JUMP Math

Many of us have looked high and low to find a Math Curriculum that fits well with a Charlotte Mason education, and after lots of research, reading, and checking things out, I've come to love JUMP Math.  

I was a Mathematics major in University when I got my Bachelor of Education (with an English minor), and have lots of experience with Math both theoretically and practically.  Math is one of the subjects that I love (although in a much different way than History and Literature...) and I've loved teaching it since I was in high school and taught my friends algebra during our lunch hours!

JUMP is a very well laid out program.  It takes an incremental approach to teaching math, taking very small steps and offering suggestions to the teacher of how to present the concepts in a real way.  I've read John Mighton's books and find his theory and approach to fit very well with a CM education.

Last week I received this email from JUMP and wanted to pass the info along to you.  The TVO program mentioned has already aired, and I don't know if the program is available in their archives.


(Sorry for the goofy colours of the text below.  I had some trouble making the formatting work and didn't have the hour or more it would have taken to make it beautiful.)

Read the Recent Globe and Mail Profile on JUMP Math

The Globe and Mail recently published an in-depth article on JUMP Math, which includes new research results from a 2009 study done in London, England. Here is a link to the article:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/science/program-could-help-kids-get-jump-start-in-math/article1433199/
Please send this link to anyone you think might be interested or post it on Facebook.

Watch John Mighton as a Guest on TVO’s Your Voice

John Mighton makes a guest appearance on TVO’s weekly program Your Voice on Sunday, January 24, at 6 pm, to discuss “Discovering Dyscalculia: The Math Learning Disability.” You can watch the show at  http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/tvoparents/index.cfm?page_id=483&event_id=2925 after January 22.

Attend the First JUMP Math Conference Coming in March

Save March 5 on your calendar for attending a JUMP Math conference in Toronto, Ontario, featuring workshops, speakers, and research news. Visit http://www.jumpmath.org starting on January 28 for conference and registration information.

Check Out Our New 2009 Edition Workbooks

Interested in seeing the results of our comprehensive revisions to our workbooks for Grades 1, 2, 7, and 8? You can get sample sections of all the workbooks for Grades 1 to 8 at http://www.jumpmath.org/new-2009-workbooks. To purchase the new workbooks from our distributor, University of Toronto Press, visit http://www.jumpmath.org/publications/order.

Donate Today!

Start 2010 by supporting a student to succeed with JUMP Math, for only $50 per student per  year. As a charity JUMP Math provides free resources for students who could not otherwise afford to be part of the program. Visit https://secure.e2rm.com/registrant/donate.aspx?EventID=7940 to donate.

Pass It On!

We sent this email message to you because you have expressed interest in JUMP Math. Please share this message with friends and colleagues who may also be interested.

© Copyright 2010 JUMP Math. All rights reserved.

JUMP Math, Multiplying Potential, the jump math wordmark, and the reagent logo are registered trademarks and/or service marks of JUMP Math in Canada and other countries.

Mailing address:
JUMP Math, One Yonge Street, Suite 1006, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5E 1E5

Winter Nature Study

It's not too late to ramp up your winter nature study time!

Barb (Harmony Art Mom) has a series of winter outdoor hour challenges that are easy to use, easy to do. Don't let the snow and cold keep you from nature study (say I while I'm tucked nicely inside a cozy home)! It only takes a few minutes a week to open your eyes and heart to the Creator's wonderful details. Barb makes it easy to incorporate Comstock's Handbook of Nature Study, and to make these times more than simple observation.

Check out her winter series! Barb only started this series in early January, so you won't even feel behind if you start now. The first one is Cattails in Winter. Then comes Winter Tree Study. And the last one to date is today's: Winter Sky and Stars. (I think my family will start with the trees, then we'll do the sky and stars. I'd enjoy talking to you at the next meeting if you tried one of them, too.)

ChildLight USA Charlotte Mason Conference - 2010

If you've thought of attending the annual Charlotte Mason conference hosted in North Carolina but have never managed to get things together in time, let this year be different.

ChildlightUSA has just announced the dates and theme for the 2010 conference:

2010 Conference Information

The 6th Annual Charlotte Mason Education Conference

June 9, 10, 11, 12, 2010.

Theme for this year’s conference:

A 21st Century Education: Applying a Charlotte Mason Curriculum

Mark the dates on your calendar today, then visit ChildlightUSA in a few weeks to get all the details as they become available.

New Library Holdings File Available

We are expecting some new books to arrive in the library any day now, and the Library Holdings file has been updated to reflect that. You can access the listing by clicking the link to the right, which will open Keep and Share, an Internet file sharing service. There you can choose "download" and peruse the holdings at your leisure.

Let the Child Choose the Material

Barb at Handbook of Nature Study has a new post with a thought provoking quotation from Liberty H. Bailey's book The Nature-Study Idea.

I hope you'll give some thought to how this looks in your CM home school, and would love to see your comments either here or at Barb's blog.

E-mail update

I have just forwarded an email reminder from Karen about the upcoming meeting. If you didn't receive it, that means that you aren't on my email list. If you'd like to be added to the list, please email me (talsma at cyg dot net) and I'll make sure you're included.

New WHHE Facebook Group

If you are on Facebook, you can now find a WHHE group there. It's a great venue for questions and answers, connecting with other WHHE members, etc. Simply follow this link to join.

And if you're not yet on Facebook, you can use the same link to sign up.

Thanks Karen, for getting this started.

Using the Handbook of Nature Study

Barb at the Handbook of Nature Study blog, has just posted an excellent piece on Nature Study in Home Education and making use of Anna Botsford Comstock's wonderful resource, Handbook of Nature Study.

Fall is a great time of year to give nature study a try if you haven't already been doing it, and a wonderful season to explore more deeply if nature study is part of your family's identity already.

Comstock's book is full of narrative descriptions of plants, animals, and insects, but did you know that she even has chapters on soil, minerals, and climate?

You can find Handbook of Nature Study through most home education retailers, on Amazon, and, for those of you who want to take a look but aren't ready to buy, you can get a free download of entire book from Internet Archive, including the diagrams and illustrations!

I want so much to reflect on our first meeting of the year, but my children need me! One is down with a fever and sore throat, the others are floundering...

Thoughts and reflections will come, but until then: thanks Karen, for opening your home to us again, and for starting us up so beautifully; thanks Liz for your thoughtful questions and input about the relevance of CM today; thank you Christine, for sharing your experiences and knowledge of scheduling, and for offering the freedom for each to find what works in their own family; thanks to each woman who attended, participated in the discussion, and made the meeting worth having; thanks Helen, for getting the library started smoothly and putting together the bookmark-schedules; thank you to all who brought desserts to share.

Here we go! Another year!

2009-2010 Library Listings now linked on the blog

After spending a day in late August with three other women going through the entire WHHE library collection, there were bins of books stacked in my living room, front porch and hallway! Now all 30 bins of books have all made it to Karen's home and have been subjected to the first sign-out time of the school year.

Thanks to those who worked on inventory with me: Sandra, Laurel, and Sandy. And thanks to Helen for stepping in to fill some of the void in library management.

If any of you, as members of the group, are willing to volunteer for library tasks (one time or ongoing), please leave a comment or email me (talsma at cyg dot net). We need help with set-up, check-out, clean-up, ordering missing parts for games, book repair, etc. Please indicate what kind of involvement you'd like to have, and we'll match you up with the right position.

There is now an up to date listing of WHHE books available for you to look at. It is organized by genre or subject and I hope you will find it easy to locate what you are looking for. Sign out of books will continue to be first come first served after the meeting - no holds will be permitted. Please look through the list, and if you are interested in a particular item that you don't see listed, put it in a comment on the blog and we'll do what we can to order it if it is suitable for a Charlotte Mason library. (Please note that we do not have books which are easy to find in the public library system - Dickens, for example.)

This morning I managed to get the current listing of library books uploaded to Keep and Share. This is a file sharing website that allows anyone to view a file, but not edit the shared version. To access the Library Holdings file, click the link in the right side-bar and Keep and Share will open, asking you if you want to download the file. It isn't a big file, and on my non-high speed Internet connection it took less than 30 seconds to download, so it shouldn't be onerous for most of your computers to handle.

Our First 2009-2010 Meeting is Coming Soon

You are warmly invited to kick off the school year with the Whole Hearted Home Educators’ Chocoholics Extravaganza on Tuesday, Sept. 15. The evening will feature a much requested discussion on how to plan and schedule your homeschool day, led by Christine Gayfer, home educating mother of 6 children ranging from 17 months to 15 years old. Christine, a popular speaker at the KWCHEA conference, has “a passion to encourage moms that the CM method is wonderful and doable in the midst of their busy lives”.

We will also be introducing this year’s wonderful book, When Children Love to Learn, by briefly discussing Chapter 1. As always, our extensive resource library will provide you with an abundance of the best materials available to support you as a homeschooler.

This year promises to be an exciting one, as we add in breakaway sessions for those who are home educating highschoolers. Eleven years ago, our group began to pursue a vision of educating our children at home in a way that would create a love for learning, rich in good literature and ideas, using the Charlotte Mason approach. This year, we want to explore how to do that with our highschoolers. How can we prepare our children in these final years of home educating in such a way that they can gain entrance to the future of their choice without losing their love for learning? How can we prepare our teens to be world changers who have been equipped for the purposes to which they have been called?

Our goal is to provide a stimulating evening in which home educators with children of all ages will be able to come away with fresh vision and skills. We wrap it all in a welcoming atmosphere with lovely refreshments to give a special night out to all of you deserving home educating mothers.

Please email Karen at rkpowell at 295 dot ca if you need directions.

Last year my family participated in this Monarch Rearing program and it was a fantastic Nature Study experience for us. We're doing it again this fall, and heard from Wings of Paradise that they still are able to accept orders for the kit.

(If you want to see some of our fun with the caterpillars and butterflies, click on the link to PeaceLedge in the sidebar, and then in PeaceLedge's topics list, choose butterflies.)

I couldn't upload the pictures from the email they sent me, but if you go to the Wings of Paradise website, you can find lots of info about the Monarch Rearing Program.

Monarch Butterfly Rearing Kits are still available!

Order yours today!

• Last order date is September 11, 2009
• Monarch Butterfly Rearing Kits are available while supplies last.
• A limited number of kits are available

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Once again we are taking orders for Monarch Butterfly Rearing Kits - everything you need to Raise, Tag & Release your very own Monarch Butterflies!

Be amazed as your caterpillars miraculously develop into beautiful Monarch butterflies! Plus, this kit provides everything you need to RAISE, TAG & RELEASE your butterflies and track their migration to Mexico as part of the MonarchWatch international research project.

• AVAILABLE BY PRE-ORDER ONLY
• PRE-ORDERED MONARCH KITS MUST BE PICKED UP AT WINGS OF PARADISE ON SEPTEMBER 12th, 2009 between 10am and 4pm
• RECEIVE FREE ADMISSION FOR YOU & up to 3 GUESTS WHEN YOU PICK-UP YOUR KIT ON SEPTEMBER 12th, 2009 between 10am and 4pm

EACH KIT INCLUDES everything you need to RAISE, TAG & RELEASE five Monarch Butterflies: 5+ Monarch Caterpillars 1 Potted Milkweed Plant 1 Deluxe Collapsible Cage Caterpillar-Care Manual Lifecycle Poster 1 Pack of Milkweed Seeds 5 MonarchWatch Tags Monarch Watch Datasheet & Info

Combining High School Biology and Nature Study

Barb at Handbook of Nature Study has a new post offering suggestions for working both Nature Study and Biology into a High School year. She shows one option of using Nature Study as the core, the other using a HS Biology curriculum as the core (in this case, Apologia).

A New Link

Sadly, it looks like LindaFay is no longer going to be blogging at Higher Up and Further In. (I'm not sure if this is a temporary stop or a forever one; you'll have to ask her that.)

She has, however, set up a website to help those getting started with a CM education. She calls it Charlotte Mason Help. You might like to check it out. It has links to articles she's written for Higher Up and Further In that relate to Charlotte Mason, as well as a history schedule for 12 years, yearly booklists, and weekly schedules for each year. She also has a link on her website to Leslie Noelani Laurio's modern English version of Charlotte Mason's volumes.

Art and Music Appreciation - Free plans available

Are you looking for a simple, prepared composer and artist study to use with your children? Barb at Harmony Art Mom has several such resources, and she has made one of them available free this summer! Here's what she says about it:

How would you like to have some relaxed plans for art and music appreciation this summer? I have pulled together six weeks' worth of ideas for you to use with your family. I have chosen an artist and a composer for you and put down some specific plans for listening, viewing, and follow-up for each.

I have packaged them all up into a neat little PDF for you to download for free.

The plans introduce the music of Felix Mendelssohn and the paintings of Claude Monet in this mini-unit. The plans also include every print I suggest and you can view them in the PDF, online, or you can print them out if you wish. I have created simple artist biography and composer biography notebook pages for you to print out as well.

To access the pdf, go to her blog post about the resource, and you'll find the link to click on. That will bring you to a Lulu page of ebooks, etc., that Barb has available, and the free summer art and music appreciation one is at the top of the list. (At least it was when I checked a minute ago!) From there you can download the ebook pdf onto your computer.

One Week Left

The countdown is on:  the ChildLightUSA Charlotte Mason Conference will begin in one week, on Wednesday, June 10, 2009.  It's not too late to register and attend!  This year promises to be another inspiring, informing conference, including an all-day workshop on narration.

Will we see you there?

Another year is done, ladies, and we'll be planning for next year at the end of June.  In the meantime, I hope you'll join me in thanking everyone who played a part in this year's meetings:

Karen, for opening her home to us every six weeks, and showing us lovely hospitality.  And Karen's family, for clearing space for all of us!

Sandy, for keeping our library vibrant and relevant, and for being so willing to share her insights into CM with us.

Those who led meetings this year:  Sandra, Laurel, Karen, Sandy, Christine, Cathy, Helen, and Liz, and, um, me. 

All who brought desserts to meetings - I can't even begin to list all of you, but you are thanked mightily!

Anyone who contributed to discussion, either during or after meetings, about CM and home education.  The group is richer for your participation!

Those who attended for the first time this year, you are so welcome among us, and we hope to see you continue with us.

Please join me by adding your thanks in the comments, and please let me know if I've missed naming someone.  Also, as leaders, we would love to hear feedback about what you liked/didn't like about this year, what you'd like to see in the future, etc., so we hope to hear from you about that as well.

Blessings to all of you as you prepare for the summer.

Jennifer

The 6 C's for High School and Beyond - Notes on the KW workshop given by Diane Wolf

(Note from Jennifer: these notes were submitted to me by Sandy M.  If you want more information about the workshop or its content, please comment below, and we'll see if someone reading can fill in some more.)

This talk was given by Diane Wolf from Trent University. She came up with this list based on her own experiences and frustrations of teaching in a post secondary setting.  Diane was very positive about the quality of home-education she had encountered and the preparedness of students she knew who had been homeschooled.  Much of her talk was personal anecdotes and stories but I was able to take down these points.

::

What are the "skills to nurture"  to prepare our students for Post secondary Education?

A. Critical thinking skills: Students need to be able to back up their opinions and be able to critique and understand how to evaluate sources of information. These skills have been widely lost in educational systems and are sadly lacking in post secondary students today. Teach students how to assess arguments and information, to understand common logical fallacies, to ask the questions,  "Why? Why do I think that way? Why do I believe that idea? What evidence is there for ...... ?" etc.

B. Character: This is what really makes students stand out in a post secondary setting. Students who are people of integrity and who can accept consequences are few and far between. 

C. Creativity: There is a great need for students who can creatively solve problems, who can discover for themselves the things they need to know, and who are adaptable. Content gaps really don't matter if the student is resourceful, creative, and an independent learner. Students need to be able to figure out their own strategies when they are lacking knowledge or technical expertise and not depend on someone else to solve their problems for them.  The ability to ask for help when needed is one of those strategies, not the tendency to expect someone else to jump in and help them.

D. Communication skills: It is very important for students to know how to work with others in a group setting. Much post secondary education is done in groups. Co-operation and teamwork skills are essential.

E. Comfort with Computers: Although the ability to use computers and to navigate common programs is essential she also highlighted that students need to know when not to use computers and how to show self control and restraint. She touched upon the vast amounts of time wasted and "negative" impact of this. She also mentioned that students won't know every computer program needed but stressed the importance of openness to learning new programs, and the importance of knowing how and when to ask for help if they don't know how to use a required program.

F. Common Sense: Sadly lacking in many students is the ability to use your head and think before you act.  (During this part she mentioned that the older students were the more they took ownership of their courses and were successful; she pointed out many students enter university at 17 years old because their parents want them to and they are completely unprepared for the independence and level of responsibility required.) She discussed the value of homeschooling in developing people who have lots of life skills, lots of common sense and are accountable for their own learning.

::

This was a great workshop, very inspiring, very affirming. I felt convicted that homeschooling during the highschool years was a perfect opportunity to develop these qualities in my kids and to prepare them for whatever adventures and responsibilities God was calling them to. I am so thankful to have attended this seminar!

Blessings,
Sandy M.

Posters

And this note came from Sara:

I recently received about 10 posters (birds, reptiles, caterpillars/moths, mammals, flowers) from the Canadian Wildlife Federation for free - you can donate but there was no talk of it on the phone - just in the pre-message part.  

Just call 1-800-563-WILD and ask for whatever complimentary posters they have available and give them your address.  They're very nice!

CBC Radio Programs on Play and Early Childhood

Sandy Rusby Bell sent me the following note this morning, and I'm now feeling a little badly for not having pointed out the first part to all of you much earlier. I listened to the CBC Ideas podcast of The Hurried Infant several weeks ago and was finding myself nodding in agreement through much of it. This is so applicable to those of us who believe that Charlotte Mason was on the right track regarding early childhood development, and it is thrilling to me to hear these idea being brought to the public ear. If you want to listen to the podcast instead of using the link Sandy has given (below), you will find it on iTunes. If you need help locating it there, let me know.

Our National Public Broadcaster CBC seems to have become very interested in the importance of play in the lives of children. Last week they aired an amazing two part documentary called "The Hurried Infant". Fascinating work on the brain, confirms so much of what CM said.

Today, at 12:00 on the Science show they will be discussing the importance of play. I haven't heard it yet so don't know what it will be like but I thought you might like to listen...

Here Sandy gave the link to the CBC program Quirks and Quarks. The link doesn't actually pull up the broadcast, but I believe that this, too, would be available through iTunes podcasts. Sorry we didn't know about this early enough to get the info out to you before the show actually aired so you could listen to it as it was broadcast, but, I suppose, we can be thankful for the technology that allows us to listen to previously aired programs so easily.)