Does Unschooling really work? YES!

Last week Randy and I were talking in our bedroom when Colin burst in and announced, "Since you won't teach me PHP, I am going to teach myself. I put PHP for Dummies on hold at the library."

I love initiative!

Apparently Colin asked Randy to teach him PHP and Randy told him he would in a few years. Randy changed his mind after Colin was proactive and they started working on a menu planning webpage for me. It is looking pretty cool.

What has Colin been up too?? Oh, my!


He has been camera crazy lately. He loves to take pictures. He loves to upload pictures to the computer. He loves to burn the pictures to picture CDs. He loves to watch his pictures on the TV.

His latest is this adventure in Adobe Photoshop. He took this picture of himself.

Then used photoshop to change the picture on his shirt to be an image he found on the web.

Very impressive. I asked Randy when he taught Colin to use Photoshop and Randy said that he hasn't taught Colin Photoshop.

Colin said, as I was posting this, that Randy taught him to use the eraser in Photoshop when they were programming their game with Phrogram (Kids Programming Language V 2.2). They used a picture of one of our fish and used the eraser to erase the tank from around it. He said he just figured out how to use layers himself.

So why haven't I blogged in a while???
Reason #1 The computer monitor blew up on me and I had to wait for a new one.

Reason #2 My boys can't make up their minds about what operating system they want and I cannot keep up!

Reason #3 It is SPRINGTIME!!!!

Reason #4 I have been catching up on my reading.

March was a lovely month - oh so very much better than February. (I am hoping that the next three months go as quickly as March did. Tomorrow I enter the third trimester of this pregnancy and I am looking forward to THE END!)

The kids and I have been very busy taking long walks/bike rides around the neighborhood and generally being outside at every available moment.
We have onions, potatoes, carrots, peas, beets, radishes, lettuce, swiss chard, chives and cilantro growing in our garden. We have even begun to enjoy the harvest of the lettuce and the chives this week and look forward to radishes by next week. Happy days! I love to eat out of my very own garden.
The crocuses and the daffodils have come and gone and now the tulips are blooming. All of the fruit trees have beautiful pink and white flowers on them and the berries are leafing out.
Randy has been working very hard getting our patio extended on the weekends and it is looking fabulous!
Did I mention that I LOVE springtime?!!

Last week, the kids went to an assisted living center with their fiddle group to play for the residents there. It was so fun! When they were finished several residents asked if we would come back. When Monique said we would, one lady said, "WHEN." It was cute. Monique said we would try to come back next month. I hope we do.

I have made a goal to keep up on my church lessons - reading the lesson before I attend the class. It really helps me get more out of the class. Good Stuff.
I have also been trying to get through the Church News each week and keep my Ensign read. It is amazing how much a girl can learn from such publications and how relevant they seem to be to what I have been thinking about or working on.

I finished Fascinating Womanhood - fabulous book, Highly recommended.
I also read Alas, Babylon for my 5 Pillar Group tonight - great book! It is a book written in the 50s about Russia bombing all the major cities at the same time, effectively ending civilization as we know it in a matter of minutes and what took place in the days after. It gave me a lot to think about. I think I will go buy some extra needles next time I get to Walmart. Oh, and I still want a farm.
I am also working on The Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer and The Great Conversation.
I won't be running out of reading material anytime soon with all the Great Books of the Western World, the classics on the first pillar reading list from George Wythe College, the Lord's Library (all the books written by the Prophets of this dispensation), and the huge stack of books I just want to read - all just waiting for me.
Right now they are all waiting for me in huge stacks in my family room as my book cases that I ordered two months ago still haven't arrived! Maybe this week they will come. I hope so.

We have to run now - time to set up for Pack Meeting.

P.S. As soon as Colin teaches me about Windows Vista Business, I will upload some photos.

Computer Education

Two weeks ago, Randy switched our operating system from Windows Vista to Freespire which is a linux based system. Colin has spent every spare second learning his way around the new system.
The first week was spent learning the necessities: Music, pictures, and account management. It took him about a day to find L Songs - the program to download his CDs. Then he worked on his account to create 10 different desktops which each needed a different background. It took him a while to figure out how to upload pictures. Monday morning at about 6:30 he burst upstairs to announce that he had figured it out. He could now upload photos from the camera. He and Robyn spent all day Monday taking pictures of random things and uploading them to his account. Then they created different backgrounds in different styles for each desktop.
On Tuesday, the thing that I have been dreading happened - he discovered the games on the new operating system. Up to this point in his life he has spent his computer time doing "educational" things. The games on Windows Vista were great. My personal favorite was one called Purble Place where you could play logic games similar to Master Mind. I liked those games. However, Freespire has real video games. They are very similar to the Nintendo Games from my childhood - Tetris, Super Mario Bros.... His favorite is a game called Super Tux - it is very similar to Mario only instead of Mario, the guy is a penguin. He has been very preoccupied with Super Tux - always thinking about it no matter what he is doing whether at the computer or not. He has spent the last four days figuring it out. The good news is that I was able to impress all of my children with my video games skills thanks to the limited time I spent on Jensen's Nintendo working my way through level 1 of Mario Brothers. I actually taught Colin a few things after he showed me how to get started - like that if you kill the square guy (like it's a turtle in Mario) and you jump on him again just right, he will slide and kill all the guys in your way. And that to jump over really tall things you have to run fast and jump at the same time. I even passed three levels without dying before I had to leave to get the bread in the oven. Yeah Mom!
I started to get a little concerned about this video game obsession yesterday, but decided to not do anything yet to see what would happen. I know Colin well enough that I know he doesn't like to play by the rules - he likes to figure things out and modify them. Sure enough, this morning he was programing his own levels of Super Tux. It came with a feature that you can create your own game and he made two different levels today. What a relief! I was afraid for his brain for a bit there.
He showed me how to program a bit. It's a lot of fun to play your own game.

Ground Hogs and Raccoons

Last week Colin and Robyn went over to the Garcia's to play with their friend Maddie. Raylene (Maddie's mother) is the Primary Chorister and she was working on songs for Sunday. Colin was helping her while Maddie and Robyn played quietly upstairs. Raylene wanted to sing a Spring song. Colin told her she would have to wait until the next day to know if it would be okay to sing a Spring song because the next day was Ground Hog day. He searched the internet and found a website to tell them about Ground Hog day and then took her to reederhome.net where Randy has a program he wrote using weather.com to tell the weather.
While they were busy learning about Ground Hog day and such, the little girls were VERY busy. The girls got into Raylene's make up and used her water proof mascara to make themselves very beautiful and liberally applied her body spray. Oh my! When it was time for Raylene to go get her big girls for school, she noticed the little girls. She didn't know what they'd gotten into and tried to scrub it off with water and a paper towel. She had to give up and just send Robyn home looking like a raccoon and smelling VERY powerful so she wouldn't be late. I couldn't help laughing when I saw her - my goodness. Unfortunately we were also in a hurry so I didn't get a picture. I had to hurry and get her in the tub to get rid of the powerful smell so I could stand to take her in the car to the library for Colin's robot creations class. We had to work pretty hard to get the mascara off - I hope she learned a lesson. We did have a quick discussion about our asking law. Hopefully she will remember the asking law next time.
Reminds me of the only time I ever saw Nancy get mad - when two little girls played in her make up many years ago. I believe I went home so fast that I forgot my shoes that day. :)

Boys and their toys!

Colin started a Robot Creations class at the library last Thursday. He had so much fun that Randy wanted to play too. Of course the Lego Mindstorms kit they bought last year didn't quite have all the features of the new version so it was listed on ebay and Lego Mindstorms NXT was purchased. They played Lego Mindstorms all weekend and Colin has had it on the brain all week. Randy has been too busy with work, his class, scouts, taxes........ to be too preoccupied with the robot but tomorrow is Saturday again. Happily for the budget, the old version just sold on ebay for almost as much as it was originally purchased for.

The really fun new game recently has been - Library.
Colin is the librarian. The girls bring him books which he scans into the computer.
The girls then take the books to their pretend house and read them to their babies. Colin lives at their house at pretend night. While he is there he reads the computer to tell them when the books are due.
Then they return them to the library and Colin reshelves them.
One special feature of this library is that if you want a picture of your baby, the librarian will scan the baby too.