School is back in session so what better topic for this week’s Works for Me Wednesday than a collection of a few of our favorite homeschooling books, programs, and curricula.

Homeschooling Tried and True Favorites

Horizons Math — this is a math that we have loved and used it for years with all of the children. It’s colorful, advanced paced, and published by a Christian company.

Start Write — this is a great handwriting computer program that lets you create custom handwriting sheets using a wide variety of styles including cursive, manuscript, Italic, D’Nealian, Handwriting Without Tears, Palmer, New South Wales (NSW), Queensland (QLD), and Victorian (VIC). I use this for thank you notes, letters, general practice sheets, and more.

A six year old’s letter is more colorful than your average note.

Sonlight — Sonlight has been the core of our homeschooling curriculum for seven years. It is a literature based program that brings history to life and makes learning a true adventure. Sonlight’s packages include all the books needed for a year’s worth of history, Bible and literature, as well as detailed instruction guides. We are very loyal Sonlight fans.

CQLA — Character Quality Language Arts is a relatively new homeschooling discovery. We have used many different language arts programs over the years. This is the first one that we have found that integrates copying, vocabulary, spelling, grammar, composition, creative writing, poetry, and dictation all in one consumable workbook. I love the way each week’s study centers around a godly character trait.

Art AND letter recognition!

Rainbow Science — this is a serious, two-year, total science curriculum for junior high students. Joshua loves the conversational tone and humor that are interspersed among the science lessons. As he said to me today, “It’s not every science book that opens up with the word ‘Yowie!’” The first year covers physics and chemistry, and the second year covers biology and applications of science. The curriculum and the Home Laboratories are completely self-contained. It has been an excellent fit for Joshua.

Math U See — I have found, over the years, that there occasionally comes a time in children’s education when they need a different approach in their math studies. Perhaps they are stuck on a difficult concept or frustrated and bored with the current curriculum. At that point it has been tremendously helpful to take a break from Horizons math and try something new. Most often this has meant spending some time using Math U See. This hands on, manipulative based curriculum, complete with DVD teaching, is wonderful. The three older children have all worked through various Math U See levels, brushing up on old concepts, polishing existing skills and learning new strategies for understanding math concepts.. Even Sarah and David enjoy playing with the manipulatives (we don’t tell them they’re doing school).

Teaching Textbooks — Horizons math is an elementary program (meaning it ends after the 6th grade – sniff, sniff) so at that point it’s necessary we select another math curriculum. I have decided on Teaching Textbooks for the more advanced math levels. Joshua worked his way rapidly through pre-Algebra and is now part-way through Algebra 1. The lectures are featured in the textbook as well as on DVD. The wonderful part about Teaching Textbooks is that every single problem is worked out on DVD (step by step).

These school cubbies hold some of our current workbooks. It’s taking me a while to finish kindergarten but I hope to be done soon.:)

Explode the Code — these are HUGE favorites in our family. They are simple phonics workbooks containing exercises on reading, writing, matching and copying. My children love them and are always sad when they come to the end of the series.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of our homeschooling favorites. I didn’t see the note about this week’s Works for Me Wednesday theme being “Brand Loyalty” until 9 pm this evening. Up until that point I was working on a great WFMW blog on marriage and some specific ways to show respect to your husband. You’ll have to come back next week for that helpful post.

Hopefully I will have time to write further about the different Bible study and devotional books we have devoured over the years as well as reading programs, geography studies, art and more that have been family treasures.

Please leave a comment and share your favorite homeschooling programs or books. I LOVE hearing what other families are using and enjoying.

Thanks!
Kathy
Project 365 – Day 247

Head on over to Rocks in My Dryer for further Works for Me Wednesday links.

Some other Duckabush WFMW Posts

TopBlogSites
Laundry Organizer
Giant Whiteboard
Travel Outfits

Join us for our Tuesday Tips for Parenting

Calling Your Child
Creative Use for the Timer
First Time Obedience
Sermon Notes
Thorough Job

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Our Works for Me Wednesday post takes a Technical Spin this week.

How many real life people do you know who blog? Of course, that begs the question, are people who blog, real people? Best not to answer questions like that, I’ve found.

Although no one really seems to know an exact number, experts generally agree that there are at least 70 million blogs (see Kathy’s earlier post, Blogs and Connecting). Even if they only average one post a month, you’d have to read 2 and one-third million blogs every day, just to keep up. Assuming it took you 5 minutes to read each one, and assuming you read non-stop without sleep or meals, you’d still only have time to read one blog in 8000.

Look at it another way: suppose your intended audience is limited to United States readers, and suppose that, as has been estimated, only 30% of North Americans read blogs. Assuming most readers keep track of, on average, 5 blogs, your share of the available readership is likely to be about 7 people.

You can always take advantage of your photogenic children to help you claw your way to prominence …

Clearly, what is needed here, is a way to stand out from the crowd. Enter services like BlogFlux and their recently-acquired partner, TopSites.

Kathy and I first started blogging for our family, some of whom are scattered around the earth, and as a hobby — a way to be reflective in the midst of a busy life. In June of this year we shared the History of Our Blog. As a direct result of writing that history, we began to think about finding a particular niche for our blog, if only to focus our writing and encourage us to be more disciplined about writing on a regular basis.

We looked at the categories within BlogFlux and we tentatively settled on ‘Parenting’ as our niche. “After all,” as I said to Kathy, “we are parents (of some sort), and it sure beats writing about celebrity gossip!”. This turned out to be a good choice, since we don’t actually know any celebrities.

The nice people at BlogFlux have a fairly simple algorithm — you insert some tracking HTML on your blog, and they count the number of unique visitors that hit your blog (some of them, of course, are more unique than others). Those with more readers move “up” in ranking, within their category. One cool thing grabbed us: each week, the counters are reset to zero. This means that, within a given week, everyone has an equal* chance at a high ranking, depending on the quality of their posts that week. As newcomers to the blog ranking game, this egalitarian approach appealed to us.

Once you can look at your stats, it is tempting to obsess about it a little.

It isn’t hard to do. Simply create a free account on BlogFlux and register your blog. You’ll choose a name by which your blog will be listed in their directory, and give the Universal Resource Locator (URL) for your blog (so they can link to it). You can choose up to 10 categories (tags) which will appear in your blog listing, and you may optionally list some information about your location, and what kind of blog software you use. Finally, you’ll be given the opportunity to generate some HTML code that you will paste into your blog template, which will link to BlogFlux and help them to track your traffic.

The HTML will look something like this:

<script src= “http://mapstats.blogflux.com/button.js.php?id=104896″ language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript” ></script>

… and the button will look like this:

When clicked, this button will take you to a cool statistics page showing your hits each day and week. Notice the id=104896 part — that is the unique number that describes our blog within BlogFlux. Yours, of course, will be different.

The MapStats button will also give you information about the location of the people who click on your site, since IP addresses (at least some of them) tend to be loosely locale-specific. We can always tell when our friend Tina checks the blog, since she lives in Thailand. For some reason, reading our blog hasn’t become the Thai national pastime.

You can click on the little flags and find out (roughly) where your readers are, or at least, where their ISPs are.

Once you’ve got the basic traffic stats working, you can move to step two, which is to add a button to your site that will show your ranking within a particular category.

Remember when you chose the categories at the time you registered your blog? Well, for the purposes of TopSites, you can also choose a single category in which you can compete for ranking. Within BlogFlux, go to your Control Panel and look over to the right at the “Top Sites” column. Choose a category and click on the “Get HTML Code” link. You should see some HTML that looks like this:

<a href=”http://topsites.blogflux.com/parents/”><img style= “border:none;” src= “http://topsites.blogflux.com/track_104896.gif” alt= “Parenting Blogs – Blog Top Sites” /></a>

It will produce a button that looks something like this:

Don’t be discouraged if you are at first on the very bottom of the list — a new week starts every Saturday night!

That’s really all there is to it. It took me a couple of tries to get it right, and you should be careful where in your blog template you put the HTML. You’ll want it to be invoked on every individual post, so they all get counted — I put mine in the footer (scroll all the way to the bottom and you’ll see it). I never did get the uptime counter to work, and it seems that the folks at BlogFlux are so back-logged that they still haven’t officially ‘approved’ our blog, but the tools seem to work fine, all the same.

We started as 481 out of 481 on the Parenting Blog list, but soon worked our way up into, er, ‘prominence’ on the third page. Now we have a whole new set of entertaining problems: “We slipped to the fourth page, post something!” wails Kathy. Maybe next week we’ll post a link to reputable Blog Traffic Angst (BTA) counselors.

… you can see we’ll be seeing a counselor soon.

Kathy tells me this is a bit more technical than she hoped. If you try it and run into trouble, or have any further questions, drop me a comment, and I’ll be glad to help you out (as best I can).

*Blogs are ranked according to the cumulative number of ‘unique’ visits for the week. Based on our observation, it seems that in case of a tie, the blog that previously held a higher position is favored over a new blog. A unique visit is defined for a specific IP address during a particular time period — it wouldn’t surprise me if that time period was 24 hours, but BlogFlux doesn’t say.

Tim
Project 365 – Day 240

Head on over to Rocks in My Dryer for further Works for Me Wednesday links.

Some other Duckabush WFMW Posts
Laundry Organizer
Giant Whiteboard
Travel Outfits

Join us for our Tuesday Tips for Parenting
Calling Your Child
Creative Use for the Timer
First Time Obedience
Sermon Note

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It’s that time of the week again – Works for Me Wednesday!! I know, you’ve been waiting in eager anticipation for the latest hint, tip, or clever pointer from the Duckabush Blog. Well, we aim to please so this week’s topic is … laundry.

True, there might be more exciting areas of life, more spiritual and interesting ones but, really, laundry is the core of every home. Without a smooth-running system for laundry, chaos and naked children abound. Laundry is an undeniable aspect of life. What to do when faced with such a substantial burden? Outsource it, of course. Isn’t that why we have children? I have worked hard to train my older three in the sophisticated nuances of laundering and, as long as I don’t look too closely, I am very pleased with their work.

Sarah and David can haul laundry up and down stairs, empty the dryer, sort clothes and even pair (notice I didn’t say ‘match’) socks.

When the kids are hard pressed for cash, I will pay them 50 cents for doing laundry. They are required to 1) empty the dryer and sort the clean clothes; 2) transfer the wet clothes to the dryer; and 3) begin another load. I figure that’s worth some money if only because it allows me to sit down and blog instead of squandering the time washing clothes for the ungrateful masses.

Daniel’s latest quest for cash resulted in him washing all the sleeping bags. So he did three WITHOUT any laundry soap, do you really need soap these days? Um. Yes, please.

I have a fairly small laundry room and, with seven people in the family, laundry is a constant, never-ending chore. My husband came up with a brilliant idea for helping me organize and process laundry. He went to IKEA and bought me an Expedit, a backless bookcase with 16 square cubicles.

The idea was to have a shelving system where each person in the family could have their own laundry ‘cubby’. The rest of the shelves could be used for linens, games or misc storage. During the design process we tweaked things further. I have two hampers in the laundry room – one for lights and one for darks. I wanted these two baskets to remain in the room so I needed to find a way to prop the Expedit off the ground. Again the creative team of Tim and Grandad went to work. They came up with the idea of placing the entire shelf on top of two file cabinets. Now we had shelving, hampers, AND filing storage. Brilliant!

And the cubbies always look this neat and tidy. You believe me, right.

As with my whiteboard, an important aspect of the project was ensuring my father was in town and available for some manual labor. Tim was the creative designer and financier behind the entire scheme. My dad served as the general contractor and all around craftsman — what a great team. The kids put on a movie and Grandad assembled shelves and filing cabinets and then secured everything to the wall.

It is wonderful to have such a handy father.

Now I have this wonderful laundry organizer. When clothes are dry they go straight from the dryer to the appropriate cubicle (folding, I must admit, is optional). If I’m short on time and washing several loads in quick succession, a basket near the dryer might fill up with clean clothes, but my couch and chairs and family room floor are NEVER covered with piles and piles of laundry. It’s a miracle! The laundry strike can end now.

Today, in honor of this post, I made labels for each of the cubbies. Note hampers and filing cabinets underneath shelf. Seriously organized!!

Head on over to Rocks in My Dryer for further Works for Me Wednesday links.

Some other Duckabush WFMW Posts
Giant Whiteboard
Travel Outfits

Join us for our Tuesday Tips for Parenting
Calling Your Child
Creative Use for the Timer
First Time Obedience

Kathy
Project 365 – Day 233

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An Oldie but a Goodie – WFMW from the Past!

Being a homeschooling mom is all about the perks – cool office supplies, 1000′s of great books (right there on your very own bookshelves), flexible hours, frequent snack breaks, and, of course, the generous pay.

But the main draw is really the office supplies. Most homeschooling moms I’ve met have what approaches an obsession with Sharpies, notebooks, binders. Don’t even get them started on their printer/copy machine or the best type of #2 pencils (which they buy in bulk).

Every homeschooling family neesd a HUGE, full-size whiteboard.

In my desire to organize and outfit one of my homeschooling rooms, I searched for a large bulletin board and whiteboard. My investigation led to expensive school supply companies, with glossy brochures and slick ads, but nothing within my budget. One day a friend casually mentioned working math problems on her large whiteboard. My ears immediately perked up. It turned out she had a six foot whiteboard in her school room.

“Oh yes, I use it all the time for math and teaching and leaving notes to the children. I would be lost without it. My husband made it for me.”

“What?!” I had never heard of a homemade whiteboard much less a six foot one. Doing things on a large scale is just my sort of thing. For example, why buy one bookshelf when you can go to IKEA and pick up seven. Hypothetically speaking, of course. A floor to ceiling whiteboard went right to the top of my Honey Do list.

The instructions were incredibly easy and CHEAP! I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of this before.

1) Go to Home Depot or Lowes and buy a 4 x 8 sheet of whiteboard ($13 to $15).

It’s called solid white tileboard (Melamine tile wall panel) used as a tile substitute in bathrooms, sometimes known as showerboard.

2) Measure and cut to appropriate size.

I wanted one that went the full height of the wall so we cut off only a portion on the top, resulting in a 4 x 7 whiteboard.

3) Attach to the wall.

Some instructions say to use panel adhesive to glue it to the wall (this would help to prevent buckling). We didn’t take this approach, deciding instead to screw it into the wall at regular intervals (into studs where possible). My father in law visited while Tim was in the middle of installation and graciously helped.

4) Frame new whiteboard with molding.

We decided to use the plastic white molding (didn’t want to deal with painting or staining). My dad was in town and offered to help. Really, Tim and I outsourced almost this entire project. That, of course, is a whole ‘nother Works for Me Wednesday tip.

Daniel helped Grandad put up the molding. Sarah joined the picture to add some beauty.

There you have it. An affordable GIANT whiteboard. We use it for everything – notes to each other, elaborate maps of imaginary lands, math problems, spelling words, grocery lists, camping/packing reminders, and of course, stick figures.

Not to mention the boys’ future plans for an armory out back.

Head over to Rocks In My Dryer for other great Works for Me Wednesday links.

Kathy
Project 365 – Day 226

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