Mid Week Music Break

I have made it clear that my Puppy loves the music of J.J. Heller.  I thought I'd give you a chance to find out for yourself how good she is.  Here she is with What love really means, the song that Puppy fell in love with.

What Love Really Means (Single)

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The HSBA winning blog for Best Group Blog was TOS Homeschool Crew.  This blog continues to provide excellent product reviews as this sample post attests.

Alasandra's Homeschool Blog: Carnival of Homeschooling the Gemstone Edition

Alasandra's Homeschool Blog: Carnival of Homeschooling the Gemstone Edition

This is a gem of an edition. Sorry, I could not resist.
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The HSBA winning blog I am featuring today is My Angels and Autism winner of best Special Needs Blog. This is a moving blog, but also very practical and insightful. I really enjoyed this Sample Post from last month.

The Muppets: A Review

Election Year Coverage

2012 is an election year ,so I thought this might be a good time to teach about the presidents of United States.   I am doing it a little differently instead of going in chronological order I decided to study the presidents as their birthdays come matter fact you know that today January 9 is Richard Nixon's birthday?

Saturday, January 7 was Millard Fillmore's birthday.  Today, we studied Millard Fillmore's presidency as part of school, and tomorrow we will study Richard Nixon.

In addition to Nixon and Fillmore, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and William McKinley were also born in the month of January.   January isn't the month with the most presidents.   That distinction belongs to  October, which has six.   At least one President has been born in each month.  June and  September only have one. 


Here's a little bit more about the details of this teaching plan.

 Preparation

Each Month

Get books out from library for the Presidents with birthdays in the next month.

I also start blog posts about each President scheduled to post in our Izola Becker Home School Blog on their birthday.  Here is the post for Millard Fillmore. 

Prior to Weeks with Birthdays

I will review the materials about the President and decide if I want to do some special project.  This week,  we started one of the 2 time lines we will be constructing.   More on those in a bit. 

Presentation


Each day on the President's birthday or school day closest to the birthday, I will give a short lesson about the President.  I will have the students prepare a fact sheet.  Later in the week, We will update the blog posts with more information. I will also have each of my kids who blog write a post each month with some facts about the Presidents born that month. 

Today I cut 10 feet from a roll of paper and had Bunny Girl  divide it into 10 inch sections.  For those playing at home, that ends up in 12 sections, 1 for each month of the year.  Tomorrow or the next day we will take the fact sheets for Nixon and Fillmore and assemble them on the January section of the roll.  After the election, we will construct a more traditional timeline with the Presidents in chronological order. 

Note: I did not realize until Today, that Nixon's birthday was today.  For some reason when I looked at it yesterday, I thought I read the 19th.  Otherwise, we would have studied Fillmore last Friday and Nixon on his birthday.

This is just a supplement to our curriculum. We are not studying American History at present.  We just began Part II of Mystery of History today as well.  I will try to post about that a little later this week.

Before I am history.  Let me tell you of our HSBA featured blog.  The category is Best Teen Blog.  The Blog formerly known as Umbrella Girl won this year.  This is a very enjoyable, fun to look at blog.  The photos are excellent, as is this sample post about taking excellent photos.

Dave Out Loud Relocated

Sunday's Cool: A Link Up and A Look Ahead

A Link Up: I am going to say something, and I don't want you to take it the wrong way.  I hate Word Press.  I have tried on several occasions to use Word Press blogs, even taught a blogging class using a Word Press platform.  They are about as easy to use, as Millard Fillmore is easy to rate as one of the top 3 presidents ever.  No offense to Millard Fillmore, in fact more on him tomorrow.

But back to my disdain for all things Word Press.  The latest debacle came a few months ago, when I tried to start a vlog, called Dave Out Loud.  I had a Word Press account with the nickname DaveOutLoud, so I thought using Word Press might be a good idea.

Big Mistake. Huge.

It took me almost an hour every time I posted to just put a video from my You Tube account on the blog.  Yesterday, I finally stopped the madnes, and started a Dave Out Loud Vlog here at Blogger.

Here is yesterday's innuagral post.  In the next few weeks I will be rerunning the videos I posted at the previous platform.  Which, as it turns out, won't take an hour for all 8 episodes, let alone 1. 

A Look Ahead:  Tomorrow, I will be posting about a special project we will be doing at school this year regarding American Presidential History.  This is one of the reasons, I had Millard Fillmore on the brain earlier.  Not exactly what else I will be blogging about this week.  It seems like it will be a rather eventful week, so I should have plenty of material.

HSBA Award Profile

Today's category: Best Homeschool Vlog

One reason why I started a vlog is to compete in this category next year.  This year's winner, Women Living Well does so much more than vlog.  Here is a sample post with an encouraging video about involving your family in your misistry.