How to home school kids

Archive for April, 2009

Have you debated learning to play the piano? These days you don’t even need to get a traditional piano. Instead of this you can pay for a good second-hand digital piano for a very reasonable cost. Once you have bought a piano, the next thing to think about is having lessons. If you have a lot of dosh, personal one on one lessons are an adequate way to learn. You will need to locate a local teacher and then set up lessons with them once a week. The main downside of this is that it can be pricey. The best approach is to learn to play via online piano lessons or piano lesson DVDs. As an example one of the most popular DVD based piano courses available today is this one http://piano-lessons-reviews.info, which boasts around14 DVDs of interesting course material. There are a number other courses on the web that give great teaching and are suprisingly reasonably priced. They have a large number of advantages over a conventional human teacher. These include: learning at your own speed, lower budget, allowing to play at the same time as a backing musical piece and much less travel time. Imagine not having to repeat the same tune over and over again in front of a teacher. Instead it’s much less embarrassing to play by yourself with the aid of an online program or DVD player. The computer will not criticise you or make you feel stupid. It really is an excellent way to learn. The lessons commonly come with video clips, sound clips, online forums, electronic books. They also include a wide variety of piano music and music styles including modern music, jazz and classical. Another big advantage with computer/dvd based piano lessons is that they are extremely flexible and can adjust to your learning speed. You can take a lesson when you have the time free, you are not fixed on a rigid schedule every week. If you are home for a week you can use the extra time having extra lessons! If you are very busy throughout the day you can fit in a lesson in the evening. If you are seriously contemplating about learning to play the piano and are unsure of the best way to approach the problem then click on the link above to go to one of the best online piano lesson review sites.

As I mentioned in a previous article I had wrote, the number of people learning Chinese in the United States still lags far behind French and Spanish. In a sharp contrast, the number of people who study Chinese has increased tremendously in Asian countries. Take Japan for an example, it ranks as the most studied language in schools, just second behind English. This could signal that Americans are still unreceptive to the idea of learning Chinese or fail to understand the importance of this language in helping them compete on the global economic stage. This dilemma has has caught the attention of politicians in Washington. The US government responded that they provided millions in funding for schools to increase the number of Chinese classes being offered a few year ago by listing Chinese as a critical language. They also increased the number of teachers to help increase the exposure in the US to learn Chinese.

China currently has a population of over 1,3 billion people. It is hard to ignore the fact that learning Chinese is the language of the future although English is still the most widely used language in the world. It is ignorant to believe that we only need communicate in English and expect the rest of the world to follow us because China is the fastest growing economy in the world. If you fail to foresee the importance of learning Chinese, you would be shortchanging yourselves and possibly lose out on business opportunities.

As a result we are now starting to see a trickle down effect. In previous years we mainly saw Chinese families taking their children to learn Chinese as a way of maintaining their cultural heritage. It is different now, there are more and more non-Chinese parents to enroll their children in classes to learn Chinese. These countries believe that learning Chinese will increase the career opportunities for their children in the future. This realization has come to light as China continues to be the United States biggest trading partner. Learning Chinese will help give anyone who is interested in doing business in China a clear advantage in terms of economic opportunities. Chinese is not only spoken in China but also widely used in Asian countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Recently, a trend of learning Chinese language has developed in high schools and coomuniies around the United States. Many people want to or are now learning Chinese language. This can be problematic although i could be a good turn of events. This is particularly so for those who know nothing about Chinese histroy, culture and the state of affairs in China today.

In mainland China they no longer use the traditional Chinese characters that go hand in hand with learning Chinese history. The Chinese Communist Party decided to alter the Chinese language for some reason, so they changes the vehicle for written communication.

Traditional Chinese characters evolved naturally over a period of time from pictographs or small drawings. By contrast the simplified Chinese created by the Chinese Communist Party has watered many of the traditional characters down to the point that they no longer are rooted in more ancient traditions.

Here is an example for your information. When refer to the traditional Chinese character for the word ‘love’, it also contains a picture of a heart in it. This makes sense as love is closely associated to the heart. But it is not the same in simplified Chinese. There is no heart when referred to ‘love’ in simplified Chinese. One may ponder how you can love without a heart.

Just like this example shows, the Chinese Communist Party has removed the heart of the entire language in many ways, it has distorted and altered it into a water downed version of its former self. In Taiwan, however, they still use traditional characters.

Therefore, you may wish to ensure that you are getting the traditional variety if your children’s school or community is planning to teach Chinese. The traditional Chinese more fully encompasses the rich history of China and the Chinese people. By contrast, those who teach our children simplified Chinese are from mainland China and unfortunately, they will also be passing on the values and ideas of the Chinese Communist Party. Whether they do so on purpose or automatically as a result of growing up in that environment, the end result is the same. It is only you that can decide if you want the influence of the Chinese Communist Pary imparted to your children.

Be sure to insist that our children are taught traditional Chinese and not the simplified version. This way the richness of traditional Chinese culture can be more fully enjoyed and appreciated. There will be more and more solid foundation to understand the more ancient Chinese traditions.

Many people overlook plants and their importance despite seeing them every day and even eating them every day. A good biology teacher, whether a parent teaching kids at home or a Montessori teacher in an eager classroom, can bring plants into exciting focus for students of biology. The new biology text by Pricilla Spears, Kingdoms of Life Connected, makes the job easy and fun, and is an excellent addition to any homeschooling science program.

The book details many projects that help children explore and understand plants, such as labeling nearby plants and keeping a file of plant images. Students will be fascinated by the history of plant discovery and will be eager to explore the many ways plants are used in their everyday lives. Edible plant families are likely to be a subject of interest that many teachers can use for topics beyond basic biology encompassing important issues in health and medicine. Children love to get practical experience of the plant world by growing their own vegetables in outdoor garden plots or inside the home or classroom.

One of the strong features of Kingdoms of Life Connected is that it guides both students and teachers through the less commonly known types of plants and places them in the context of broader networks of life. Interesting discussion of liverworts and hornworts and mosses can stimulte student interest in discovering other amazing plants they may never have thought about before. Show your students a picture of a quillwort or club moss and explain how it is related to the large, scaly barked tree “Lepidodendron” from the Paleozoic Era. And, suggest to your students that they refer to Kingdoms of Life Connected to discover what else was alive in paleozoic times.

This book’s high quality illustrations are an excellent complement to the text. The diagrams of relationships among the plants makes it easy for students to remember important elements of order in the diversity. There are many interesting tales to tell from the kingdom of plants. You will find the new text to be an excellent resource to make your lessons both accurate and interesting, whether you want to discuss the ginkgo tree as the last survivor of its lineage, or talk about monilophytes and pteridophytes.

Kingdoms of Life Connected is just one item in a growing catalog of science education products produced by Big Picture Science that are tailored specifically for elementary and middle school science teaching, whether in a homeschool setting, a Montessori or charter school classroom, or a traditional public school.