Monday, 6 January 2014

Language Arts {Virtual Curriculum Fair}

Welcome to my first post for the 2014 Virtual Curriculum Fair.  Today I'm sharing on Language Arts, both what we do and some of the curriculum that is available in the homeschool market to help you with Language Arts in your homeschool.

I shared some of my thoughts on language arts in high school in two posts: Writing and Composition in High School as well as The Art of Language in High School.

In our homeschool we are following an eclectic approach this year incorporating a Charlotte Mason approach along with Delight Directed education and Sonlight.  We are working on strengthening Sir N's writing skills through copy work and hand writing practice.

We are currently working on narration skills at the moment as I have come to realise that it certainly pays high dividends in the high school years with the fruit of a student who is able to "Attend, remember, visualize, comprehend, synthesize (see the whole from the parts), and articulate as the result." A Charlotte Mason Companion page 115.  Narration helps a child to train his/her mind to "sort, arrange, correlate, select, reject and classify" information. A Charlotte Mason
"Narration develops the power of self expression and forces the child to use his own mind and form his own judgement." - Karen Andreola A Charlotte Mason Companion page 114Companion page 115.

Spelling is the servant necessary to be successful in all the areas of written language arts. We will be using copy work and once we have completed Explode the Code book 3 we will be working our way through Spelling Workout.  

Vocabulary is not synonymous with spelling and is often times missed in language arts programs and deserves equal mention and attention. Twaddle free literature introduces new words in context to the student. Do not make the mistake of only choosing literature that your child can read to themselves.

Poetry enlarges a students language ability and teaches the clever use of words in self expression.  With this in mind we will be enjoying poetry together.  As Sir N gains confidence in public speaking we will add in poems to learn and present with expression. We will try different types of poetry until we find some that we like and then explore it further.  Poetry comments on all human experiences, it is comprised of everything  from war poems and epics, to psalms of worship, to love sonnets, to delightful nonsense verse that trips off the tongue, to nursery rhymes - CMC Page 220

Our Year Ahead


Language Arts

Readers
Read Alouds


Resources
Grammar Programs


Spelling Programs
Narration & Copy Work
On Pinterest

FREE on the WWW
Language Arts Curriculums

Take some time this week to visit some of the other 2014 Virtual Curriculum Fair participants.

Some of these links will not be live until tomorrow due to time zone differences as these bloggers are from across the globe.

What are you using for language arts this school year.  Susan has invited you all to share what you are using and add your link to the linky

Blessings
Chareen

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Saturday, 4 January 2014

Grab My Button Tutorial

I've had a few requests on how to make a Grab My Button for your blog so I thought I would share a step by step tutorial to make it easier for you. It used to be a fairly straight forward coding but something has changed in the coding world and so I now use a button code generator and tweak it.

Step 1
Your first step is to choose a picture to use.  Most bloggers use square graphics as these are easier to place side by side or one under the other in your side bar.  The average size is 125 px x 125 px. Do not worry about the size of your graphic when creating because we can adjust this in the code.

I used Microsoft Publisher to create my graphic but there are plenty of great FREE tools out there to use.   Two that come to mind are Photoscape and PicMonkey. 

Photoscape is a FREE downloadable tool and is excellent.  I use it to make my photo collages for both here and my instagram.
Pic Monkey is an online mostly FREE tool that is fairly easy to use. 

Be sure to save your pic in a medium to higher resolution as you want a good looking picture not out of focus.

Step 2
There are a number of options to place your button on the web in order to use it.   You can use a free graphic host like Photobucket. If you have a self hosted site you can upload it and grab the HTML to the graphic or you can open a new post in your blog, add the graphic, open the HTML and grab your code from there.

 Here is an example of what this looks like and which code to select.


Check your code by pasting it into your browser and it should open a page with the graphic showing.

Step 3
Now it is time to generate your button code.  I recommend you use "Grab My Button" over at My Cool Realm.  It is very easy to use and generates code for both the Blogger and Word Press platforms.


  • Type in your website/blog title.  
  • Copy and paste your blog's URL
  • Copy and paste the URL of your graphic
I

  • If you are blogging on the Blogger platform leave the container type on Textarea.  If you are on a self hosted site or Wordpress then select Pre.
  • Click Preview

If you are happy with the preview then click on Get Code. Select copy and add to your widget.

Re-size
When I added the code the graphic was to big and I needed to tweak the code in order for my button to fit in my side bar.  I know that working with code can be a little frightening but I encourage you to give it a go.  The code we want to add is sizing for the graphic.  So I want to tell the browser what size to show my picture so I need to define the width and height.

  • When you look at the code it looks like this

<div align="center" style="padding: 5px;"><img src="http://i1180.photobucket.com/albums/x410/everybedofroses/DesignD_-2.jpg" title="Every Bed of Roses" alt="Every Bed of Roses" /></div><pre style="background: none; border: none; padding: 0;"><textarea style="background:#f0f0f0;border: solid 1px #cccccc; color: #777777; font-size:100%; height: 50px; margin:auto; text-align: left; padding: 7px 0 2px 5px; display: block; width: 90%;">&lt;div align="center">&lt;a href="http://www.everybedofroses.blogspot.com.au/" title="Every Bed of Roses" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img src="http://i1180.photobucket.com/albums/x410/everybedofroses/DesignD_-2.jpg" alt="Every Bed of Roses" /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div></textarea></pre>

  • img src this tells us where the image is stored
  • I wanted my graphic in the side bar to be slightly larger than the standard 125 by 125 pixels so I changed the numbers and previewed it until I was happy with the size.  Add in height="160"  width="160" just before /></div> You can change these numbers to whatever you want them to be as long as your graphic fits in the spot you have placed it.
  • Now you need to add in the height and width for the button in your grab text area so when people add it to their blogs the graphic is 125 x 125.  After the second img src add in  height="125" and then width="125" before the last forward slash.
  • If your graphic is already made at 125 px by 125 px then there is no need to add in the code.  I add it the height and width when ever I add in buttons to my collection in order to make them all the same width and height.
  • With the new code it will look like this
<div align="center" style="padding: 5px;"><img src="http://i1180.photobucket.com/albums/x410/everybedofroses/DesignD_-2.jpg"  title="Every Bed of Roses" alt="Every Bed of Roses" height="160"  width="160"/></div><pre style="background: none; border: none; padding: 0;"><textarea style="background:#f0f0f0;border: solid 1px #cccccc; color: #777777; font-size:100%; height: 50px; margin:auto; text-align: left; padding: 7px 0 2px 5px; display: block;  width: 90%;">&lt;div align="center">&lt;a href="http://www.everybedofroses.blogspot.com.au/" title="Every Bed of Roses" target="_blank"&gt;&lt;img src="http://i1180.photobucket.com/albums/x410/everybedofroses/DesignD_-2.jpg" alt="Every Bed of Roses"  height="125" width="125" /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div></textarea></pre>

Time to add it to your blog
  • Go to your layout.
  • Add a HTML widget
  • Copy and paste the code in here.
  • Save
  • Move the widget to where you want your grab button to be.
  • Save your new layout 



If you would like to partake in a button exchange, please grab my button add it to your blog and  leave a comment with a link to your blog. I shall then add you to my Bloggy Friends page. 

This page will be having a make over so be sure to watch for my 6 days of Bloggers to Follow post series starting next Saturday.

Blessings
Chareen

Next Blogging tutorial Making 'Grab My Button' buttons line up {22 February}
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Friday, 3 January 2014

Virtual Curriculum Fair

The new school year is about to commence in Australia and for some of my readers January is a time where we find some things are just not working for our students and we are on the look out for something new or fresh ideas.

It's time for the 2014 Virtual Curriculum Fair.

These year’s dates and themes 
(links will be added here as each theme goes live):
  1. January 6th---Playing with Words: the Language Arts---includes phonics, reading, writing, grammar, spelling, speech, literature, etc., etc., etc. Latin and foreign language studies could also go here.
  2. January 13th---Discovering Patterns: Mathematics, Logic, and Science---includes anything to do with mathematics, mathematical thinking, numbers, arithmetic, symbolic logic, critical thinking, and math-y sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.).
  3. January 20th---Exploring Our World: Social Studies and more Science---includes history, geography, world cultures, worldview, biology, botany, geology, etc., etc., etc.
  4. January 27th---Seeking Beauty: the Arts and Everything that Brings Beauty to Our World---includes any of the arts, handicrafts, but really ANYTHING at all that adds beauty to your homeschool.
Blessings
Chareen
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