by Charlene Teglia | Nov 21, 2012 | Uncategorized
Thanksgiving is upon us! For NaNoers, the final push to the finish line is ahead.Via
Paperbackwriter, here’s the most incredibly useful link for creative blockblusting I’ve ever seen collected on the internet.
For those about to bake, I salute you. And here is my go-to
pie crust recipe. Like the name says, foolproof. And as always, the
turkey hotline is there for those in need of advice.
Trying to keep kids busy over the holiday weekend? On Flickr I shared my own cave painting, an easy art project I did with the kids this week, with instructions to do it yourself. If you want to turn it into a treasure map project, do the drawing step first. (Thanks for the treasure map tip, MJ!)
by Charlene Teglia | Nov 4, 2012 | Books
For the past few months I’ve been consumed with starting off the year in homeschooling. We’ve had 2 years of Calvert, and while I’d read up on reviews of K12 vs Calvert and looked at the K12 site, looked at sample lessons, etc., I was still totally unprepared for the K12 experience. As I type this, the K12 curriculum is being boxed up to return and Calvert is on the way. I wanted to write up a side by side comparison that might be helpful to anybody else trying to make a decision and wondering if there was any real difference between the two programs.
First off, why did we switch in the first place? Because it was convenient. Our local district was set up to use K12 as an at-home option, and not set up to use Calvert. On the surface, they looked very similar. Both are used in most states as an at-home public school option, both use an online school interface, both ship a complete curriculum for the school year covering the core subjects and offer electives like foreign languages, music and art. Both come with lesson plans and are intended for use by the typical homeschooler who is probably not a professional teacher.
There, however, the similarities end.
Calvert lesson plans are very clear and complete. If you are supposed to use certain books, reading certain pages, and completing certain workbook pages, the lesson plan lists it all. There is a wonderful consistency to them, every lesson plan begins with a stated objective, teaches to the objective, assigns work on the objective, and ends with a few checkpoint questions to test whether the objective was reached. If not, you know what your child needs more practice on.
K12 lesson plans may or may not include an objective, may or may not contain clear instructions on what materials to use, and are inconsistent in labeling. Example: subjects are divided by units, each unit being numbered with the current lesson. So, Unit 3, lesson 1 will show on the lesson plan. And the corresponding workbook might say Unit 3, lesson 1. Ditto the teaching guide. Or they might not have that labeling at all, leaving the end user to guess which pages in the teaching guide apply to the current unit and lesson. This makes for a very difficult end-user experience.
Calvert provides complete materials for the school year, aside from a few common household items. For instance, in a science unit that involves an experiment with plants, you might be expected to provide your own pot, dirt and seeds, or in a measuring unit in math you might be expected to use paperclips and other common items as measuring tools. In 2 years with Calvert for 2 kids in different grades I didn’t encounter anything we didn’t have to do the lesson or couldn’t easily improvise.
With K12, we didn’t make it through 2 months without needing to purchase books for each child for the literature units. This isn’t a huge deal since we buy books for our kids all the time, but given the expense of K12 it’s surprising when the texts being taught aren’t all included, and time to get the required books delayed the lessons by a day.
Calvert’s online system is very orderly and easy to navigate and use. If you are in a public school option and using online lessons, it’s very clear which ones are required and how to go about using them. If you are using the teaching advisory service or public school option, any lessons that are required to send in for teacher review are labeled in the lesson plan with instructions to save the lesson to the mail-in portfolio. When mail-in time comes, it takes about 2 minutes to package up and slap on a mailing label because everything is already in one place.
K12’s online system is very labyrinthine and many of the options are not clearly labeled. For instance, in K12 you might see a whole list of National Connect classes listed for each child with nothing to indicate which are required, which are optional, which are repeats of a class your child already attended online, and what lesson is being taught for the subject so you can tell if you’ve covered it yet or not. It does say what core subject it is, but no further detail. My kids’ online class options and requirements changed repeatedly in the first two months of the school year with no advance warning or explanation. Questions got contradictory answers or no answers. The online system also features periodic “adaptive lessons” which change based on the answers a student gives. This leads to a wildly unpredictable experience and my kids hated them. And finally, the send-in lesson instructions are very unclear and require a lot of time to deduce which lessons are required for which student, and said lessons have to be rounded up and located long after they’ve been completed since the instructions aren’t provided up front.
Calvert students spend a little time online but the majority of time is spent on text books, workbooks, and doing hands-on activities. The computer is mainly used to see the day’s schedule, access the day’s lesson plans in order to collect everything needed for each lesson, and to answer the brief set of checkpoint questions after the lesson.
K12 students spend a lot of time online. Science and history are entirely online subjects, except for activities and some writing you might do at the end of a lesson. And while my youngest found games like Noodleverse and Spell and Stack entertaining, she made more progress on her spelling when I made her get away from the computer and write her list of spelling words by hand.
Religion is a hot-button topic for many people. We found the Calvert curriculum firmly based on education and with no religious overtones. This makes it a great fit for a person of any faith who can focus on school at school time and religious instruction outside of school.
This was not true of K12. One child’s literature course included Bible lessons taught with a moral focus rather than following the same pattern as all the other literature taught, and one child’s 10 question Roman history test featured 3 questions on Christianity and one each on Nero and Augustus. Here’s a quote from K12’s William Bennett: “Our curriculum has a point of view. We believe in certain things, we believe in certain ideas of right and wrong, and of knowledge and truth and that’s manifest in our program. We’re centered in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we do not ignore faith and religion, we do not ignore the arguments against evolution, because there are some.” If this point of view fits with yours and your philosophy of education, it might be a good fit for you but it isn’t pleasant to be taken by surprise by it.
The Calvert curriculum follows the Classical education
pattern using phonics to teach reading, drilling math facts and principles to learn math concepts and is very fact-based in the early grades. A homeschooler who has read The Well-Trained Mind will appreciate the approach used. But even if you don’t know the why behind the approach, you can appreciate the results as children master principles and skills they’ll need later for higher-level work. The ease of use, completeness, clarity and simplicity make it a terrific experience.
by Charlene Teglia | Jul 19, 2012 | Uncategorized
Guess what is shipping early? Cowboy Lust, containing my ROPED. You can get yours now and have a little Christmas Cowboy in July.
Snippet from ROPED
copyright 2012 Charlene Teglia
All rights reserved
“Whoa, cowboy.” Regan started to roll away, but he caught her in a firm grip and started winding rope around her wrists with a speed that proved he deserved all his calf-roping wins. “Bondage? Really? What happened to hello?”
“Hello, Regan.” Jonas continued his work without pausing, making knots and securing the rope to the headboard. “This is my way of making sure you don’t run off before I’m finished with you.”
“I didn’t run off the last time,” Regan said, exasperated. “You’re a heavy sleeper.”
“Not that heavy.” Jonas took her shoes and after a quick glance around the room, opened the window and threw them outside into a snow bank.
“Hey!”
“Can’t run off in the snow barefoot,” Jonas said, crossing muscular arms over his broad chest as he stared down at her.
“Those weren’t mine,” Regan moaned. “They were Nancy’s. They didn’t come from Payless.”
“Nancy? That friend of yours who went off to become a supermodel before marrying the cowboy next door?”
“Yes.”
“She won’t miss them,” Jonas stated, the problem of the shoes moved off the table.
That was probably true. Regan switched to a topic that might actually get her somewhere. “What are you doing here, Jonas?”
“It’s my ranch.” He didn’t miss the surprise in her eyes. “Nancy didn’t tell you?”
“No.” Regan had assumed he’d left forever when he’d gone away and onto achieve whatever the town bad boy was destined for. The vague vision made her realize she hadn’t thought much about an adult Jonas; he’d stayed eighteen in her brain, the dangerous boy all the girls wanted, an impossible dream for a bookish, flat-chested girl.
Her impossible dream continued to stare down at her, but Regan was used to courtroom tactics and refused to let it intimidate her. She attempted to settle into a comfortable position, difficult with her wrists bound together and the length of rope allowing her minimal room to maneuver. “Okay. You wanted to talk. Talk.”
by Charlene Teglia | Jun 25, 2012 | Uncategorized
First, Wheee! Time Magazine suggests you cowboy up and read. Cowboy Lust (contains my ROPED) is included in Time Magazine’s Summer Reading issue! This means that the connected story I set up in Roped kind of needs to get done now to take advantage of the exposure. Hadn’t planned for that to be a priority so soon but when the unexpected happens, priorities shuffle.
Second, pay no attention to that man behind the curtains, but this site has long needed to transition to Drupal 7 and the time is now. A shiny new Drupal 7 build which includes Drupal Commerce is in the works. Drupal Commerce will allow me to sell my own titles directly, so I can do things I’ve wanted to do for some time here, such as offer signed copies of print books, direct downloads of my e-titles, etc. The offerings will be very limited to begin with, but I’ll be adding backlist titles of mine as they come out of contract and I re-release them along with new work. Exciting times!
by Charlene Teglia | Jun 11, 2012 | Uncategorized
1. The Shiba Inu puppies are back. Awww.
2. Neal Stephenson wants to revolutionize sword fighting in video games. Check out the kickstarter and re-read Snow Crash.
3. What’s your muppet type, Chaos or Order?
4. Don’t know what to do with that kale from your CSA? Cooking Light has 14 recipes for you.
5. If writing is starting to seem all adult and heavy, check out
this short film and revisit the world of your inner child’s imagination.
by Charlene Teglia | Jun 6, 2012 | Uncategorized
Via IO9, Ray Bradbury has left us for the stars. Or the October country.
I read pretty much everything the man wrote except his screenplays. His stories burrowed into my brain and remain there as an example of what story is and why you should say to hell with anybody who laughs at your love of dinosaurs or circuses.
Goodnight, Mr. Bradbury, and thank you for leaving a light on.
by Charlene Teglia | May 24, 2012 | Uncategorized
There’s a lot of stuff going on around here, it just isn’t really visible. So, what’s happening behind the scenes?
1. Had a lot of trouble with spammers creating user accounts to post spam. So I did some backend changes to resolve this and hopefully the spam will be less problematic around here.
2. I have new covers for self epubbed books that are already out and for one that hasn’t been released yet. I should have time to update, format, upload, etc. all of this soon. I hope.
3. Cowboy Lust is coming soon (August). So I need to get a page created for it. I hope to do that soon, too.
4. Nuns and Huns in the Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance is all revised and done, done, done until publication. I need to create a page for that, also, but kind of waiting for release date info.
5. Hard at work on finishing Mammoth Paranormal tale.
After that, more novels will be coming soon.
by Charlene Teglia | May 23, 2012 | Uncategorized
1. Homework. I’ve had it with homework. Last night after once again having my kid work on it from the time she got home until I told her to stop because she had to get ready for bed, I went out and did some research. Turns out there is no evidence that homework for elementary and middle school aged children has any benefit at all, and it’s not uncommon for kids to find themselves in the situation mine is in, where the assignment is supposed to take 20 minutes but actually takes much longer to complete.
Monday’s assignment, for instance, took me 20 minutes just to explain and work through an example for her. THEN she started to do the work on her own, finishing at bedtime. From now on, she’s going to put in her 20 minutes and that’s it. Putting in another 2 hours or more of assigned work after a full day of school is too much to put on a small child.
2. Still working on my Mammoth Paranormal story. It turned out to be a story I’d started more than 10 years ago, and it’s always interesting to me how ideas ripen and taken on new forms and are suddenly ready to be finished long after I’ve even forgotten about them. Really excited to see this one done at last.
3. Sleep. Or lack thereof. I’ve reverted to tools like the Baby Go to Sleep CD on constant repeat because napless baby and sleepless nighttime baby is a recipe for psychotic breaks all around. Also not good for productivity. Blackout curtains are helpful, too.
4. You don’t know until you go. We had an aborted campout last weekend that we knew could end in rain and bad weather. But it also might’ve been fine and fun for everybody and ultimately the deciding factor was that we’d never know unless we went. Sometimes you just have to take the risk for something you want, even if you know it might not pan out. The alternative is to stay in a very narrow comfort zone.
5. I’m experimenting with writing on the go using iPad and Evernote with a keyboard folio. Not sure how I’m going to like it yet but I really want a good portable writing solution and I want one that just sticks to text and doesn’t get in my way.
by Charlene Teglia | May 14, 2012 | Uncategorized
Happy post Mother’s Day to all the moms out there. I wanted to spend my day wearing a 20 lb backpack and climbing a trail to a waterfall, so we got everybody ready for the day and headed off to hike in Olympic National Park. Which, by the way, never gets old. You can buy an annual pass for $30, a whole lot of entertainment value for the money, and it’s all yours, from the beaches to the glaciers. Since one child was at the doctor’s office on Friday we kept it very low key, and took the easy, well-maintained trail from the parking lot to Sol Duc Falls. The total round trip is a bit over a mile and a half, a nice distance to loaf along breathing unbelievably clean air and drinking in all the sights and sounds. It was literally a breath of fresh air and a feast for the senses.
by Charlene Teglia | May 4, 2012 | Uncategorized
Hello, May! So much work to do, so little time. Books to finish. Short due for Mammoth Paranormal anthology. I’m knocking out the short first and spent yesterday brainstorming plot details, choosing character names, working on the blurb and settling on a final title. Since the theme is a “monster hospital”, my story is Visiting Hours.
The playlist:
Abraham’s Daughter, Arcade Fire
Bring Me to Life, Evanescence
Love is a Place, Metric
Everybody Knows, Concrete Blonde
One, U2
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