feel the same. Thankfully Pre-Calculus has a similar feel to Algebra.  It’s harder than I expected, but I am actually enjoying it and looking forward to doing it. I’m trying to not set my hopes up to high though. Every time I start a new math book, it seems pretty easy and obvious and straightforward in the beginning. And then by Lesson 15 I’m knee deep in corrections.  All a part of the learning process I suppose!

As you’ve probably already read, I got my ACT scores in. I am very happy with them, but I hope to do better next year, especially in the math department.  I think I will, because just yesterday I learned a very simple something in my Pre-Calculus that was on the test.  That was kinda frustrating, but there’s nothing I can really do about it but retain the information for next year’s ACT.

Yesterday night I was trying to think of a new plotline for next week’s Betty Blonde. I’ve found it’s much easier to do a plotline a week than just several gag strips by the way.  Longer plotlines (like Nosey-book) will last two weeks, and normal stories will last one, with the occasional gag strip to separate the storylines.  Anyway, I was thinking and thinking. Christian suggested doing one about Big Wilma’s hair. I liked that idea because I do feel like I need to develop Big Wilma more, but I honestly didn’t feel like drawing that one right then. Dad also suggested one about Betty Blonde taking a test, and I want to do that one too! Bu I couldn’t think of any good jokes for it.  So then Dad and I came up with a new idea. It has to do with music, it includes a side character that I’ve already used before, and I really like the entire story. I hope you all will too!

Well, the waiting is over sooner than expected.  I checked the ACT website for Kelly’s scores yesterday afternoon.  All her scores were there except the writing score.  I tried to get Christian’s scores from the web, too, but did not have the right access ID.  Lorena handed them to me when she and the kids got home from their workout.  Both of them did very well.  I really did not know how to judge their scores so I talked to Evan at work.  He knew that, for some reason or another, most of the schools publish the range of scores the middle 50% of admitted students received on their ACT.  For example, 25% of the students admitted to North Carolina State University had an ACT composite score below 21 and 25% had a composite score above 26.  Oregon State had 25% below 20 and 25% above 26 on the ACT composite score.  Kelly’s composite score was well above the higher score for both colleges.  There is certainly room for improvement.  There were materials in both math and science that we had not yet covered.  We are excited to see how she did on the writing test.

Christian did very well, too.  He was took the test as a participant in the Duke TIP program.  A participant must receive a 20 or above in English, a 20 or above in Math, a 21 or above in reading, or a 21 or above in Science to qualify for state-wide honors.  He met that criteria in virtually evey category.  There are two sets of programs offered to students who receive high enough scores on the test.  They are called Academy and Center.  Christian qualified for the higher of the two called Center.  When I was going through the material, I saw that Kelly had actually qualified to attend the programs, too.  All in all, we were very happy with the results.  Best of all, it showed us some areas where we can focus for the rest of this year and the next and invigorated us to keep on going.

THANKS FOR THE HELP!  I fixed the blog header image a little.  Lorena tells me it needs more work.  I am glad there are artists in the family with an eye for that sort of thing.  Ruthie and Lynn were both gracious enough to let me know the theme was not displaying correctly on their computers.  I am really glad they took the time to pop me a comment.  It took longer to work that out than I originally figured.  I would be greatly appreciative if you let me know whether I actually fixed anything.  For that matter, if there is anyone else out there who sees a problem with the format, please let me know.

I think I have finally gotten the web theme to the point where it is not completely embarrassing.  Troy helped me find a bug last night that I think I fixed this morning.  I want to make more changes, but they will have to wait until I get some other things out of the way.  This is one of those times when the time available for self reflection is at a minimum.  That is why I very much appreciate Kelly’s post from yesterday.  I am glad she thinks about topics like “Social Graces”.  It is interesting that the book we are reading aloud in the evening about how to make the best use of your voice, even in tense or intimidating situations.  Those situations do not seem unlike the social situations Kelly describes in her post.  If things get tense, people start acting weird.  Some people are better at dealing with that than others.  I am sure practice really helps, but practice without some way of knowing what it is you need to change to maximize graciousness can actually exacerbate the problem.  Thinking, talking, and reading about how others deal with these issues is a good thing.  I certainly am excited that I might learn something about how to be more gracious.  Or at least, learn how to be less of a clod.

Being yourself is more easily said (or typed) than done.  I always believed that I was pretty good at being myself.  Or maybe I deluded myself into believing that I was pretty good at being myself.  Either way, being ‘me’ has proved to be not as straight-forward as I thought.  For example: I want people to like me.  Who honestly doesn’t?  So, when I’m talking to someone that I don’t know very well or haven’t talked with in a long time, I will begin to imitate them. I will mimic their way of speaking, I will use their slang, I will point out every little thing we have in common.  It’s always very awkward. And after the conversation is over, I will come out of my silly state of mind, psychoanalyze the conversation, and berate myself. I promise myself I will be real next time, so people will like me for who I am.  Like I wrote in the beginning of this paragraph, easier said than done. I also might go on and on about me and my life and how wonderful I am.  I know that’s got to be grating to all but the most patient and kind-hearted of people. Truth be told, it’s a sad cycle.

What about group situations? There I have a totally different problem.  I still want other people to like me, but it’s harder to act like just one person because (obviously) it’s a group.  So now I will tug and pull and push and shove the spotlight in my direction, until I am standing right in the center of it.  And then I’ll put on a ridiculous show.  But I’m working on it!  It’s the sort of thing that requires the help of God and a personal choice I suppose.

Oh the insecurities!

Thank goodness some people do see past that. And I know it’s not always as bad as I say it is. Otherwise I wouldn’t have all the lovely friends I have now. I do not know why they’ve stuck with me, but I am very glad that they have. 🙂

After the frustration of the superficial coverage provided by Sound and Look Professional on TV and the Internet, we are quite happy to report that a book by one of the collaborators on that book appears very promising. The name of the book is  Broadcast Voice Handbook.  We read through it and wondered why the author was willing to collaborate on such an obviously inferior work.  At any rate, we are enjoying this second book and looking forward to the arrival of the third:  On Camera: How To Report, Anchor & Interview.

Christian wound his first transformer last night for the ham radio.  Only two to go and then we get to start putting it in its case.

Last night we settled in to read aloud for a half an hour or so in the usual way.  Kelly, Christian, and I sit on the big sofa to the side of the fireplace in the kitchen.  Kelly inks a Betty Blonde comic–I don’t let her do the initial drawing while we are reading because she has to think too hard and misses what is being read.  Christian knits.  I read.  Lorena usually takes a nap over on the small sofa across from the fireplace.  It is all very nice, but yesterday it dawned on me that there is no way I wanted to subject my kids to any more of the inane nonsense in Sound and Look Professional on TV and the Internet.  So we are going to quit reading that until On Camera: How To Report, Anchor & Interview gets here from Amazon.  I really hope that is a little less grating and has a LOT more substance.  No wonder all the television networks and stations are in the tank.

On the bright side, Christian was able to wind a toroid last night for the ham radio.  It looks like we are back on track to getting it assemble in the next couple of weeks.  Of course we will not be able to get it tuned up and ready to go until we start the radio theory book, but it is great to see it come together.  Christian does not need me so much to do the assembly, but we like to do it together.  Now, I usually scan in one of Kelly’s Betty Blonde comics while he works on the radio.

Random story up ahead! :

Every Tuesday morning we go to my piano teacher’s house. It’s way up high on a very steep hill. I have no clue how they got it up there.  But every week mom pushes the minivan up the hill somehow, and we head in to my lesson. At least two minutes before we have to get out of the car and go inside, I start frantically cutting my nails.  My piano teacher is very much opposed to long nails. She says (and I’m paraphrasing here) that we can all afford to give up a little vanity in our lives. I get the feeling that she thinks I keep them long because it’s the fashion or something, but the truth is that I’m lazy, and it’s very hard for me to cut the nails on my right hand. Sad.  Anyway, she has threatened to cut my nails for me several times in the past, and two weeks ago she did it. Yes, you read that right.  She got her fancy-schmansy little leather nail-kit, opened it, and took out a fancy-schmansy little pair of nail-scissors. And she cut my nails.  It was embarrassing to say the least, but I lived. Thank goodness it’s my own fault and that she’s my friend, or else I’m afraid would’ve been rather mad.

Ah yes. My piano teacher is the source of many entertaining stories… 

I actually don’t know why I shared that particular story with you all.  I think it’s because I feel like I don’t have very much to write about right now. The ACT is over, Gospel meetings ended temporarily yesterday 🙁 , the Nosey-book fiasco is done with… things are really calm right now!! Well relatively calm…

I am amazed that we did most of the stuff on our list this weekend.  Lorena shopped at Costco after we had breakfast at Mcdonalds on Saturday morning.  We went to Borders and looked for a book on how to write for broadcast video.  They had nothing, so I ordered On Camera: How To Report, Anchor & Interview from Amazon. I think that book will be OK, but I really need to get a couple on how to do a documentary and how to do new writing, too. There is a Radio Shack right beside the Borders so we were able to find one of the wire gauges we needed, but we are still looking for the other. Kelly finished up a Betty Blonde and has some good ideas about some others.  I worked a little bit on all the things on my programming list, but the new WordPress theme for this blog is going to take more effort than I had originally anticipated.  We had Donnie, Rosemary, and Riley L., and Courtney and Caroline E. over for dinner between meetings on Sunday.  That was great.  Lorena cooked up a fabulous dinner (spiral cut ham, rice, asparagus, chocolate cake, etc.).  We met at Courtney and Caroline’s home for Sunday morning meeting in Florida just after we got married for a couple of years, so we consider them to be close family!  We have to do that more often.

We have a very full weekend ahead of us.  We LOVE to spend Friday nights together as a family just to hang out.  We plan to do that.  Then on Saturday we have a lot of things to accomplish:

1. Go to the MacDonalds by the Costco to have breakfast.
2. Mom will wildly enjoying her shopping at Costco.
3. Christian, Kelly, and I have to find a book on writing for video documentaries, news, or some other similar title at the Borders by the Costco.
4. Read some books, drink some hot cocoa (coffee for Dad), also at Borders.
5. Drop off the almost due books at the Cameron Village library.
6. When we get home (or on the way home), stop by a Radio Shack to pick up some #26 and #24 epoxy covered wire for the ham radio.
7. Work on the ham radio.
8. Do several Betty Blondes for next week.
9. Read aloud about video production.
10. Get ready for company to come over between meetings on Sunday.
11. Go through the “rest of the year” plan for homeschool now that the big test is over.
12. Program:

• BleAx program improvements for scanner integration and Christian’s graphic novel
• Water project programming
• Program for work
• Rework the truly pathetic theme I am currently using for this blog (probably not going to happen this weekend, but I can always hope)

It should be an awesome weekend.  I think I might even get off from work a little early to get started.

Last night we started reading the book Sound and Look Professional on TV and the Internet. It seems like it might have a lot of interesting information in it, but I suspect that it was not written for rocket scientist. It irritatingly uses the word “talent” to describe people who stand in front of the camera and talk. Even if that is the word comely used in the industry to describe people who stand in front of the camera and talk, we are pretty much unwilling to use it to describe the likes of Katie Couric, Peter Jennings, Walter Conkrite and Dan Rather. Still, it is not too good to speak pejoratively about anyone, so we use the word “talkers” instead. The good news is that the book appears to be a good introduction to the basics of video broadcast performance. The bad news is that I do not think we have a good book about video content preparation, so I am on the outlook for that. We do have a book on voice, but I think we will wait on that until after we finish our current book and one on writing for news or commentary broadcasts. I will keep you posted on whatever book we find for that.

About the same time Kelly started drawing her daily comic strip, Christian started work on a Betty Blonde graphic novel.  He filled an entire sketch book with his story, but it was pretty rough in terms of how it was drawn.  Since then, he took a little bit of a hiatus to work on our ham radio, study C++ programming, and knit his Ubuntu scarf.  A couple of days ago, he decided to start the big effort to draw and ink the story in preparation for publishing it in PDF form as a graphic novel.  He only has about a third of the story written so far, all of which needs to be redrawn and inked, but it is coming out great.  It has a completely different feel to it than Kelly’s comic that is just as fun, but equally as crazy.

The whole concept of a comic featuring Betty Blonde, Spike, Big Wilma, and Mr. Nobody started with a magazine the kids started all on their own.  They got the idea they would like to make a magazine, so they started writing articles, drawing pictures, and putting it all together with Microsoft Publisher.  They called their magazine Kaktus Kids.  I had absolutely nothing to do with it.  So, Betty Blonde is not just Kelly’s invention, but a joint venture.  Here are the three issues we put up on the web in PDF format:

February 2007

May 2007

March 2008

The layout of the comic will be quite a bit different from Kelly’s daily strip.  I scanned in the first four panels and used the program I used to format Kelly’s comic so I could put together an example of Christian’s work.  The Graphic Novel format will feature nine panels per page laid out in a 3×3 grid.  The panels will be larger, to print out nicely on 8½x11 inch paper.  I will have to add some functionality to my BleAx comic strip accumulation program to be able to automatically put Christian’s comic panels together in the format we like.  We think this might be a project that will take about a year to complete because we have so many other things we need to do in parallel, but it is starting our very nicely, so we are very excited about it. 

We have agreed to try the two read alouds along for awhile to see how it goes.  We will do a week or two of only the broadcast book first, though, to give Christian and I a chance to finish assembling the radio.