HomeSchooled in the Burgh!: New Material

Can't Find a Good School for Your Kids? Buy One!

What does Will Smith do when he can't find a decent school for his kids? He buys them their own.

The actor recently paid $889,000 to lease Indian Hills High School in Calabasas, Calif., after failing to find a decent educational program for his two young children. Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, have been home schooling their brood until now. According to People:

"We started home-schooling our children probably six years ago," he said. "We found about eight or nine other parents that home-school, so we put them together. ... There's just very powerful educational concepts that we believe in, and we feel like 'I want to design the system that revolutionizes public education.' "

In 2005, Jada Pinkett-Smith told Essence that the decision behind home-schooling came from their dissatisfaction with current models of education.

"The school system in this country -- public and private -- is designed for the industrial age," she said. "We're in a technological age. We don't want our kids to memorize. We want them to learn."

Parents just don't understand, huh Will?

While most people will find it difficult to provide their kids with a school of their own, that doesn't mean you shouldn't be involved with your child's education.

source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/newsandviews/2008/05/cant_find_a_good_school_for_yo.html

Yes Spring Break was over on Monday and we've been very busy this week. I've been trying to come up with different ways to teach (I was told we would receive some assistance with learning items & you can guess that's not happening). I placed an order for some supplies from teachchildren.com and amazon.com a couple days ago. I'm excited of course. We use the online computer program from Time4Learning.com (it's a sister system to Compass Learning) for Math, Reading, Science, History and some miscellaneous subjects like Geography. We use the White Board and workbooks for Handwriting. Right now we're being creative by surfing the internet for ideas for Spanish (123teachme.com/learn_spanish/spanish_for_children) and Health (kidshealth.org). As far as P.E. we workout to 'Walk Aerobics For Kids' with Leslie Sansone, workout on fitness balls and dance to music. He had a playdate twice this week with his buddy and we created a life skills script we read for communications. This week went well and I'm looking forward to my shipment so we can start on new material.