Tim's Year 11 Schedule

It's not done yet; we're making a lot of changes. Tim has music lessons on Monday and Thursdays, and likes to be around on Wednesdays because Mr. B has more free time that day, and it's no fun if Tim has a stack of books to get through. So those days need to be lighter. Also, Tim has his own list of books that he wants to get to, and I figure he's old enough to help decide what he wants to read. He only has two years of school left and some of these books are books he's wanted to read for awhile - and I want to make time for them now, since they are educational.

So, he's reading a Year 6 biography on Churchill and that's the only biography he's reading. He wanted to read The Last Lion, which is two volumes about Churchill, but I don't see how he'll fit it in, so he reluctantly agreed to do Never Give In instead. He wants to read Ruskin's Mornings in Florence, so he's doing that as his art text instead of The Story of Art. He loves H.V. Morton's travel books, so he's reading three of those this year instead of The World by Jan Morris. He wasn't impressed with the logic book by the Bluedorns, and opted for Euclid's Elements instead. For poetry, he's doing Millay, Yeats and Auden instead of a contemporary anthology. He wanted to read the writing book by Annie Dillard that he saw mentioned in the Beehive blog, so he's using that instead of On Writing Well. He's doing Darwin's Black Box and The Case for a Creator instead of the nature books in Year 11. He's skipping Brideshead Revisited. And he'll fit in Roosevelt's Letters, How Green Was My Valley, and To Kill a Mockingbird as free reading. He's going to look at Mein Kampf but not read all of it.

So I have the list of books he's doing and which days of the week he'd like to do them, and I'll try to get his daily schedule ready tonight.

It's done now; you can see it here.

10-year-old Kahoa's Year 4 schedule is also done; he started Year 4 last year and wasn't ready for it, so I created a Year 3.5. This year we're trying again. His schedule is here.

Keola's Year 7b schedule is here.

And what about my own reading list? I'm already committed to Parents and Children, CM's volume 2. Besides Shakespeare and Plutarch, which we do as a family, and our daily poem from AO's Year 1 poetry anthology, this is my tentative reading list for the year:

Year 4 Probable Read-alouds
Kon Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl
It Couldn't Just Happen by Lawrence Richards

Year 7
Secrets of the Universe by Paul Fleisher (probable read-aloud)
The Life of the Spider by Henri Fabre
History of English Literature by H. E. Marshall
Taste of Chaucer by Anne Malcolmson
Medieval Poetry

year 11 (I doubt I'll get to more than one or two of these)
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
In Search of England by H. V. Morton
Autobiography of a Slander by Edna Lyall
Seven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave by David Breese
Mornings in Florence by John Ruskin

I've been wanting to read some of the Year 7 books for years, so I'm making them my first priority (after CM's vol 2, that is!)

One Schedule Done

At the beginning of every school year, I make each of the boys a daily schedule based on AO's 36-week schedule, tailored to their individual needs. It usually takes a day or two to get them all done, but it makes the whole year go so much smoother if each boy knows exactly what he's doing.

This year, it's taken me a week to get just this one done. We have company, so I've been distracted - and I forgot my system of cut/paste, and I was a third of the way finished before I remembered it.

This is Keola's schedule. It's too long to paste here (180 days, each day with a list of a half-dozen books/tasks), but you can see it by clicking here. I'll probably do Kahoa's Year 4 schedule next.

Clearplay Video Filtering Questions?

http://www.clearplay.com/

Can anyone tell me how this works?

As I understand it, I buy a Clearplay DVD player for $99, and it comes with a trial USB download that filters 250 movies (the list of those movies is here) If I like the service, then I pay a subscription of $79 a year or $7.95 a month, and I get 100 filter downloads each month - do I choose which filters, or do they? Does that mean I have to wade through lists of movies every month? And I rent or purchase DVDs that I want to watch, they don't provide that, is that correct? All the service provides is filter for certain movies?

Miss Moana's First Picture

Miss Moana has drawn lots of times, usually little series of scribbly circles and zig-zag lines that look like she's trying to write chicken-scratch. This is the first time she's ever said "I'm going to draw _____" and then actually made an attempt to. She said, "I'm drawing a sun." And this is her attempt. :)

Latest Car Update

Mr. B spent the day getting records of work done on the car, talking to insurance value assessors, his own agent, etc. And here's how it stands so far:

Our own agent can't/won't do a thing for us. It's not her problem, it's between us and the insurance company of the lady who hit Mr. B.

The other insurance company is being firm on the settlement of $133 to declare our car 'totalled.' Although our make/model of the car has a NADA value of up to $1800 and is being sold for $900-1200, they're sticking to their original arbitrary assessment of $201 as our car's value.

Although the police record states that the other lady was at fault for pulling into a busy main road without yielding to oncoming traffic, the insurance company is insistent that Mr. B is 25 percent at fault because "accidents take two people." It's his fault that he was there, and that he let her hit him.

Our last resort is to prove that we had a rebuilt engine put in, which theoretically adds value to the car. We have that proof, but I don't see them caring.

Mr. B is also collecting data about how much this make/model of car is generally valued at - cars for sale, Kelly Blue Book, NADA. Our bank said that NADA is the standard - but it's impossible to know what the insurance is using to assess the value of our car and they aren't sharing that information. It's their own little secret. They didn't use NADA. Maybe they made up a number. I doubt they'll care how much everyone else values the car at - if they did, they would have used a standard listing from the beginning.

So that's where it stands. Their client hit us, and their concern isn't to help us get our car driveable, it's to pay out as little money as they can, and they know we have no recourse because they have lawyers and we have nobody to go to, no advocate.

What happens to someone struggling to get by with an old car if he gets hit through someone else's mistake and his car is totalled enough to be undriveable and he needs transportation to get to his job? He can't get any kind of working car to replace his for $133. What happens to people in that situation? Luckily, it's more principle for us - we'll have to pay some money because of an insured motorist's mistake, and it's an unwelcome expense for our single income family, but it won't ruin us. We'll still have use of the vehicle, although it's uglier than it used to be. But what about people living on the brink of financial ruin, what do they do when this happens to them?

Car Update

I posted about Mr. B's little accident here; he was hit while driving to work.

The other person's insurance company has finally settled on what they're going to pay to reimburse us for the damage the lady did to our car, which they deemed a total loss: $138. That doesn't even cover the money we paid to hammer the body off the wheel and replace the tires where the metal rubbing on them wore grooves in them.

Here's how it apparently works, according to them:

The car is old. So old that it isn't even listed in Blue Book. They did enough research to be able to tell Mr. B that replacement value, what this particular car is selling for on lots, is about $900. But they placed an arbitrary value for our car of $230-something. Then, one of their agents accidentally marked down that Mr. B was "25 percent at fault." He wasn't, the officer who wrote up the report stated that the lady was totally at fault for failing to yield. But they docked 25 percent off the $230 because of that, leaving $201. And then, since Mr. B plans to continue driving the car instead of junking it, they docked off $68 "for parts." I guess that's what they'd get if we gave the car to them and they sold it for parts.

Mr. B is going to try to take care of this. His sister is visiting from across the country, but instead of getting to visit with her, he'll be spending his one day off this week making phone calls, getting his car-guy to detail the work we've had on the car, and getting other documentation to try and recoup what he had to pay for the damage done to his car by another motorist whose insurance company doesn't want to pay for her mistake.

Moana-ese

Can you tell the difference between these two words?

flahluh

flohluh



Not sure? Okay, here's a clue; pay attention because I'm only going to post this once and she'll expect you to know it - when she asks for her flohluh, she gets very upset if you try to give her a flahluh.



Are you ready?





Flahluh





Flohluh

The Homeschooling Meme

I was tagged by Colleen to play!

1) ONE HOMESCHOOLING BOOK YOU HAVE ENJOYED
School Education by Charlotte Mason

2) ONE RESOURCE YOU WOULDN'T BE WITHOUT
Project Gutenberg's free e-books

3) ONE RESOURCE YOU WISH YOU HAD NEVER BOUGHT
Animal Farm; as soon as I got home, I found my missing copy and now I have two!

4) ONE RESOURCE YOU ENJOYED LAST YEAR
Free art at CGFA.

5) ONE RESOURCE YOU WILL BE USING NEXT YEAR
Travel books by H. V. Morton

6) ONE RESOURCE YOU WOULD LIKE TO BUY
["The Pilgrim’s Progress audio version that Mother Auma plans to use,"- we used this, but not last year. We loved it!!] The resource I would like to buy: Shakespeare plays on DVD

7) ONE RESOURCE YOU WISH EXISTED
The perfect typing program

8) ONE HOMESCHOOLING CATALOGUE YOU ENJOY READING
I rarely look through homeschooling catalogues, every time I do, I start wondering what I'm missing and I start doubting what I'm already using. I do like Veritas, though.

9) ONE HOMESCHOOLING WEBSITE YOU USE REGULARLY
Ambleside Online

10) TAG FOUR OTHER HOMESCHOOLERS
Beth, Miss Roxie, Ginger, and Mama Squirrel

Weekend Post

We have company, relatives who are considering relocating here. It would be nice to have family in the area, and they homeschool, which would be an added blessing!

I'm feeling a sudden desire to curtail my online presence, partially to conserve time, and partially because I seem to have a pattern of sharing too much, and then pulling back. It won't affect my blog, since it's unlisted except among AO lists.

I'll be making up daily schedules for each of the boys this week based on the AO 36-week schedules. I do this every year before we start the new year. It makes the whole year go smoother if each boy knows exactly what he has to do each day.

Here are a couple of pictures taken this week - one is of Kahoa at the county fair, playing cowboy on the merry-go-round, and the other is Miss Moana looking solemn.

A Frivolous Book Meme

From Krakovianki's blog. She's been posting about a craft fair in Poland, which is of particular interest to me because Chopin was from Poland.

1. One book on your desk right now?
The Cloud of Witness edited by Mrs. Gell

2. One book with a bookmark in it that you haven't picked up for a few days?
The Mists of Avalon - I promised myself I would read it for the last five years. Finally, a few weeks ago, I picked it up and read a good bit of it - and was disappointed. I decided not to finish it, but the bookmarker is still there in case I relent and give it a second chance.

3. One book marked with a pencil (or other irregular marker) stuffed between the pages instead of a proper bookmark?
A small Children's Bible (I was underlining something)

4. One book with the cover falling off, or other grievous injuries?
The Age of Fable; luckily, we have a second copy.

5. One book you "ought" to be reading, but don't feel like it?
Too many to choose from

6. One book sitting on the shelf and enticing you to read it instead of anything else?
My son's DK book about Pirates

7. Your most recently acquired book?
The Cloud of Witness

8. One book on your "wish list?"
Norms and Nobility by David Hicks

9. One book you literally threw in the trash?
I haven't ever thrown any book in the trash, but Mists of Avalon may be a first

10. One person who ought to answer these questions?
Miss Roxie and Ginger (that's two, isn't it?)