Hi Chocolate Bunny! WELCOME! It's good to hear a first person account of a homeschooled student. I am glad that you found this site and are willing to share! Most of us are learning from experience/as we go how to homeschool, so any advice from one who's actually been through the homeschool experience is great! Thankyou so much for sharing. Any other ideas you have from your perspective would be very welcome also! I am curious as to what you used in your other classes such as math and history. Did you learn another language as well? If so, what did you use for that? Sorry, don't want to inundate you with questions, I just am very interested in your perspective! Thanks!
Thanks for the welcome! Jackie, haha, I hadn't thought about the Veggie Tales bunny song; one of my brothers thought of this username for me because I just love chocolate and bunnies -- the real ones! Streams of Civilization is what I used and I thought it was good. I also liked reading G.A. Henty books and any other stories about real or fictional characters in history. It made it more "real" to me. Though to be honest, history was one of few subjects I didn't enjoy very much. Now I wish I'd taken more initiative and paid better attention so I had a better grasp of history; I am wanting to do some fun "summer school" stuff with my youngest brother when this semester is over. Hopefully we will both learn some things! I thought I would do a broad timeline on paper going across a wall and include when various things were invented as well as important people and events. I will try to find interesting books on historical figures (shouldn't be hard with the library our mom has built for us!) and plug them into the timeline as we go. I thought we might talk about what was invented when and what sort of transportation was used, etc. and put them on the timeline first and let my younger brother try to figure out where someone goes in the timeline by listening for clues in the story. I'm sort of building ideas on what we could do to make things fun as summer approaches. Deena, I am happy I found this forum too! I have looked for homeschooling forums a bit in the past just for fun, but I haven't found any that looked very active until now. For the first few grades (I think up until 3rd) we used Abeka for math. Mom felt it was really good for the first few grades, but didn't like it very much for higher grades. So as we reached 4th grade we would switch to Saxon. I thought it was great, especially for high school. For lower grades I think I would have found it boring (I wanted pictures!). I took Spanish in high school. We actually started Spanish earlier, but to be honest I don't remember what we used. Something that just gave us some basic vocabulary. In high school we used Power-Glide; I thought it was really good, but I still am far from fluent. I still really want to learn Spanish, so I am going to look into Spanish classes and try to watch movies in Spanish and get as much exposure as I can. I can read it a lot better than I can understand it verbally, and I can understand it verbally a lot better than I can speak it. The other language I would love to learn is American Sign Language. I've been told that's not really a language you can learn from books or videos, so I found a church near us that has a big Deaf ministry; I'm hoping to find someone there who will teach me over summers. Sorry for the long post; I am happy to answer any questions anyone would like to ask of me -- as you can see I may give you more of an answer than you wanted!
ChoclateBunny, they are RIGHT when they tell you that Sign Language CANNOT be learned from a book. A video is much better. The signs are moving, and you can't capture the movement on paper. I started learning when I was 14 when Deaf showed up at my church. My major in college was Deaf Ed, so you see it influenced my life! Learning directly from the Deaf is really the best way to go. I saw a book the other day someone was using to "learn" sign language, and I was very good and just kept my mouth shut!!! (It was VERY WRONG!!!) I tried Power Glide French last year with my kids and HATED it!!! It was the one designed for younger kids. We're kind of doing Rosetta Stone on-line now, and that's working well, but only for comprehension, not for speaking. One of the other threads is discussing math right now...you know how everyone either loves or hates Saxon! Nothing in between! You might want to check that out! Did you do both volumns of "Streams of Civilization"? I'm only familiar with the first one.
That's interesting you know ASL and majored in Deaf Ed! I would love to get to the point where I could become an interpreter some day; I am majoring in nursing and I imagine hospitals and the Deaf would like to have more people right there who knew ASL and could interpret. I have been interested in learning it for years now; it's just been finding a class/someone who can teach me that has been difficult. Now that I think I might have found a place not too terribly far from us, I just have to wait until summer since I do not have time right now. I'll go check out the Saxon thread. Yes, I used both volumes of Streams of Civilization. I think I liked both about equally well.
chocolate bunny welcome to the homeschool spot. I have my two girls in sign laguage right now and they are learning so fast. Jackie is right a video is a way to go. But, watch the video some of them are bad. I found one with Big Bird boy is it good along with a book. The teacher is amaze how much the girls know when we go every week.
There's a psychology prof out of Bowling Green that has videos that are very well done, named Cr. Harry Hoeman (not sure about the spelling!). He did one that was EXCELLENT about a young boy named Mike Barry. He was videotaping Deaf adults to use for his teaching, and one Deaf lady brought in her son, about 6YO at the time. The child was Deaf, too. Well, being an inquisitive little guy, he was very interested in everything going on around him. And he wanted to "be on TV, too!" So they finally decided that nothing was going to get done until the let the kid "be on TV". So they started interviewing him, and found his command of ASL fantastic. They ended up doing a complete video/book on him. (The book explains the grammar, etc. of ASL). Warning, though. Dr. Hoeman's stuff is more for a person who wants to learn proper ASL grammar, instead of a vocabulary book!
My kids were taking signed English from a lady in our church. Not sure how well they'd be able to communicate with it, but they were learning it very well! That lady moved to Hawaii though, so the skills have deteriorated to pretty much nothing now. I wanted to keep them going in it, but never found another teacher of that or ASL. So we've moved on to other things, though I look now and then for a class or something... Jackie, do you ever teach classes? THat could be some extra income...
No, I don't teach. I don't know ASL grammar enough to do it credit, and I would not feel comfortable teaching Signed English. Though I will say it's not too hard to pick up ASL once a person has learned signed English. The problem is that most people don't really understand the difference. Learning ASL involves so much more, including Deaf culture. Did you know that deafness is the ONLY handicapping condition where the children generally do NOT pick up the culture of their hearing parents? Plus I've been out of the Deaf community for quite some time now. Though I recently run into the two Deaf ladies that I first learned sign from all those 20 years ago!!! They currently attend Mom's church. That was a very nice "reunion"! The lady that interprets for them now is a HS'er in the Columbus area!
high school We are planning to use www.AmericanSchoolOfCORR.com as part of our high school program. It doesn't seem to take all day nor four years so it will suit us fine. http://bb.bbboy.net/independentstudyhighschoolmessageboard
We have found a wonderful Algebra 1 book and a Spanish book both on high school level. We are going to let her do a lot of writing for English. And reading the timeless classics for Lit. like the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, and The Lord of the Flies. We have also talked about doing high school using blocks, like she will take Algebra 1 and Physical Science and one elective for the fist semester. Then changing to English and MS. History and Geography and one elective for the second semester. We will do English for a nine weeks and Lit for a nine weeks. The same with MS. History and Geography. She seems to learn better not following a set curriculum. We have several teacher friends that are willing to read her writings, give her their comments, and even give a grade. The electives will be: Computer Applications 1 Spanish 1 She gets to choose the one she will do for the semester.
Which books would those be ? Which books would these be? Through American School my son's plan is to use Persona a Persona for Spanish and Algebra 1 Structure and Method for Algebra
AmeriSchoolMom I was looking over the American School web site. Going to have dh look it over tonight and see what he things. Not bad alittle over 900 for four years. Have you ever done this before or know anyone that done it. Is it a good program do you know what books they use? How do they grade or don't they.
American School Here is a website forum; you will see AMERICAN SCHOOL first click/link however BEFORE you click that, scroll DOWN and see the ARCHIVES very good info there in the archives and of course at teh "current notes. http://bb.bbboy.net/independentstudyhighschoolmessageboard Also the book list is under COURSE DESCRIPTIONS at the website, but I also have a typed booklist i'd be happy to send you. I will enroll my son for the fall but I have purchased use most all the core texts and study guides because I wanted to see what it was like. The $900 includes all books, studyguides, and shipping, so you would NOT have to buy the books separately ! (I just wanted to "see" them before enrolling....) There is a yahoogroup http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AmericanSchool_HomeSchool and there is a lot of good info and helpful members there too!
Someone, early in this thread, mentioned Thomson Education Direct. It is called Penn Foster now, and when we used it, it was ICS (International Correspondance School). There are pro's and con's to using this. If you purchase all of the high school at once, you can receive all of the books at once. That is what we did. Otherwise, if you finish a book quickly, you may be waiting for the next book. For some, getting them all at once might be overwhelming, but I just put them on the shelf until we studied them. They normally ship the subjects out one at a time and I wanted them to study more than one subject at a time, and more in-depth. We did supplement some and used the library and internet a lot. But all of this was just me deciding that we needed more. This school is inexpensive, and it has been said that you can finish in two years. I think this is very possible, which would allow for attending a Junior College or get online college credit earlier. My first son was ADD (we think) and I originally used this to hurry and get him a diploma. We did not choose the college-bound electives for him. My youngest used it also, after using Lifepacs for a while, and he is an honor student (Senior) at a private Christian school. We did select the college bound requirements for him. Some of the books are excellent and some are not as good if you were trying to get the very best books from different curriculums, I'm sure there are some better ones to find. A couple of the books he had in HS were the same books that some of his friends had in a college classes. None of the books are Christian, but the history gives the Christian history and doesn't leave it out. All exams are multiple choice. This is probably the worst thing about the program. If you are a seasoned homeschooler, you would want to add essays and research papers and some other things. Someone could get this curriculum and just scan the books and answer the questions and get a diploma. But, if you are actually homeschooling and watching, and assigning, you could get a good education using this. It is probably the easiest way, if you want easy. My kids did not mail their tests, they answered them online (except for a few English papers) and got the results immediately. You can call an instructor and get help on a lesson, too, but we never had to. This is great if you have children (boys?) that don't like to do a lot of writing. As far as it not being a Christian curriculum, it is not anti-Christian and by the time my kids were in high school, there weren't many Christian issues left to iron out in our family. One other thing is that if you fail an exam, you may take it again, but your second try, even if it is an A, will be no more than a C. For the academic, this might not be considered good enough. But it did get them diplomas and my youngest is an honor student, like I said. Liz
I google'd PENN FOSTER and was not able to confirm that they have Regional Accreditation. (I think they do not actually...) American School has a Regional accreditation which is recognized by the U.S. Dept of Education and it is the one (the "accreditation; that is, Regional accreditation") that colleges actually recognize; that the Federal Financial Aid recognizes, etc., if those are issues you might run into. It has been important especially to under-18 college students who want to qualify for state and/or Federal Financial aid. Just fyi.
About accreditation, when we used ICS/Thomson/Penn Foster, they suggested that you find out if the school you were going to accepted their accreditation. We never checked it out. He was accepted into a junior college for the first semester, we made too much to qualify for Fin. Aid, and he transferred to a 4 year university the second semester with no problems. But I do think the best one to use would be one that you knew was accepted. Does regional accreditation mean that it is accepted in certain parts of the country?
it means it is recognized by the US Department of education and rather accepted nationwide. "accreditation" is only an issue if you have reason/circumstance for it to be accredited. And there are some valid reasons, but most don't have them (the need for accreditation)
AmeriSchoolMom I have some question on the American School and wondering if you could help. Does the price you gave us for four years or one year? Does the schooling get them ready for college or are the books not good? On there web page is there a place you can look through pare of book to see what they are like in case you don't like the program you can go on to something different. I like to kind of see the book first. I haven't heard of anyone using this program so want to get alittle more information if I can. Thanks for your help.
Accreditation Just to satisfy my curiosity I went to both websites and this is what I found: American School is accreditated by: "1. The North Central Association of Colleges and Schools 2. The School is recognized by the Illinois State Board of Education as a secondary school" Penn Fosteris accredited "nationally and regionally" "Penn Foster High School is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Secondary Schools for our high school and vocational-technical programs. Penn Foster High School is also accredited by the Accrediting Commission of the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC), which is listed by the U.S. Department of Education as a nationally recognized accrediting agency. Penn Foster is licensed by the Pennsylvania State Board of Private Licensed Schools. Our school is registered with the NCAA Initial-Eligibility Clearing House." I think with any school you may need to find out if the college you are going to attend accepts the accreditation of the high school program you are going to use.
Is "middle states" on of the regional accreditations recognized by the U.S. Department of Education? that's what I was wondering; i'll go look and report back
