I love TV and I don't think kids should be limited in watching it.
The subject line is the short answer to the following question that was posted on one of my homeschooling mailing lists:
The subject line is the short answer to the following question that was posted on one of my homeschooling mailing lists:
Lately I've been reading a lot about unschooling/ natural parenting. What I've found is that the more I read, the more I have to unsubscribe from homeschooling list/ discussion/ message forum I've been reading, because I find it so toxic to deal with so many people's overwhelming control issues. One of the main ways in which people perpetuate control issues is through their controlling their kids' food. Whether it be through a special diet or through vegetarianism or limiting sweets or SOMETHING. I guess since it's such a basic need, it's a basic starting point for control. For me this has been very evident in online and RL circles of parents with special needs kids. It seems like everyone who homeschools a kid with autism is obsessed with controlling the autism (or more accurately, the autistic child) via controlling their kids' food. When my son was very small, I tried the Gluten Free, Casein Free diet prescribed to many parents of autistic kids. I saw my son suffering, and connected it to his being different from other kids; I didn't blame it on the fact that *I* was the one struggling because his personality and needs don't fall in line with cliche child development expectations but because he was autistic and hyper and I was convinced THAT NEEDED FIXING and this diet claimed to help me do that. I tried the GFCF for 9 months. It was sincerely all 31 flavors of hell. I am a single parent who works from home and though Dad is supportive and contributes, we are on a very tight budget and I have limited amounts of time. GFCF cooking and eating was expensive and time consuming. AND DISGUSTING. All the GFCF substitutes for the real things are gross, y'all. Fake bread and pasta and cookies - all gross. Real Oreos are good, GFCF "oreos" are nasty (my son and I have a joke now - any food whose name includes quotes is probably inedible). Some things are edible, but edible isn't the same as enjoyable. And I'm not going to pay $7 for a marginally edible loaf of bread that takes me 3 hours to make, when $1.59 buys me a really good normal loaf from Publix. I hated the diet the whole time we adhered to it. I felt like a horrible person, snatching cookies out of my kid's hands at birthday parties, naysaying all his food preferences, nagging him to drink soymilk (which neither of us, we can now admit, really likes) instead of cow's milk, etc etc. etc. It was socially limiting and restrictive to my child, so I couldn't see how that helped with my son's social struggles. And the more you find out about this way of eating, the longer the list of foods you cannot eat gets. Your food world gets narrower and narrower. And worst of all, when I really started questioning and reading the scant research there is out there, I discovered there is almost NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF that it helps make autistic kids happier or more well-functioning (whatever that even means) at all. And yet there are autism treatment centers who won't even see you for a consultation if you are unwilling to absolutely control everything your kid eats. I am not saying there is no such thing as a gluten intolerance or allergy to artificial ingredients or whatever. Obviously there are. There are tests for that. I now tell parents, if you think your kid is celiac, or allergic to anything else, this is a serious thing that is permanently and radically life-altering. Get him tested and make sure there are solid medical reasons for controlling his food to that degree. Don't start eliminating all your kids' preferred food just because you hope, based on frantic Internet anecdotes, that it'll make your 5yo less hyper. (God forbid a 5yo should be hyper.) That is a recipe for sure-fire misery all around and probably won't do anything but perpetuate misery.
Today we attended a beautiful marionette show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, FL. It featured a Greek-myth inspired play populated by stunningly detailed and charming marionette puppets made from found objects (aka trash!) by the incredibly talented Miami-based artist, Pablo Cano. You can see many of his beautiful and very moving pieces and find out more about this unique artist on his web site.
Today we hung out in Miracle Mile, did a little trick-or-treating there, then we went to the 8th birthday party of a friend of Shorty's, then all the kids went trick-or-treating in THEIR neighbhorhood. We all had SO much fun!!! Shorty dressed as Mario from Super Mario Brothers - he looked so cute and he was a huge hit! Everyone who passed him oohhed and ahhed at his costume. :) We had bought a fake moustache, but it was so hot out that he kept sweating the glue on, so we ended up just drawing it on with eyeliner. It looked hilarious! I just had various holiday paraphernalia on, and some fancy make-up (I had been planning to wear big sparkly fake eyelashes, but forgot to buy the adhesive. So now I own big sparkly eyelashes...) Shorty said my costume was "Someone who enjoys Halloween." Hee! A few little kids asked me how I got my hair that uniformly silvery. "Was it like a spray or something?" Yeah, or something. LOL!! My mom unfortunately has a pinched nerve in her back at the moment, and is limping as a result, so true to her sense of humor, she dressed as a zombie. She handed out candy to the trick-or-treaters who stopped by the party and gave many of them quite a scare. My friend's son the birthday boy dressed as a flying squirrel - you'll see him demonstrating how they glide through the air below. ;) Best of all, my friends the parents of the birthday boy dressed as Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman from "Mythbusters." And a good time was had by all!
This message is from a Virgin Mobile user. Enjoy.
This message is from a Virgin Mobile user. Enjoy.
Paid a visit to my local Goodwill store today, and decided to turn this group of vintage mismatched china and glassware into two cake stands/ displays. The blue one is a French provincial pattern with some modern geometric elements. I thought that paired nicely with the cobalt blue glass base, which has little polkadots etched all over it. It turned out quite fancy looking :) So I'll be using that to serve things, probably at holidays and when guests come calling and whatnot. I would love to find a large bell jar to cover it and make it a real cake stand! The second project was significantly trickier, as I was using a liquid adhesive and it was difficult to glue the thin lip of the plum colored shot glass to the mustard-colored plate (from Pier One). But so far it looks pretty solid. I liked the elegant Japanese-inspired brush painting on the top plate; wish the gold trim wasn't quite so worn, but I guess that's part of its shabby-chic appeal. I'll be using that as a permanent display on my kitchen table, for fruits and other goodies. Total costs for the project: $3.50. Not including the adhesive. :) I have one more left to make - a jewelry holder made from an upcycled matching violet-trimmed salad plate and tea saucer, with a gorgeous purple votive holder as the stand between them. Maybe I'll make a few of these for Christmas! They're pretty, versatile, easy, inexpensive, unique and quite durable. Needless to say, I'm quite pleased with myself right now. :D
This year for US geography, my son, age11, is using the Trail Guide to US Geography curriculum from GeoMatters. We're on week six, and so far, we are very happy with the results. Shorty is learning one state per week nstead of cramming two or three states per week as the curriculum recommends. When we get to Florida, our home state, we will spend an extra week or two doing a Florida history and state study lapbook using additional resources as well.
In this way, Shorty will take a little under two years to complete the course, but so far, we're finding that pace really suits him. He is really digging into each state every day and chatters endlessly about all the cool stuff he's learning about America.
The curriculum teaches the same content with questions and activities for three levels: K-3, 4-8 and high school. So you can use the same curriculum for all your kids and do a state study with the whole family, or do it three times with each child and learn totally new information. It also teaches research skills with atlases, dictionaries, almanacs and other sources, and includes map drills, art projects and other hands-on recommendations. It's fairly inexpensive for everything you get and you can use the resources for several years.
Here is a link for their online store.
For this curriculum, you'll need:
- Trail Guide to US Geography - $18.95 - it is $12 on Amazon. This is the spine of the curriculum, with all the daily questions, map drills, and projects and resources listed for each state, plus an 8-week literature-based study on the fifty states at the end.
- Some kind of comprehensive US State atlas - we LOVE the one she recommends, Children's Illustrated Atlas of the 50 states, which is $10. The author explained to me on the Yahoo! group that no atlas she found was 100% amenable to the questions and approach in her book - all the ones she reviewed lacked this feature or that piece of information, because there seems to be no perfect children's state atlas around - but that is okay, because a main goal of the course was to teach the child research skills on a global scale, so that if your child can't find something in the atlas, he knows how to find it elsewhere, or online. I liked that, and so far, I have seen it bear out results.
You'll also need some kind of access to blank maps. We've been really happy with the Uncle Josh book she has for sale - it's usable for world geography, history, and many other purposes as well, very well worth the $20 on the site, available from Amazon and RainbowResource for $12 or so. I think it's probably possible to get blank outline maps of each state for free online, but I like having it all there in one place. I make copies on my printer each week. They have all the maps available on CD-ROM for nearly $30, but we found that a little out of our price range. Your family's mileage may vary, and I think it may be very worthwhile if you have more than one child.
You'll also need a recent almanac, we got the 2009 paper back almanac from Time Life for about $9, but Time for Kids has a kid-friendly one for the younger set for that much, too. Again, these are resources you'll use for years and a main purpose of the curriculum is to teach research skills organically. Of course, there are online almanacs and resources which can take the place of a hard copy almanac, but I am really loving the hands-on approach to teach children research skills. It has definitely been successful in that so far with my kiddo and I'm really happy with it.
Finally, they have an 8-week section at the end on learning geography through literature, so for the US geography course, you'll need a copy of the novel "The Captain's Dog" about the Lewis and Clark adventures. We won't get to that until late next year, and we'll then get ours from the library for free.
There are 2 other recommended resources that are optional from GeoMatters - Geography Through Art, an art project book which can also be used with their world geography curriculum, and Eat Your Way Through the USA, a national recipe book. My son has textural/ food/ OCD issues due to his autism so we skipped the recipes, but he has been enjoying the Geography Through Art book - I put the projects from that book as an art workbox whenever we have it come up :) But the curriculum is quite doable without either of these books.
It cost me under $50 total, and considering it was for over 2 years' worth of in-depth hands-on material I didn't think that was too bad at all! I could probably have cut down on the costs, too, if I had decided to forgo the almanac and the outline maps, yet I don't regret purchasing either of these. I'm just very impressed with the quality of the programs. When Shorty gets done with the US Geography course next year, we'll definitely consider purchasing their Trail Guide to World Geography course for 8th and 9th grade. They have an additional course, Trail Guide to Bible Geography, which is a survey of geography of the ancient world, but that's thinking too far ahead for us!
They have a Yahoo! group, on which the author posts quite actively, in case you have any questions not covered by their course samples and detailed FAQs on their main site: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/GeographyTrailGuides/
They also offer two complete curricula centered around geography that come very highly recommended by many parents I know, Galloping the Globe for world geography, and Cantering the Continent for US geography. Those are a little more expensive initially, but as I understand it, they are complete, geography-centered unit-based curricula designed for multiple years of use, and all you need to do is add math and language arts/phonics. Their Trail Guide series is their stand-alone geography curriculum, which we chose because we already had AmblesideOnline as a main curriculum and because my son doesn't really like unit studies.
I should mention that AmblesideOnline has its own literature-based geography studies, using living books by Holling C. Holling like "Seabird," "Minn of the Mississippi" and "Paddle to the Sea." Unfortunately, for some reason, my son HATES doing geography this way and strongly dislikes all of Holling's books! So we're happy with this more formal, structured, research approach to learning geography.
Bonus points for us: it's turned out to be very workboxable!
We're on the sixth week of our school year this year, and so far, my son enthusiastically cites geography as his favorite subject, and can tell you all kinds of details about the six states he's learned about so far. I think that speaks for itself!