Month: March 2009

Yesterday, I wrote (here) a little bit about how Kelly and Christian learned how to read.  Luke from the Sonlight and Homeschooling blog made a comment about the success of the reading dogs program in getting shy children to read.  That made me think of a couple of special advantages my family enjoyed when it came to education.  The first and maybe the greatest was the gift of a love for education that probably started with our grandmother, Grandma Sarah’s mom.  Ida Jenkins was a small woman, the daughter of very poor Finnish immigrants who spoke only Finnish for the first eight years of her life.  She had to wait until she was eight years old so her younger brother was old enough to go to school with her as they had to row a rowboat five miles each direction across Tenmile Lake and their parents did not want them to go alone.  She taught third grade at Harrison Elementary School after having gotten a teaching certificate from Oregon Normal School.  I think she must have gotten the certificate some time in the 1930’s. She admonished and advocated for my siblings and I while we attended school at Harrison for our early elementary years.

Grandma valued education greatly and instilled that love in our mother who graduated from Oregon State University in 1952 with a bachelors degree in pharmacy.  She and another woman were one of only two women in their class, the second and third women to ever graduate as pharmacists from Oregon State.  The competition for grades was fierce in those years as many of the students were veterans of the World War II and the Korean War, serious about getting a later than usual college education so they could on with life and support their already growing families.  Grandma J. and our kid’s Grandma Sarah were passionate about education.  Grandma Sarah gets genuinely excited about people who finish their college well.  That excitement has been an encouragement in all my educational endeavors.  I truly want to pass the gift of that excitement along to my children.

The second advantage we enjoyed was that we did not have a television in the house when we were growing up.  The motivation for our not having a television when we were children was mostly religious.  Almost no one in our church had a television.  We were slightly embarrassed about that and tried to make up for it by reading as much as possible so we could talk about the things the other kids saw on television.  I guess the thinking was that if we read the book, we could at least sound like we might have seen the movie.  It did not work so well with the weekly television programs.  I well remember the first family in our neighborhood who got a color television set and the excitement around the school centered around the first full color episode of Bonanza.  We kind of got stuck on the outside looking in.  What we did not realize is that, even in those days when television programming was a lot more wholesome than it is today, the fact that we did not have a television gave us a huge academic advantage.  I think the greatest benefit for us kids was that it gave us a whole lot more time to read, play, do projects, and engage with other people than those kids whose parents let them watch a lot of TV.

It is kind of funny.  Now, when I tell people we do not have a television a typical response is, “Good on ya!”  Even the kids are proud to not have a television.  Still, we try to find appropriate ways to enage with video and television so the kids are not completely divorced from popular culture.  Now, though, when secular and materialistic worldviews, bad morals, and other negative influences are added to the waste of time, we make a big effort to manage their use of those media.  I think that not having a television in the house is still a huge academic advantage.  Now we just need to figure out what to do about the internet.

I know I’ve been writing an awful lot about my crafty projects lately, but I finally got some pictures of my amigurumi, and I really want to share them with you all! So here are the pictures, before y’all get sick of me.

P.S.!!!  Dad… can you help me out with these???

So the first is a picture of my first two attempts. Tigger was my first one, then Piggly.  The third one on the left in the second picture is one that I’m making for Jenna, my neighbor friend. She wanted a pig too. I am almost finished with it! It just needs a pair of legs.  The last picture is what they are all supposed to look like.

I am slaving away at my math homework today.  Pretty intense stuff. Dad had to read through one of my math lessons with me yesterday and explain it all to me. We haven’t done that for a long time, because most of the time I can understand it on my own. But it was very helpful! Thankfully, Dad enjoys doing that kind of thing (or at least it seems like he enjoys it 🙂 )

Soooo back to finding the zeros of polynomial equations. 😛 Ta-ta!

Both of the kids learned how to read when they were four. I do not think that is an especially impressive achievement. I think many if not most could do the same with the right encouragement and tools.  Kelly and Christian loved to play the Reader Rabbit computer game.  We read to them a lot, often repetitively.  Kelly memorized The Owl and the Pussycat from hearing it so often when she was three.  We worked with the kids to memorize scripture from a very young age.  I think all those things worked together to help the kids learn to read pretty early.  Watching the kids learn to read was one of the greatest joys of my life.  I am not sure about the process through which Kelly passed on her way to reading.  I am sure it was gradual, but it seemed like it happened over night.  One day she went from quoting poetry we had read her and playing Reader Rabbit to reading Calvin and Hobbes.

Calvin and Hobbes played a big part in Christian’s path to reading fluency, too, but his path was not as direct as Kelly’s.  As far as we could tell, Christian did all the same things as Kelly to give him a base from which to learn.  He memorized a lot of scripture, finished two our three Reader Rabbit disks, and listened to an hour or two of read alouds every day.  Still, he did not take up reading until we found a mechanism for teaching him.  It became very clear that Christian and Kelly learn differently.  It might be a left brain, right brain thing.  I am not sure.  I just know that they learned how to read in very different ways.  When Kelly read well at a fairly age, it was such I gift, I wanted Christian to have it too.  So, I decided to make a plan.

I wanted the process to be interesting to Christian because I wanted him to have a love for reading.  I knew that part of that interest could take the form of he and I spending time together.  We both loved that, but that was not really enough.  I wanted him to have more than just a desire to spend time with his dad.  I wanted him to love reading for reading’s sake.  I started through a number of reading programs.  The first two or three did not work at all.  At that time, we often went to the Christian Supply bookstore in Beaverton, Oregon on Saturdays because they had a very good homeschool section there.  I found a set of workbooks called Explode the Code.  I bought the first couple of books.  I did not have a lot of expectations at the time about whether these would work or not because we had already decided several other systems were too tedious, not effective, or too expensive.

I do not know how well these books will work for other teacher/child combinations, but Explode the Code turned out to be perfect for us.  The reason we liked them was because Christian and I could complete two or three pages from one of the books in about fifteen minutes.  It was truly amazing.  He worked through the first twelve books (1-6.5) in about four months and could read.  I sat there for fifteen minutes per day for four months and watched him learn to read.  The only thing I added to the process were a few minor prompts and corrections.  He did the rest.  What a gift.  I do not know if that would would work for every child, but I bet it would work for a lot of them.  It was a joyful thing for both of us.

After we got through those first twelve books, we switched to Junie B. Jones.  He read all of them aloud to me.  They were interesting to both of us.  In the past, he had leafed through Calvin and Hobbes comic books looking at the drawings.  Now he would read them to himself, laugh, and read them to the other members of the family.  A lot of the words in Calvin and Hobbes were big ones, so he did not always read them correctly.  Sometimes, the thing he laughed about was not really the point of the strip.  Still, both Kelly and Christian read both Calvin and Hobbes and Foxtrot comic books a lot.  I think it was tremendously beneficial for their reading fluency.  More than that, they had something they truly loved to read.

Imagine how much more useful education would take place in America if every child had someone who was willing to sit with them for fifteen minutes per day for six months and listen to them read.  I honestly believe that is all it would take for the vast majority of children to read fluently.  I think the fact that an interested adult is looking on is more important than the method used.  We have some friends who are about the age of my parents who visited a public school close to them after their retirement three days per week to listen to kids read.  I do not know why any parent would not want to do that for their child.  If there was ever a win-win situation, this is it.

Many people think of physical education and sports programs interchangeably.  I started getting skeptical about that notion when I first read a book by Kenneth Cooper titled The Aerobics Program for Total Well-Being.  The book describes Cooper’s aerobic point system that helps people develop a fitness program to assure they do the right kind of exercises to keep them fit.  It disabused me of the notion that sports such as football, basketball, golf, tennis, or even soccer were particularly good activities on which to base a fitness program.  When you take out all the standing around, timeouts, watching while others perform, and exercise performed in short anaerobic spurts, those activities are really not much good.  Cooper assigns points for different activities depending on the aerobic qualities derived from doing them.  Not surprisingly, running, swimming, aerobic dance, cross-country skiing, and combative sports like wrestling and boxing fared very well in terms of aerobic points earned per minute of activity.  Here is a chart with points for some of the activities he measured.

We like programs like Cooper’s because it is possible to measure activity.  Early on, we decided we wanted a program that would help the kids develop a habit of good fitness.  We wanted to tie the physical fitness program to healthy eating.  Then, like all our other homeschool activities, we wanted to be able to measure progress in addition to activity.  I knew that Cooper had continued to do research after he wrote his first book.  He learned that, in addition to aerobic training, strength training is also important for long term fitness.  We decided to design a physical education program that included three main focus areas:  aerobic fitness, strength training, and diet.  Up until now we have concentrated mostly on aerobic fitness and diet as the kids have been too young to take up a serious weight training program.  We will start a more formal weight training program this summer.

The kids are on a summer swim team at the YMCA that earns them many more points than they need for a base level of aerobic fitness.  During the rest of the year we needed to find an activity they could do in an hour or so that was both measurable and not too tedious.  Our YMCA has great exercise facilities, but the reality of the matter is that most of the aerobic point producing activities are fairly tedious, so the measurement itself needs to be a big part of the motivation for doing the activities.  We have reached several milestones this year in regard to the kid’s fitness.  The greatest is that both Kelly and Christian have medium and long term fitness goals on which they have made good progress.  The hard part was to continue through 35 minutes on an elliptical machine or a track for enough days to get infected with the joy of making progress toward a goal.  After they met some short term goals (Christian did over 100 push-ups in a day, Kelly hit a certain distance/calorie output for 35 minutes on an elliptical machine), they were energized to continue.  I think they will see the same kind of effect when we start lifting weights later this spring.

They have gotten me inspired to push a little harder than the 3-4 miles of walking I do every day.  We have decide we will start a graph of our progress here on this blog to go along with the weight loss chart.

Those of you who know me well, know that I have always disliked Coke. I don’t think there’s anything really disgusting about it, and I don’t mind drinking it, it just seems too sweet and Coca-Cola-ish for my tastes.  But just because I dislike Coke doesn’t mean that I can’t have fun at the World of Coca Cola! Cokelandia (in Georgia) was awesome.  I wondered how people could fill an entire building with facts about Coke. I mean, there’s only so much you can say about it.  But someone did it, and it was awesome!   We watched an amazing 4-D movie about Coke.  We wore cool cardboard ‘n’ plastic glasses, our chairs bumped up and down, water was sprayed in our faces, we were jabbed in the back a couple of times.  A full chiropractic session, with entertainment!  We also taste tested 64 different drinks from all over the world.  My personal favorites were Vanilla Coke, Fruit Punch Power-Ade, Lift (Also known as Manzanita in Mexico), and good old Minute Maid Lemonade. Good stuff! I learned a few things which I want to pass along to you, just in case you ever find yourself in the Coke museum:

1. The drinks from Africa are VERY sweet
2. You’re only allowed to drink drinks in the drink drinking area 🙁 And you can’t take them outside the museum with you.
3. Everyone should have a sip of Beverly, the world’s most flavorful and distinctive soft drink.
4. Don’t worry about restrooms. There are plenty of them around. Trust me, I know.

We all got a free commemorative bottle of Coke on the way out, and we got our picture taken with a statue of John Pemberton (?), the inventor of Coca Cola himself.

I finished my Amigurumi tiger, and I only have the ears left to make on an amigurumi pig.  I would put up pictures, but the camera is messed up right now. 🙁

We had a good weekend in Georgia visiting our great friends from Arizona and California.  We visited the Coca-Cola Museum and were impressed with that area of Atlanta.  It seemed so clean and orderly there–maybe somewhat different than I remember when I lived there twenty years ago.  The drive there took us about seven hours each way.  It was funny that it did not feel particularly onerous.  The kids did some homeschool.  We talked.  I got a little more exercised than I should have in one discussion and felt seriously admonished about it when our friend told us about one of her friends who is very good at not taking responsibility for the actions of others.  The whole weekend was like that.  I came back home with the desire to dedicate myself to more humility and kindness.  Those qualities are good and right.  I just need more of them.

Note:  I found a VERY cool piece of free software:  Photo stitching with Hugin.
EasyPeasy:  Ubuntu for netbooks!  H.T. Craig J.

We are going to drive down to Atlanta this afternoon to see our old friend, Kim Floyd.  She will be there visiting her cousin Barbie’s family.  We are looking forward to spending the weekend with all of them.

We had a great month for homeschool in February.  Both the kids took the ACT college entrance exam for the first time and did quite well.  Each of the kids planned to take a CLEP test, too, but it was just too much to do all the school work, prepare for the ACT and prepare for CLEP tests on top of that.  They have continued to study hard and plan to take their next CLEP test on March 18 at Johnston Community College in Smithfield.  Kelly will take the US History II test.  Christian will take the Freshman English Composition test.  Kelly will have her first piano recital this month.  Christian continues to make progress on his guitar.

One very big milestone is that Kelly has finished Geometry and move on to Pre-calculus.  Her goal is to finish Pre-calculus very early in the year next year so she can get through Calculus next year in time to take the CLEP calculus test before she starts school at the community college the year after.  She will have to spend some time doing math this summer, but it is a great goal that we believe she can make.  Christian is on the verge of finishing Algebra II.  He should start into Geometry this month.  Another milestone, of sorts, is the worm dissection Kelly and Christian did with our new neighbor girl Jenna.  They were a little worried about it, but Jenna’s enthusiasm helped them through the process.  Kelly has two more dissections to do for her Apologia Biology program which include a crawfish and quite a large frog.  They look forward to it.

The kids should have their annual report topics picked within the next week or so.  They will get started on the reports in April.

Most days of the week, Mom, Christian and I head down to the YMCA and work out for 35 minutes on they elliptical machine. They are nice machines… you can plug in your age and weight and goals and lots of other things and there are many different programs you can use.  I don’t think it’s as great as swimming, but we all get a good workout.

A few weeks ago I started charting how far I went and how many calories I’d burned. Since I try to do a little more than I did the time before each day, it’s been super exciting to see the dramatic difference between the first day and the latest day.  My big goal right now is to get to 4 miles in 35 minutes (although I might make it 40 minutes). I’m getting an average of 3 and a half miles and 280 calories for 35 minutes, and that’s taken me a while so I’m not exactly sure how long it will take me to get up to my goal. But it’s been really fun going through it. Dad is going to help me put my chart onto the computer so it’ll be backed up and easier to access.
 
I’m REALLY looking forward to swimteam though! I want it to be here right now! Sign up day is on April 11th (in a little more than a month!), and it starts sometime in mid-May (2 and a half months!)  TOO LONG! 

Sigh…

I see a potential Betty Blonde storyline in this. 😉

With lots of friends going to college or studying hard in homeschool, I too often put the focus on other people.  I always harp on the kids about learning.  I try to be careful to make the very important distinction between learning and getting a degree, certificate, or diploma.  Degrees, certificates, and diplomas hold now value other than what is accrued to them by the societies within which they are honored.  They do say something about the process through which someone has passed to acquire them, but even that is diminished of late by grade inflation and the big push to get everyone through college.  I think the old 8th grade diploma became the high school diploma in the fifties and is the bachelor’s degree of our day.

At any rate, I am finishing up a big chunk of functionality for the product on which I work at my day job.  I will be moving on to a new chunk of functionality that will require me to have a deeper understanding of the math used to know things about the three dimensions of things in scenes of which we capture images.  We will take multiple images from different directions, light the scenes with different spectra, diffusion, and direction of light, and do some other tricks to try to get information on the third dimension of things from two dimensional images.  I know quite a bit about how to do that now, but need to do it at a precision and speed and with noisier images than I have ever worked in the past.  What that means is that I will need to start learning some new things.  It is math and it will be messy to learn, but I have been harping on the importance of learning until you die so much.  No it is time for me to put my money where my mouth is!

Note:  Here is an interesting article by one of my favorite authors that helps me remember why I need to study hard–I am not that smart.

I had to put this up for Lorena and the kids.  This is my colleague and her daughter.  Cute does not adequately describe this little girl.

We are in the middle of what will be a fairly long stretch where all we have planned is to perform well in school.  There are a few piano performances and weekend trips planned, but really not too much else until swimming starts in the late spring.  It dawned on me that we make the most progress in projects and school in these sorts of times.  There is a desire to relax, do the minimum possible, and just glide through times like this.  I have “slacked” many times over the years, but view those times as wasted.  We are on a tight schedule to meet some very specific goals for school.  If we meet them, the kids will be, literally, a year ahead of where they will be if we do not meet them.  There are some fun things to learn that can bring a lifetime of enjoyment (e.g. Amigurumi and ham radio).  I can learn new things to do my job better.  I think it is important to set time aside every day to relax and talk, but that is not what I am talking about.  What I am talking about can be as little as focusing on piano instead of browsing through facebook, doing a few math corrections instead of playing Runescape, learning a new knitting pattern instead of reading that interesting article on what hat to wear, studying C++ programming or Spanish instead of optimizing Firefox performance for the 42nd time, drawing a couple of extra Betty Blondes instead of re-reading an Agatha Christie novel for the 53rd time, etc., etc., etc.

On Thursday, I bought a hook, on Friday I taught myself how, on Saturday I practiced, and on Sunday I crocheted an adorable, tiny  amigurumi tiger!  According to Wikipedia, amigurumi is the Japanese art of knitting or crocheting stuffed dolls. Amigurumi can be as simple as This or This and as complex as This orThis. Simple or Difficult, the end result is always adorable!!! My modest little tiger is not quite finished yet as he doesn’t have any eyes or other facial features, but as soon as he does, I’ll take a picture and post it up!

I got the pattern from this really cool magazine that Dad got for me called Knit.1  It included an easy starting project for knitting lace that I want to do, and of course the 12 amigurumi zodiac animal patterns. 🙂  I am soooo excited about all my crafting! I have a blue and green scarf that’s almost done, 1/4 of a pair of purple fingerless gloves done, 9/10ths of the way done with an embroidered Betty Blonde napkin, a new fruit-themed napkin to embroider, TONS of amigurumi, Betty Blonde (of course) and maybe some knitted lace! Yay!

So on Thursday (maybe Friday) my neighbor friend Jenna came over in the afternoon and went with us to Christian’s guitar lesson.  We went to the Micheal’s that is right next door to the music store where Christian takes lessons, and looked at all the yarn. Jenna and I are crafting buddies now that she has learned to knit.  An added benefit of being her friend: someone gave her a huge box full of embroidery and cross stitch goodies and she is kind enough to share with me. 🙂  After that we all went to the gym. I usually do the ellyptical with mom, but this time Jenna and I walked around the track.  After that we went home and she and Christian and I all dissected the worm. Thankfully Jenna was brave enough to pull the worm out of the dead animal bag.  Unfortunately, all of the animals were placed in one big bag, with nothing separating them. 😛  We had SO much fun dissecting the worm though!!!  I was surprised! I thought I’d be really squeamish (and I was at first), but it was awesome.

We had a two hour snow delay here at work.  They shut down all the government schools and many of the private schools in the area.  It never crossed my mind that we might have a good snow in North Carolina in March.  Amazing.  It rained most of the weekend, too.  We enjoyed that by spending most of the day inside doing crafts and working on the computer.  We bought Kelly a knitting magazine when we went to the Borders while Lorena was shopping at Costco.  She spent most of Saturday crocheting here way through the animals of the Chinese Zodiac.  Hopefully she will write about that and put up some pictures over the next couple of weeks.  On Sunday evening, the kids cleaned up the kitchen and the bonus room for Lorena.  Christian untangled all the rats nest of cables up there.  Now we need to hang them on a peg-board, but we have to get a peg-board first.

When I got onto the computer this morning, I noticed that we were missing all the bookmarks.  I falsely accused Christian of overwriting the bookmarks when he installed Xubuntu on Kelly’s eeePC.  Then, when I got into work, I a message came up when I was using Firefox that said there is a bug in Firefox/Foxmarks that causes the default bookmarks to replace the stored bookmarks.  Sorry about that Christian.  I zapped all the bookmarks, but have them saved on my laptop at home, but have decided our bookmarks are getting to messy anyway, so we are going to start over from scratch.  Xubuntu is an amazing solution for even a minimal eeePC like Kelly’s that has only 2G of RAM.  I hope Christian is going to write about it in Nerdhow.  I liked it so much that I replaced it on the old Linux/Homeschool computer that will now be Lorena’s computer.  The new Dual Boot Ubuntu/Vista (soon to be Windows 7) computer is supposed to get here on Wednesday.