Archive for August, 2008
August 29, 2008 at 1:17 pm · Filed under books
I had the pleasure of meeting author Mia King when we lived on the Big Island (Hi Mia!). Unlike me, she still lives there. Via Larramie, I just discovered that Mia’s second novel, Sweet Life, will be released next week. It’s set in Hawai’i, so I’m really interested in reading this one! It will be such a treat to sink into the island, if just for the time it takes me to read the book. Another item of interest? Mia’s a home educator, and includes a homeschooling angle in Sweet Life.
Larramie has more and Mia blogs here.
August 29, 2008 at 7:37 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Prices in US dollars and Eastern Caribbean
Like a child, I couldn’t resist setting this one up!
Have a great weekend, all!
August 28, 2008 at 3:38 am · Filed under My Musings
We’ve been watching the Democratic National Convention; Brad especially has been interested in the political process of late. Last night as Barack Obama came on stage, it really hit home that this is indeed history in the making.
I wanted Brad to understand just how recent the Civil Rights movement was, just how much things have changed in what is really a very short time period. Martin Luther King’s fight for equality isn’t something that only happened in history books - this great man did his work during my lifetime.
The prejudice that blacks face(d) is something that I’ve seen first hand and I wanted Brad to hear this, so we stayed up late talking about MY history as it relates to current history. The rural community in which I grew up was very white. I remember seeing the occasional “mixed couple” (visitors, of course) and hearing the whispers about how indecent it was for a black man to marry a white woman, and wondering why. I remember Roscoe Phillips, the only black student in my high school and an excellent running back, being told that he only made so many touchdowns because there were so many white players chasing him. And here we are today watching a black man run for the president of the country.
Whether you plan to vote for Barack Obama or John McCain, and regardless of which man becomes our next president, this election is a momentous occasion. It IS history in the making.
August 27, 2008 at 6:49 am · Filed under home education
Structure left over from a festival.
Remnants of a sugar cane mill
98 degree water near the volcano
Roadside conch shells
Local woman carrying bread fruit
The Pitons in the rain
Purveyor of coconuts and mangoes
August 26, 2008 at 6:28 am · Filed under rants
Doing laundry and then dumping it in a heap on the couch to wrinkle for a week is not doing anyone any favors. Seriously.
August 25, 2008 at 1:23 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
What. A. Blast. Yes, I said that! I also screamed. So loud in fact, that another one of the journalists on the trip joked that he thought I’d fallen off. But man, what a rush. Before our first run, we got a long list of instructions that started to run together and make me worry that I’d forget to do something. I was nervous. The first person in our group asked to go first in order to take photos as we all came in. And then my SON jumped up and went second, getting over his nerves very quickly. What’s a mom to do but follow suit?
The zip line tour took us across seven different lines, the grandest being 200′ high and 800′ long. It was gorgeous, though I must admit that I didn’t do much sightseeing as I was focusing on what I was supposed to be doing. I don’t yet have photos of myself on that line - and I declined to record myself screaming, as my husband requested - but here we are harnessed up:
Lovely, eh?
Here’s Evan getting ready to take off:
And going:
Going:
Gone:
And here’s a net bridge that we had to cross to get to one of the lines. Frankly, this was scarier for me than the zip lines!
Fun, yes?
August 16, 2008 at 5:17 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I’m quite confident that my superpowers inlcude the ability to keep the plane I’m flying on aloft.
Off to St. Lucia. Plenty of photos to come!
August 9, 2008 at 4:29 am · Filed under home education
From the California Dept. of Education:
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell made the following statement Friday after the 2nd District Court of Appeal issued a 44-page ruling that declared, “California statutes permit home schooling as a species of private school education.”
Read the entire press release, here.
August 8, 2008 at 5:24 am · Filed under home education
Miranda has a new post up, detailing the learning that has occurred at her house this past week. For anyone who’s wondering if kids really learn anything without following a textbook plan, this will be enlightening.
As a side note, we’ve never done traditional spelling. Well, I take that back. We’ve done a little spelling, when the kids have used a workbook to fill in the blanks until their interest waned. Spelling tests and rote memorization were not part of our day. Mostly, we talked about how words sounded, or different spelling rules (and all the exceptions!). My feeling was that as avid readers, they’d come to recognize the way a word should look. And, I didn’t want them all hung up on how to spell a word, when they were trying to put a creative thought on paper.
There were some dicey years when I really questioned whether or not it would work. When Brad was young, if he didn’t know how to spell a word, his solution was to add the “magic e” to the end of it, which created some really interesting correspondence. His spelling has improved over the years, and it occurred to me the other day that two different things he wrote were completely error free. It’s a different way of learning, and in this case, substantially slower. He’d never have passed “tests” using this method. But he got here just the same.
August 6, 2008 at 2:23 pm · Filed under environment
I heard this story on NPR yesterday while I was out running errands. Luo Yu is a Chinese farmer who’s growing organically. The story is interesting, but this portion is pretty telling (and likely not limited to China):
During his walk around the farm, Luo calls out a greeting to some farmers working in rice paddies at a neighboring farm, which is not organic.
But Luo notes that while those farmers don’t use pesticides or chemicals on the produce they grow to eat themselves, they do use pesticides on the produce that they sell — because they are going after yield.
“They’ll do whatever will earn them the most money,” he says.
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