Christmas Ornaments

It's been too long since I've blogged, or they've changed something, but I can't get the pictures to get in order. I'm too tired to fool with it....I'm just going to go with the flow....so, the last shall be first. ;)

Anna working on the tree.
Both squirrels sorting decorations....

2006...Bible verse...I don't know if this was supposed to be a Christmas ornament or not, but I used it as one. ;)

A "B" on a block, with Santa on the other side....I have no memory of ever seeing this one before, but it's here just in case it's important. ;)

One of several from 2000...

I have this one because it was free. ;)
Emma and Anna's angels from, I think, 1998.

Oscar's commemorative doggie in a stocking, 2007.

Anna's first Christmas, 1997.

2009....my mantra for last year. ;)

Anna's angel, because she didn't have one in the set....I think I explain about the set later....

The ornament someone bought us after Ethan died. I think it was

MIL, but I'm not positive.
Ethan's first Christmas ornament, 2000.

2002...this was a quick-run-in-Walmart-and-find-something-before-everything-is-sold thing. ;)

Christmas lists the girls made, I think, in 2004.

2004, mirrored butterfly. It's fallen apart SO many times and I've had to glue it back!

From 2000...I bought several new ornaments that year.

2005...perhaps....?

2002....you notice I stopped relying on my brain to remember the year and painted it on. ;)

Barbies, gifted to the squirrels from my cousin...the ballerina is Anna's, and the bride, Emma's. Both have broken legs, but the bride's dress hides hers...if you look close you can see tape on the ballerina's legs. ;)

1999....Emma made this in school, her first and only completed year of preschool or any other school. ;)

2005...photo holder

2008...I have no idea what it's supposed to be, but I liked the shape. ;)
2001...a bell.....it was difficult enough to buy one at all....buying something particularly special was NOT going to happen. Emma's first Christmas, 1995.

2003....lighthouse...plays Silent Night and has a teeny light in the top.

Our angels. Well, angels for three of us. These were from Emma's second Christmas, so Anna doesn't have one. I wish I could find one for her, simply because it would complete our set...not because I particularly like them. ;) (MIL gift.) ;)

Vintage glass ornaments. I LOVE these, but they're a bit too fragile for tree use...

so I hung them on suction cups and stuck them on the window. Yeah, THAT's going to be safer....

And that, my dears, are our ornaments we get out every year and love so ridiculously much. ;)

Swirly Learning

I have learned SO much lately....things I am amazed I never knew!

For instance...."Educational Notes".....NEVER heard of these before they were on an episode of Pawn Stars. HOW did that happen? I used to read U.S. money price guides for fun! How did something so interesting get past me?

This page tells more about them...http://banknotegallery.com/maingallery/mainpages/edunotes2.html, but these have larger, easier-to-see photos...

http://usrarecurrency.com/1896$2SilverCertificateEducationalFR248PCGSEF40PPQSn10273175.htm

http://usrarecurrency.com/1896$1silvercertificatefr224au55educationalsn545828.htm

http://usrarecurrency.com/1896$5SilverCertificateFR268EducationalSn7423707.htm

And the Occupation of Alcatraz....How'd THAT never get mentioned once during 11 years of history classes? History is my favourite topic to read about.....I've read thousands of books about history, mainly United States history, and had never heard of this before I saw a mention in Antiques magazine.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Alcatraz

Today I learned the difference between *disc* and *disk*

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-difference-between-a-disc-and-a-disk.htm


Happy Thought

The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

~Robert Lewis Stevenson

Unschooling

There was a segment on Good Morning America about unschooling.

I do NOT recommend watching it....HIGHLY biased. They announce before they even start with the segment they're biased against it!

They say, "There are no textbooks, no tests and no formal education at all in their world.".....um, excuse me?

They're in the *real world*.

No textbooks? We have books on top of books in our library, and, yes, some of them *are* textbooks. (I would insert a picture of my wonderful library here, but the shelves haven't been built yet, and the books are still in boxes.) ; )

No tests? When we need to figure out the square footage of a room, *that* is the test of if we can figure square footage. When they are writing a story *that* is the test of how well they understand the English language. When they hear about a news story or watch a movie and look at a globe to find out where it happened *that* is the test of their knowledge of geography.

No formal education? Well....only if they don't *choose* formal education. Both my girls have chosen to take classes they were interested in. Not for a grade, not for a certificate, not for prestige...simply because they were interested. Radical concept, no?

Quoting from the article again..."When asked how their children learn things like math, she said, "If they need formal algebra understanding, then they will, they'll find that information." " (*She* in this quote is the unschooling mother.)

Actually, what the interviewer said was, "They'll never get X+Y=Z." I'll not mention my opinion about how stupid that sounds and go on to the facts. X+Y=Z *only* means something if there are values given to X and Y. If my kids go to the store and want a snack and a drink, X becomes the price of the snack, Y becomes the price of the drink and they find out, wonder of wonders, what Z really is!

Again, a quote, "Most children will always choose television over reading every time..." Yes, and *most* children are schooled. Right now my children are reading. Sitting right beside the tv. The tv is off. No one has told them to turn it off, they have as much freedom to have it on as to have it off. It's a choice they've made on their own. This is an AWESOME blog post I read today about unschooling reading. I LOVED it!

One thing they mention, and I've seen somewhere else recently, is the argument that kids should go to school for "exposure" to different things so they'll know what they're interested in. I suppose, if a kid spends all his time doing one thing, say playing the same game over and over they might need help with exposure...(unless, of course, the game is chess in which case people seem to think it's a good thing.)

Well, I don't know about *all* public schools, obviously, and have no idea what they might offer, but I do know about *required courses* and by the time you get through with their required courses how much time do you have left to explore the others? From our own school experience when we did the little unhappy teaching/schooling experiment at the beginning of '09-'10 school year, Emma was signed up for the required Biology 1. All the kids take Bio. 1, then Bio.2, then Chemistry. They *might* take Physics if they're particularly gifted. On the other hand, when Emma and I were discussing things she might be interested in learning about, paleontology, geology, archaeology and astronomy were the fields of science mentioned. If she had spent the past 10 years in school would she have even known there were other sciences she could delve deeper into?

I Loved this quote from the father in the story: "they will do what they need to do, whether or not they enjoy it, because they see the purpose in it." Amen!

Here's a statistic for you...."As many as 29 percent of state university students and 43 percent of community college students require some amount of remedial education upon enrolling in college" http://blog.scholarships.com/news/many-college-freshmen-need-remedial-courses/

That's 72%. 72% of the kids who actually attempt to go to college need remedial courses, and there are lots of kids who don't even attempt college. I guarantee my kids can do at least as well as that! LOL

How many 14 year-olds count Shakespeare as one of their favourite authors? My kid does. How many 12 year-olds can rattle off scientific facts like a wizened old scientist? My kid does.

One example of unschooled learning comes to mind. Emma is currently interested in anime and manga . When she decided to make some of her own manga the second thing she did (the first thing was to read a book on how to draw manga) was to go to the library and check out books on Japanese history and culture, and asked for a book on learning to speak Japanese. (I found her one at a used book store.)

I wish she'd let me scan some of her pictures! She's doing GREAT with the drawings. I haven't been privledged to read any of the stories yet, but I'll bet they're good, too.

She is choosing to draw, read, learn and study because she wants to! She already knows more Japanese than I learned of Spanish during a *required* course in high school.

Once again, my kids are the best! ; )

Odd Bits of Rambling...

We've *still* not finished with the house-stuff....BIG mess-up with the appraisal, but we're past that now and finally have a closing date...and I am SO ready to be done with it all and MOVE! ; )

Almost everything we own is in boxes, and Anna is bored nearly out of her mind, and I'm fighting depression and, honestly, *any* kind of "education" is NOT happening right now! Emma is on the computer from the time she wakes up until she goes to bed, and she's interested in Animae, and Japanese as a side-effect of that, so *she's* busy and happy, but the rest of us....BLAH! : P

Anna wants to sew...of course anything I could pull out like that is all packed...she wants to draw and can't find any pens or pencils in this mess (really, I don't think I packed them, I think they're just buried...), there are boxes on top of boxes, all the books are packed, and the videos, although the DVD's are still out. As a result, she's spent the past week watching The Andy Griffith Show over and over.

Daddy has been finding some shows for her to watch online, sciencey stuff from the History channel and Discovery channel sorts of things that she likes, but mostly she wanders around bored. I'm so sorry for her, and I simply can't muster the get-up-and-go to help her!

I'm going to try some St. John's Wort when I can remember to buy some....something's got to change, although I suspect when the house-stress is gone that will help a LOT, as will Spring's arrival! ; ) Winter has been SO rough this year! First day there was sunshine and I spent about two hours just sitting in a sunbeam! Daddy walked past and said I reminded him of a cat, but I couldn't help it. I NEEDED that sunbeam!

Yeah, I've whined and complained in this post........good thing I don't get many readers! LOL

On Self-Evaluations, from GWS #116

Quoting Susannah Sheffer from the editor's note in GWS #116, May/June '97

"In the opening pages of A Sense of Self, I tell about Nicola, a 14-year-old homeschooler who was in a violin class in which the students were asked to critique their own performance. The other students were uncomfortable about having to evaluate themselves. Most of them kept turning to the teacher to check with her. Nicola was the only one who seemed to find it natural to look to herself for an evaluation of her performance.

Though I told this story as one in a series of examples of how homeschooled girls stand out with respect to self-confidence and trust in their own perceptions, I always felt that the subject of self-evaluation was fascinating in itself and deserved a closer look. There's so much talk in education about how best to evaluate young people, and so little talk about about the fact that being able to evaluate one's own work is an important skill. But think of the dependence that comes from having to rely only on outside evaluation, from having no idea how you "did" until you get the test back or see your report card or hear your teacher tell you what she thinks.

This is the kind of dependence that some educators think young people have to live with, but ...young people can be quite capable of looking critically at their work and evaluating their progress over time. Even when people are novices in a particular area, they are capable of discerning the gap between what they've done so far and what they want to do. ... It doesn't help a beginner to say, "You achieved 76% of what's possible." (which is essentially what grades do). Rather, it seems to me, beginners are looking for advice about how to close he gap between what they are trying to do and what they have managed to do so far.

Which is why thinking about evaluation inevitably leads me to thinking about goals. The deeper flaw in schooling's usual system of external evaluation is that the students are seldom setting and working toward their own goals in the first place. Self-evaluation only makes sense if you're asking yourself, "What am I trying to do, and how close have I come?" Otherwise, it becomes something more like, "I'll try to guess how well I have met someone else's expectations," and that mind-reading game is, I fear, more often than not what characterizes the ecperiments in which students are asked to give themselves grades. ... the key question - so often the key question in education - is: who's in charge?"

New Year, New House, New Life?

December passed so quickly I don't remember much about it. ; ) Christmas was quiet...mainly because we were snowed in for most of the week before, and 3/5 of the Christmas parties we'd planned on attending were cancelled.


BUT, we were not just sitting around playing Monopoly. ; ) (Not that there's anything *wrong* with sitting around playing Monopoly....I enjoy a good Monopoly game...where was I? Oh, yes...)

We've been working on getting our house! It's close now....so close I feel all bubbly inside! ; ) The survey is scheduled for tomorrow, and we're supposed to go talk to the peoples at the insurance office....the last two big things on our end! After that it's just waiting on the loan guys to get their ducks in a row...or papers in a file or whatever it is they're doing. ; ) (At least, that's what I think is what's happening now...I could be wrong...we've never bought a house before.) ; )

Until we figure out the nuances of our new bills...water, electric heat, house payment....we'll be without phone/internet. Hopefully once we're into it a bit we'll be able to find money for those, but until then....or until a few pets die off...I'll have to use the library computers....NOT looking forward to going back to that! lol BUT, a house is worth it! : )

I'm so full of ideas and thoughts about fixing it up! Every morning I wake up thinking some new thing I might do to it. ; ) This morning I was thinking about making drapes. We *will* need drapes or something....someday I'd like to have wooden shutters inside, but they're not in the budget (or daddy's to-do list) so I'll have to wait on them, so drapes, I guess, will have to do. I can see the design in my head but getting it out onto fabric is another thing altogether.....I can NOT use a sewing machine, and that'd be a LOT of hand-sewing! Still, que sera sera! : )

As far as schooling is going....lots of fun there! Emma is writing two novels right now, a sequel to a certain vamipre book which shall not be named and a sequel to the same book from the vampire's POV....sound's interesting, but she doesn't want me to read it. ; ) She's going through pens like there's no tomorrow, though. ; )

Anna is doing whatever it is she does....experimenting with fire and ice and animals (not at the same time, mostly) and building shelters and learning about survival in the wild and she just started basketball again.....she's always busy!

Oh, and Emma made a new friend! At Anna's basketball practice/game yesterday (wherein Anna scored 10 points for her team!) Emma noticed a girl sitting on the bleachers near her and....wonder of wonders...went over and introduced herself! You'd have to know Emma to know how HUGE that is...she surprised herself, even! ; )

SO, lots of things going on....it's going to be an interesting year, I just KNOW it! : )