The summer fun edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Small World At Home.
6-year-old qualifies for National Spelling Bee
May 29, 2012 by
A six-year-old Virginia girl who learned to read before the age of 2 will compete in the National Spelling Bee. Homeschooled by her mother, a college professor, Lori Anne Madison plans to become an astrobiologist, reports AP. She also excels in math and swimming.
“Hold on to that basalt,” Lori Anne Madison said in a bossy 6-year-old’s voice, shoving a chunk at her mother, “and do not drop it.”
“Go away,” her mother said playfully.
Sorina Madison held on the rock nonetheless, and soon was carrying more basalt and a nice hunk of quartz.
By then Lori Anne, wearing a green “Little Miss Sunshine” shirt, had joined up with more friends and had taken on a different quest, searching for snails, slugs, tadpoles, water striders, baby snakes at the Scotts Run Nature Preserve in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
“Oh my gosh, what is it? A water worm. A water worm! It’s alive,” said Lori Anne. “I need it in my collection. It’s wonderful.”
Her mother tried to enroll Lori Anne in a private school for the gifted, but the headmaster said she was too smart.
The veteran spellers, some as old as 15, have honed sophisticated study methods, spending hours daily over many months in their attempts to master as much of the unabridged dictionary as possible.
Lori Anne? She likes to study while jumping on her trampoline, with her mother calling out words.
“She doesn’t sit at a table for hours to study anything. I mean, she’s 6,” Sorina said with laugh. “She’s still a 6-year-old and we want to allow her to be a 6-year-old.”
Lori Anne’s favorite word is ”sprachgefuhl,” which means an intuitive sense of what’s linguistically appropriate.
Carnival of Homeschooling
March 31, 2012 by
Sprittibee is hosting the Texas edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling.
Carnival of Homeschooling
February 25, 2012 by
This week’s Carnival of Homeschooling, hosted by A Life Supreme, honors a creation of the Harry Potter world, the pensieve, which “allows you to take thoughts that you have conveniently removed from your mind (and stored in handy phials up on the shelf) and view them from another perspective at a later time.”
That could be useful.
In Texas, a dog can get a high school diploma
February 16, 2012 by
A Texas law meant to help home-schooled students qualify for college has spawned diploma mills, reports KHOU-TV in Houston. Public colleges and universities have to accept the diplomas as valid, though one girl paid $600 for a diploma before learning the Navy considers it worthless. Lincoln Academy awarded a diploma to a basset hound named Molly, who took the test online.
And what was Lincoln’s “test” like? Doggone laughable at times, with questions like “a triangle has how many sides?” or “the President lives in the White House, true or false?”
In a couple of hours, with our help, Molly passed. After a $300 payment and a few days later, her diploma and official transcript arrived. Lincoln Academy was even nice enough to e-mail:
“Dear Molly, You have truly reached a new milestone in your educational career… sit back and enjoy your new life of being a high school graduate from Lincoln Academy.”
In fairness to the diploma mills, writes Eduwonk, “I had a basset hound who was pretty damn smart.”
Home schooling anarchists in the ’70s
November 15, 2011 by
My Parents Were Home Schooling Anarchists in the New York Times Magazine recalls the wanderings of a family of six in the ’70s from Spain to England to Mexico to St. Louis. Dad worked on his novel. Mom taught the four kids — and wrote about it in the New York Times in 1975 in Home Is Where the School Is.
High school football without the high school
November 5, 2011 by
Barred from sports at their local school, Maryland homeschoolers have formed their own football teams, which also recruit students from private schools too small to field a team.
Indiana OKs broad voucher bill
May 5, 2011 by
The nation’s most sweeping school voucher program — with tuition aid for low- and middle-income families — is now law in Indiana. Gov. Mitch Daniels signed the bill today, along with another bill expanding charter schools.
Parents can choose to use vouchers at private schools that accept state regulation, including religious schools. As family income rises to $60,000 for a family of four, the voucher’s value will go down.
Other voucher systems across the country are limited to lower-income households, children with special needs or those in failing schools.
Indiana’s program would be open to a much larger pool of students, including those already in excellent schools. Indiana’s program will be limited to just 7,500 students for the first year and 15,000 in the second, a fraction of the state’s about 1 million students. But within three years, there will be no limit on the number of children who could enroll.
Indiana will save money on voucher students: Vouchers for elementary and middle school students are capped at $4,500 and no voucher will equal funding for public-school students.
According to Rick Hess, 60 percent of Indiana schoolchildren will be eligible for a voucher worth up to 90 percent of public education costs. The student must attend a year of public school to qualify for a voucher.
The bill also gives a $1,000 tax deduction for private-school tuition or the costs of homeschooling. That’s expected to cut revenues by $3 million.
While most choice advocates are celebrating, Cato’s Adam Schaeffer argues the law is a “strategic defeat for educational freedom” because it greatly expands state regulation of participating private schools.
To qualify for vouchers, schools will have to administer state exams and submit data on students’ progress, admit students by lottery and “provide good citizenship instruction” that stresses respecting authority, the property of others, the student’s parents and home, the student’s self and “the rights of others to have their own views and religious beliefs.”
What does this mean for religious private schools teaching that one can only be saved by belief in Jesus Christ?
Private schools that refuse to be regulated will risk losing most of their students, Schaeffer writes.
Tops in math — and spelling
March 16, 2011 by
Evan O’Dorney, winner of the Intel Talent Search’s $100,000 top prize, previously won the National Spelling Bee and a gold medal at an international math Olympiad, reports the San Jose Mercury News. O’Dorney, 17, is home-schooled by his mother in Danville, California. Dad is a BART train driver.
“I’m excited and shocked,” Evan said after his win Tuesday. “This has been exciting, especially the judging interviews. All the science questions and working with scientists who are in very different fields than me, I’m very grateful.”
For the Intel contest, he solved a problem involving square roots – “Continued Fraction Convergents and Linear Fractional Transformations” — in general terms.
In a layperson’s summary, O’Dorney wrote: “In this project, I have discovered and proved an unexpectedly simple formula that allows one to predict, given a particular square root, whether the two methods yield infinitely many results in common.”
A black belt in tae kwon do, O’Dorney studies piano performance and composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He’s written a musical representation of the number pi, an opera and a piano concerto. He will head to Harvard in the fall with plans to become a math professor.
Tax credits for homeschoolers?
January 8, 2011 by
Room for Debate asks if homeschooling parents should get tax credits to cover their costs. Conservative Republicans say they’ll require states to offer a credit, though it’s not clear what form it will take. Currently, only Louisiana, Illinois and Minnesota offer some tax relief to homeschoolers.
Several debaters argue credits will come with regulations, such as testing, which some parents will see as intrusive. Some parents will prefer to keep their independence, especially as the credits’ value probably will be limited. But some will be interested.
The Home School Legal Defense Association, proposes a $500 credit for all parents who spend their own money for tuition, tutors, books, curricula, computers and the like, writes William Estrada, the group’s counsel. Public school parents who supplement their children’s education expenses would be included. It could end up as a tax credit for parents of school-aged children. Not that there’ s anthing wrong with that.
Your thoughts?
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