Free home ed resources – Khan academy

Today, rather behind the home ed times, I finally got around to mentioning Khan academy to the older children. Big took a look, and didn’t like it – we’re not sure whether she had her screen up too bright, had a headache, or there really was an issue with the fonts for her. We’ll look again another day.

Small though. Small is the epitome of the child gamification of education was invented for. Do questions to earn energy to change my avatar? You’re on. I had to drag him away to eat, 44,500 points later. He’s mastered the 90 skills in early maths, including the one about American coins (so even if the rest of it was stuff he already knew, as seems rather likely, he now knows more than I do about American coinage.) I figure this is a good thing, for some reason he’s rather down on Mathletics at the moment, so something else that gets him churning through maths instead is fine by me.

When you sign up as a parent, to coach your children, it suggests that you do something new with them. Like programming. In this household, that’s not new. I was programming Scratch with them years ago (not that I can actually find the irritating animation on here to prove it). And I hope that by reading books with Big, programming and drawing with Small, and a whole load of all sorts of things with the little ones, I regularly demonstrate that learning is a life long activity. Despite that, I couldn’t resist diving into the economics section, as I’d love to understand more about all of that, to hopefully be able to write more on the basic income ideas with a bit more authority. So I watched the first video on macroeconomics, and understood quite a lot about what’s wrong with our day to day system. It relies, if I’m understanding correctly, on people assuming that capitalism does good things by accident, when it seems to me that the system we have now is so rigged, it’s not doing good things for anyone but the people doing the rigging.

I may have more to learn in that area.

Alongside Khan academy, we also researched pinhole cameras, in the hope that there will be enough sun visible through the clouds for us to see it disappear. And on that note, given that the eclipse kicks off in around 7 hours, I’d better go grab some sleep.

On second thoughts, I’ll schedule this, so you’ve got something to read when the eclipse is over and done with. (And if I happen to get any great pics of our equipment, I’ll pop them in before it goes live!) Eta 100% cloud cover here, so we watched the eclipse from the bedroom on BBC. Not quite the same I suspect.