Here is the link to the Junk Drawer Robotics Curriculum if you are interested in starting a robotics club of your own.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Robotics Club
In addition to our garden club, we have been leading a robotics club after school for two years now. We are using the 4-H curriculum for "Junk Drawer Robotics" which lets kids problem solve and build thier own solutions. We got together to build our final projects last week which was an ROV (Remote Operated Vehicle). It must have neutral boyancy in the water and be able to move in at least one direction. This was a really fun challenge. At our last meeting of the year we will get together and watch eachother's ROVs perform in the wading pool.
High Flying Math
http://www.multiplication.com/games/play/flying-high
We are practicing our multiplication tables around here a lot. Here is a fun free computer game to help memorize facts. You get to design your air plane and fly it through storm clouds picking the correct answers as you go. Tex and I really enjoy this one. I hope you do too.
We are practicing our multiplication tables around here a lot. Here is a fun free computer game to help memorize facts. You get to design your air plane and fly it through storm clouds picking the correct answers as you go. Tex and I really enjoy this one. I hope you do too.
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Spring Activities
As we snuggle under blankets working on Science and Social
Studies, snowflakes blow past the window during our last blizzard of the year.
It is hard to imagine that we were outside in our shirt sleeves yesterday but
such is the spring weather in Colorado. In addition to frantically finishing up
this year’s curriculum and testing so we can enjoy a relaxing summer break; we
are delving deeper into the back yard mini farming movement.
This year, although we are still carrying on with the
robotics club, I have started another club that is close to my own heart.
Gardening club! We are having several families come over and use one of my
garden plots this year. Yesterday they
finished digging it up and mixing in compost and fertilizer. Then I showed the
kids how to make a hoop house so they could plant carrots just before the
blizzard hit.
My own hoop house is beginning to look quite lovely inside
and I can’t wait to eat those spinach and onions.
For a long while now I have been pondering the meat
question. How can we get fresh, organic meat? An organic, free range chicken
can cost $12 and that makes it difficult to keep the grocery bill down with a
family for four, especially when two of us are growing. We could compromise our
health and buy the mass produced, corn fed, hormone stuffed meat at the store,
or we can figure out a way to raise fresh meat and eggs. We have decided to try
quail. They are small, and quiet making them perfect low profile neighborhood
residents. Their maturity cycle only takes six weeks from egg to plate which
makes them an extremely productive possibility. Their eggs are extremley nutritious as well.
It took quite a bit of hunting to find some local chicks, but we got
ahold of six. They are very small but how adorable! I can't wait to see how many girls we got. They all look the same at this point.
Monday, April 1, 2013
I recently was reading a little book called "Cottage Economy" written by William Cobbett in 1833. I was surprised to hear him say so much on the subject of education. I think his thoughts have relevance in this day and age where we have learned to depend so heavily on an unhealthy and expensive agro-giant system of sustainment. Read on to see what he has to say about education. Read the book if you are curious about cottaging. As for my own home school today; after history and before math, we are learning to make bagles.
11. "Education means breeding up, bringing up, or rearing up; and nothing more. This includes every thing with regard to the mind as well as the body of a child; but, of late years, it has been so used as to have no sense applied to it but that of book-learning, with which, nine times out of ten, it has nothing at all to do. It is, indeed, proper, and it is the duty[Pg 9] of all parents, to teach, or cause to be taught, their children as much as they can of books, after, and not before, all the measures are safely taken for enabling them to get their living by labour, or for providing them a living without labour, and that, too, out of the means obtained and secured by the parents out of their own income. The taste of the times is, unhappily, to give to children something of book-learning, with a view of placing them to live, in some way or other, upon the labour of other people. Very seldom, comparatively speaking, has this succeeded, even during the wasteful public expenditure of the last thirty years; and, in the times that are approaching, it cannot, I thank God, succeed at all. When the project has failed, what disappointment, mortification and misery, to both parent and child! The latter is spoiled as a labourer: his book-learning has only made him conceited: into some course of desperation he falls; and the end is but too often not only wretched but ignominious.
12. Understand me clearly here, however; for it is the duty of parents to give, if they be able, book-learning to their children, having first taken care to make them capable of earning their living by bodily labour. When that object has once been secured, the other may, if the ability remain, be attended to. But I am wholly against children wasting their time in the idleness of what is called education; and particularly in schools over which the parents have no control, and where nothing is taught but the rudiments of servility, pauperism and slavery.
13. The education that I have in view is, therefore, of a very different kind. You should bear constantly in mind, that nine-tenths of us are, from the very nature and necessities of the world, born to gain our livelihood by the sweat of our brow. What reason have we, then, to presume, that our children are not to do the same? If they be, as now and then one will be, endued with extraordinary powers of mind, those powers may have an opportunity of developing themselves; and if they never have that opportunity,[Pg 10] the harm is not very great to us or to them. Nor does it hence follow that the descendants of labourers are always to be labourers. The path upwards is steep and long, to be sure. Industry, care, skill, excellence, in the present parent, lay the foundation of a rise, under more favourable circumstances, for his children. The children of these take another rise; and, by-and-by, the descendants of the present labourer become gentlemen.
14. This is the natural progress. It is by attempting to reach the top at a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world; and the propensity to make such attempts has been cherished and encouraged by the strange projects that we have witnessed of late years for making the labourers virtuous and happy by giving them what is called education. The education which I speak of consists in bringing children up to labour with steadiness, with care, and with skill; to show them how to do as many useful things as possible; to teach them to do them all in the best manner; to set them an example in industry, sobriety, cleanliness, and neatness; to make all these habitual to them, so that they never shall be liable to fall into the contrary; to let them always see a good living proceeding from labour, and thus to remove from them the temptation to get at the goods of others by violent or fraudulent means; and to keep far from their minds all the inducements to hypocrisy and deceit.
15. And, bear in mind, that if the state of the labourer has its disadvantages when compared with other callings and conditions of life, it has also its advantages. It is free from the torments of ambition, and from a great part of the causes of ill-health, for which not all the riches in the world and all the circumstances of high rank are a compensation. The able and prudent labourer is always safe, at the least; and that is what few men are who are lifted above him. They have losses and crosses to fear, the very thought of which never enters his mind, if he act well his part towards himself, his family and his neighbour.
16. But, the basis of good to him, is steady and[Pg 11] skilful labour. To assist him in the pursuit of this labour, and in the turning of it to the best account, are the principal objects of the present little work. I propose to treat of brewing Beer, making Bread, keeping Cows and Pigs, rearing Poultry, and of other matters; and to show, that, while, from a very small piece of ground a large part of the food of a considerable family may be raised, the very act of raising it will be the best possible foundation of education of the children of the labourer; that it will teach them a great number of useful things, add greatly to their value when they go forth from their father’s home, make them start in life with all possible advantages, and give them the best chance of leading happy lives."
11. "Education means breeding up, bringing up, or rearing up; and nothing more. This includes every thing with regard to the mind as well as the body of a child; but, of late years, it has been so used as to have no sense applied to it but that of book-learning, with which, nine times out of ten, it has nothing at all to do. It is, indeed, proper, and it is the duty[Pg 9] of all parents, to teach, or cause to be taught, their children as much as they can of books, after, and not before, all the measures are safely taken for enabling them to get their living by labour, or for providing them a living without labour, and that, too, out of the means obtained and secured by the parents out of their own income. The taste of the times is, unhappily, to give to children something of book-learning, with a view of placing them to live, in some way or other, upon the labour of other people. Very seldom, comparatively speaking, has this succeeded, even during the wasteful public expenditure of the last thirty years; and, in the times that are approaching, it cannot, I thank God, succeed at all. When the project has failed, what disappointment, mortification and misery, to both parent and child! The latter is spoiled as a labourer: his book-learning has only made him conceited: into some course of desperation he falls; and the end is but too often not only wretched but ignominious.
12. Understand me clearly here, however; for it is the duty of parents to give, if they be able, book-learning to their children, having first taken care to make them capable of earning their living by bodily labour. When that object has once been secured, the other may, if the ability remain, be attended to. But I am wholly against children wasting their time in the idleness of what is called education; and particularly in schools over which the parents have no control, and where nothing is taught but the rudiments of servility, pauperism and slavery.
13. The education that I have in view is, therefore, of a very different kind. You should bear constantly in mind, that nine-tenths of us are, from the very nature and necessities of the world, born to gain our livelihood by the sweat of our brow. What reason have we, then, to presume, that our children are not to do the same? If they be, as now and then one will be, endued with extraordinary powers of mind, those powers may have an opportunity of developing themselves; and if they never have that opportunity,[Pg 10] the harm is not very great to us or to them. Nor does it hence follow that the descendants of labourers are always to be labourers. The path upwards is steep and long, to be sure. Industry, care, skill, excellence, in the present parent, lay the foundation of a rise, under more favourable circumstances, for his children. The children of these take another rise; and, by-and-by, the descendants of the present labourer become gentlemen.
14. This is the natural progress. It is by attempting to reach the top at a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world; and the propensity to make such attempts has been cherished and encouraged by the strange projects that we have witnessed of late years for making the labourers virtuous and happy by giving them what is called education. The education which I speak of consists in bringing children up to labour with steadiness, with care, and with skill; to show them how to do as many useful things as possible; to teach them to do them all in the best manner; to set them an example in industry, sobriety, cleanliness, and neatness; to make all these habitual to them, so that they never shall be liable to fall into the contrary; to let them always see a good living proceeding from labour, and thus to remove from them the temptation to get at the goods of others by violent or fraudulent means; and to keep far from their minds all the inducements to hypocrisy and deceit.
15. And, bear in mind, that if the state of the labourer has its disadvantages when compared with other callings and conditions of life, it has also its advantages. It is free from the torments of ambition, and from a great part of the causes of ill-health, for which not all the riches in the world and all the circumstances of high rank are a compensation. The able and prudent labourer is always safe, at the least; and that is what few men are who are lifted above him. They have losses and crosses to fear, the very thought of which never enters his mind, if he act well his part towards himself, his family and his neighbour.
16. But, the basis of good to him, is steady and[Pg 11] skilful labour. To assist him in the pursuit of this labour, and in the turning of it to the best account, are the principal objects of the present little work. I propose to treat of brewing Beer, making Bread, keeping Cows and Pigs, rearing Poultry, and of other matters; and to show, that, while, from a very small piece of ground a large part of the food of a considerable family may be raised, the very act of raising it will be the best possible foundation of education of the children of the labourer; that it will teach them a great number of useful things, add greatly to their value when they go forth from their father’s home, make them start in life with all possible advantages, and give them the best chance of leading happy lives."
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