The Cave

In a fit of spring fever a couple weeks ago when the weather was gorgeous, we really wanted to get out of the house one week and were graciously invited by our friend Carmen to come visit her out in her canyon.  A good 25 or 30 minutes outside of town up a mountain
we went.  What a fun experience!  First we visited for awhile and went out to check out the baby goats.  How cute!

Then we ended up going on a bike ride/hike (kids rode we walked) out to a very cool cave in the side of the mountain.  Carmen's very adventurous daughter decided to climb up into the cave and soon we all followed!

The dog is sitting where we entered.  From there we climbed up and around to the quite large opening that you can see Ben and his friend (the adventurous one) coming out of.  That area is outside a "window" of the cave.
There are more adorable pictures from this day, but I didn't ask Carmen if I can put her kids on the web, so... there  you have it.

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A Tour of the Cell

A Tour of the Cell (from National Science Foundation Biology)
http://www.nsf.gov/news/overviews/biology/interactive.jsp

We really enjoyed this (got it from clickschooling ) Ben is fascinated with biology and the human body and just learned recently about the digestive system and how nutrients get to the cells.  He loved learning about the various cell organelles in more detail!

Planet Earth

We are watching it.  It is gorgeous in HD.  Our favorite part so far was the segment (I can't remember which episode) that showed the baboons walking through the water upright, wading in and looking just like humans.  We were cracking up!  I found a link to that section if you haven't seen it: http://www.mypartypost.com/watchvideo/5022/Planet_Earth-_Baboons_in_the_Water

Interesting sidenote.  Kevan had a friend over during the friend's Spring Break.  We were excitedly going to watch the latest recording of Planet Earth.  I asked the friend if he had seen any of them yet.  He looked down as he said, "Yeah, we watched one in science class."  I asked if he had enjoyed it.  His response… "It was long."  Needless to say we decided to postpone watching it until the guest was gone.  My son would have been in the same place had he stayed in this child's class last year and this year.  I could see it happening; that's why we started homeschooling.  Of course it's not just Planet Earth; I'm sure there are plenty of schooled kids that enjoy it.  Its just so obvious that when something is done in school it loses its joy and beauty.

Carnival of Homeschooling is Up!

With a tax theme. <g>  But it's not unpleasant, seriously.  You can check it out here.

Notebooking with Powerpoint

Benefits of Notebooking in general:

• Can be used with any style of homeschooling
• Creates student ownership of content
• Inspires creativity
• Easy review

Benefits of Notebooking on the computer:

• Completely free (you already have the computer if you're reading this
• No printing unless you want to archive the finished product
• No scissors, glue, or irreversible mistakes
• Less time-consuming (well, it can be)
• Student pride in professional-looking product
• Works for non-crafty as well as crafty; non-visual as well as visual; non-computer geek as well as geek
• Multimedia can be added! Recordings of dramatic readings; photos; videos of actual events in history; videos of experiments; live links to web sites
• Easily sharable via the web, email, print
• Ready for sharing with your family, homeschool group, 4-h club or scout group (excellent public speaking opportunities!)
• Paper copies are easily printable
• Professional quality archives can be had for pretty cheap!

The queen of electronic notebooking, Tammy from Moore Homeschool Adventures, has a Yahoo group and a free online course on how to get started. Before I ran into Tammy last year I had been using Powerpoint for notebooking for my kids. This is my 2nd year homeschooling, and I came from a background teaching middle school. My students loved making Powerpoints for presentations and reports. So I brought that into my homeschooling, and my kids loved it too. Tammy tends to use word processing programs for her notebooks, and offers templates, ideas and inspiration all for free.

I prefer using Powerpoint most of the time. When I talk about Powerpoint, I would like to add that if you use a Mac and don't have Office, Keynote has the same basic functions. If you have Windows and don't have Office, you can get OpenOffice.org for free, and use the Impress program to do the exact same things! Here's why I love to use Powerpoint.

• Powerpoint is meant to create content that will be viewed on the computer; this makes layout a no-brainer (important for me as a very non-visually-gifted person)
• Powerpoint is also meant to be printed, and there are many different print options.
• Anything you can do on a word processor can be done in Powerpoint; the opposite is not true
• Multimedia can be set to play automatically at a certain point in the project without needing to be clicked
• Powerpoint can export as images, web pages, or self-contained presentations that people can watch even if they don't own Powerpoint. On a Mac, it can be exported as pdf or a Quicktime movie as well.
• Audio narrations can be added to go along with the display.

Here are some notebooks we have done with Powerpoint.

This is a History notebook on Ancient Rome by my 7y.o., Ben. This powerpoint was exported as .jpg files and stored at flickr.

Since it is stored at Flickr, you can click on each photo to see a larger version. If I choose to, I can display each slide much larger, like this:

Or even like this:

Here's another History notebook by 7 y.o. Ben. This one is on the early Middle Ages in Western Europe.

I have exported the above powerpoint as a web page as well. The links for navigation are created automatically by Powerpoint. See it as a web site here:
Early Middle Ages notebook

If I wanted to print this notebook myself, there are several options. I could print one slide to a page, like this. I could print 2 slides per page like this. I could print 4 slides to a page like this. In fact, I could print up to 16 slides to a page (although that would get a little hard to read, if the purpose is just to keep a paper index of notebooks, this would be a great paper saver).

At the end of the year, I can print all of a student's notebooks into a professional bound book that will last a lifetime using a service such as Blurb for as little as $12.95 (for 20-40 pages) up to 440 pages for $64.95 (that is definitely cheaper than ink and supplies for regular notebooking or lapbooking an entire year!) Once the book is created, grandma and grandpa can even order their own copy from the site effortlessly.

Here are a few more examples of notebooks we have done. So much more can be done that we have not even delved into yet (this is only our 2nd year homeschooling after all). The options are endless.

Presidential Timelines - by Kevan, 11 y.o. at the time
Earth's Surface - by Kevan, 11 y.o. at the time
Fables - by Ben, 7 y.o.

Century Books
We are going to be starting Century Notebooks a la Charlotte Mason. I have set up some Powerpoint templates that we will be using to create these century books. They are already set up and hyperlinked, which took quite some time, so I welcome anyone that would like to try it to use them. If you pass them on, please mention where they came from. So far I have created the 17th-20th century. These are blank .ppt templates.
17th Century
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century

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