Internet Monitoring aka spying on your kids

So, without going into the details, it has become obvious that we need more than the usual Computer In A Public Room and Mom Has All the Passwords for the computers our kids use. We have tried a lot. The Macs come with Parental Controls settings, with two problematic areas:

1. the application restriction options works backwards. I want to be able to say "Let them use everything but these three." Instead, it is set up so that I have to say "Only let them use the ones I check." So any background app that is essential to the function of something we want triggers a "You don't have access. Allow access?" screen. This would be great if the option to Always Allow Access actually did anything, but it does not. So the process of getting called over to enter the Parental Control password is repeated ad nauseam. 
2. The web-filtering was squiffy at best.

So, the next thing we tried was Net Nanny. She looked so good on the surface, but once installed we learned that she didn't always show up to work! Sometimes she would launch and filter, sometimes not. We fired her and moved on. Even if she had worked well, she wouldn't be enough.

We need more than website-filtering, we need to be able to track all the computer activity. Why, you may wonder. Well imagine that your child's homeschool work includes some software that will allow the user to check the answers after each attempt. And the software will allow for adding and deleting users at will. Yup. Your child could create a bogus account. Check all the answers. Get a screenshot of the answers. Delete the account. Copy answers from screenshot to the work on his or her own account. Grrrr.

Enter SniperSpy. Oh SniperSpy looked powerful and mighty and effective. Live Chat support 24/7! All sorts of wonderful monitoring tools -- live screen viewing. Periodic screenshots. Just what we needed. I could buy one license and install it for each user, or so I was told. The installation was glitchy, but no matter, live 24/7 chat suppport to the rescue. Not!

The automatia is good, I'll hand them that, even including typos and spellings errors for that authentic look. But really? Three different chat support people happen to type the same identical line with the same capitalization error and slightly unusual vocabulary word? "Please wait while i go fetch some data." And as soon my questions got complicated the responses got more and more bizarre. Plus the lag between questionand answer was 5-10 minutes each time. Really not useful at all. I have filed a request for a refund with PayPal (ALWAYS buy software downloads with PayPal so you have some hope of a refund if things go bad).

Currently I am working with SpyTech Realtime Spy. The installation was nearly trouble-free. At one point I got stuck and opened a trouble ticket. I got an email back right away from the CEO! Seriously. I looked him up and it was really him. The owner and CEO is working the tech support desk. I love that! And it didn't hurt that his response cleared up my problem.

Check out the Demo! It will

• show live screens.  What the child is doing in one room, the mother can see in another room.
• show the applications used and the time they were used.
• capture screenshots at intervals I set.
• show websites visited.
• show windows opened. Helpful if one has a child with a quick mouse-finger.  History homework window was open at the same time as YouTube window was opened.  Interesting.

And if you end up buying, be a sweetie and click through here first.  I get a wee commission if you do.  But that is not why I am telling you about it.  NetNanny and SniperSpy have affiliate programs as well, but I'm not providing links to their products because I was disappointed in them.  So far, RealTime Spy is doing what I want it to do and I want to share it with you.

• RealTime Spy for PC
• RealTime Spy for Mac

internet monitoring, spy on computer, net nanny, computer watch, 

homeschooling infographic

Source: TopMastersInEducation.com

Sea Fever

Sea Fever

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking,

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

 I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

~ John Masefield 

This is the poem that my children are memorizing this week and I liked it so much I thought I would share it with you.

still homeschooling?

I find this conversation both revealing and perplexing and annoying:

Relative: Ohhhh, you're still homeschooling?
Child: Yes
(Me, silently): still?
Relative: Do you just home-school or do you ever get to be with other kids?
Child: Oh we do lots of other stuff with other kids -- book club, co-op classes, basketball . . .
(Me, silently): just?  and is education supposed to be about being with other kids?
Relative: Oh good.  Is that just once-in-awhile, or every week?
Child: It varies.
(Me, silently): Why don't you ask them what they are learning?
Relative -- to me:  How long will you do this? Will you let them go to high-school?
Me: As long as we think it is appropriate.
(Me, silently): let them?  Here they are, getting a great education, and you speak as if I am depriving them of something.

It's revealing in that it shows the relative's assumption that school is about socializing. It's perplexing in that I've always thought that school was about education.  It's annoying in that it introduces to my child this rather skewed view of school and home-schooling.

Home-school curriculum 2012-2013

Here is what we are doing this year.


Math: We will continue with Math-U-See because it works so well for us.  The nice man gives the lesson on DVD, the children do the practice exercises. It's great.  Dandy will also participate in MathUSee's online once-a-week tutorial. We will continue with the  very charming Life of Fred series, which pairs nicely with MathUSee. 

Language Arts:

• We will continue Chickadee with the homey Amish curriculum Pathways Readers and Workbook.  
• We are enjoying learning poems through IEW's Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization.  Both kids can rattle of 20+ poems and counting.  
• For Spelling we will continue with the highly successful Sequential Spelling.  Love this.  Ten minutes a day and they can do it without me.
• For Vocabulary we use Wordly Wise: a lesson a week.

Writing: Both children will take the  Institute for Excellence in Writing's once-a-week online tutorial. 

Geography: Maps, Graphs and Globes from Steck-Vaughn.

History: We will use Beautiful Feet Books' Medieval History packet, which we'll augment with the Story of the World material.  I'm really looking forward to this unit: Beowulf, Robin Hood (the original socialist), King Arthur.  Yum.

Science:  Beautiful Feet Books makes a great Learning Guided titled History of Science.  It walks us through the great scientists via engaging biographies.  We will augment each topic with hands-on Science in a Nutshell experiment kits -- that is, when we are studying Thomas Edison's life, we'll also be doing experiments with electricity. 

Dandy will also take a once-a-week science class with ZLO (Zacchaeus Learning Opportunities).



Bible:  The children and I will all attend Bible Study Fellowship's Study of Genesis in the fall.


Art/Music: Chickadee will take once a week art/music classes at ZLO (Zacchaeus Learning Opportunities).

How about you?  What are you using this year?

The Children's Homer by Padraic Colum

The Children's Homer by Padraic Colum, read by Robert Whitfield is a real treat.  A grand adventure, expertly retold for a younger audience and read aloud by a master-story-teller.  What more could you want?

The Raven

October seems like the perfect month for Poe's The Raven:

• Classic Poetry Aloud offers an elegant reading of this classic creepy poem.
• StoryNory offers a perkier version.
• and you can hear the Allen Parsons Project version as the soundtrack to this whimsical home-movie interpretation of the poem: 

The Daily Listen

I've mentioned this before -- using iPod playlists for instruction -- in my post about Breakfast Devotions.  Since then I have expanded it to include:

Memorization Work:

• The BSF memory verse for the week set to music or merely read aloud, if we can find it in iTunes.
• The poems that we are memorizing from Andrew Pudewa's Linguistic Development Through Poetry. 
• Our vocabulary words for the week from Wordly Wise.
• The current unit's chapters of Prima Latina. 
• The books of the Bible.

Read-Alouds

• Any Old Testament chapters from The Message that are part of our study for Ancient History from the guide that Beautiful Feet puts out.
• The chapters from The Message that our BSF study is covering this week.

This plays during the time of the day that we are doing chores, moving about the house.  While we are doing schoolwork, we listen to an all Classical playlist.

Later this year we will study Classical Composers, so their works will be added one at a time to the list, so that we can start to distinguish them from one another. 

Wordly Wise

We have just started with this Vocabulary Building curriculum and I rather like it.  I download the audio presentation from the Wordly Wise website and add it to our iTunes "Daily Listen" playlist, which I will tell you about in an other post.   After a couple of days of listening, we tackle the worksheets.  The children get most of the answers right and feel all clever and "Good at English".  The webiste also includes fun review games which are a nice carrot for children who complete their lessons promptly.

Besides, what's not to love about a curriculum that includes this sentence: "Only the Congress of the United States has the authority to declare war."

P.S. Just found the Wordly Wise Word Lists here, so if you wanted to you could just work with the word lists and the audio and the games. 

20 great reasons to home-school

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2011-2012 Curriculum for Home Education (aka Home-schooling)

Here is what we are doing this year.


Math: We will continue with Math-U-See because it works so well for us.  The nice man gives the lesson on DVD, the children do the practice exercises. It's great.  We've found that when the Epsilon text pairs nicely with the Fractions text from the very charming Life of Fred series.

Bible:  Bible Study Fellowship's Study of Acts, AOP's Monarch curriculum.

Language Arts: We will continue with the homey Amish curriculum Pathways Readers and Workbook.  We will also finish up -- but won't re-purchase -- last year's Monarch curriculum from Alpha-Omega Press.

Writing: I am looking into the Institute for Excellence in Writing products, particularly the one that pairs with the Beautiful Feet Books' Geography Through Literature packet.

Latin: We have left-over from last year both Prima Latina and  English From the Roots Up material, though I think we are joining a group this year to hire a teacher and have an actual Latin class.

Geography:   Geography Through Literature packet from Beautiful Feet Books; Maps, Graphs and Globes from Steck-Vaughn; finish up -- but don't re-purchase -- last year's Monarch curriculum.

History: We are just now starting Beautiful Feet Books' Gilgamesh packet.  When we finish this, we'll move onto Beautiful Feet Books' Ancient History packet, which we'll augment with the Story of the World material.  After the new year, we will need to listen to Washington - Our Home Audio Book as Washington State History is required of us this year, as Andy is entering -- on paper at least -- sixth grade.

Science:  Beautiful Feet Books makes a great Learning Guided titled History of Science.  It walks us through the great scientists via engaging biographies.  We will augment each topic with hands-on Science in a Nutshell experiment kits -- that is, when we are studying Thomas Edison's life, we'll also be doing experiments with electricity.  We will also finish up -- but won't re-purchase -- last year's Monarch curriculum from Alpha-Omega Press.




Music:  Piano Lessons

Cursive: Handwriting without Tears

Hillsdale Academy, affiliated with Hillsdale College -- where I should have gone to college if I hadn't been so young and foolish -- makes available online their complete curriculum.  I found several useful resources here, and was pleased to note that that many of the set reading lists are echoed in the Beautiful Feet lists -- though that is hardly surprising, as one of the Beautiful Feet curriculum writers was a graduate of Hillsdale College.

How about you?  What are you using this year?

Alpha Omega's Monarch Curriculum

We've moved some of the children's curriculum to online/CD-Rom material.  Of all that we are trying, Alpha Omega's Monarch is my favorite.  Obviously the scope and sequence and delivery all pass muster or I wouldn't even have given them a chance.  In addition, I like . . .
. . . that the children's daily work is listed on their homescreens.
. . . that I can access their lessons, their progress etc. from my computer (it's all online).
. . . that I set a start and a finish day and the program spreads the work out.
. . . that I can cancel a "School Day" and the program bumps the rest of the year's work accordingly.
. . . that it comes with a readable "Scope and Sequence" overview so that I know what is coming up.
. . . that the daily worksheets and quizzes and tests are 90% graded by the program.
. . . that a Godly worldview permeates the material.
. . . that there is a nice mix of worksheet style tasks and project-style tasks.
. . . that it is easy to get started with and simplifies my tasks.
. . . that the kids enjoy it.

Unit Studies

Unit Studies: I need a clue.

I have on hand two of the Stewart Unit Studies: Lewis & Clark and Birds -- these are both short -- and two of the longer ones: The Prairie Primer (Laura Ingalls Wilder books) and Further In and Further Up (The Chronicles of Narnia). 

What they have listed for a day's work would take us a week.  Do you use Unit Studies?  Can you fill me in?

read the directions

So yesterday Dandy turns in his homework 100% wrong.  Every bit of it.  It's obvious that he hasn't read the directions. I ask him "What were you supposed to do here?" and he makes up some gobbledygook.  I ask him to copy the directions (there are 5 small sets) and he throws a fit.  The fit and its consequences pretty much eat up the rest of the day and carry over into today. 

Finally, at about 3:00 he resigns himself to the task, sits down and copies out the directions.  Ten minutes later -- yes, 1 day and a half of protest over 10 minutes of copy-work -- he is industriously completing his language arts work.  He strolls through the kitchen and remarks, "Reading the directions really helps."

Why yes, Dandy, it does. 

home-school curriculum overhaul and reviews

Every once in awhile I get the urge to revamp, reassess, and revise our home-schooling routines.  We recently set up a computer for the children to use, which opens up a whole new arena of curriculum for us.  I'm particularly attracted to curriculum that does the grading for me.

Here is what we are currently using:

Language Arts

BASIC SKILLS AND INFORMATION

We are using the Pathways Readers and Workbooks as well as the Climbing to Good English series. I like the Pathways series a lot -- the readers are themed about a hard-working Amish family that has values similar to ours, so there is a lot of moral reinforcement in these books.

The children are practicing their keyboard skills and letter writing skills as they sends daily emails to relatives via Kidmail.net.  $30.00 a year gives the kids their own email addresses and gives me complete control over what goes into their inboxes,  I manually approve each and every potential correspondent.  This service helps them learn:

• keyboarding
• writing
• how to keep a conversation going

They are both learning cursive with the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum.

We have added the Sequential Spelling DVDs for our Sequential Spelling sessions, which pretty much cuts me out of the loop.  The children do the lessons together.  You can preview the lessons here.

Math

We love the MathUSee curriculum. The nice man teaches it on the DVD, the nice children understand it and fill out the nice worksheets.  If only it were on-line and self-grading . . .

Have you met the Timez troll yet? He's marvelous.  The student navigates through the drafty castle until a troll blocks his way.  The troll will demand multiplication facts.  If you can provide them, you may pass; if not, you will be thumped and have to start over.  

·  

Social Studies

We are learning about Ancient Times via the Story of the World material.  The children listen to the CD, read the book, do the worksheets and the tests.  We supplement this with the awesome Usbourne internet-linked books.  And we just discovered History Pockets; nifty little kits that the children can use to create artifacts of what they have learned.

We are checking out the Time4Learning online curriculum on a two-week trial.  (Full disclosure, they offered me cash to review their curriculum on my blog; since I was working on this post anyway, I said "sure".)  For 34.90 dollars a month (total, two kids), I get full curriculum (Math, Language Arts, Social Studies, Science) whether I need it all or not.  It's all web-based and auto-graded, which I love.

Each child has done a lesson in Social Studies and I can't say that it was a resounding hit.  We'll give it the full two weeks and I'll let you know more then.  If this does not work out, we will probably go with Switched On Schoolhouse: History. It's all on CD-Rom.  It's interactive.  It's self-grading. It's expensive.

Science

We are checking out the Time4Learning online curriculum for science as well. Same lack-luster response after our first lessons, but we'll give it time.  If this does not work out, we will probably go with Switched On Schoolhouse: Science. It's all on CD-Rom.  It's interactive.  It's self-grading. It's expensive.

We often listen to our Science lesson on our All Around Us CD.

And have you seen this?  Expensive, oh yes, but elegant, informative, and I wants it, I wants it I do.  I might even let the kids use it. Layered Earth.

World Languages

LATIN and GREEK

We use three approaches for Latin and Greek:

            Prima Latina: audio CD + workbook  The children listen to the audio lesson, do the workbook tasks, and practice the vocabulary words via iFlipr, which works on both the computer and on my iTouch or iPad.  Try it.  How many words can you decipher?

            English from the Roots Up: vocabulary cards.  These clever cards show the Greek or Latin root word on one side and then a list of common words using that root on the other side.  The children simply copy the cards, essentially making their own flashcards which they drill each other with.

Word Roots CD-ROMs: Fun adventure games in which the clues are all in Greek and Latin roots and you must decode them to move forward in the game.

Bible

We have ordered Switched On Schoolhouse: Bible.  In the meantime, we visit this site daily and the children take turns reading the passage aloud.


Enrichments

THINKING SKILLS
Chess: We use the Chess4Life Knight level training DVD -- short snappy lessons help improve Dandy's game and the Chess4Life website for on-line practice games.

COMPUTER LITERACY

The children have (at last) their own computer.  I’ve made them a home-page which includes links to approved sites.  They are learning about seeing and clicking on active links, key-boarding, and navigating learning software.

Fine Arts

PERFORMING ARTS

We participation in community theater events as performers (A Christmas Carol, Dance School Christmas Program, Girls Choir) and as audience (Swan Lake, Wizard of Oz).  Both kids take piano lessons and Chickadee starts Ballet lessons in January.

ART
Chickadee uses the Draw Write Now series. These books provide guided free-hand drawing and some copy-work.  She really enjoys them and is improving mightily. 

Health/PE

We are all staying physically active at our local Athletic Club which offers children's programs at the same time as the adult programs (how clever!).  They swim and participate in group sports in the gym whilst I do Pilates.

Questions for you:

1. Have I left off your favorite curriculum?  What is it and why do you like it so?
2. Have you used SwitchedOnSchoolhouse?  Comments?
3. Should I start Dandy in 3rd grade Science and Social Studies/History and prod him through at double-speed? Or just bag 3rd grade and start with 4th grade?  Yes, I know he is supposed to be in 5th grade, but he is just barely writing, so I have to teach him where he is, not where is age-mates are.