New learning resource : FindingEducation.com

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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?

What I’ve been doing

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Bible in 90 Days daily. I’m current with Day 35. That’s 1/3 of the Bible read since July 2.

Rescued several Juvenile/YA books from my parent’s attic and it’s been a hoot re-reading them. Titles like:  The Summer Riders by Patricia Leitch, Nobody’s Brother by Anne Snyder and Louis Pelletier, Hail, Hail Camp Timberwood by Ellen Conford, Summer Begins by Sandy Asher and a book that didn’t do me much good at the time, The Teen Girl’s Guide to Social Success by Marjabelle Young Stewart. I haven’t looked, but I’m sure these are all out of print; I read them so long ago.

I was surprised to find references to some pretty controversial stuff as I re-read. I have no memory of how I felt about those issues as a teen (bullying, teen s*x, first kiss, abortion, divorce and antisemitism) and what I thought of the characters’ decisions in the storyline. How I wish I had kept a reading journal back then! How fun and interesting it would be today to return to those teenage thoughts.

Reading these books must have been a positive experience, since I kept them safely tucked away for so long. I liked them, I probably loved them, and I imagine I wanted to give them to my daughters to read one day. I love books that are good conversation starters.

So that’s been my late July, August so far. Sorry I’ve been quiet here. I’m not sure how chatty I will be in these last few weeks of the summer. Time will tell, eh?