Monthly Archives: August 2010

Blog Hop for Hip Homeschoolers

Posted on by
4

Photobucket

Welcome, Hip Homeschoolers, I’m glad you’re here.

If you have never been to my blog before, let me give you the five-second tour. I mostly write about books and reading. Books capturing my imagination, books that make me think, books that move me to action. Books I love. I also blog about the books my children read and the titles that find their way into our days.

I occasionally offer my opinion as to books I believe are better left on the shelf, rather than in your child’s hands. Hey, I’m a homeschool mom. We are known for our strong opinions, right?

My homeschooling posts are more informative (Look at this cool website!) rather than the mommy blogger fare (This is what we did today in our homeschool!) only because now that they are getting older, I want to protect their privacy.

My children are 12, 10, 8 and 5 years. We’ve been unschooling since May 2009. I cannot imagine any other way to live. The simplicity of our days, the freedom to do as we want – I would never trade it for the world. Homeschooling is a wonderful gift that I’m happy to share with my children.

When I do mention my children, it’s always as Susan, Peter, Edmund and Lucy. If I had known my husband and I would have two girls and two boys, I may just have really given them those names. (If you recognize where those names come from, then you and I are going to get along just fine.)

We work and play in the beautiful Garden State. I love coffee, Twitter and dream of owning a kayak.

Thanks for visiting. Leave a comment so I can visit your blog too.

What to read instead of Eat, Pray, Love: travelogues by women

Posted on by
6

If you are interested in reading about women traveling the world and living overseas, but want to skip the spiritual elements presented in Eat, Pray, Love (One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia), try these books. The archived blog posts give more information.

Reading Lolita in Tehran (A Memoir in Books) by Azar Nafisi

The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad

Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez (archived blog post)

A Year in the World (Journeys of a Passionate Traveler) by Francis Mayes (archived blog post)

Tales of a Female Nomad (Living at Large in the World) and Female Nomad and Friends (Tales of Breaking Free and Breaking Bread Around the World) both by Rita Golden Gelman (archived blog post)

From this list, Tales of a Female Nomad is a favorite. If you want to read more about living in Indonesia, start with that title. A Year in the World did not hold my attention; I don’t think I finished it.

Do you like to read travelogues by women living overseas? What book would you add to this list?

New learning resource : FindingEducation.com

Posted on by
3

Friends, I have seen the future of our learning at home and I like it.

Now that my children are getting older, I want to use the Internet more to our advantage. I have my Delicious bookmarks account that I’ve been using to hold sites I find for my children, but that always felt awkward to me. I didn’t want the kids to have to wade through my personal bookmarks to find what they needed. I thought of using email, but they don’t have email accounts yet. (Does my 8 year old need gmail? I’m going to go with No.) I thought of writing down the website addresses on scraps of paper, but that seemed too cumbersome.

Thankfully, I found a website that solves the problem.

At findingeducation.com, you set up a “classroom” to give “assignments” to your students/children. You can tag assignments by grade and subject and make “due by” dates. If you blog with WordPress, you will feel comfortable right from the start with how the site works. (I’m not sure it’s run on WordPress, but it looks eerily similar.) I’m not too keen on the labels (classroom, subjects or due dates), but since that’s the language of the rest of the world, those of us with a nontraditional approach to homeschooling will just have to ignore that part.

This is my findingeducation.com classroom. So far, I have one lesson posted for my baking-crazy preteen.

I’ll be posting links of educational interest for my kids; feel free to poke around my site. Let me know if you make a classroom too. There are no comments, which I love. No way for spammers to come and stalk my kids. There is a built-in search engine that looks promising.

I’ll let you know how how my kids respond to this virtual way of helping them pursue their interests and our learning at home.

Does any one else think the future has arrived?