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Last night we went to our first homeschooling event. It was billed as a "curriculum fair;" it turned out to be a massive flea market for homeschooling families to get rid of old books, curricula, games, software, resources, et cetera. (There were workshops, too, but we skipped them because they didn't seem like a good fit.) Everything I saw was very cheap, and it was nice to be able to chat a bit about how people had used things.
The biggest thing we learned is to get a babysitter next time. It was in Annapolis, which is a long way to go in after-work traffic, and when we got there the church where it was being held was swelteringly hot. Alex alternated between desperately needing everything she saw and whining that she didn't want to look at anything else. I would've liked to have more time to page through potential resources, consult with Michael, and sift through the big bins of fiction books. Oh well. There will be more.
The sponsoring group was a fundamentalist Christian homeschooling group, and, well. Mixed in with the sane resources on the various tables would be things like Astronomy God's Way. There's a good-sized secular homeschooling organization in Baltimore, so we won't be dependent on these folks for an ongoing social network. Which is good, because there's only so much biting my tongue that I can do.
At any rate, we came home with a nice little pile of stuff:
We probably could've bought six times that number of random cool books and reference materials, too. The things we actually purchased were kind of random, except for Family Math, which I've been intending to buy for a while.
The biggest thing we learned is to get a babysitter next time. It was in Annapolis, which is a long way to go in after-work traffic, and when we got there the church where it was being held was swelteringly hot. Alex alternated between desperately needing everything she saw and whining that she didn't want to look at anything else. I would've liked to have more time to page through potential resources, consult with Michael, and sift through the big bins of fiction books. Oh well. There will be more.
The sponsoring group was a fundamentalist Christian homeschooling group, and, well. Mixed in with the sane resources on the various tables would be things like Astronomy God's Way. There's a good-sized secular homeschooling organization in Baltimore, so we won't be dependent on these folks for an ongoing social network. Which is good, because there's only so much biting my tongue that I can do.
At any rate, we came home with a nice little pile of stuff:
- A big set of reading rods, which are interconnectable cubes with one or more letters on them, used for various word construction activities to support learning to read. This came with a book and a bunch of activity cards, $18.
- More Mudpies to Magnets, a book of science experiments for young children, $7.50.
- Family Math, a really neat (and well-regarded) book of games and puzzles to promote mathematical thinking, $2.
- A small set of pattern blocks, $1.
- A Life Like Mine, a UNICEF book about how children live around the world, $5.
- Laminated unlabeled outline maps of the US and Europe, for use with dry erase markers, 50 cents.
- A big, cool, illustrated-with-detailed drawings book about noted construction projects through the ages, $3.
- A boxed set of twelve "BOB books," very very simple phonics readers, $5.
- A Fisher Price toy garage with a bunch of toy vehicles. Alex insisted when she saw it that it was what she'd always, always wanted. and she's sure played with it a lot today. They threw in a big plastic floor mat wth roads and buildings on it for more car play, $4.
We probably could've bought six times that number of random cool books and reference materials, too. The things we actually purchased were kind of random, except for Family Math, which I've been intending to buy for a while.
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Someday when Alex is old enough to appreciate the absurdity of it, I'll lend her my copy of Astronomy For Women which was originally published in France in 1909. It's a hoot.
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Did you know that God designed the sun to get its power by little explosions that happen over and over again deep inside the sun? Something called thermonuclear (thur’ moh new’ klee ur) fusion is making all those little explosions. That’s a big word, but now you know it. So next time someone asks you how the sun gets its power, tell them, “thermonuclear fusion!” What is even more exciting is that thermonuclear fusion makes the sun brighter and brighter each year. Can you believe the sun is actually getting hotter and hotter as it gets brighter and brighter? It is! Thermonuclear fusion tells us that there could not have been life on earth billions, or even millions, of years ago. You see, since the sun is getting brighter and brighter each year, if we were to go back in time, we would see the sun getting dimmer and dimmer each year. In fact, if we were to go back billions of years, the sun would have been so dim, or faint, that it could not have provided enough warmth for life on earth. If temperatures on earth were much cooler than they are now, there would be terrible consequences. Oceans would freeze, and it would be winter all the time. Even with the sun’s current hot temperature, Antarctica is still very, very cold. Scientists have discovered that the sun would have been many times cooler, actually more than 30% cooler, if it were here billions of years ago. No life could have survived on the earth if the sun were that cool, because the earth would have been a frozen chunk of ice water, with frozen land scattered about. Not a single thing could survive such temperatures. This gives us good evidence that life on earth is young, certainly not millions or billions of years old, as some might want you to believe."
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If a person trained in physics or astronomy were to make that assertion, I'd tell them to calculate the total luminosity of a sunlike star at zero age main sequence and at 4.5 billion years after ZAMS. Then graph the distance of the habitable zone from the central star as a function of time in AU.
Of course any person capable of doing that would also realize that the assertion is false on its face. But it's just convincing enough for people who don't know how to do the calculations or understand anything about stellar evolution.
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It makes me really cross.
Why, compared to that, Velikovsky is science!
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(That wasn't worded well....baby is sucking my brain cells out. -grin-)
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Our current plan is for Michael and I to each work three days a week so that we can both take a substantial role in homeschooling.
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