Below you will find links to resource articles about writing in general or Time4Writing classes offered online.

I hate to admit but we spent a weekend recently nitpicking.

Since I had a lot of time to joke with the kids and I hate to waste a potential teachable moment, I harped on about the words. As I went through my daughters hair, I asked if she knew what the lice's eggs were called. Answer nits.

I asked her if she knew what it was called when I went through her hair looking for lice eggs.

 It took her awhile before the light bulb went on.

Nitpicking! "Yes, it's detailed painstaking laborious work. See where the word comes from? Our language is lousy with such terms."

Sadly, she missed this reference so I dragged her through it.

"What's the singular of mice?" Mouse. Good.

"And what do you call a person who is mouse-like?" Mousey. Good.

Now what's the singular of lice? And what do you call a person who is full of them? Louse and lousey. Superb.

I love expanding my vocabulary with games.  That's the great vocabulary.co.il website.
For focused education, the vocabulary games on SpellingCity.com are awesome.
For online vocabulary education integrated in a complete language arts program, go with Time4Learning.com.

Like it or not, we are all struggling to parent in a new age. Our kids are different, the technology is different, their careers and tools are different than any previous generation. There are some websites that talk about these things.  Interested?

Parenting In An Electronic Age , For Parents in Todays Electronic Age with articles like Video Games & Parenting and Kids Internet Safety

Parental Tech - Get some ideas and advice on the technology

Learning - Todays World - The amazing internet has started its information revolution and has totally changed the nature of information access and retrieval. And today's companies and schools are different. Entire layers of middle managers are now gone from America 's corporations. They have articles on

I run Time4Learning.com which has a kids playground which is really for the youngest kids (preschool up to second or third).  Our third through eighth graders, actually their parents, have often asked for a kids playground for them.  When I speak to them about it, they're really thinking of an appropriate combination of:

- casual games
- a community with forums, blogs, and other fun ways to interact

I've tried to find a community design that i could use but so far, i've never found one that met both our technical and safety requirements.  I'm getting ready to rethink it.  Points that I'm sure of:

- Parents need to be able to supervise if they want to.
- Parents can just trust us to supervise it
- There need to be two distinct areas with entirely different look and feels activities: a 4th-5th grade, and a middle school area

I'll go looking at ning and epals and some other ideas. I might also start by looking to see what kids are doing these days on blogs. What are they writing about at those ages? What do their memes sound like?

I thought I would point out an interesting detail about how excited about their work some people be.

Those crazy people who invented me, me, Ed Mouse.  I know they invented me primarily to help market Time4Learning.com  But, out of sheer excitement for their creation, they created a whole website about me.  Pretty cool, huh?

The idea of a Cartoon Character
Early Character Sketches
Ed becomes a Cartoon Mouse
Featured Story Boards
How far can this animated character go ?
Artists' interpret Ed Mouse with Character Art.

Time4Learning has totally rebuilt their preschool online program featuring.....ME. I'm the host of their new preschool program.

Click through to learn about their homeschooling curriculum in general and their preschool online program in particular.  And I quote:

Online preschool games from Time4Learning are a great answer to the parents' search for a safe and easy-to-use preschool curriculum.

Time4Learning is an easy-to-use online preschool curriculum for young learners, featuring animated activities with fun characters and sound effects. The characters in the learning games guide children through the steps of the learning activities, making it simple for pre-readers to follow and enjoy.

Heres's other places to find good vocabulary word games or web home school info. Plus, their homeschool parents forum is the best.

an online alternative to cancelled summer school classes

When I started this blog years ago, I had several purposes. One was to have one blog where I collected my thoughts and received input on how best to communicate with the Time4Learning members.  A second reason was to understand how homeschoolblogger worked. And more generally, to get a feel for blogging.

I think I'll take a quick inventory of my situation against these original goals.

Time4Learning continues to have good day-to-day  direct communication with members. We probably received 100 phone calls per day and 250 emails. We answer them all in house and mostly, we end each day by returning each email.  Additionally, we have rapid follow-up on issues that need to be escalated and we notice patterns so that if there is a technology issue, we find out about it sooner rather than later.

The Time4Learning parents discussion forum has grown to where it is a very pleasant and active community.  I moderated it with Jen for the first six months. Then, we reached out to some active users and asked if they would like to be moderators. This has worked out very well primarily due to the really high quality people that we hooked up with. Also, frankly, it helps that we pay everyone always very promptly and as promised. I'm very old fashioned that way. I keep my commitments low and I ALWAYS meet them.  We now have subcategories on the forum about Christian Homeschooling and how Time4Learning fits (or doesn't. We are a standards-based curriculum); special needs education discussion, Supplemental Resources, WAHMs, WOHMs and other Working Parents , and State by State Homeschooling Info .

We tried in a number of ways to have a periodic chat on the forum. We put up a great technology for it but never really mustered much of a response or crowd so we stopped it. 

We've put putting together homeschool state reps for Time4Learning and it's been slow-going getting them selected with their information posted on our website. It should accelerate over the next 30 days. 

As I look over the old posts, I use to think a lot about a chat service right on our website to ask questions and a formal customer relationship management system. In fact, we built our own database for tracking and emailing our customers so we didn't have to buy one.  And we prefer having people call us to chatting with us.  Frankly, we like to talk with the.

Bottom line: Situation is good.  But I'll keep thinking about it.

Hi All, did you know that I have my own Ed Mouse Website? It's the least that I deserve as a premier cartoon mouse, don't you think?

Also, I've started reading a new blog about vocabulary and words for learning today and homeschooling.

This is a really fun game: States MatchIt Game

Many people think that Geography Trivia  Is Very Important

It forms the basis for understanding our political and physical realities. Want to understand the challenge of global warming, start with understanding the basics of our world...of geography. A great of geography education can be effectively taught through geography games and map games. These geography learning games help form the basis for understanding our country, our states, our world. Play on!

To help the new homeschoolers, T4L is putting together a directory of people who can help new homeschoolers access local resources. 

A network of experienced homeschoolers to help new homeschoolers with local information and contacts.  They are providing a list of homeschool contacts for the 50 states and a link toresources on the website where you can learn about key resources for homeschoolers in each state. These pages were compiled, in part, by Time4Learning's state reps who are available on the forum to answer questions.

For instance, for Oregon homeschooling info, their page starts: I am Kelly (my forum name is Hearthstone_Academy) and I have been educating my six children at our home in Oregon for the past twelve years. My eldest son is a homeschool graduate who has also graduated from college. The younger five are all still at home, although a daughter will graduate this year. My youngest turns four in a few days. Although he has special needs (Down syndrome), I have been working with him on some of the typical preschool skills.

Then, on their homeschooling forum, you can ask Kelly questions about Oregon homeschooling resources.  

New homeschoolers in North Carolina can get a lot of help from the new T4L page about North Carolina homeschooling resources put up by Topsy.  And in case that's not enough help, they can ask follow up questions about homeschooling rules and resources in north carolina on the homeschool forum.

Her article starts: Homeschooling in North Carolina

Hi, my name is Kerry, (my forum name is topsytechie) and I have been homeschooling here in North Carolina for almost ten years now.  I have two boys who have been homeschooled most of their lives with a couple short forays into private schools.  We actually hadn't planned on homeschooling at all.  In fact, homeschooling wasn't even on our radar until my oldest son came down with a serious illness just before starting kindergarten.  Following his illness, he needed a lot of therapy and his immune system was quite weak, so a classroom wasn't really an option for us. Think of me as an accidental homeschooler.

I just read a great blog called web home schooling which had an article with some homeschooling website recommendations. And I quote:

My strong recommendation for those homeschooling and using the web is to check out the following.

 Time4Learning’s web-based online curriculum.  They have great interactive lessons for middle school, elementary school, and even preschool.  It’s highly interactive and full of animation and multimedia. Whereas some curriculum are just lots of text with an occassional video or animation, Time4Learning is an interactive experience.  All those tough math concepts seem simple when they’re explained in such alight-hearted manner.  Who says fractions has to be hard? Their great multimedia lays it out so simply.  Give it a try.  Time4Learning is a great homeschool partner. They let you sign up month to month and start and quit at any time. Start by looking at their lesson demos.
 

 Number 2 choice - Time4Writing.  If you are like me, you find some subjects hard to teach.  One of the hardest is writing skills, especially when the kids get into middle and high school.  Expectations are so high. And my kids just don’t react well to my correcting their writing. Want help?  This isn’t a “how to”, it’s an online tutoring course where they work directly with your student teaching writing skills every week and giving one-on-one feedback.  You get the same tutor for the whole eight week course which the kids really like. It’s definitely worth taking Time4Writing’s writing classes. They have sentence writing, paragraph writing, essay writing (these are for writing tests and college essays), and research paper writing.
 
 
Number 3 choice - Fun Building Vocabulary. This is not really a curriculum choice but a fun collection of vocabulary games. Vocabulary is Fun is a leading vocabulary website worldwide with the best flash online word games.  The vocabulary games include an online word search, an online crossword puzzle, and hangman online (their version is called HangMouse).  Users choose the vocabulary list that the online word game will use in the word game. So have some Fun Building Vocabulary.  
 
 
Number 4 Choice - Spelling City. This spelling program should be used by everyone. I would have put it first but I’m not a huge believer in the importance of spelling skills.  Despite that, now that I’m using this site, I’ve returned to having spelling as part of our weekly routine.  You know what’s really cool, check out how the vocabulary site’s science songs have put their vocabulary/spellinglist on SpellingCity.
 
 
Number 5 choice - This learning games website is really what it sounds like.  But they have the best collections.  For instance, they have keyboarding games, memory games,  science songs (also integrated with vocabulary lists), and math learning games.

I'll tell you who is not the best blogger out there....ME.

I use my blog as a rough draft for my thoughts. Instead of putting a yellow sticky on my desk, an email to myself, or a note on a pad, I scribble it onto my blog.

Last year, I took a great blog writing course where I learned how to construct a blog worth reading and to collect an audience to read it.  Great course. I highly recommend it.   Check it out at:

Starting a blog by Time4Writing.com.  It evolved from Black Belt Blogger.  My personal blog was about earning a black belt at age 50.

I've always been amazed by spellcheckers and grammar checkers, especially the latter. I've heard about software that actually grades your papers called automated writing evaluators. I think that could be really cool.

Of course, they won't be perfect. Like homeschooling, we're not perfect. Neither is the alternative. 

Here is a some navigation information for those looking for how T4L helps special needs kids:

Learning Difficulties & Online Learning

• Special Education
• Special Needs Learning
• Learning Disabilities
• Dyslexia
• ADD/ADHD
• Sensory Processing Disorder
• Autism Education
• Aspergers Syndrome
• Different Learning Styles
• Your Right-Brained Visual Learner
• Visual Spatial Learners
• Central Auditory Processing Disorder
• Down Syndrome
• PDD