The Way They Should Go

Well, we made it.  Babchie kept the girls for the weekend - and they had fun even if the weather wasn’t conducive Babchie’s big beautiful pool.

Scott and I went to HEAV (unfortunate acronym isn’t it) which stands for Home Educator’s Association of Virginia.  I was there last year, but this was Scott’s first time. 

The first thing you have to know is, this thing is HUGE!!  The vendors and Used Book exchange take up the whole large convention hall.  Then we use all the individual rooms in the main building, and many rooms in the 2nd building for speakers.  There are 3 time-blocks of speakers on Friday and 4 time-blocks on Saturday - not including the key note speakers - and there are 18 different sessions in each block!  So that’s roughly 54 sessions on Friday and 72 on Saturday.  Yipes!! 

In the end we ordered the whole conference on MP3 and should get it in about 2 weeks - there were too many conflicts where we couldn’t go to everything we wanted.  Plus, by the end we were a little brain dead.  It’s like getting information from a fire hose during some of the sessions - and inbetween we’re debating “does this science curriculum look indepth enough to keep her interest - but still on a 1st grade level?  Is this “Christian” to the detriment of hard science?  Or “Hard Science” to the detriment of honesty about the unknowns and doubts of some of our knowledge?  Ok, next is math…  timelines… maps…  whew!

I went to one session I thought was really interesting.  It was by Andrew Pudewa and was titled “Spelling and the Brain”.  I was not (and am not) the best speller and so have laughed a little at the idea of me teaching my daughter to spell.  He is a very good speaker and excellent at giving example of what he means so you understand.  The big take home point is that spelling is the sequential retrieval of virtually random information (his own definition).  It is very tough to teach spelling in a read/write format because when you look at a work you don’t take in the individual letters in sequence to store in your brain, you take in the whole word.  (Have you seen that email that goes around where all of the words have all the right letters, but not in the right order - but you can still read it?  Same idea.)  So then it doesn’t reinforce the order of the individual letters in the child’s brain - especially since their brains are still developing and they have more trouble than adults with seeing proper letter order anyway.  SOOOO… teach spelling like the old-fashioned spelling bees.  It’s Auditory/Verbal.  You HAVE to spell a word out loud in an order - so if you do it in the right order, it is stored in the child’s brain IN ORDER.  Practice like this with them.  That’s my poor condensing of the seminar.  You gotta google him, it was interesting.

I tried to be very kind to my dear hubby.  He hates to shop.  He hates to shop like I hate stupid party games - which has lead to a marriage saving compromise in our home.  I don’t make him shop.  He doesn’t make me do stupid party games.

But this is one of those cases where I need his input, so he went into the lions den with me - being the vendor fair!  I had done a fair amount of research, so I knew I either wanted to continue with Horizons Math or switch to Math-U-See.  We watched the Math-U-See demo DVD a few nights before the fair and were impressed (he used these blocks to demonstrate factoring trinomials - I think it’s the first time I understood what that was doing!) but had a few questions about the long-term use of the curriculum.  Plus, I planned to do our own Life Science course this year - but then heard about Apologia’s Exploring Creation through Zoology I.  It’s the study of all winged-creatures - being Birds, Bats & Bugs.  This is only her absolute 3 favorite catagories of animals!  So we wanted to check that out. 

Hubby went with me when the doors opened on Saturday morning.  We made a bee-line to the Math-U-See and asked questions, then went to Apologia to go through the book and ask questions.  Then his responsibilities for shopping for the day were done.  Ok, Actually I also made him come with me to the Miller Pads and Paper table just long enough to take a huge stack of construction paper out to the car.  But besides that I would do the work of tracking down what we needed and comparison shopping.  He did come back in with me on Saturday to help me decide on a timeline and maps for History/Geography.  We got the timeline, we nixed the maps to see if we could find something closer to what I want.  Who ever heard of an “Ancient Times” map (this was wall sized we were looking for) that didn’t include ROME!!  Italy was completely bumped off the left side of the map.

Can I just say that I LOVE Rainbow Resource??  If they had a book that I needed, they had the consistantly lowest price.  They also have a really wide variety of products, so I got science, handwriting, history, Bible & Art materials from them.  AND if they didn’t have something on hand that was in their catalog, you could place an order at the fair and pay no shipping.  Whoo-hoo!

In the end I got our Math and Science curricula.  I got the last Draw Write Now book I was looking for as well as lots of practice paper.  I was able to get a lot of our history books, but still have to search down a few of the readers. 

I got First Language Lessons of the Well Trained Mind, the Big Picture Bible Timeline, Greek and Roman times “newspapers”, DK phonetic readers still shrink wrapped, and a book that is like an Usborne book of Bible History - but another publisher - all at the Used Book Swap!!  I was very excited.

And I found a really cool series of books called Art in History.  They are 30+ pages each, medium-large print and are each a different culture’s art.  So I got Ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Chinese Art.  They take you through examples of the cultures Art, talk about materials and methods used, changes that occurred, and even have at least one “try it yourself” project in each book - all on Elementary level.  Exactly what I was hoping for!  Of course this was through Rainbow Resource - who also had a “make your own Papyrus” kit I bought too!  I had fun. 

Overall it was a really good trip.  We ran into 4-5 couples from our church there, and we had only known 2 would be there.  Maybe the funniest was running into a woman and her husband who are in the Thursday morning Bible Study I teach, and I hadn’t known she would be there!

That’s all for our weekend.  Hope you all had fun too!!

Meg.

So now, I’m back to planning it out for next year.