Cambridgeshire Academy: 2017

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Future Software Engineer & Coding

Our daughter has decided that she wants to gear her high school courses towards being a software engineer. She has always been strong in math and then had a fascination with all things technology and robots. I thought she would outgrow it but evidently that is what she sees herself moving towards as we enter high school next year. Software engineers average $93,000 a year, so I think we can rest assured this isn't time wasted!

We are looking into her earning college credit while in high school as our state offers that and it is free! She wants to work from home until she gets married and she is in the right field to do so. I will be spending the remainder of this school year laying out just how we will go about this.

She started coding a few months ago and absolutely loves it. Most recently she is using Python but she did other programs before moving to that one. Here are some book she has used to self-teach herself and some of her coding.

Thursday, July 27, 2017

Update On Us

I haven't taken the time to catalog all of our journeys with homeschool the past few years or so due to surgeries, miscarriages and a cross-country move! Yes, it has been a busy time and my main goal with homeschool was just to keep pushing forward despite all the setbacks. I'm happy to say that we finally "caught up" this month in several areas but there is no time to slow down because we are changing some things with our original long-term plans for Katie.

Katie has always been strong in math and then the past few years showed a great interest in science and technology. She is gearing toward a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) high school plan. Her desires for more technology courses and a life-long interest in space have me rethinking our high school plan. This school year that we are getting ready to start next month is the year before high school (8th grade) and will determine the path for the last 4 years.

8th Grade Renaissance & Modern Book List

We will only be choosing about half of the books (poems) from this list for the year. Also, I haven't screened all of the books either, so I won't have a final book list of what she read till the end of this school year.

Late Renaissance/ Early Modern

Adventures of Don Quixote - Dover
The Complete Fairy Tales - Perrault
Robinson Crusoe - Defoe
Favorite Poems - Wordsworth
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Coleridge
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle - Irving
The Pied Piper of Hamelin - Browing
Grimm's Fairy Tales - Grimm
Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and Other Writings
Goblin Market and Other Poems - Christina Rossetti
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Twain
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Verne
The Raven - Poe

Modern

Kidnapped or Treasure Island - Stevenson
The Man Without a Country - Hale
Little Women - Alcott
Sherlock Holmes stories - Doyle
The Jungle Book - Kipling
The Time Machine or The War of the Worlds - Wells
The Call of the Wild - London
The Scarlet Pimpernel - Orczy
Short Stories - O. Henry
Anne of Green Gables - Montgomery
Murder on the Orient Express - Christie
Gone With the Wind - Mitchell
The Yearling - Rawlings
The Song of Hiawatha - Longfellow
The Road Not Taken - Frost
Collected Poems - Cummings
Poems 1919-1934 - de la Mare
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems - Hughes
Pygmalion - Shaw
The Hiding Place - Ten Boom

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

7th Grade Medieval History Book List

Beowulf: A New Telling - Nye
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Tolkien
The Canterbury Tales - McCaughrean
The Inferno of Dante - Alighieri
Saint George and the Dragon - Hodges
The Sword and The Circle - Sutcliff
Shakespeare Stories - Garfield

Quotes

"If you take your children to Caesar for their education, you need to stop being surprised when they come home as Romans" - Voddie Bauchman

"Too many parents who would never send their children to a church on Sunday that taught doctrines they believed to be wrong, have had no problem placing them in state schools five days a week where they are taught conflicting doctrines and ideas." - Cal Thomas

“I believe it would be much better for everyone if children were given their start in education at home. No one understands a child as well as his mother, and children are so different that they need individual training and study. A teacher with a room full of pupils cannot do this. At home, too, they are in their mother’s care. She can keep them from learning immoral things from other children.” ~Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Schools have not necessarily much to do with education... they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.” ~Winston Churchill

"Let it be remembered, that I do not speak to the wild, giddy, thoughtless world, but to those that fear God. I ask, then, for what end do you send you children to school? “Why, that they may be fit to live in the world.” In which world do you mean, — this or the next? Perhaps you thought of this world only; and had forgot that there is a world to come; yea, and one that will last for ever! Pray take this into your account, and send them to such masters as will keep it always before their eyes. Otherwise, to send them to school (permit me to speak plainly) is little better than sending them to the devil. At all events, then, send your boys, if you have any concern for their souls, not to any of the large public schools, (for they are nurseries of all manner of wickedness,) but private school, kept by some pious man, who endeavors to instruct a small number of children in religion and learning together." - John Wesley

"I am commanded to bring my children up in the nurture and instruction of the Lord (Eph. 6:4), and to do so by teaching them God’s statutes when I sit in my house, when I lie down, when I rise up, and when I walk along the way (Deut. 6:7). I am also admonished not to place myself, or by extension my children, under false teaching (Col. 2:8), or to expose them to teaching that undermines God’s Law (Matt. 5:17-20)." - Voddie Bauchman

"God has designed your family—not the youth group, not the children’s ministry, not the Christian school, but your family—as the principle discipling agent in your children’s lives." - Voddie Bauchman

“I am sure as I am of the fact of Christ’s reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling engine for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and anti-social nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen”. – Dr. Archibald Alexander Hodge (1823-1886), Chair of Systematic Theology, Old Princeton Seminary

“Education ought everywhere to be religious education… parents arte bound to employ no instructors who will not instruct their children religiously. To commit our children to the care of irreligious people is to commit lambs to the superintendent of wolves”. ~Timothy Dwight; President of Yale University from 1795-1817

SECULARISM is a philosophy that claims that there is no God-or that if there is a God, He is irrelevant. HUMANISM essentially says that in the absence of God, humans can and should act as gods by judging, choosing, and defining what is right for themselves. The philosophy pervading the public education system combines these two philosophies into one.-Ken Ham

Remember, you are not managing an inconvenience; You are raising a human being. -Kittie Franz