Fish

Check out the Audubon’s National Seafood Wallet Cards. Free to download.

Consult the card when you go to restaurants or markets with fish on your mind. Your seafood choices can help make our oceans healthy again.

Environmental Defense Fund shows how to make smart choices when eating seafood. They have info also as a pocket guide or accessible on your cellphone.

For those taking fish oil supplements as a source of heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, they also list which major U.S. producers of fish oil supplements purify their products to reduce or remove contaminants like mercury and dioxins.

Design a Willy Wonka Board Game

Create a board game based on the play, Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka. This could actually be used for either children or adults to help create any type of board game. Includes assessment rubric and prompt.

Who Homeschools?

For those that don’t homeschool…Don’t think you know anyone who homeschools? You probably do.

Tim Tebow, quarterback for the Florida Gators at the University of Florida is the only sophomore ever to win the Heisman Trophy.

Famous people who are or were homeschooled or who homeschool their children. Just a couple you may have heard of include Lisa Whelchel who played Blair on the television show “The Facts of Life” and Wikipedia founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales.

A side note: The State of Alabama’s “Tim Tebow Bill” is legislation that will allow homeschooled students equal access to sports and extracurricular activities.

The Bitter Homeschooler’s Wish List

Deborah Markus of Secular Homeschooling Magazine must have been reading my mind when she wrote The Bitter Homeschooler’s Wish List. I wish she would put it on a t-shirt! To read the full article, visit http://www.secular-homeschooling.com/001/bitter_homeschooler.html.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• 2 Learn what the words “socialize” and “socialization” mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you’re talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet, and you can safely assume that we’ve got a decent grasp of both concepts.

• 7 We don’t look horrified and start quizzing your kids when we hear they’re in public school. Please stop drilling our children like potential oil fields to see if we’re doing what you consider an adequate job of homeschooling.

• 13 Stop assuming that because the word “home” is right there in “homeschool,” we never leave the house. We’re the ones who go to the amusement parks, museums, and zoos in the middle of the week and in the off-season and laugh at you because you have to go on weekends and holidays when it’s crowded and icky.

Subscribe to Secular Homeschool Magazine

Homeschooling in California

California homeschoolers are homeschooling as usual. Ann Zeise of A to Z Home’s Cool cautions homeschoolers not to panic. She has posted resources for those who want to follow what’s going on with California homeschooling and read the original decision.

Debbie Schwarzer, HSC Legal Team Co-chair, posted information on what to do and what not to do on the list sponsored by HSC, the large California Homeschool Association, HomeSchool California (HSC). You can read the article here.

Chinese New Year

Make a fire-breathing dragon mask
Games, poems, paper lanterns and more
Lots of crafts & activities for learning about China & Chinese New Year
Wreath
Crayola has lots of projects
Chinese Zodiac game
See and read explanations of Chinese New Year with video clip of the New Year parade and celebration, a Fortune Cookie Factory and more
China, Chinese New Year’s, and The Giant Panda Bear Themes
Lots more info on 2008 - The Year of the Rat

A Prayer For Children

A Prayer For Children by Ina Hughs

We pray for the children who sneak Popsicles before supper, who erase holes in math workbooks, who can never find their shoes. And we pray for those who stare at photographers from behind barbed wire, who can’t bound down the street in a new pair of sneakers, who never “counted potatoes,” who never go to the circus, who live in an X-rated world.

We pray for children who bring us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions, who hug us in a hurry and forget their lunch money. And we pray for those who never get dessert, who have no safe blanket to drag behind them, who watch their parents watch them die, who can’t find any bread to steal, who don’t have any rooms to clean up, whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s dresser, whose monsters are real.

We pray for children who spend all their allowance before Tuesday, who throw tantrums in the grocery store and pick at their food, who like ghost stories, who shove dirty clothes under the bed, who never rinse out the tub, who get visits from the tooth fairy, who don’t like to be kissed in front of the carpool, who squirm in church and scream in the phone, whose tears we sometimes laugh at and whose smiles can make us cry.

And we pray for those whose nightmares come in the daytime, who will eat anything, who have never seen a dentist, who aren’t spoiled by anybody, who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep, who live and move, but have no being. We pray for children who want to be carried and for those who must, who we never give up on and for those who don’t get a second chance. For those we smother and…for those who will grab the hand of anybody kind enough to offer it.

Calculate Your Carbon and Cash Savings

The Stop Global Warming calculator shows you how much carbon dioxide you can prevent from being released into the atmosphere and how much money you can save by making some small changes in your daily life. It’ll promote action, awareness and empowerment by showing you that one person can make a difference and help stop global warming.

General Dining Etiquette

Do not talk with your mouth full. I’ve had meals with people who constantly talk while they eat. After that first time, I try to position myself at the dining table away from them. It’s not that the person is bad, it’s their dining habits that I won’t deal with. I’d rather eat the food on my plate - not what came flying out of someone else’s mouth while they were talking with their mouth full.
Did you know that the point of etiquette rules is to make you feel comfortable, not uncomfortable? The idea is that if there are standards that people abide by, then you can have confidence that you are behaving “appropriately.” It takes the guesswork out of public behavior. I was blessed to have parents who taught me dining etiquette, but many people are not so fortunate.
However, there simply isn’t time in the day to set aside a separate amount for eating and for talking. By combining the two activities, an incredible amount of time can be saved. Also, none of your companions will ever need to ask what you had for lunch again. They will know, because they can see. Please speak with your mouth full is a tongue-in-cheek article of the benefits of mid-masticational interaction.

Cereal & Parfait

My favorite cereal is Nature’s Path brand cereal Pumpkin FlaxPlus Granola. It’s vegetarian, has no trans fats, is whole grain and low in sodium (20mg per serving). Plus it has the UDSA Organic symbol on the box. Nature’s Path also has a great looking Granola Strawberry Parfait recipe that I hope to try this weekend. It calls for ricotta, yogurt and strawberry jam but I think I’ll swap that out for vegan versions of ricotta and yogurt, and real strawberries.