Dial Boutique Collection (Giveaway)

As a member of the Purex Insiders group, I was recently able to try a free bottle of Dial Sugar Cane Husk Scrub, a deep cleansing moisturizing hand soap. This new addition to Dial’s Boutique Collection of hand soaps has micro-scrubbers and has a scent “inspired by freshly cut sugar cane.

The bottle looks pretty—always something I appreciate, and the scent is wonderful! Emily really loved it and noticed that her hands smelled nice for a long time after use. I also caught her just smelling the soap bottle!

The first day I had my new Dial soap out on the counter, I had been doing some cleaning with bleach, cleaning algae and mildew off the side of our house. I really hate the way the the bleach smell stays on my hands for hours (and seldom remember to wear gloves when working with bleach). However, this time, I washed my hands with the Sugar Cane Husk Scrub and went about my way. A little while later, I realized that there was NO bleach smell at all on my hands. The soap had managed to remove it all!

This is one of my favorite Dial scents, so I know I will enjoy continuing to use this variety.

Would you like to win coupons for 2 free bottles of Dial Hand Soap? Just enter the giveaway for a chance to win!

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Greek Morphemes Lessons (It’s NOT Greek to Me!) Schoolhouse Review

For the past month, Emily has been using a new vocabulary program that she just loves. Greek Morphemes Lessons (It's  NOT Greek to Me!) ($69.95) focuses on teaching the foundations of much of the vocabulary we encounter—Greek morphemes. The three components of the program are the Instructor’s Manual, Student Book, and Instructor’s Manual CD (soon to be replaced by a flash drive). We actually received both the CD and the flash drive. I loved using the flash drive since it was quicker to move from one computer to another. Many computers now don’t even have a CD drive, so the flash drive makes the program easier to use for many people.

The publisher, Ready to Teach, also sells a program that teaches Latin morphemes.

Greek Morphemes Lessons consists of 12  5-day lessons. Each weekly lesson has the same format:

Day 1: Watch and interact with the slide show on the CD. The slide show introduces the 16-18 Greek morphemes for the week by encouraging the student to think of words containing that morpheme and figuring out a meaning. The actual meaning of each morpheme is then taught and the student copies the definitions into the Student Book. The student then makes flashcards for the morphemes. (The teacher’s book had pre-printed flashcards. We just used these to save time and Emily still learned the morphemes quickly without the added step of making her own.)

Day 2: The student “works” 16-18 words by taking a word, breaking it into individual morphemes, defining each morpheme, guessing a definition for it, then looking up a dictionary definition for the word. Example:

bibilomancy

Biblio: book

Mancy: prophecy or prediction

My definition: prediction of a book

Dictionary definition: divination by means of a book, especially the Bible

Day 3: Create a context clue sentence for 8-16 words. These sentences can use definitions, synonyms, antonyms, or examples in the sentence to give clues to the meaning of the target word.

Day 4: Write possible definitions for (sometimes fictional) words like pantochronologist and isochromic using the weeks’ morphemes. Match these words to funny definitions.

Example:  (pantochromophobia—a fear of all colors—If you have this, you prefer your movies in black and white.)

  Review words using a simple matching game found on the CD.

Day 5: Test

I think this program is a fantastic way to learn vocabulary, an important component of SAT preparation and overall reading comprehension. Learning the 200 prefixes, suffixes, and roots in this book will result in the addition of hundreds of new words to a student’s working vocabulary. Emily spent 20-40 minutes a day on the program and was able to complete a lesson every week.

She has enjoyed the program and it’s usually the first subject she works on each day. In fact, she keeps saying, “I love vocabulary!” Not something I ever thought I’d hear her say!

After the first week, Emily was able to do her vocabulary work independently. Some tasks were more difficult than others. Emily had trouble coming up with context clue sentences on day 3. Writing definitions and using synonyms was easy, but giving hints to a word using antonyms and examples was more difficult for her. I helped her the first week and she finds it a little easier each week. I really think that mastering this technique will help her to decode unfamiliar words by using context clues when she’s reading. She really enjoyed making up or deducing her own definitions for unfamiliar words and found this quite easy once she knew the individual morphemes.

The emphasis of Greek Morphemes Lessons is not the memorization of vocabulary, but the learning of morphemes that will enable the student to decode many many words. With the exception of a few starred words, the student is not required to memorize a dictionary definition of the word, but is instead required to come up with an approximation of meaning using the word roots, prefixes, and suffixes. I think that this process of learning and using word roots in different ways throughout the week makes this an enjoyable and effective way to learn vocabulary.

All year long, in the biology lab I teach, I’ve been introducing the students to morphemes to help them with their vocabulary words. Every single week, there are words that could be figured out or learned more quickly if the students knew that bio means life or ovi means egg, and so on. I’ve realized that none of these high school students are in the habit of dissecting words this way. This is an important and time-efficient way to learn new vocabulary and improve reading comprehension. I’m thrilled that we’ve had the chance to try out Greek Morphemes Lessons (It's  NOT Greek to Me!) and highly recommend it.

 

Teach Them Diligently Conference

Last weekend, Emily and I went to our first Teach Them Diligently conference. I’ve been to homeschool conventions before and always enjoy hearing about new homeschooling products and techniques and browsing the vendor displays. I seldom buy a lot—I’m one who likes to think about and research a product thoroughly before I buy, but I always come home with a few goodies.

One of the things that attracted me to this particular conference was the fact that there were children’s and teen programs. I’ve never taken children to a homeschool convention because they would have been quickly bored, both by the speakers and by the shopping. However, knowing that Emily would have something fun to do this time, I brought her along.

The conference was held at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, which was absolutely amazing. Because we stayed onsite, we were able to come and go from our room all day long and bring meals and snacks to keep in the room. The hotel was beautiful and I spent a lot of time simply walking around enjoying the greenery.

The view from our room!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emily had a good time at the 4-12 Youth Program. I think it was more sitting and listening than we had anticipated, but she made lots of friends and begged to stay until the end instead of leaving earlier in the afternoon as I had planned.

The speakers were good—more inspirational and relationship-oriented talks than nuts and bolts teaching talks, though. Since there were 199 sessions and I was able to catch about 10, I ordered the recordings for the rest. That will keep me busy for quite a long time.

Emily is already asking to return next year, so we may do just that!

Science and Social Studies Fair

Our home school cover school just had our annual science and social studies fair. The afternoon began with a very interesting presentation by therapy dog handlers. The kids learned about how therapy dogs work in schools, hospitals, and senior centers and were able to see and interact with several dogs, practicing the correct way to meet and greet a strange dog.

After the presentation, the students that had brought projects each had a few minutes to tell about their displays. My biology lab group presented a project about their fruit fly experiments and explained their food web posters. Emily did a history project on Adolf Hitler.

Lord Heritage Homeschool Record Keeping Program (Schoolhouse Review)

 HomeSchool Office, a product of Lord Heritage, is a complete, online homeschool planning program that will help the user plan and keep track of schedules, resources, lesson plans, and grades all in one integrated program. The annual charge for HomeSchool Office is $79. This program is divided into six components, as described below. I will describe each component, then tell about my experience using each.

Team

This is where you input the basic information about your homeschool such as address, school district, teacher name, and students.

This section just took a few minutes to set up.

Plan

This is the place to input the individual subjects for each student. Goals and objectives and grading scales may be included if desired. A school calendar, already set up, but easily customizable, is here for attendance-keeping.

I found the “help” section necessary for navigating through this section. I didn’t find it intuitive, but fortunately, there are a few articles in the Support section that walk the user through each task.

Courses must be chosen from a drop-down list and there is no option to customize. Although there is a large selection of courses, one of Emily’s courses from this year, sculpture, was not an option. I was forced to call it Art: Fine Arts or Art: Other. Her Personal Finance class was under Mathematics, which is not terribly accurate for the particular course she is taking, although some math is involved, of course. I would have appreciated the ability to add customized course names here. I already had course descriptions written for Emily’s courses, so I easily cut and pasted them into each course.

Setting up a weekly master schedule is necessary in order to lesson plan. I had to assign each subject to a time slot each day. This was rather tedious. There was no copy function to assign a subject over several days, so each had to be typed in separately. Each subject must be a course and must be listed only once a day to avoid double assignments. I tried inputting English in two slots, since Emily does her grammar assignment first in the morning, and does literature and writing later in the day. That resulted in two assignments of literature a day. Even if you don’t work on a time schedule, courses must be assigned an arbitrary time in order for lesson planning to work.

Individual assignments (lesson plans) are also inputted in this section. Within each subject, the user must input each daily lesson. Then the lessons will be automatically assigned in sequence, one per day. This was also a lengthy process.

 

Order

This section seems to be the place to view or to print schedules on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis. Daily assignments are not visible in any view without clicking on the individual subject.

Work

Within the work section, any individual assignment may be marked or unmarked as completed, or pushed forward to another date.

Evaluate

Grades are entered here. A variety of assignments can be graded and assigned a weight, enabling the user to create a final grade based on 60% tests, 20% labs, and 20% daily work, for example.

The grade weighting option is a great feature, enabling me to weight tests, daily work, and projects as different percentages of the final grade.

Attendance is automatically marked as present/full day based on the school calendar, but any day can be modified to mark the student as present/ half day or absent. I find it easier to mark absent days than full days, so I like the way this was set up.

Report

I was most impressed by the report building task. It took merely seconds to check the boxes for which quarters and which topics I would like to include on my report. One more click and the report was generated. I could do anything from printing attendance records for a quarter to goals and objectives for the year to a full-year report including student personal data, goals and objectives, grades, and attendance. The finished reports looked quite professional. This is the area where all the hours spent tracking data is worth it!

Unfortunately, I was not able to make the Lord Heritage Record Keeping Program work for me. There are some nice features (automatic tracking of attendance, nice-looking reports, and the ability to weight grades), but the process of inputting lessons was too long and the choices were not customizable enough for me.  The lack of an actual daily list of lesson plans made it difficult to use. For now, I’ll be sticking with my paper planner and Microsoft Word created reports.

This is a new program, so hopefully changes will be made in the coming months to make it more user-friendly.

Fish and Frog Dissection (Apologia Biology)

We finished up our dissections for Module 13 last week. We missed a day due to snow and ice, so we squeezed 2 dissections into one busy afternoon.

First the students did a perch. Then, they did frogs. The text gave detailed instructions for the fish, but not for the frog, so I had them watch a virtual dissection video online. We found that very helpful, and by the time they got started, they were confident in where and how to cut and had an easier time identifying the various body parts. If I were to do this again, I’d look for virtual dissections for everything before we tackled the preserved specimen.

One of our frogs was packed full of eggs! Very interesting.

Emily anticipating spattering guts!

Throwback Thursday: Wild West Trip 2003

In 2003, we took a cross-country trip from Alabama to Montana, spending three weeks visiting historical sites and natural wonders. Emily was only three, but she even remembers some of the things we saw! This was so much fun. I’m really wanting to do the trip again!

Here are a few of the highlights:

Dinosaur National Monument

Garden of the Gods, Colorado

Promontory Point, Utah

Buffalo at Yellowstone

Yellowstone National Park

Manitou Cliff Dwellings

Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump

Waterton and Glacier National Parks

Freedom Project (Schoolhouse Review)

Over the past eight weeks, Emily has been taking an online class entitled, “Mother, Should I Trust the Government?,” sponsored by FreedomProject Education.

FreedomProject Education offers online classes for students from Kindergarten through high school from traditional core classes to classically-oriented courses such as logic, economics, and Latin. The course Emily has been taking is not one of their regular classes, however. It is a family/teen/adult class intended for enrichment rather than a full credit course. It met for 2 hours a week on Monday nights and is based on the book, Mother, Should I Trust the Government, by Jake Jacobs, who is also the teacher. It is a lecture and discussion-based course with weekly reading assignments from the book. No other assignments, tests, or grades were given. FreedomProject Education periodically offers these free (donations accepted) 8 week family courses. Starting soon are courses on Critical Thinking and Bible as Culture.

Our Experience:

Joining the class was simple. Each week, we received an email with a link to follow to the classroom. We could see the teacher, a chat box, and a Power Point slide on the screen. Dr. Jacobs spent some time chatting with the students and getting to know them, so it was a friendly, rather casual atmosphere. (Emily preferred to just watch and listen rather than participate in the chat, though, so she was pretty much invisible.)

The book, Mother, Should I Trust the Government? is a  book that explores the appropriate role of a republican government and the Constitution-defying overreaches of our current bloated U.S. government. Beginning with the Constitutional Convention, Jacobs takes the reader on a sweep through U.S. history to current day events, exploring the intents and conflicts of our founding fathers as they designed a form of government that would be strong enough to hold together, but not powerful enough to infringe on the rights of the individuals or the states. He discusses the federalists and anti-federalists, the causes of the Civil War as it relates to government power and states’ rights, and the explosion of government power through the 20th century. We both enjoyed the book and felt that it was a good counterbalance to the liberal viewpoint that we are bombarded with by the media and most secular texts. I have to admit that reading the book made me feel rather hopeless about the direction our country is taking and the chances of a turn-around happening, but he did include narratives about several individuals that are making a difference in politics despite overwhelming odds.

Although the class covered approximately one chapter a class, the discussion of the first few weeks seemed repetitive and a bit rambling.  The repetition was not entirely a bad thing, though. At first, I felt that Emily was in over her head a bit because she hasn’t studied government yet and it has been several years since we’ve covered U.S. history. But because important points were discussed several times, I feel that Emily now has a good grasp of the philosophical differences between liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. She understands the viewpoints of the founding fathers and knows the difference between federalism and anti-federalism. She understands that many of the same differences of opinion about the role of federal government are the same today as they were 200 years ago.

As the course progressed, Dr. Jacobs covered a good deal of U.S. history, especially in how it related to the role of government in individual lives as well as the differing opinions about how much power should be allotted to the federal government as opposed to the state governments. As a southerner, I found Dr. Jacobs assessment of states’ rights during the Civil War very enlightening. I have often heard (and was skeptical of the claim) that secession of southern states was about “state’s rights,” not slavery. Through the use of original source documents, such as the South Carolina and Texas statements of secession  and letters from the vice-president of the Confederacy, it was clear that the primary state right that the Confederates were concerned with was the states’ rights to own other human beings.  That is why it is so important to include original source documents in any study of history or government!

Two hours was quite a long time for a class and I felt that the material could have been presented as easily in a 1 1/2 hour time period. I would have loved to see more outlined points on the Power Point in order to help Emily in her note taking and to follow the topic more easily. I had her take notes, but she’s not very experienced in doing so, and had some difficulty in picking out the important points rather than smaller details. Other than that, I think what Emily has learned will help her have better perspective as she studies American history next year and government in another year or two.( I will have her re-read Mother, Should I Trust the Government? when she studies U.S government.) We’ve also had some great discussions about both history and current events that were sparked by this class. Overall, we enjoyed the format of this class and will consider taking more FreedomProject Education family classes.

     

Visual Learning (Schoolhouse Review)

 

Over the past month, Emily has been using Visual Learning Systems’ online video course, Digital Science Online: Secondary Edition (Grades 6-12) as a supplement to her biology text.  Digital Science Online includes a wide variety of online videos in all science content areas. Both Elementary (Grades K-5) and secondary versions are available, but we only used the secondary edition. The homeschool subscription costs $99 for up to 8 students.

 

The heart of the Digital Science Online program is the video collection. The middle/high school topics include:

• Physical
• Earth
• Life
• Integrated
• Health
• Biology
  

Within each topic are 8 to 30 video lessons that are each approximately 20 minutes long. Emily found the videos to be interesting and easy to follow. The narration was accompanied by beautiful video footage of nature, animals, and illustrations of concepts.

While a student could learn a lot simply by watching videos, complete teacher material is available to accompany each lesson. Many lessons include animations as well as videos.  Each lesson begins with a pre-video activity. For example, in the Gymnosperms and Angiosperms lesson, the teacher shows the students a flower and a pine cone and initiates a discussion about what type of plant each comes from and the reproductive differences in those types of plants.

Next, a Preliminary Assessment is given so that the student sees what he already knows and gets an idea about what will be covered in the video lesson. A video review page is filled out while watching the video. Multiple worksheets can be printed for each topic. These vary from lesson to lesson, but include vocabulary, hands-on activities, reading comprehension/critical thinking passages with questions, followed by a Post Assessment. Learning objectives and a complete video script are also included in the teacher materials.

We found that completing one video lesson a week was a comfortable pace. Emily could have easily done two lessons if she hadn’t been simultaneously keeping up with her regular textbook as well. She did the preliminary assessment and video on the first day, then spent a couple more days working through the worksheets and post assessment. Sometimes I didn’t assign her to do all of the worksheets, but just picked one or two that focused on what I thought were the most important topics.

In the Reptiles and Amphibians topic, Emily classified various amphibians and reptiles by order and did some research to learn about habitat, reproduction, number of species, and general characteristics. She did a compare/contrast activity for reptiles and amphibians and designed her own fictitious reptile. Each of the topics we used included an unscrambling/matching vocabulary task, which Emily hated. I eventually just printed off a list of the vocabulary for her to match, eliminating the unscrambling words part of the activity. Her favorite parts of the program were the video and and the video review page that she completed as she watched. She says the other pages were “just work.”  (They weren’t busywork—I felt that they were worthwhile, but she didn’t find them especially fun!)

I thought that the lessons Emily did were a bit on the easy side for high school level, but they were still a worthwhile supplement to her regular biology lessons. The range of biology topics wasn’t as complete as I would have liked. While there are many videos about plants and the human body, there were none about invertebrates, and few about cells or single celled organisms. I do think that Digital Science Online could be considered as a complete science curriculum for younger students, but it is best used as a supplement for high school aged students. (Visual Learning doesn’t claim that it is a complete curriculum). We have enjoyed using Digital Science Online and will continue to use it as a science supplement.