Those of you who think that Coca-Cola is being really generous by helping out the polar bears might want to take a look at their bottle of Coke. According to the 2-liter bottle of Coke that my husband picked up for me, they only want to save the home of ONE polar bear.

That’s right, they only want to save ONE polar bear. If you notice, my Coke bottle says “Protect the Polar Bear’s Home”. Anybody who has taken a third grade English class knows that if you want to indicate the homes of PLURAL bears, you would write “bears’ “, with the apostrophe on the end. As a homeschool teacher, I know that you teach this in third grade English class, because I taught it to my daughter last year.

In most cases, I wouldn’t bother to point out a simple grammatical mistake like this. When someone makes a grammatical error on their blog, a message board post, or in a small business situation, I can sympathize – we all make grammatical mistakes once in a while. When a larger publication, like the New York Times or some book publishing house, allows a grammatical mistake to slip by them, I shake my head, wondering how they could let the mistake pass the grammar checkers.

However, I really wonder how a mistake like this could end up going through the checks of a BILLION dollar corporation. Coca-Cola’s packaging more than likely goes through focus groups before it hits our store shelves. A lot of people look at it before it leaves the factory, yet nobody noticed this mistake? It really makes me fear for the future of the English language and for the education of our country.

“ARIZONA: HUGE companies are giving out free baby stuff to moms with baby’s aged 0-4 years. E-mail required. Limited supplies. Act now!”

Seriously? Baby’s? Baby’s what? Which baby?

I realize that this ad is probably just someone writing this out of their home, or at least I hope so. The horrendous grammar really annoys me. I’m okay with really bad grammar or spelling mistakes in a message board post, but I know that someone is paying money to send me this ad day after day. You would think that if the author knew that they didn’t know much about grammar, that they would at least have a friend look at it? Perhaps not.

Most of the kids in my neighborhood have already started school for the year. Our church started school Monday; some kids started on the 11th, and some really crazy schools started at the end of July. We’re still on summer vacation until September 8th.

No matter when you’re starting school this year (or if you already have), if you are choosing to homeschool your child, you might want to check out The Old Schoolhouse’s Online Homeschool Expo. It runs from October 4-8, and it should be pretty exciting. There will be guest speakers, door prizes, and fellowship. Best of all, it doesn’t matter where you live, if you can get online, you can attend!

Some of the guest speakers include Zan Tyler, Dr. Jay Wile, Jeannie Fulbright,Carol Barnier, Diana Waring, Todd Wilson, Davis Carman, Kim Kautzer, and Lee Binz. The theme this year is “Celebrate Homeschooling”. If you homeschool, you have a lot to celebrate. The freedom to let your kids have a couple extra weeks of summer while everybody else is already working, for example. The freedom to teach about the Founding Father’s without a lot of progressive propaganda. The freedom to spend time with your kids. The freedom to fit education to your child’s needs and abilities. You probably have your own unique reasons to be thankful to be homeschooling.

Between now and midnight on August 22nd, you can save $5 off the price of the Expo. Right now it’s $19.99. With this, you’ll get more than $200 in free eBooks, plus an mp3 copy of the sessions.

This year, there will be special teen sessions, plus there will be an emphasis on writing. Although my little boy is only going to be working on writing letters this year, my daughter, on the other hand, needs to start writing more. Over the summer, she’s learned that writing can be valuable… I told her that she can keep any money that she makes from designing t-shirts, but she’ll need to know how to write to do that work. No matter what level your child is at, I’m sure that he or she does a lot of writing too.

If you sign up early enough, you’ll be able to attend the preconference shows with Dr. Jay Wile, Jeannie Fulbright, and Kim Kautzer. They will take place on August 24th and September 1st.

If you’re like me and need to Tivo everything to fit it into your busy life, you might prefer the October Expo to Go instead. Tickets for that will be $14.99 if you order this week.

Tickets sell out (at least to the live event), so if you’re interested, then you might want to think about signing up as soon as possible. The Old Schoolhouse is a Christian organization; I like that, although perhaps the leftist visitors that I had at my blog a few weeks ago might not.

In case you didn’t catch the link earlier, you can find out more at Schoolhouseexpo.com. Or click on the picture at the top of this post.

Let your homeschooling friends know too!

It has been a long time since I taught myself how to type. I waited until I was in middle or high school to learn. Nowadays, my three-year old pecks at a typewriter. Learning how to type (at an earlier age) is more valuable than ever.

This is where Keyboarding for the Christian School comes in. I was recently sent a copy to review. Because my daughter is in the second grade, we took a look at the elementary school version, but there is a version for middle and high school students.

There are a lot of things that I like about this book. It goes through the keyboard systematically, just like I learned to type when I was in school. There are periodic reviews. Once you start learning how to type sentences, your child gets to type Bible verses. This book also teaches the number pad and gets into some basic word processing. The book has some time tests towards the end, but it’s mostly focused on learning the positions of the keys and actually learning to type. This is a good thing for my daughter, who is a perfectionist and doesn’t like the pressure of a timer.

There are a few things that I don’t care about in this book, and it’s fairly minor. They use Times New Roman font, which is great for word processing, but scrunches up some of the letters together so it’s harder to differentiate each word when you’re trying to learn to type. I personally think that a fixed-width font would have been preferable for most of the book; the one exception being the word processing section at the end. They also use the New International Version for the verses; this might be preferable to many people, but my church likes to use the King James Version, so there might be some confusion there.

Overall, this is a pretty good book. While it’s likely that a secular book would work just as well (or a program like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing), this book is a good choice if you want to use a book, and you want to incorporate Christian beliefs into your typing program.

Earlier, I reviewed the Beehive Reader and All About Spelling. I really loved All About Spelling, but the Beehive Reader was a little youngish for my daughter, who is now working on 150+ page chapter books like Ramona Quimby, Age 8. I was recently given the opportunity to review What Am I, which is the first volume of Level 1 from All About Reading.

This book is a lot like the Beehive Reader, but it doesn’t directly correspond with All About Spelling like the Beehive Reader does. Because it is Level 2, it is a little bit more advanced. Like you would expect out of a reading text, the stories get more difficult as it progresses. In the beginning, the sentences are primarily one-syllable words, and the sentences are fairly simple. The final story, “What Am I?”, is considerably longer, has more difficult words, and is more complex.

Like the Beehive Reader, the book is beautifully illustrated, and is hardbound, so it will last through several children, if you need it to. It is 160 pages.

My daughter thought that this book was more interesting than The Beehive Reader, which was much too simple for her. This book was closer to her level, but over the year, she has exploded in her reading ability, and this book was still a little simple for her. I do recommend this book for early readers who have progressed past the Beehive Reader though. It’s a little too early for my little boy to start working on this set… he’s still working on his letters… but this will probably do nicely as a supplement for his reading (I’m partial to BJU reading). I’m a firm believer in having something available for kids to read.

I have taken this book to church as well. The sermons sometimes go over my daughter’s head, so she sometimes reads this book, along with Seasons of Faith. Even though it’s a little simple, it’s something that we can take along.

A story hit the news a couple of days ago that was fairly bothersome to me: students were kicked out of school for wearing American flag t-shirts on Cinco de Mayo. Really?

I don’t have a problem with Mexicans, or any other race for that matter. I have friends that are from Mexico. However, I do have a problem with Americans kowtowing to Mexico. What makes their country so much more important than say… Russia… or Germany… or Zimbabwe?

I don’t celebrate Canada Day, or Bastille Day; why should I care about Cinco de Mayo? Actually, I do care about Cinco de Mayo, it’s my brother’s birthday. So I have to make sure I give him a phone call or something. Other than that, who cares? I thought about making tacos that night, but we already had them earlier in the week, so we had chicken instead.

I’m American, not Mexican. If people want to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, that’s fine; I just don’t think that it should be a national holiday in America, any more than St. Patrick’s Day or Valentine’s Day are. We don’t celebrate every country in the world’s Independence Day, and as far as I am concerned, Mexico is no more (and no less) important than any other country on the planet. Well, that’s not true. I’m a big fan of Australia. I spent five weeks there once, and it’s like a home away from home. I love it there. But I don’t expect other Americans to share my love for Australia. Any more than I expect Americans to share my daughter’s love for Italia (she was born in Italy, so she happens to have feelings for that country).

Another way that Americans often tend to kowtow to Mexico is by what language they learn. “Bilingual” seems to be code for speaking both English and Spanish. That’s not the definition of bilingual, bilingual is speaking two languages. Parents will say “I want my kids to be bilingual so they can get along in this country.” In some places, it’s absolutely essential that you speak Spanish if you want to get a job at McDonald’s or Taco Bell. If you really want the big bucks though, you’ll be bilingual… in something like Arabic. Don’t get me wrong, I love languages. My daughter is on her way to being bilingual… in Chinese. They’re going to own our country anyway. I have studied several languages myself. My second language was German. I then studied Russian. Spanish was the fourth language that I worked on (I don’t use it much though). Right now, I think that Chinese and Arabic are more useful.

I like America. I love the Constitution and what it stands for. I just think, if we’re all going to be Americans here, that’s what we need to be. It’s great to have your favorite country outside of America, but I don’t necessarily think that it has to be Mexico… and I don’t think that everyone should be forced to give any non-American country any more prominence than any other non-American country.

I was watching America: The Story of Us on the History Channel (it’s a great series, I highly recommend it for both you and your kids), and I noticed that they were giving away a copy of the video to every classroom in America (or that was their goal). I figured that I’d take a look to see if that included homeschool families, although I doubted it.

To my surprise, I discovered that to be eligible for the free DVD, the “School must be an accredited public, private or home school, grades K-12 and college.” Now, I’m not sure what an accredited homeschool is, but I signed up for the DVD. They said that it would be on its way this summer in time for the fall semester.

I have the first episode on Tivo; I’ll try to get my daughter to watch the video tomorrow. We have already been over American History from Columbus through the Civil War, so this will be review; however, I started teaching her about Columbus when she was 5, so she really doesn’t remember much from back then.

So far, they showed Episodes 1 and 2 on Sunday. There are things in there that I didn’t know, and I have been through AP American History, have read extensively on History, and am currently reading A Patriot’s History of the United States. I’ve also read a great deal of The Real George Washington. I haven’t seen too much bias… yet… although I do expect to see some bias when they start talking about the Great Depression.

I was recently sent a copy of the Seasons of Faith book series, available from CBH ministries. If you’re a Christian and you have kids, you might be familiar with the company. They’re the people that do Down Gilead Lane and Keys for Kids.

The Seasons of Faith book series consists of four books, each representing a different season of our Christian life. There is a lesson in each book that kids can appreciate.

In the spring of our Christian life, we’re just learning about being a Christian, and life is exciting. In Racing Midnight, Becky is visiting her friend’s farm, and would like her friend to know Jesus too.

In the summer, we grow in God’s love. In You Can’t Come In, Zack learns that God won’t let sin into heaven, just like Mom won’t let a dirty, mud-covered boy into her clean kitchen.

In the fall, we make mistakes, but we learn of God’s forgiveness. In Seventy Times Seven, Brad learns that he needs to be forgiving… just like the unforgiving servant.

In the winter, the storms of life come. Thomás is upset because he’s been going through a difficult period of life… but then he realizes that to make it through, he needs to be rooted in God.

There are a lot of good reasons to like these books. For one, they present God’s lessons in ways that kids can understand. The illustrations are excellent. The characters are ethnically diverse, so they appeal to everyone.

Each of these books comes with a CD, where Uncle Charlie reads the book, and chimes tell the kids when to turn the page. I’ve read the book to my kids, and we’ve also used the CD. My kids are familiar with Uncle Charlie from listening to Keys for Kids in our car when he’s on. He’s a great reader, which is probably why his Keys for Kids series is so great. He also does a great job with these books.

These books are great for independent readers, kids who want to listen along with the CDs, and for parents to read to their kids. These would be great for families, Sunday Schools, and Christian day cares. I highly recommend them.

These jobs can be done by whoever is the most qualified, wherever they live. Education is important. Unfortunately, America is not doing so hot when it comes to education. In fact, most of western society discourages competition.

I wrote a longer article on the subject of American Educational Laziness. It was originally meant for the blog, but then it grew to over 800 words long, and I figured that was too much for the blog, so I posted it at the main site.

While looking at today’s Arizona Republic, I saw that Arizona plans to graduate some of its student’s early with a “Grand Canyon Diploma”. To get this diploma, students would have to take a rigorous exam. They could then go to community college or train in a vocational school.

Officials said that this would increase the high school graduation rate, which is currently at about 70%. Of course, if you make something easier to obtain, that will increase the results. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll get a better education out of it.

If the problem is that kids are bored in school, give them a challenge. Let them enroll in community college classes and get high school credit for it. Make sure that advanced placement courses are available. I took my first college course as a junior in high school; it was a biology course, and it was taught by a teacher who worked both for the community college and for the local school district. In my senior year, I took two community college courses in the morning, then I’d drive to my high school and take colleges in the afternoon.

The Grand Canyon diploma would not prepare students to enter four-year colleges. Shouldn’t that be a requirement of a high school diploma, that you are ready to tackle higher education? I think that more than a few of these people would be disappointed later on when they find out that they can’t get into college. We never know what the future will hold; my husband didn’t start college until he was more than 30 years old.

Are some kids in high schools held back academically by the schools? I would say so. I’m not sure what classes are offered at high schools around here, but if they’re not challenging enough, that could be a problem. That would also be a reason to allow dual enrollment in college courses while in high school. However, high schools don’t necessarily produce such a high quality of graduates as it is. The reason why Arizona stopped requiring homeschoolers to take standardized testing was because they were kicking the pants off public school students.

Graduating students early is not the answer. Offering them more challenging courses (letting them dual-enroll in a community college or offering AP classes) is a better answer.