Please Tell Us About Your Country

For the upcoming school year we're organizing everything around the 7 continents.  For each continent, we're focusing on the larger nations but also the countries our family has some connection to - ones we've traveled to or our family is from.

I wrote to the following embassies requesting any educational materials they make available, especially maps:
Our nationalities:  England, Ireland, Mexico, Myanmar, Germany (via email as per website)
Our travels:  Australia, Botswana, France, Japan, Panama, and Spain
Other nations we want to learn about:  Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, India, and Russia

I visited each embassy's website and tried to follow their directions for PR materials.  Some, such as Germany, wanted all requests handled via email.  Some, such as Japan, had materials on their website.  Some wanted inquiries sent to a regional consulate.

I tried to customize the communication to each so it was relevant.  Germany's email said, " We are a homeschool family in the United States of German descent.  This year for our studies we are concentrating on world geography and culture.  Would you please send us any materials appropriate for kids to learn about Germany and for teachers to help kids in their studies.  A map would especially be appreciated.  Thank you so much for your time."

The snail mail letters had the above image for the intro.  I wanted to involve the kids in the request for info but it would have been unrealistic of me to expect older toad to write that many letters.  Also, younger toad of course wants to be involved in everything so this did involve him a little bit.

I'm hoping the power of snail mail will bring us some fun treasures.  I'm also of course saving all the addresses so hopefully we can write gushing thank you letters.  I will post back with what we get.

National Parenting Gifted Children Week

National Parenting Gifted Children Week begins today sponsored by Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted.  The direct link to the 2012 week is here.

We're making education choices for the fall and the announcement made me reflect on what gifted means in our house. There's been a lot of chatter in the gifted press this year about gifted kid's potential and promise.  Are schools doing enough to turn these kids in to the next world leaders, Nobel Prize winners, and 21st century innovators?  I'm a product of a 'gifted' system.  I received two, count them two, years of gifted services in middle school.  I'm now a SAHM and homeschool educator of my kids.  I don't consider my two years of gifted services or 8 years of university wasted even though I'm not making world news headlines.  I'm just a 'gifted' mom trying to raise two 'gifted' boys.

Older toad is freaky smart and younger toad has not been tested but statistics say he's well above average just by being related to his brother.  So they're gifted but what does that mean?  For us that's just normal.  They don't seem exceptional since they've always been our kids.  We don't have imaginary 'normal' siblings we compare them to.  We joke older toad is Spock with anger management problems but he hasn't become that, he's always been that way.  Spock was a perfectly normal half Vulcan/half human kid since he was the only one.

Gifted + Intensity = Welcome to life at our house.  We don't need educational pedagogy to tell us about overexcitabilites, positive disintegration or asynchronous development.  We just need a family road trip.  Cue trip to Kennedy Space Center; two adults with graduate degrees trying to explain advanced physics to a 5 year who is so geeked out by all the absolutely amazingly cool space stuff he can't remember to eat his snacks and devolves into major tantrum enough for public head turning because he can't share with a 2 year old.  That may not be 'normal' for many families but the only thing special for us in that story is Kennedy Space Center.

Normal for most people is what they're used to, normal is what we all do, normal is comfortable.

Since everything is more at our house, gifted just means my kids are more normal.  They may or may not go on to do publicly acknowledged amazing things like the leaders of 'gifted' education would like to see.  I just hope they will be grow up to be exceptional human beings who happen to be gifted.

Travel Ideas

 We're starting our staycation this weekend so my posts might become irregular.  We decided to do a staycation since the toads are not the best travelers.  We've made a no cooking and very little cleaning rule so hopefully it's a bit of a break as well as lots of fun checking out the fun things to do here.

If you are planning a trip in your area or across the country this year, check out this list of organizations.  You can search their websites for ideas that you wouldn't find on the travel websites.






American Association of Museums - Here's a PDF of all accredited museums in the country.

American Association of Zoos and Aquariums - Here's the list.  Their education section has helpful links for studying polar bears and elephants.  Here's the kid's section.

Association of Children's Museums - International list

America Public Garden Association - Searchable database.

Association of Living History, Farm, and Agricultural Museums - The list.

Association of Science and Technology Centers - The list.

National Park Service -  Get outside!  Here's the teachers section of their website.  Here's the kid's section.

National Registry of Historic Places - Their directory by state is more like a travelogue than simple list so it's still fun and educational even if you're not planning a trip.  Also, they have a whole section devoted to teaching with historic places here and their kid's section here.

If you've got a great resource for finding places to visit that I've left out please add it to the comments section.

Function Box

We made a function box.  It's proving fun to play with.  Older toad understands the concepts of the four basic functions (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) but sometimes he can be slow since he still usually relies on figuring the sums every time.  He is NOT a flash card kind of kid.  I'm hoping incorporating more games will help him speed up naturally.

How we play - 3" X 5" card goes in one side with a number written on it.
Then...
Option #1 -  It comes out and I tell him a number.  He has to say which function was performed on the original number to get the second number.  Example - the card says 3, it goes through the machine and I say, "12", he would correctly say multiplication.

Option #2 - It comes out and I ask him to perform a function and give the answer.  Example - the card says 5, it goes through the machine and I say, "Add 4 and what do you get?".  He would correctly say "9".

That's how I envisioned it but he likes combining them.  So we do, "4 goes into the box and 12 comes out.  What did I do?"  He would say. "You added 8." and I remind him I could have multiplied by 3.  The most important part - you have to make a noise as the card goes through the function box, otherwise nothing will happen.

He of course loves getting to man the box and be the one who figures the problems.  He has surprised me with his accuracy and obsession with negative numbers.

I made our function box out of an old sunglasses box.  When they had their paint out I painted it.  I wrote the symbols for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, one on each side.  Then I turned them loose with star stickers.  I left the ends of the box on so I could close them up and store the cards we write on inside.  It's the perfect size for 3" X 5" cards.

If you'd like to get more fun math ideas check out the Living Math website.  Living Math is all about learning math in context and has proved a very valuable approach for us.

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2012 Global Peace Index

The 2012 Global Peace Index has been released by the Institute of Economics and Peace.  You can visit the report's interactive map here to see how the different nations in the world are ranked.  Iceland is ranked #1.

Free Media for Homeschoolers

 I did a post last week about ways to save money homeschooling.  You can read it here if you missed it.  I wanted to break out some of the links for clarity.  This post is all about free media sources to supplement your studies.  I've enjoyed all these websites, some more than others, please preview as necessary for your family.



Primary source materials - These are mainly museums that put original documents up on the web.  There are so many more here, please add your favorites in the comments.
The British Library -
Gilder Lehrman - Gilder Lerhman Institute of American History
Library of Congress
Massachusetts Historical Society -
National Postal Museum - a division of the Smithsonian

Audio books and sound materials
Ambling Audio books 
Free Music Archive - free music recordings, audio stories and story books for kids through Kazoomzoom
Kiddie Records Weekly - Vintage kids records - really fun
LibriVox - Free audio books
Lit2Go - stories and poems as Mp3's 
Story Nory - Free audio books for kids
Wild Music - sounds exhibition from the Science Museum of Minnesota

Print books
Amazon freebies for Kindles
Baldwin Project for Children's Literature - ebooks of children's classics
Bartleby - Great books online
International Children's Libray - Mulit-lingual
Project Gutenberg - 40,000 free ebooks
Rosetta Project - Complete Library of kids books - great options for foreign language study
Wikibooks

Video
Early America - Short historical films
National Film Board of Canada 
PBS
TED talks
Top Documentary Films - Free documentary films
Wolfram Demonstrations Project - Science models

Some of everything
Open Culture

And last but not least, check with your public library.  Ours offer audio book and music downloads for free.

Post in the comments section any wonderful sources I've left out.

Enjoy!

Pink Oyster Mushrooms

No, it's not our newest favorite band.

One of the activities we rounded out the year with was growing pink oyster mushrooms.  We chose the pink oysters because they were considered easy with high humidity and heat tolerance which you need for FL in the early summer.  They were super yummy, fairly productive for being cared for by a 5 year old and hopefully will give us more next season.

We inoculated a box of wood chips and grass hay with the kit leftovers.

If you're interested in starting your own magic mushroom patch, visit Fungi Perfecti's website here.