A Homeschooling Plus

Emily is in the hospital right now for a ruptured appendix. It stinks! She has been here for 6 days now and still going. We are looking at 2 weeks at the least. The plus side here is that she isn't missing school. Still she is too sick to do her lessons and is vomiting a lot, but she is not behind. She is ahead by a couple grades on some things so I don't have to worry right now that she is falling behind. The hardest thing for her is that she is missing dance class. We have been reading stories- a great Madeline story about getting her appendix out- and we are watching non-educational videos. But she is learning a lot about other kids who stay here for months at a time. Kids with cancer down the way and she is learning life lessons that aren't so fun right now to learn. We love her and really hope that soon she will be able to get up and go home and learn while not feeling the need to vomit. Until then, its wonderful to know that life is learning and sometimes we do it when we are sick in the hospital.

Start of the School Year

Emily and I have started our school year officially. Our affidavit is sent in, even though she technically doesn't need it until next year, we decided for our own protection to send it in. Now that vacation mode is officially off after a great Disneyland trip, we are on track. My goals for this year are to work with her math skills and practicing them and practicing writing. She is doing very well. She told me that she already knows how to write. I told her that is true that she knows how to put her thoughts down on paper and can read very well, but that everyone needs to practice their penmanship and the operations of writing letters. We got one sentence down well and I was very pleased with her. Small steps, she is doing great!

We have also been working on her math and she has been doing very well with her math. We have been working on addition, subtraction, place value and multiplication. She has also improved a lot with her reading interest level. Even though she has been reading on a 2nd grade level, she hasn't wanted to go much past picture books and small chapter books. Recently she has picked up 4th grade reading material on her own and found it interesting. She finished in half a day the 4th Magic Treehouse book and asked for more.

So far things are going great! We are excited to start a new year.

Ebay + Homeschool

I needed some books for the new year and was frustrated to find the prices to be outrageous and the shipping terrible too. So I decided to finally jump on and join Ebay. The books I needed were $35 with $8 shipping. Through Ebay I got them for $26 with free shipping. Every little bit helps, especially with homeschool when everything comes out of pocket for us parents.

Homeschool Musical

I went a few weeks ago with a homeschool friend of mine to a small theater here that was doing a Homeschool Musical play.


It was pretty funny and they of course made homeschoolers appear weird, but smart. That's a plus. And really in all, they were fairly respectful of homeschooling. I will say their 'Linoleum Dynamite' was very good! The thing I found to be funny about him was that the real character Napoleon Dynamite was not a homeschooler, but went to traditional public school but was weird anyway. Seems you get both weird public and homeschoolers. It was really fun.

Homeschool and Emily

Emily has been working on her math and her multiplication. We did some flash cards and she started to tout the "Mom, this is too hard and I don't know the answer." So I patiently worked with her until she believed in herself and I KNEW she would get it right. She got the answers right and I had to tell her that she knows it isn't hard because she taught herself the concept of multiplication. She totally knows it and got it and her confidence was boosted when she saw that she did have the answers right. We did the Hooked on Math flash cards. And brought out her Math-U-See math blocks for her to visualize the problems. She is just like me in her audio visual learning.

We have also been working on her writing particularly with her holding a pencil correctly. She likes to hold the whole thing in her fist. And doesn't want to listen to me when I tell her to hold it the other way. I don't push too much when she gets obstinate with many things because she soon finds the correct way with our working together on things. But in this case, I have to push her. I don't want her creating habits that will be harder to break. And her other issue with writing we are working on is when she writes mixtures of upper and lower case letters in her words. Emily to her is always spelled with upper case L. She is really thriving in reading, but she has been doing it for so long. I still get amazed at how she takes a difficult and long word and can break it up so well to be able to figure it out. I don't know if her reading level is on a 2nd or 3rd grade. I am going to have to do another online evaluation soon just so I know where she is at. I know the books she is reading are in that level, but it will be nice to know.

Lindsey has been getting doses of starfall.com and Letter Factory. She walks around saying "The A says AHH" But kind of gets lost with the other letters. She recognizes by sight A,B, D, E, G, H, I, K, L, M, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, W, and Z. She mixes up M and W sometimes as well. She is doing so well. Things are going great right now. Emily's drama class is almost up. They are soon going to perform their play and Emily has memorized her lines and does really well with acting. Her interests recently has included dinosaurs and storms. She asked me the other day in the car "Mommy, do people have egg tooths?" HAHA! She read that birds have an egg tooth to break out of their shell and I had to tell her we don't have an egg tooth because we don't need one.

Universal Pre-K a Scam

Wow, this article says a million words. And I can just say how happy I am with a GOOD reporter. John Stossel was also the one that brought us the gem on 20/20 called 'Stupid In America' that addressed the Nation's failing schools. I seriously can't believe some of this. I am not a pre-school fan as it is and this just tops it all. My favorite parts are the ones that are bolded. The location of the article is here.

It used to be that the first day of kindergarten was the first day of school. But now there's a new movement: Universal pre-K. Every child in America should have a chance to start school before kindergarten. Isn't that a wonderful idea? Part 4 of John Stossel's special "Bailouts and Bull" on universal preschool.

Universal pre-K was one of President Obama's campaign promises, and most Americans agree with him. Sixty-seven percent of Americans think the government should pay for every child to go to preschool, according to a June 2008 poll by Peter D. Hart Research Associates/American Viewpoint.

It all sounds so good. However, Mia Levi, a parent who owns six preschools in California, is not convinced.

"Of course it sounds good. All they hear about is a little sweet preschool program, and it's for the little children, and how can you say no to little children?" she said. "But this whole thing is a scam. It's like some kind of spin they want everybody to believe."

One argument against universal pre-K is that most American kids already attend pre-school. Parents pay for it themselves, and if they can't afford it, there are free programs like Head Start.

But under a universal system, taxpayers would pay for every child, regardless of who needs it.

"It's a flagrant waste of money," Levi said. "It's as if I went shopping for myself because I needed a dress for a party and I went and bought a dress for everybody else who was going to be at the party, whether they needed it or not. Who does that?"

The government thinks it can do a better job, but don't they have enough problems running K-12 education?

Just this week, while delivering remarks on education in America, Obama said, "We've let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us."

Is the solution to our problems to add more grades onto a broken system?

"The government is providing K-12 education. and unfortunately, we're in the toilet," said Levi, "to say that they are the ones to define what quality is, is laughable."

Universal Preschool 'a Waste of Money'

While there is no guarantee that government would run preschools well, there is one guarantee: It would cost taxpayers billions.

One argument against universal Pre-K is that most American kids already attend preschool.

"Now with the economic situation being what it is, you're telling me that we're going to devote billions of dollars that we don't have? It's a waste of money," Levi said.

Making matters worse, private preschools that are already functioning well would have to conform to government standards, reducing the incentives to compete and provide the best-quality education. Levi and many others recognize this.

"The beauty of preschool is that there are myriad choices. If we didn't do our job, families would go down the street to the next school. Public schools aren't doing their job, and they get to just keep opening their doors," she said. (One HUGE reason why competition in education is SO important.)

Yet the president and many universal pre-K advocates point to statistics that claim for every $1 the government invests in pr-school, we will get $10 back.

Lisa Snell, education director of the Reason Foundation, points out that those impressive pre-K statistics are misleading because they're based on small studies of kids with very low IQs.

"They have these tiny studies of severely disadvantaged kids. But then they extrapolate as if you would have the same benefits for middle-income and higher-income children," she said.

She also pointed out that the most well-known of these studies, the Perry Pre-School experiment, followed only 58 children. These kids received many benefits like parent counseling and home visits -- all bonuses that would certainly skew the results.

Libby Doggett, executive director of one of the leading universal preschool advocacy groups, Pre-K Now, defends the study because she believes it demonstrates the benefits of a massive investment in preschool for low-income children.

"Well that study was an incredible study because they did have a random assignment. They had children who didn't get this treatment and children that did get the treatment, and the treatment was really high-quality," she said.

A Real Head Start?

And while that study concluded that preschool had a lasting effect on kids, plenty of other studies of the government's Head Start program point out that the gains from preschool tend to fade over time.

"By the second, third, fourth grade, they can't tell the difference between the kids that went to Head Start and the kids who didn't," Snell said.

In addition, studies have found that too much preschool may lead to kids becoming more disruptive and aggressive when they get to elementary school, a finding which Doggett acknowledges. But she insists that the government can provide high-quality programs that will avoid this problem.

"They're doing it in a number of states. Oklahoma is a good example. Georgia is a good example," she said.

It's true that those states have government-run preschool programs already. Oklahoma has had it for 10 years, and so has Georgia. They've spent billions of taxpayers' dollars on it, and the result? Not impressive. Oklahoma's performance has actually dropped relative to other states.

"We don't want to just focus on IQ scores," Doggett insists. "We want to look at how children are doing in their social and emotional, noncognitive development. ... Your children will learn more in pre-K than you could imagine."

But how can we be so sure that the government can do a high-quality job?

"This time, we're going to get it right," Lisa Snell said of the government's promise to American parents. "We can't get it right with Head Start, we can't get it right with K-12, but if you give us control of the preschool market in America, this time it will be high-quality."

Do Kids Really Learn Like This?

I am driving Emily and Lindsey in the car and this is how the conversation went:

Emily: "Mommy, 5, 4 times is 20."

Me: "Why yes it is sweetie. How do you know that?"

Emily "Because on my colorful tights there are 4 flowers and each flower has 5 petals. I counted them and there are 20 all together, so 5, 4 times equals 20."

That little conversation heralded some more math problems. I asked her what 3 + 3 was and she told me 6 and I told her that 3, 2 times is 6. We got out her math blocks the other day and discussed decimal street and did subtraction, addition and multiplication. I really can't help being surprised by what this girl can do! She reads everything she can get her hands on. Her cousins let her borrow a dinosaur book and after our lap book we made (that I have yet to show on our blog) she read it from cover to cover with complete fascination.

Lindsey has also been learning like wild fire. She told me "B mommy, b-b-baby" and both of them loved the Children's Chinese video I had from the library. If I ask Lindsey what her tóu is she points to her head and her ěrduo she points to her ear. Her bízi- she points to her nose. She walks around saying some sayings I don't even remember with the handful of times I heard them watching it. I LOVE watching my kids learn. It is fascinating to me!