Tech Ed 4 Kids Partners with Parents, Students, and Teachers to Measurably Propel Student Achievement in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math
Newsela and the News
Last year when we took a break to go remote our local school decided that they didn’t want to pressure the kids with learning anything new. The grade school, we were doing 5th grade, simply wanted to work on keeping up the students social emotional learning. My little one though really liked his schedule. He wanted to stick with doing all the same things he did at school each day and that started with homeroom! Homeroom at school included watching some sort of news program that the school must have subscribed to and I’m sure they had their school report telling birthdays, lunch and more.
To add that to our day as the school ‘break’ stretched we would watch the news here together, which we were sure to discuss. Once in a while I felt we would need to censor it a little, but it helped keep up with what was going on in the world and in our area. We’ve continued it on into this school year as we’ve homeschooled. Now we’ve added some extra things like the debates.
Finally I added in a news story each day from the site Newsela. It lets me print stories with questions included. We can discuss the articles and go over the questions. I created an account with my Google sign in and am able to choose what articles my son might be interested in. The articles include word counts and could be shared onto google classroom if I wanted to create sets that are related to topics we are researching.
There are also teacher sets that can be used, put together by teachers that curate articles related to a pertinent topic. I’m looking at one now on To Kill a Mockingbird – ‘Do We Still Need Atticus’ Lessons Today? The set includes 23 articles that include ‘Recalling An Era when the Color of Your Skin Meant Paying to Vote’ and ‘Redlining Prevents Minority Families from Becoming Homeowners’. There are also sets on topics such as Math in the Real World and Women History Month, even programming a school’s basketball team against the Pick and Roll Defense (I have no idea what that is!)….
We stick with one article per morning and add a discussion. There are additional sites that offer news. We haven’t tried them, but it’s good to find the one that works for you and stick with it. Some include videos like the National Geographic site for kids, and others are articles like you would find in the paper. Speaking of which we have also been pulling out the paper and my son currently grabs the comics. Originally he stuck with the comics, but has slowly added puzzles to his interest in the local paper. Over time we will add articles that are more interesting!
https://www.huffpost.com/section/teen
https://www.timeforkids.com/g56/handwashing-helper-2/
https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/#/1275700291922
CodaKid (More Coding) or you can learn and have fun too!
There are so many ways to make learning fun. One of the things we’ve tied in is CodaKid (besides Tynker). On a side note though, last night we were watching the new Netflix documentary on the Social Dilemma. A documentary-drama hybrid that explores the human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations and calling it dangerous. I don’t know how many of you have noticed the posts by people saying their kids can’t sit in front of the computer all day for school. Kids in tears because school has gone remote and is all online. I have to admit I’m confused by the contradiction saying that we can’t get our kid’s off technology because they are addicted …. but wait they can’t be expected to use the computer for a few hours each day for remote learning, they can’t handle it….
Codakid has several cool classes on coding. My youngest is currently sticking with the Minecraft with Java, but I’ve pulled up the Cart Racing with Unity and he’s been working through it with me at the same time. There are so many things that can be tied into coding! Math, reading, and it even can count as a foreign language. There are clubs that get together for coding and competitions. Scholarships that can be applied for that link in, and that’s not even counting the logic skills that are acquired. There are so many ties with coding to additional topics:
There are so many ties with coding to additional topics:
- Math: Scaling
- Math: Logic
- Reading
- Social Studies: Can be tied in with the history of languages, programmers, and more
- Science: physics of motion
I’m not an expert at curriculum development, but the more we homeschool, the more I see overlap between subjects allowing learning to happen throughout the day, no matter what we are doing! I have to admit that I enjoyed CodaKid as much as my youngest seems to. The only complaint that I’ve heard so far was that on the Java and Minecraft class, was that it’s moving a little too slowly and he would like to get to coding faster. The set up stage of the lessons is very detailed and walks through every step. In the class that I was using with my youngest I have to admit I tended to skip portions where I could guess what was going to happen and just ‘do it’ and then come back in after. I’ve used several of the tools already though and have installed development software many times before. It seemed to work for me, but for my youngest who felt that he had to watch everything and go step by step…. that portion was a little boring and led to a hiatus.
Students can also take those skills as they enter college and use them to either volunteer or better yet, find a paying job to help work after they have finished. There are even sites dedicated to small coding and design jobs like fiverr and frelancer. My own first paid job in college was writing an inventory system on the Commodore 64 for a small business to just keep track of their products. This was back in the time of floppy disks (5 1/4″) and the DOS operating system and WINDOWS weren’t even a thing I’d used yet.
Tynker Coding (adding coding to homeschool)
Debating what to study for homeschooling, one of our thoughts was ‘We need a language!’. We discussed every option of language we had some experience with and looked at what colleges are accepting. Interestingly enough some colleges now are taking programming languages in place of a foreign language. In the end, for our house we chose both foreign language (Spanish) and to look at computer coding. Personally I really like computer code, and to me it seems like it may help with employment in the future more than a foreign language…. but having both skills is a large benefit.
The younger kids learn another language the easier it is, and what we have been finding is that Spanish is not something that our son is going to pick up easily (and isn’t too willing either). Currently I’m working on slipping Spanish words into conversation as they fit and looking at labeling some things around the house to help make it a little easier to make the Spanish ‘common place’.
For programming my youngest enjoys Minecraft and we’ve found a few places that include programming mods for Minecraft. One of the first sites we decided to try was Tynker which included a lifetime subscription. The site also allows programming from the web or a tablet through an app. Besides Minecraft programming they include several other options, so it looked like a great place to start. We’ve slowly been working our way through, but from what we’ve seen so far it was worth the subscription we went with. We’ve since added another coding tutorial site also, but tynker was a great place to start. The site even starts with younger grades and looks like it would work starting with first or second grade.
Students love playing video games, what’s better than letting kids work on writing their own games to play. Coding teaches logic skills that help with future math and science (as well as some design thrown in).
Playing with Fractions using Cooking
We were needing a break a couple days ago during homeschooling and making cookies seemed to check all the boxes. I was reminded of the old skit by Bill Cosby where he discussed cake for breakfast…. eggs, milk…. yep it’s breakfast! Making cookies is fractions! We now have a math activity that ends with a snack and to top it off we are up and moving around the kitchen using some fine motor skills. As my husband came in he reminded us there was chemistry involved also. Perfect! If you really want to cover the bases it had reading too because of reading the recipe…
We ate the cookies to ‘Would you Lie to Me?’ a recent show that was on TV and learned something about human behavior. My son joked that would be social studies and we had covered the day. My thought was that he works so hard normally it was a good day and he needs the flexibility once in a while.
There are so many things that you can do with fractions and cooking. Look at adjusting the recipe to make more, or make less, convert the measurements to different units….. there are options, or just measuring with fractions. Then how many cookies fit on a sheet, how many sheets do you need, how much time, changing the cooking time if you change the temperature….
One of our ‘experiments’ with cooking involved accidently putting in too much baking soda. (A tablespoon instead of a teaspoon) So we had the discussion about what will that cause to happen? What does baking soda do in a recipe?
In cooking, baking soda is primarily used in baking as a leavening agent. When it reacts with acid, carbon dioxide is released, which causes expansion of the batter and forms the characteristic texture and grain in pancakes, cakes, quick breads, soda bread, and other baked and fried foods.Chemical formula: NaHCO, ₃
Our cookies came out of the oven and were almost immediately pounced upon as snacks. I’m pretty happy that my little one this year has been ore willing to try knew new things. I think this was our second time making cookies and he was willing to eat them both times. For someone that doesn’t like broken cookies or cookies that aren’t round from the store I consider that a win!
https://oureverydaylife.com/how-to-set-a-wristwatch-12273992.html
https://www.theottoolbox.com/teach-fractions-in-kitchen/
https://www.perkinselearning.org/activity/cooking-fractions
http://www.montereyinstitute.org/courses/DevelopmentalMath/U02PROJECT_RESOURCE/index.html
https://www.scholastic.com/content/dam/parents/migrated-assets/printables/pdfs/problem-solving-and-cooking-printable_v2.pdf
Starting Home School
Yep, we decided to completely swap to homeschool, we got our curriculum (we got extra!) and we are ready. What we learned quickly was the same as the old adage about too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the soup or whatever that saying is… both my husband and I teaching the same subject to one child that is 2e leads to lots of tears and confusion. So our first try lasted less than a week. I had read the instructions, participated in every group I could find that matched, searched information, and subscribed to sites…. my husband also was searching and was finding so many interesting things to go with too. Two sets of instructions didn’t go well, so we finally got it worked out and coordinated behind the scenes. One teacher and two planners….
We are now a few weeks into it and still run into days that are frustrating. Our public school had to close for a few days to re-evaluate after two days of being open which just made us feel better about our choices, but it didn’t make my son feel any less isolated. He’s doing great with the school work and we are really finding some cool things to work on. We have the same book that the school uses, but we ended up going with the Life of Fred series that my son loves! We are at the pre-algebra level and the first book tied it to physics, calculating the forces needed to move a safe down a hallway to start. The book ties the math completely to the real world using a story to make it exciting and then adds sections that are ‘Your turn to play’. My little one likes math anyway, so the way Life of Fred is written made it hard to get him to stop math for the day and move on.
The books that are included with the curriculum are below his reading level and have some activities that may be more ‘busy work’, so we are trying to figure out a better plan to deal with that. We’ve also decided to tie in some lesson plans to look at the election. The presidential election only happens every 4 years and has so many parts that it’s really good to look at what’s going on as we can see everything in action.
At one point for social studies (Egypt and Mesopotamia) my husband even worked out an archeological dig in our back yard. We’ve now done a few field trips that involved hiking in the woods by our house and also going to a local state park to collect items for science.
We did move a desk down to use for homeschooling, I was hoping it would free up our kitchen table for us to eat and not have to clean up schoolwork each meal…. but what really happened is the desk became a storage spot and the table is still the spot to do schoolwork. – And every meal everything has to be moved. We are slowly getting there though.
Homeschooling: Choosing a Curriculum for our 2e
We’ve enriched in the past, but this is our first year completely homeschooling. Choosing a curriculum resulted in us changing our mind several times. At first we bought a set of textbooks for each subject in the correct grade level. We could just make our own. I joined Facebook groups that were full of advice! We definitely wanted to stick with secular curriculum. I picked a set of books that seemed to fit well for topics that are going on now in the world, reading level, and grade level. Besides ELA, Math, Science, Social Studies, PE and Art. We added Coding and Spanish.
I AM MAHALA
Fahrenheit 451
I Will Always Write Back
Tom Sawyer
To Kill A Mocking Bird
Debating how to make sure we were meeting all the common core standards, we decided to add the website IXL. IXL sticks with the standards, making it a little easier to make sure we don’t miss anything. After adding IXL and receiving all the books I tried to line everything up…. but ugh! The Facebook groups are great for curriculum discussions also. Our local school district was still saying they were going back 100 percent in person with no online option.
One of my favorite Facebook homeschooling groups is Secular, Eclectic, Academic (SEA) Homeschoolers group. Curriculum recently has been a popular discussion. Moving Beyond the Page was one that looked good to me. Moving Beyond the Page is a complete homeschool curriculum for creative, hands-on, and gifted learners.
We decided to go with the Moving Beyond the Page (11 to 13) set for this year. The year is broken into two semesters with five units each semesters. Our first class day will start with ELA (The Pearl), Science (The Hydrosphere), and Social Studies (Egypt and Mesopotamia). For math we added the Life of Fred – which isn’t necessarily listed as secular, but we are going to give it a try.
We also have Tynker, Brainpop, and a few other subscriptions to enjoy! I’ve pulled out our old chemistry sets to go with and we are looking at Mel Physics right now. Time to start home school Monday!
About Me
I am a SAHM/WAHM of three boys ranging in age from 13 to 29. We are working on saving enough for college at the same time as dealing with school and our older independent kids. I author a few blogs, including http://teched4kids.com. I have in the past taught computer information technology classes for the local university and taught workshops for kid's in technology education besides being the Kentucky State FIRST LEGO League Championship Coordinator from 2005 to 2008. I now work as a computer consultant, run a handmade home business, and am available for workshops. Life here is always an adventure!
