Book Review: Bringing up Bébé

According to Pamela Druckerman, French children are, for the most part, well-behaved angels, tiny ambassadors of good manners and self-control to the world, and it all has to do with the way the French parents raise them.  I don't know if that's true or not, never having been to France myself, but I decided to suspend my disbelief and just go with it for the course of this book.  And honestly, it wasn't as bad as I was expecting, though there were a few passages that left me with the momentary urge to chuck it out a window.

Review: Kaplan Anatomy Coloring Book

As I noted in my last post, one of Sydney's goals for our summer quarter is to study human anatomy.  Not because I'm a sadist and want to force high school level work on my preschooler, but because she's obsessed with it.  I blame the hubby.

One of the resources I acquired to help her is Kaplan's Anatomy Coloring Book.




I thought it was going to be very basic, but wow, was I surprised when it turned out to be extremely detailed and very accurate.  I later learned that med students sometimes use it to help them learn anatomy, so believe me when I say it definitely shows everything in plenty of detail for the average preschooler.

And it isn't just pictures- it has blanks to fill in labeling the various body parts, systems, organs, and everything else that lurks within our bodies.  There are pictures of everything from cells and synapses to full-body diagrams, and the illustrations are extremely well done.

This would be a great resource for an older student studying anatomy and physiology.  When Sydney hits that age, we'll be getting another copy of this to use.

Review: The Horse Boy

From Netflix:

"When conventional therapies fail to help their autistic son, Rupert and Kristin Isaacson travel with Rowan to Mongolia in the hopes that a combination of traditional shamanic healing and horseback riding will benefit him. Director Michel O. Scott's documentary juxtaposes scenes of the family at home in Texas with their journey on horseback across the breathtaking Mongolian countryside in search of reindeer herders and a powerful shaman."

I thought this was a beautiful and extremely well-done documentary, as well as one that gives an honest look at what it's like to live with an autistic child.  Having worked for many years in the past with autistic children living in group homes, I know firsthand just how trying it can be to deal with the varied behaviors, and this film didn't gloss over them.  We see the parents trying to wash their kid with bottled water after he poos in his underwear.  We see the endless screaming tantrums.

But, more importantly, it was a story about how far parents will go to help their child, and that was beautiful.  I don't know that I ever would have been brave enough (or foolish enough, as some doubtless think) to take an autistic child into the heart of Mongolia on horseback for the slim chance that something might help, but they were, even as they dealt with their own doubts later on.  And while the film didn't go too much into the details of the shamanic practices in Mongolia, the family's matter-of-fact approach provides a very balanced look at it all, neither ridiculing something very different from what our society believes, nor blindly buying into everything they come across.

I won't give away the ending and whether or not Rowan was cured by the shamanic intervention, but I will say that a sense of peace and acceptance pervades the documentary, and I'd highly recommend it for anyone looking to learn more about autism and alternative therapies.

Rent it on Amazon

Watch it on Netflix

Our Saxon Math arrived!

Finally, after exactly seven days, our Saxon Math K is here!  Sydney is so excited, and we ended up doing the first four lessons on the first day.

I'll post a full review once we've been using it for a few months, but I just wanted to give my first impressions because, well, when you're homeschooling one preschooler, opportunities for blogging about curriculum are few and far between.

I was quite impressed with the quality of most of the manipulatives.  The plastic pieces are extremely thick and sturdy, and you get a lot of each kind of material.  The balance does seem a bit flimsy, as other bloggers have noted, but if it becomes a problem later on we can always purchase a better one.

The book is thick.  Holy mother, is it thick.  It is over four hundred pages, and I could get a decent workout just hefting the thing a few times a day.  It is spiral bound, which I love, and everything is scripted.  I like that, because I tend to go on a bit much.  This helps reign in my overlong explanations.

As I said, I'll post more on this later on.  I'm so excited though that I had to post SOMETHING about it.

Here's a few more pictures from what we did today:

Making the "big wall of China," according to Sydney.

My pretty flower.

Sydney's pictograph.

She was SO excited.

Video Review: AAR pre-1

Because everyone and their dog are interested in AAR pre-1, I threw together a quick video review.  My first!  So be kind, please.  I thought about typing it out, but gosh, if this isn't just a heck of a lot easier.



Funnix- A Review

As I mentioned in previous posts, we were able to snag Funnix during the two-week period this month they were giving it away.  Now that we've been using it for a couple weeks- Sydney is up to lesson sixteen, I think- I thought I'd review it for anyone considering paying the near forty bucks it costs normally.

Funnix is a computer program you download through the website via an emailed link.  The download itself can be a bit glitchy, and I had the best luck when I stopped trying to use Firefox and used IE instead.  The download comes with several parts.  You get the lessons themselves, of which there are one hundred and twenty, the workbook, the readers, and Funnix 2.  Obviously, as we're only up to lesson sixteen, my review doesn't cover the readers or the second part of the program.

I was initially hesitant to use a computer program to teach phonics, as we limit screen time pretty heavily around here, but it's not an animated, hyper freakshow like some other reading websites (I'm looking at you, Reading Eggs) and the vast majority of what you see are letters and still drawings with a voice-over giving instructions and asking questions.  The woman's voice isn't great, but I've heard much, much worse.  There are occasional places in the audio where the sound quality changes for several seconds, as if they had to rerecord some parts, but it's not too much of an annoyance.

You are going to want some kind of screen protector for your computer, because a big part of the exercises involve having the child touch different letters and pictures on the screen.  If your kid is more of a jabber than a toucher, you might want to find a different program.

The exercises themselves are simple and fun.  Your child will learn letter names, sounds, and blending simultaneously, so it doesn't have the soul-crushing monotony of some other programs.  The storytime segment is my daughter's favorite part.  The program reads a story accompanied by pictures, slowly sounding out the occasional word and asking Sydney what the word is.  

Each lesson ends with a worksheet which you have to print out from the pdf file.  The worksheets are fairly simple, and are a bit on the dull side, but nothing too terrible.  There is a writing component in each of them, but that's easily skipped if your child isn't quite there yet in fine motor skills.

Overall, it's a great program if you manage to get it for free.  Is it worthy almost forty bucks?  That, I'm not so sure about.  I could have bought two phonics programs in book form for the price I would have paid for this.  If your child has a good attention span and loves to snuggle, you'd probably be better off buying one of the many books out there, but if your kid has trouble staying engaged, this would probably be a great program to try.

Funnix Website