Portfolios preserve homeschool achievements

One difference between homeschooling and public schooling is that homeschoolers tend not to amass the stacks of paper that public schools seem to thrive on. This is both good and bad: good in that you don't have piles of paper hanging around because you have not wasted your child's time with mind-numbingly repetitive exercises; bad in that you don't have the ongoing record of your child's milestones. Rather than keeping a gradebook or a folder crammed with every project ever done, parents should consider helping their children build a portfolio. A portfolio is different from a simple record in that it is a collection of only your child's best work that can serve as a showpiece for his talents. Think of it as your child's gallery that can grow and change as he does. As your child gets older, a portfolio may prove useful in getting admitted to certain academic programs or even in getting a job. You might want to make a portfolio for each subject. Don't use just any old folder. Splurge a bit and get something with a nice, durable cover that reflects the contents and your child's personality. The older your child is, the more you should consider a "professional" style cover, as the portfolio may be shown outside the family. The folder should be expandable as your child adds more of his best work. A three-ring binder is ideal. If it is an art portfolio, you will want pages that will allow you to mount artwork without damaging it. Center the art on each page to keep a clean look. Be sure everything is dated discreetly so you can see your child's progress. Put your child's name on the cover with a label that you design in Photoshop or another graphics software. For a touch of upgraded class, you could use an engraved nameplate. Done right, a portfolio can not only be a family record but a useful tool for your growing child.

Learning HTML at home

Many parents would like to give their kids an educational edge by teaching them the technical skills they'll need later in life. But with technological advances coming so rapidly, especially in the field of computers, more than a few parents not only don't have the skills themselves but have a hard time even discerning what skills are worthwhile learning.

One facet of the technoscape that will linger for some time still is the Internet, which revolves around the concept of "web pages." Creating a web page is something you can learn to do and then teach to your children quite easily.

Web pages work their magic through "scripts" written in Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML. Now, here's the secret: HTML is just text, and all the fancy stuff web pages can do is just based on words in a text file.

Because HTML is a type of programming, there is some jargon, but most of it is easy to remember because the commands are often initials or abbreviations of English words.

To get started making a basic web page, make a text file. It's best when you're learning to do this with a simple text editor like Notepad. If you use something with more options, like Wordpad or Word, you'll find the computer will rewrite some of your work and throw in tons of extraneous coding to boot. Whatever program you use should be able to save plain text.

Once you've created the text file, name it something like "MyWebPage" and change the extension from "txt" to "htm." The computer will ask if you're sure and possibly warn you that the world will end if you change the extension, but just click "OK."

Open the file if you haven't already. Write yourself a friendly note like "I am so happy to be learning HTML." Keep your text window open and then find your file's icon on the desktop (or wherever you put it). Click on it to open it in your web browser. (If the browser doesn't open the file automatically, make sure you've changed the extension to "htm," then right-click on the icon and select "Open with" and your browser.) Your web browser should display an otherwise empty page with your message on it.

Now you can start adding HTML to make things look different. All HTML commands, or "tags," begin with an open angle bracket, <, and end with a closing angle bracket, >.

All basic web pages need to start with the following template:

<html>
<head>

</head>
<body>

</body>
</html>

The first command just tells a computer that this is a web page. That's especially important when you start worrying about search engines finding your work, but that's for later. Just remember for now that <html> and </html> should be the first things on your web page. The two commands act like a container for everything else to come.

The next command, <head> and </head> mark off the place where you can put fancy scripts, set styles for your page elements, include messages for visiting web browsers and so on. It's the "thinking" element of the page that contains most of the "unseen" workings of your page.

Between the <body> and </body> tags is where most of your work will appear, including all the elements that will be visible to anyone looking at your page. Elements can be changed by adding what are called in-line style sheets.

The first thing you can do is change the background color of your page. Inside the opening body tag, add "style='background-color:#00FFFF'" so that your tag looks like <body style="background-color:#00FFFF">. Save your file and refresh your browser. This should give your page a nice light blue background. There are literally millions of colors you can choose from. For more on web color codes, check out this page.

Now, let's beef up your message. Put the paragraph tags, <p> and </p> around your message. Make sure your message and its tags are between the body tags. Then we'll add to the opening paragraph tag a stylesheet that says "style='font-family:sans-serif; font-style:italic; color:#FF0000; font-size:72px;'" so your tag looks like <p style="font-family:sans-serif; font-style:italic; color:#FF0000; font-size:72px;">. Save your file and refresh your browser. You should see your message in large, sans-serif, red italic letters. For more about font options, see this page.

Those are the absolute basics. With just those simple commands, your child can begin putting together a nice-looking web page about your homeschooling experiences to share with family and friends. Play around with the numbers and options to see what happens. See the above links for more options.

Editor's note: This is the first part of a planned occasional series about web design.

Mis-math-ed: Things to make a parent go 'huh?'

What better way to start off the new year than with a rant against incomprehensible math textbooks? I don't know how it is in other states, but in California, the once sensible step-by-step approach to teaching math seems to have been replaced with a see-if-it-sticks approach. It's not clear to me when this change occurred, other than that it was sometime between my dimly recalled childhood in the Paleozoic Era and my own child's bumbling into the Mirkwood Forest that is modern mathematics. At the risk of sounding like an overbearing parent, I recall when we were taught math (back when we walked 10 miles through the snow and mud to get to school) that the teachers started with what was called "the basics" and made sure we had some command of the facts before moving on to things like, oh, Algebra or Calculus ... or Interdimensional Physics. This sort of teaching methodology apparently is passe. We've been homeschooling for years now, and each year the "new" math textbook has looked a lot like the previous year's. No sooner did our son begin comprehending multiplication than he was being thrust into graphs and algebraic equations. Each successive year brought more of the same, just torqued up a notch. I can't recall a year when the child was not assaulted by what previously was considered high-school-level math. I also can't recall a year when any of it really "stuck." Complicating matters is the fact that the writers of math textbooks are not content with speaking English, instead splattering their lessons with enough jargon to baffle anyone with less than an engineering degree. Far beyond simple concepts like numerator and denominator, students even in elementary school are assaulted with arithmetic means, multiplicative inverses, negative numbers, nonnegative integers, prime factorizations and radicands. It's enough to drive you crazy. It did Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of "Alice in Wonderland." He was certifiable -- mad as a hatter, as he would say. By the time he got done with learning math, what had he learned? He was able to "prove" that two times two actually equals five: If x=1 and y=1 then 2 * (x2 - y2) = 0 and 5 * (x - y) = 0 therefore, 2 * (x2 - y2) = 5 * (x - y) Divide both sides of the equation by (x - y) 2 * (x + y) = 5 Plug in the values for x and y 2 * 2 = 5 And Christ Church College made him a professor of mathematics. Go figure.

Homeschoolers head to national robot contest

A group of homeschoolers from Oklahoma City have qualified to compete in a national robotics contest to be held in April, according to NewsOK.

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• Robot Building for Beginners: Technology in Action by David Cook
• I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

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The BEST Robotics National Championship is an annual event that pits student groups from at least 15 participating states against each other in a contest to see who can build the best functioning robot.

The championship features both homeschoolers and students from public and private schools. Last year, a group of Missouri homeschoolers took the top award.

The Oklahoma City group includes 30 students from grades six to 12. The group won second place in a regional competition held in Arkansas, qualifying for the national event to be held in Orlando, Fla.

The task this year was to create a robot that could sort golf balls from Easter eggs.

For more information about the BEST championship, or about starting a competition in your area, go to the BEST website, http://best.eng.auburn.edu/.

Your child might be a homeschool candidate if ...

If you are thinking about homeschooling but aren't sure yet if you want to take the plunge, there are some things to bear in mind. Above all else, homeschooled kids are unique, special, bright -- and sometimes scary smart. Here's a list that might help you decide if homeschooling is the right thing for your child. Your child might be a candidate for homeschool if ... When you watch "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," you catch him saying things like, "Ah yes, the Chronicles of St. Anselm," or "Alexandretta? Highly doubtful." He determines how much milk to pour into his cereal by calculating the ratio of Cheerios' nutritive values to his anticipated playtime energy needs in Joules. He not only understands Einstein's Theory of Relativity, but is working on a video documentary that will, quote, "blow the lid off the Einstein conspiracy." He can recite the names of all American presidents in order of height. For his third grade English essay he chose to write a 30-page report on the whimsy of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" -- in Middle English. He has nearly perfected his gourmet recipe for Beef Wellington a la Peanut Butter for chemistry class. He has ever explained that leaving the lid off the blender while making a milk shake was not an accident, but merely a test of chaos theory. The family pet has ever been an unwilling participant in your child's study of genetics. He has built a working flux capacitor into the family minivan. The United Nations has designated your child as ambassador to outer space, just in case. Light bedtime reading for your child is a chapter out of "Moby Dick." He laughs at the jokes in Shakespeare. He knows the last digit of pi. The messy piles of toys and clothes in his bedroom are actually a map of the molecular structure of a new element he calls "Madeitupium."

Homeschooling a fragile right

Earlier this week, President Obama gave a speech calling for more money for education and "innovation." He seemed to be focusing mostly on college tuition and programs, but homeschoolers may fairly ask, what about us? If you're looking for education innovation for pre-college children, it's unlikely to come from the union-ruled public school system. Homeschooling is itself a much-needed antidote to public schools' failures. But instead of backing homeschoolers, government at all levels either ignores the opportunities provided by homeschooling or even sometimes goes out of its way to put up barriers to parents who won't condemn their children to educational failure. In 2008, a California appellate court ruled that parents without teachers' credentials cannot legally educate their own children. Only the resulting outcry forced the judges to reconsider their opinion. But arguing that the court should uphold its previous ridiculous ruling was the California Teachers Association. Surprised? At the federal level, the National Education Association opposes homeschooling. While our homeschooling rights in California may sometimes hang by a thread, we can still be thankful that we don't live in Europe or other parts of the world. Many supposedly democratic countries in the EU have outlawed homeschooling altogether. In Sweden, authorities recently jailed Christer Johansson, father of 9-year-old Domenic, for taking his son home overnight from his state facility without official approval. The reason the boy is being kept separate from his family? Aside from letting the boy live with a couple of cavities and not following the Swedish government's vaccination schedule, the main complaint authorities have is that Domenic's parents were discovered homeschooling him. Now they only get to see their son for one hour every five weeks, and they can call him on the phone for 15 minutes every two weeks. The case is being appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. In New Zealand, Gerno and Andrea Schöneich are awaiting a decision on their application for asylum. The Schoneichs fled two years ago from Germany, where they faced fines, jail time and the threat of losing their children because they homeschooled. Germany continues to harass, threaten and jail homeschoolers who don't have the resources to leave the country. Homeschooling is also illegal in: Argentina, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Croatia, Greece, Netherlands and Spain. While homeschooling in America isn't currently threatened, we can't take for granted that it won't be, particularly when teachers unions hold such sway nationally and in state houses across the country. We parents owe it to our children to always be vigilant and make our voices heard. After all, our children are worth fighting for.

Homeschoolers make mark in science

People who are unfamiliar with homeschooling often have a long list of assumptions, most of them negative, about families who choose to educate their children at home. Among these is a belief that homeschoolers can never achieve in something as complicated as any sort of science. While science is probably one of the harder subjects for a parent to teach without school facilities, such as technical equipment and a dedicated lab space, it's doable, and some homeschoolers have gone on to make their marks in the sciences. Take two homeschoolers as cases in point: Francis Collins and Erik Demaine. The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief Collins is the former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, which mapped out the human genome--the genetic structure of human DNA--and provided groundbreaking and crucial information for medical researchers worldwide. An evangelical Christian, Collins wrote an influential book called The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. He was appointed by President Obama in 2009 to be director of the National Institutes of Health. (Source: NHGRI, Genome.gov.) Demaine became the youngest professor ever at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he joined the staff at the age of 20. Demaine's youth was spent traveling the country with his father, who was a goldsmith and glassblower. Not only is Demaine a genius in mathematics, he has used his artistic talents to create an entirely new way of teaching. He is considered the leading theoretician in origami mathematics, which is now being used as a way to present complex mathematical concepts in architecture, molecular biology, robotics and other disciplines. In 2008, he had a show of his creations at the Museum of Modern Art, and many of his pieces are now part of the permanent display. (Source: ErikDemaine.org.) There's no telling for sure where these two men would be if they had been forced into public schooling. Through no ill intention (usually) of the teachers, public education seems designed to thwart exactly the kind of imagination that makes for leaders in science and other fields. As homeschooling parents, we need to always remember to be encouraging and never be afraid to let our children explore new ideas, because you never know where they might lead.