Photo by Niner.
The daughter who supplies my header photos has started a blog to show off her pictures:
Niner’s SnapFair
[It’s pronounced “NEE-ner.”]Update: She no longer posts to that blog, but has been writing and posting photos, recipes, and craft projects to her new blog — College & The Years After.
Her photography skills continue to improve, and her sense of humor comes through in the stories that accompany each photo. I’m sure she’d love to have you stop by and visit!
Photo by Arbron.
This week only, [When I checked the link in April 2011, this was still free!] CurrClick (which carries the Math Mammoth workbook series) is offering Quotations from Shakespeare’s Plays as a free download. This ebook offers copywork tips from Charlotte Mason and about 30 pages of passages from Macbeth, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, etc.
And if you are planning a study of the Bard, you won’t want to miss the following always-free Internet resources.
Photo by Complicated.
Princess Kitten is recovering from her cold and getting some energy back. She came to me and said wistfully, “I wish I could do backwards math.”
I looked up from my keyboard. “Backwards math? What do you mean?”
“Umm. It’s kinda hard to explain, but I can show you.”
Photo by ccarlstead.
Congratulations, math team! All your hard work paid off, and I hope you enjoyed yourselves thoroughly. Of course, as C. S. Lewis wrote:
…if you do one good deed, your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.
Now it’s time to practice for the state level in March. You can find practice problems online at:
Preparation Drills for MATHCOUNTS
or
The “Go Figure!” math challenge
[ACK! MathCounts has re-written their website. The old link is no longer any good, but I haven’t yet found the new location for this game.]
And give the new interactive Countdown Round game a try:
This post has been revised to incorporate all the suggestions in the comments below, plus many more activities. Please update your bookmarks:
Or continue reading the original article…
Not to be outdone by her older brother, Princess Kitten insisted on starting a blog of her own:
I have given them a section of my blogroll. If you are interested, they would both love to have you drop by and read their stories. Chickenfoot is writing in the “fractured fairytale” vein, at least for now, while Kitten’s tales tend toward animal adventures.
This teacher’s opinion: It certainly beats those dreaded “Pretend you’re a pencil” essays!
This week’s Carnival of Homeschooling highlights the Department of Education’s (yes, the federal government agency) list of top reasons to homeschool your children. Janine Cate of Why Homeschool, the carnival’s home blog, says:
I’ve noticed that these reasons for homeschooling are phrased with the assumption that there must be something wrong with the school, wrong with the child or wrong with the family to motivate homeschooling. This is not surprising considering the list came from the Department of Education. Thus, I’ve added my own commentary in parenthesis.
It is an interesting read, as are the many homeschooling blog articles in the carnival. Check it out!
As I write, there is still time to send in your submissions for this week’s Carnival of Education, which should be up sometime tomorrow at The Education Wonks. I will come back then to put up a specific link.
Edited to add: The Carnival Of Education—Week 127 is now posted.
My ds has opened his own blog, and he has some funny stories to tell. The first one is now posted at:
…with more to follow soon. I hope you enjoy them!
And if any of you homeschooling families have students with blogs, I am sure he would enjoy hearing from them. He could use some links for his blogroll.
From a recent e-mail:
“Hello! I am on the board of a homeschool co-op. We have had requests for a math club and wondered if you have any tips for starting one. We service children from K-10th and would need to try to meet the needs of as many ages as possible.”
There are several ways you might organize a homeschool math club, depending on the students you have and on your goals. I think you would have to split the students by age groups — it is very hard to keep that wide of a range of students interested. Then decide whether you want an activity-oriented club or a more academic focus.
When I started my first math club, I raided the math shelves in the children’s section at my library (510-519) for anything that interested me. I figured that if an activity didn’t interest me, I couldn’t make it fun for the kids. Over the years we have done a variety of games, puzzles, craft projects, and more — always looking for something that was NOT like whatever the kids would be doing in their textbooks at home.
MamaSquirrel has posted some great ideas for doing elementary math without a formal math program.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 