Learning to Write - Poetry

At Time4Learning,

Which has a cute name

Learning to Write

is practically a game!

My karate interest, my interest in blogging leads to...

I've been quite the dojo rat, hanging out at lavallees karate school in ft lauderdale. What's funny is how I have now combined two of my hobbies:

• Karate
• Blogging

The fusion of these two hobbies can be seen in my karate blog. Plus, I've combined them with my professional life in several ways. Firstly, I've been building blogs and found that they can be used to help grow my business through providing increased visibility for my online educational sites. Secondly, and this is the most interesting, I've found that writing an interesting blog is difficult. While I can write interesting articles, I've had trouble finding a voice and personna that people want to read and that the audience will keep coming back to. So I started looking around for interesting examples. And I've found that only a few people have learned how to blog about their life in a way that actually connects to an audience.

So, my efforts at karate blogging have led me to wish that I could earn a black belt in blogging. That is, I wish I could blog well. So if you want to know more about my writing course and specifically, the blog writing course.

This is how it's all come together. john

Karate School

I've been spending alot of fun time learning in a whole new area: karate.

I've been going to the lavallee black belt dojo in Ft Lauderdale.

I've been learning a new language with terms like bugo kum ite, (bugo khum ite), ouse, aiee, sensei, keoshi, kata, kempo kataa, mma, XMA, ultimate fighting, and a bunch of other funny terms.

Education is social...so....

Heh, I'm in the business of education. We can't teach without having students.

And, we would like to share our thoughts on websites and blogs and get your thoughts. To do this, we will try using technorati....


Technorati Profile

Learning Vocabulary Can Be Fun - Now has a blog!

Hi Everyone!

Time4Learning now has a new affiliated site called: Learning Vocabulary Can Be Fun

Mostly, we will keep the vocabulary site the way it is. The few changes that we will make will be:

- increase the number of vocabulary words and vocabulary topics in the vocabulary games. For instance, we just added 600 new words to the database by providing individual word lists for pre-kindergarten to 8th grade. There are now 219 topics and 10,353 words in the vocabulary database. There are many suitable topics for both young and older students.

- adding a vocabulary blog to improve communciation with the users and to solicity information on what more the site could be providing or on how best to use it. The first post was about Teaching with Crossword Puzzles and the second was the announcement about Jacob (creator of the site) about the increased vocabulary topics list.

Teach to the Test - FCAT

This year, my daughter has teachers who have thrown out all pretense of teaching anything other than FCAT.Last night at her school’s open house, I sat, stunned, as her English teacher explained that there would be no curriculum other than FCAT practice until after the writing test in February... “I don’t teach any literature at all until after that time,” the English teacher said. “I’m sure you all understand.”

I don’t understand. Not at all. I’m speechless. by Vicki McCash Brennan

Ms. Brennan - You are so right to be outraged.

How can America, whose future depends so much on education, have turned our educational system into this test prep morass? It's a grim frivolous time in education where the need for reform has been hijacked by a top-down order to focus on the simplest most-measurable type of education and get the largest number of kids possible to score at the passing level.

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And now a word from our sponsor. There's an article about Warriors Collide, Ft Lauderdale. This is a little bit like news.

Here's some resources to be found on Vocabulary Learning Fun.
Vocabulary Resources :Ultimate Vocabulary - A software package designed to vocabulary
Expand Vocabulary - A chnce to do what the name says!!!!
Power Words - For people with little minds. Use big words to compensate and highlight your lack of brainpower.Vocabulary Builder - Learn about the parts of words. Like lego, parts can be assembled into bigger things!!!!

.GRE Vocabulary - This will teach you how A better vocabulary is...uh...better. A series of cheesy educationally-invalid ways

Increase Vocabulary - How does your vocabulary tell everyone about your personality ?Vocabulary Software - To feed the hungry machine, we need to keep pushing software. Very popularWord Smart Review - I haven't had a chance to review this essay but I'd like to.

Lastly, aren't you curious:Why do I blog?

That's all folks !!!!

Technology Education

My kids in the car yesterday reminded me how different their childhood world is than mine was. The eight year old was looking at a catalog and asked me to buy some gadget so he could "text message" his friends. Text message his friends? I only figured out what that was about in the last year.

And then my 13 year old handed me her cell phone saying that there was something wrong: she was hearing a sound that she had never heard before. I listened and laughed. It was a busy signal. Something that she with her digital world with voice mail et al had never heard before.

All of this reminds me how different the kids skills are these days. And how different the tools that they use are. They seem to be doing very well with the practical aspects of mastering the computers and the net and their cell phones and ipods, but what about understanding how some of this stuff works?

I think that its a bad thing for anyone to thing that the technology around them is black magic, not understood and not understandable. No, I'm not saying that everyone should learn to code. I am saying that everyone should be able to explain why the light goes on when you touch a switch, what's the difference between a circuit switched classic telephone line and the VOIP technology used by digital networks, and the relationships between magnets and electricity.

As technology becomes more embedded in our world, I think our understanding of the technology, at the conceptual level, should also deepen. I'm now looking at the technology curriculum standards to see if they are addressing these issues only as users or with some feel for the need to appreciate the tools around them.

Home school high school

Homeschooling for High School – What’s different?

Homeschooling your students into high school will surely many bring changes to your homeschool program . There are several reasons that the approach used in the elementary and middle school years should change for the high school years.

First of all, the subject matter is much more in-depth. So most homeschooling parents shift from a role where they are a subject-matter expert to a role where they are more of a guide. Parents often broaden their use of outside resources not just from their local support group but they include online courses, courses at local colleges, and often, at their local high schools (especially for homeschool driver’s education.)

Homeschooling in high school can also be different since at the high school level, there is a need to prepare skills and credentials to meet career and post secondary education requirements. This means that in addition to complying with minimal requirements for homeschooling, parents start considering the requirements to receive high school diplomas, to gain acceptance to colleges, and to be prepared for careers.

Here is a link to more information on how to plan for the changes in homeschooling at the high school level.

And, there are parents who are moving in the other direction. There are parents who only start homeschooling in high school.

Free Educational Games Online

Online Free Fun Educational Games.

I'd like to mention four websites:

A Vocabulary site called Vocabulary.co.il

A Spelling site called SpellingCity.com (really cool but not yet finished).

A site with Learning Games for Kids which features the hurricane song and sun song.

And, the free demo learning games on Time4Learning's site.

UK Homeschooling

I'm travelling in the UK at the moment, staying with friends near Bristol. Actually, we're pretty deep in the country.

When people ask what I do and I explain about homeschooling in the US, they all say that it's illegal here although it's a shame since the schools have apparently badly declined in the past decade.

So I thought I'd peak around online to see what is actually allowed....

First, from , I learned from familyonwards.org: If home schooling is something you are considering you should contact the Home Education Advisory Service (www.heas.org.uk). The Department for Education and Skills sets out conditions parents have to fulfill in order to educate their child at home; these can be seen on their website www.dfes.gov.uk.

The gov site only mentions homeschooling in a number of posts on the forum. But the HEAS site, the Home Educational Advisory Site, talks about a Quiet Revolution.

They provide alot of support. More later on the UK>...BTW- I know a fair amount about the differences in the school systems having attended 2nd-4th grade in the UK myself and then, having my elder daughter start her education in the UK system. What I know is that it's way different. color vs colour. Letter names vs letter sounds.

But Time4Learning has alot of subscribers for online homeschool learning from the UK, most are expats....

Developing Interactive Curriculum

We're developing some curriculum and while the developers are very proud of their preliminary drafts, they have been a little shell-shocked by the highly critical feedback that our parent-educators are providing. After I sent along a few emails, I wrote the following to help my educational developers get a feel for the context....

I'm glad you're reading and struggling with the feedback. Obviously, homeschool parents are not like professional educators.

They are outspoken, not-intimidated by credentials, don't give false praise, and are not politically-aware (nor -correct). They feel like educational veterans having spent day and night for years wrestling with the limitations of existing curriculum. They are passionate, they want the materials to be better for their children now. They are willing to experiment. And Time4Learning has raised expectations about the level of interactivity.

As a resource for getting feedback on educational materials and curriculum, I think they have tremendous potential. I'm hoping over the next year to get a real system in place for getting feedback and suggestions. I think this will be easier for finished materials where we are just looking for bugs or suggestions or ratings (great, OK, weak). I think it will be harder for materials that are early in development where they are being looked at somewhat out of context. But, if I am really going to launch into curriculum development, I will need to have an efficient feedback loop.

I think their feedback is great guidance to getting us "on-track" although in some cases, expectations are out-of-whack.

I hope you are using this feedback with the teacher although perhaps filtering it before passing it on....

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Homeschool Curriculum by Time4Learning
PreSchool-8th Grade.Math, Phonics, Reading Comprehension,and so much more!
Games for Kids. Reports for Parents.
For homeschool or enrichment

Is Homeschooling Legal?

Is Homeschooling Legal?
State Regulations in the US about homeschooling

In the US, all 50 states (plus DC & Puerto Rico) have mandatory school attendence laws until a certain age (often 16). But, each state has it's own method of defining what constitutes "school attendence".

In some states, parents are free to set up their own homeschool and take full responsibility for their children's education without any reporting or constraints. In other states, the children need to be enrolled full time in an accredited school but the school can provide a home-based distance-learning program. Often, some states require the parents to establish a "school".

In short, each state is different and many states change their rules. And, the rules for school attendence are different than those about who can issue an accredited high school diploma.

Time4Learning has been researching and recording some of these different regulations. While this does not constitute legal advice, here is a collection of information by states about homeschooling....

Alabama Homeschooling & Time4Learning
Florida Homeschooling & Time4Learning
California Homeschooling & Time4Learning
Georgia Homeschooling & Time4Learning
North Carolina & Time4Learning
Ohio Homeschooling & Time4Learning
Texas Homeschooling & Time4Learning
Alaska Homeschooling & Time4Learning
Virginia Homeschooling & Time4Learning
South Carolina Homeschooling & Time4Learning

Grade Level Curriculum

Online Learning - Grade by Grade

Time4Learning teaches preschool, elementary, and middle school curriculum.

We have put ontline a series of grade level summaries for our parents convenience. Take a look!

Preschool
Kindergarten
First Grade
Second Grade
Third Grade
Fourth Grade
Fifth Grade
Sixth Grade
Seventh Grade
Eighth Grade

Social Studies Homeschool Curriculum

Social Studies is one of subjects that some kids seem to really like. Here's an overview of Time4Learning's online social studies curriculum.

In first and second grade social studies, students learn about human's basic needs and are introduced to map reading and historical and cultural holidays. Learn more about first and second grade social studies lesson plans.

Map skills are enhanced in third grade social studies and geographic terms are introduced. Students also study Alaska Inuits, Vikings, exploration of the Americas and colonization of North America. Read about the third grade lesson plans here.

Upper Elementary - Fourth & Fifth Grade Social Studies Curriculum

In fourth grade, ancient civilizations, the Incas, Mayas and Aztecs and the American Revolutionary war period are studied in the history lessons. Geography lesson focus on land formations and how people interact with their physical environment. United States civics are introduced. Complete details are in the fourth grade social studies lesson plans.

Early civilizations ranging from the Olmecs to the Phoenicians are the focus of fifth grade history, along with 19th century United States history, including the events leading up to the Civil War, the war itself, and post-war reconstruction. Economics, US and world geography, and government systems round out the fifth grade social studies curriculum. Read here for complete details about the fifth grade social study lesson plans.

Preschool Homeschool - Is it?

Does it count as homeschooling, if it's only preschool?

What a silly question!

Answer: since you can get into arguments about curriculum, it must be homeschooling?

Is preschool too young to learn to read?
Should a preschooler be unschooled?
Should a preschooler follow a structured curriculum?

I find that one system that works as part of the preschool homeschool curriculum for me is Time4Learning with their learning games.