How did people homeschool before the Internet? My hat is off to those early pioneers who did it secretly and sometimes illegally, with no readily available resources, texts, how-to books, websites, yahoo groups. All by themselves. Really, I would never have been so brave.
I have a few examples of how lucky we are. We've been studying ancient civilizations and recently moved from Egypt to Mesopotamia to India. I went to one of my new favorite web sites www.emints.org and found a link to a website that showed actual pictures from an archeological excavation of Mohenjo-Daro. So my kids got to see what we had just read about in A Story of the World. They saw what this almost 4000 year old civilization looked like, the citadel, the baths and what an excavated site looks like. It was really cool. Can you imagine having access to that sort of information when we were kids? Or worse, can you imagine NOT having access to it?
Later we went back to that same website and looked up solar eclipses. We watched a webcast of a solar eclipse in Turkey from, if I remember correctly, 2004. We are also compulsive googlers. My daughter is the questioner in the family - a constant stream of questions I could never answer without my computer. She woke up one morning a couple of weeks ago, the sleep still in her eyes and asked "Mommy, how old is the universe?" Google to the rescue. 13.7 billion years.
And then there is the library system, which I access through the web. When she asked in the car (one of my most vulnerable points for question answering, there's a whole lot of I-don't-know-s going on there) where the song "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" came from, I googled it first and then logged into the library system to get some books and recordings. We can request from a whole group of libraries, 70 of them I think. It's an amazing collection, right at our fingertips. We also have a compulsive requesting problem. Luckily, the library sends us friendly email reminders when we have items to pick up and when items are due.
There is a touch of TMI here - too much information. But, really, these kids can learn what they want when they want. Isn't that what it's all about?
1 comment:
It is amazing! I think if you get On Star you might be able to have Google in the car. That is certainly what I need because all of the good science and history chats happen there or at the kitchen table.
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