via HEM

Good Afternoon Friends,

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many of you are rushing to send help to our friends in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The recovery and cleanup will be a very long process and there are things that will be needed in the future, but not immediately. This is why I am writing to you today.

Project Noah is a homeschooling ministry that helps homeschooling families in crisis. We only provide curriculum and school supplies to the families that come to us with crisis needs - whether it is because their home has burned, or been flooded, or the primary wage earner has been without work for an extended period of time, or other similar crisis, we try to help. We have been serving the homeschooling community for almost 5 years now and will continue as long as there are families in need.

Although some of you that receive this letter do not homeschool, you can still help. There will be a great need for school supplies, even the workbooks that you see at Sam’s Club and WalMart will help.

The majority of homeschooling families in these states operate through their local churches. The churches as well as the families have lost much, including school books and school supplies. Having worked in the arena of these types of crisis for a number of years, I can tell you that these things are not on their minds right now. BUT…when they begin to think about these things, Project Noah wants to be able to have those things ready for them. Books, calculators, rulers, notebooks, pens, pencils, erasers, teaching tapes, textbooks - all the things that we use throughout the course of our homeschooling year - these will be needed. Even lunchboxes, crayons, markers, and on and on and on.

If you would like to help us help them in this unique niche of need, we would be honored.

To send us your donations please ship to the following location:

PROJECT NOAH
17519 Warm Winds Dr.
Tomball, TX 77377

our fax number is 713-429-5971

Please spread the word!

Your Servant,

Lisa Guidry, Director

Got my book today, and the answer key, and the chapter/midterm/final exams with answer key.

We’re planning to do a chapter a week. I think we may step that up - as usual it’s up to T.J. what the pace is since it’s his school and all. At any rate he wants to be done by Christmas, and he’s quite fond of math.

So hold on, here we go! Next stop: Knowledge!

I’m not going with the Story of the World.

Mostly because the folks behind Well Trained Mind (who also wrote the Story of the World) are specifically contemptuous of unschoolers, singling them out from all the other numerous homeschool philosophies, to represent them as possibly well-meaning but ultimately neglegtful and irresponsible parents who raise ignorant kids.

I plan to write more on this topic later, by the way, but in the meantime see page 617 of the Well Trained Mind and as an aside: please see here for a good start to what unschooling is, if you have never heard the term.

WTM suggests if you are in a group with lots of unschoolers that you should leave, immediately, before they do something child-led, or something, to your to-the-minute-parent-planned ‘classical’ model of education. Oh eek! Perish the thought!

So that’s silly to dismiss their book because of that, maybe, but I’m also told they have a noticeable Protestant bias in the next book, which isn’t so silly.

But I digress. My point is - does anyone know of another good read-aloud sort of history text? I’ve seen some Usbornes that look pretty good, and A Child’s History of the World, by Hillyer. But none of them have I actually seen and held and read.

What have you read to your K-2 kids about history that they liked? Grand sweeping overview and very specific period suggestions welcome.

I got one of the Jacobs textbooks in the mail today. Looking through it, it seems as though it will be everything I hoped. I like when that happens!

Now we’re just waiting for the other copy to get here and we can get started on geometry. Jommetry!

In George Orwell’s novel 1984, Winston and his fellows were subjected to a regular ritual called the “Two-Minute Hate,” a brief video montage of horrible images — crimes, murders, calamities, and such — at which the viewers were expected to boo and hiss. Then an image of the designated enemy would appear, so that the irate audience could channel their rage at this personification of evil, even though he was little more than a made-up scapegoat.

Nick Winkler, a reporter at KWTV News 9 television station, has almost doubled the Orwellian standard. Instead of a mere two minutes, he treated Oklahoma City to a full Three-Minutes-and-Forty-Seconds Hate, complete with cruel child abuse, beating, and murder! His designated villain was homeschooling parents, every one of whom, he implies, should at least be presumed a potential child batterer.

This hatchet piece against homeschooling was aired during the 10:00 news Thursday night. You can view the segment online yourself. What follows is a complete verbatim transcript of the libelous hatefest, along with still images from the show, and my own insights.

KELLY OGLE: As many as 20,000 children in Oklahoma are homeschooled, and many study harder and learn more than kids in public schools. But, as Nick Winkler found out, sometimes homeschool can be used as a cover for parents who neglect or abuse children, and there’s no law against it.

No law against what, Kelly? What can you mean? No law against neglecting or abusing children? Because if so, I’m certain you’re mistaken. Or do you just mean there’s no law against homeschooling? But let’s see what Nick Winkler “found out”:

NICK WINKLER: State law does not force parents to send their kids away to school. So some parents just write a letter to the school and keep their kids at home. It’s that easy.

Actually, it’s even easier than that, Nick. There’s no need to “write a letter to the school.” Unless you’ve already enrolled your children in a school, then you’ll need to withdraw them, and I suppose that should be done in writing. But no matter, it’s pretty easy either way.

What I’m really wondering at this point is, why is this man standing in front of the State Capitol Building at 10:00 at night? Didn’t he know they were closed? Nick and his cameraman drove the News 9 van all the way from the Griffin Communications offices at 74th and Kelley to 23rd and Lincoln, just so he could report Live from the Capitol, to say those three sentences! The dome behind Nick is to let you, the viewer, know that this is a Serious, Important Story about Government. Sometimes I find the conventions of television news unbearably silly.
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Today we read about nomads and early civilization in The Story of the World. Discussion included whether or not there were marshmallows and hot dogs, what lizard stew would taste like, and who built the first grocery store.

We’re reading Story of the World and we like it. Today we talked about timelines, and how old pictures and letters can help you figure out what happened before you were born. Abby says she has a History and it has a birthday and it is four years old. Faith was intrigued with the idea that archeologists find trash and broken things to ‘tell a history’, then corrected herself to say, they tell about history, then said hi-STORY is a STORY!

So all in all I’d say some connections were made. Tomorrow, nomads!

In T.J.’s honor we’ll be upping our Netflix movies-out number from 3 to 4. He’ll have to listen to an endless litany of “Oh wow, you mean you never saw that? You must, posthaste!” but I expect he will take it with his typical good grace. It is a 16 year old’s lot in life, after all, to be introduced to bits of the world they have not yet met. T.J. tends to do so with aplomb and good cheer.

So anyone seen any good movies lately?

T.J. and I decided on geometry this year. One of the unique properties of our homeschool is that one of our students does not live here, so we need doubles of texts if I’m interested in the subject too.

Well, I dilligently researched and ferreted out what I hope will be our dream text - Phoebe the philosophy major demanded rigor! deduction! Proofs! and T.J. the college prep student wanted whatever would give him the best foundation for higher math… I present to you Harold Jacobs.

So I found us some decent used copies and away we’ll go! Yay, geometry! We’ll be using the Keys to Geometry and the Standard Deviants video course if we need any extras.