Tales from the Conference…

I have just spent a wonderful two days at the SEARCH Homeschool Conference. I generally avoid conventions, but since Susan Wise Bauer as a speaker, I made an exception. I am beyond thrilled that I did.

I have read her book, The Well-trained Mind, and had found great validity and practicality in much of her approach using the stages of the Trivium. Those stages identify the true educational and psychological differences in our children and divide them into the catergories of grammar stage, gr. 1-4, logic stage gr 5-8, and rhetoric stage, gr 9-12. I was eager to attend her seminars on writing plans and teaching history with the great books, as well as preparing for college admission.
(I will be posting about these throughout the next week, after I organize my notes) While I found I was instinctively following a lot of the classical model, we do have some holes in grammar and timelines that we will address this year.

While I have been impressed with her great mind, I was blown away with her warmth and candor as a speaker. It is easy to forget while reading her scholarly analysis that she is a homeschooling mother as well, and had been homeschooled herself. Please take a few moments to direct yourself to her site and learn more about her philosophy and products.

I was also thrilled to find there are some new products out there, or at least new to me. My favorite find is a new math curricula called VideoText Interactive. I will admit that I am probably one of the last people to get excited about math. I have two children who strongly dislike math, most likely from a stressful cocktail of bad experiences with Saxon, their personal ilk and a mother who is math phobic.

Yet, when I walked by this booth at the fair, I was drawn to a video screen with an algebraic equation. The soothing voice spoke me through as they did the next step of adding between parenthesis, while the screen highlighted the section in green. As the voice moved through the problem, hightlighting each step as it went, I could easily see how this would be appealing to my kids. Four youngsters (under 12) were sitting in seats, predicting with great success what would come next as they learned. The program has daily video lessons, workbook lessons, and quizzes. It has six modules, combining pre-algrebra, algebra I and algebra II into a single course to be done over two years.

I visited the used curricula section and found some of these for sale. I picked up just module A for $30, to see the kids would take to the program. If they do, I will be certain to purchase it!

I spent time in the used curriculum sale (five classrooms worth!) and found some things on my list for the next two years. I picked up Artistic Pursuits books I -II for $15. I got some great geography helps like Uncle Josh’s Outline Map book ($3) and Around the World in 180 Days ($5). I picked up a myriad of grammar resources, as well as some great science and unit study aids. Not only did I find some other exceptional bargains in the used book section, I came home with five empty crates of curriculum I no longer needed. I only wish I had know to take the stacks of children’s paperbacks the kids have decided weren’t favorites, and sold those as well. There is always next year!