Homeschooling through Blogging

Some may say our homeschooling is non traditional but we tackled math, spelling/grammar, science, Bible, history, current events, typing, research skills, and reading today.

I taught my 11 year old to blog. I created a blog for her attached to mine. She hates to write and gets a mental block with it. She will write songs and skits on scratch paper but not for anyone to see. If I ask her to write a journal entry, a paragraph about something she read, etc. she gets all flustered and just plain frustrated. Her attention to spelling and punctuation is just not there.

First she started with typing in an essay I write comparing the Flood story in the Bible with stories of the Flood from other cultures. Then we looked up other interpretations. It was very interesting. The commentator explained that the Hebrew words translated as the "whole earth" in many Bibles literatal translation is "local land". When the words are translated in context they refer to the land where the people were that the story was about. For example when he speaks of Canaan, and he says whole earth, the writer in the Bible story was referring to the whole area that was inhabited which was Canaan. Check out the blog post Rambling of A Princess.

My daughter asked, "But mom what about the shells that were found on top of Mt. Everest? Doesn't that mean that the flood waters covered the top of that mountain at one time?" So I google that and we came up with an explanation that made sense of the plate tectonics and that the planet was mostly covered in water in the Beginning and Mt Everest is a mountain that came about from a shift. Can you see how much research we are doing with this? All the while she is typing her finding and posting pictures with it. She didnt know how to do any of this until this morning.

Then I had her go on Fox News and read some articles on what was going on in the world. Not much interested her until she came to an video interview about two famous people who had suffered with diabetes. Then the light bulb went off!!! She said, "Mom, you know Nick Jonas has diabetes." I responded, "Really, do you know what diabetes is?" Of course, she thought she might know but was very interested in search the internet for info. She remembered that Nick Jonas had done an interview on Jonas Brothers Living the Dream about his struggles with diabetes. She searched and searched and finally came up with the video that we could post a link to her blog. She searched out clear definitions of diabetes, the types, struggles, descriptions and images of people who have the disease and created a new post.

But the fun didn't stop there. Tonight we were driving through the end of a storm and when we came through it, there was a beautiful rainbow. My daughter took pictures of it with her phone and said "Mom, when we get home I'm gonna post this rainbow and stuff about rainbows on my blog." And when she got home the research began right where she left off. Its in draft form now with a picture, a small description waiting on all the research she wants to add in the morning. Hallelejuah I think we have found the golden ticket!!