Well Monday was the first day of school her in Montgomery County, and feeling a bit subversive, I posted this YouTube clip to my Facebook wall. A perceptive high school friend who I haven’t seen since, well, high school wrote, “Hmm, is this post due to past or current frustrations with education? Or perhaps just an appreciation of Pink Floyd… I’m curious.”
Ding, ding, ding! We have a Facebook semiotics winner!
Here at our house, we decided Tuesday would be the first day of homeschooling for Ms. M. And what do we have on tap for this semester, give or take?
- EPGY writing course. Pricey but solid, and comes with a transcript. Starts later this month.
- Mom-assigned literature studies, starting with Great Expectations.
- Aleks.com for math, with a tutor twice a week.
- Four Lukeion.com workshops that bridge language arts/history/art, combined into a independent study class with a grade and a paper.
- Latin with Artes Latinae.
- A Critical Thinking class with Online G3.
- A glass art class at a local art space, plus lots of self-initiated sketching, sculpting, and photography. M. would like to enter something in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards this year.
- The new craze at our house, slacklining, for P.E.
- M. is teaching herself the Irish penny whistle and we’ll attend two operas this year, with preparation beforehand. That should cover music.
- Guns, Germs and Steel: Unit Study on the Fate of Human Societies, aka History through Food. The science part will focus on infectious diseases, with a lot of background care of Discovery Education streaming video and field trip(s) to the Koshland Science Museum. There will be geography, health and of course lots of history/anthropology. She’ll also be reading Salt: A World History, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, A History of the World in 6 Glasses, Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World, and An Edible History of Humanity.
- Health…well, we’ll weave health in there somehow.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time planning all of this out. The hitch: unlike most teens she really hates email and online communication in general. She much prefers to be handed a physical piece of paper. So I’m trying to make things as “user friendly” as possible, for example giving her all the login-instructions and passwords in one Word document that she can both hang above her desk and keep on her laptop desktop for quick reference. She knows organization is an area she has to work extra hard on, and because she knows, she’s putting extra effort into it.
She’s going to be a busy girl this fall, for sure. But that’s what she wants and that that’s what she needs in order to be ready for high school next year.
P.S. Too bad home economics isn’t required by the
state instead of music. Over the summer she’s gotten more and more deeply into tea and baking/cooking the proper accompanying goodies, with recipes she’s found in food blogs. (She drinks tea several times a day. Loose leaf, thank you very much, and in a proper British teapot.)
P.P.S There was a nice article on homeschooling in the Frederick News Post recently.
No math?
Aleks.com for math, with a math tutor twice a week.
Is that pre-algebra, by the way?
I’m thinking about your science component. Exponential growth? Can you have her grow bacteria? And count them (either by plating them, most straight-forward, or by Optical Density (basically, a measured way of shining light through and measuring the light absorbed))?
Maybe measure the carbon dioxide produced by yeast in bread as it rises?
Koshland doesn’t really have enough there there. It’s great if you know the subject already, but not to start there. I am speaking of the permanent exhibit, of course.
There is a video from the Teaching Company “The Human Body: How We Fail, How We Heal”. It has a good chapter/segment on infectious disease. Lectures 9 through 16, it’s a pretty long segment. I have that video and the accompanying book. It would go well with the display on the outside wall of the Koshland. http://www.koshland-science-museum.org/exhib_infectious/where_are_they_01.jsp
Another thing to look into for science is the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s BioInteractive site. They are having live webcasts in December on the topic of Viral Outbreaks. http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/index.html
Thank you for pointing these out. They definitely have the great names; Eric Lauter in Genome-stuff, Thomas Cech for RNA, and Joseph Takahashi for circadian rhythms. I assume the names for the other topics are just as well-known in their fields.
I don’t think you’re doing enough, SOM.
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“Health…well, we’ll weave health in there somehow.” Remember, adequate sleep is HEALTH! If you only did that, you’d already be ahead of the school pack by a mile.
Here’s another resource for lectures on biology, this one from UC San Francisco.
Hmmm. Interesting. I was a gifted kid and I feel that my education was weak until I got to boarding school. By then, it was too late in some ways. I’m a surgeon so, by most definitions, successful. However, I feel that I could have done more, earlier.
That being said, I have 2 little boys, 5 and 7. The 7 yo is a “more” child. I am content to have him in a cute little multi-age charter school for elementary school. But come middle school I’m planning on “teaching my own.” I am starting to look around at resources and have not been able to find many people who are affluent and homeschooling. I have money and resources that I can throw at this. Not unending amounts of either…I’m a doctor, not a hedge fund manager. Yours in the first website/blog which seems to have some of what I’m looking for. I like your curriculum. If I were in 8th grade, I’d be stoked for this year. My 8th grade year was uninspiring unless you count forays into criminal behavior. Good for you and yours.
I will tromp around your blog, lurking, and look forward to any tips you can offer.