Home-schooling to avoid vaccines

I just read this article on Parentdish.

Apparently some people are homeschooling just to exempt their kids from mandatory vaccinations. Personally I think vaccinations are important and disagree with those who choose not to. I really hope that isn't the only reason they are choosing homeschooling though.

There is talk about whether homeschoolers should be required to be vaccinated and honestly, I agree that they should. The point of mandatory vaccination is because the more people that don't vaccinate, the more likely the disease will come back. This is more important in a social setting like school but is important just in general too.

Homeschooling Break

Well we didn't do any homeschooling this week, well except for talking and reading books on the subject and going to playgroup. Our subject was supposed to be All About Me. I don't know how much homeschooling we'll do next week either as I'll be recovering from the surgery (see side bar.) So we'll just call this a homeschooling reprieve. If I can post next week I'll do some general homeschooling posts.

Been a Little Slow

The last two weeks we've been sort of lax. I haven't been feeling well and just haven't put in much time. Luckily it's not hard to homeschool a toddler as all play is learning for them. I have pictures of our week of Yellow and Monkeys that I will hopefully post soon but even that week was slow. This past week we had books on dogs but didn't even do a colour and barely did anything. We did go to playgroup though so she did some painting, crafting and singing. I'll be posting pics of her artwork as well. Today I have her playing with playdough and we've gone on a few walks where she's seen motorcycles and we are still working on the difference between trees, bushes and flowers.

Tonight or tomorrow I'll hopefully get all the pictures downloaded onto the computer and can then post them.

Picture Books Really Do Teach Toddlers

This news article is actually from Nov 2006 but it's the first I've seen of it.

"Reading picture books to 18- to 30-month-old toddlers helps them learn things about the real world, psychologists find."
"Simcock and DeLoache tested 108 little boys and girls: 18 month olds, 24 month olds, and 30 month olds. Kids of each age were divided into three groups. One group was read to from a book with photographs, the second group was read to from a book with color drawings of the photographs, and a third group wasn't read to at all.

The pictures showed a child going through the three steps of building a simple rattle — putting a ball in a jar, attaching a stick to the jar, and shaking the assembled toy to make it rattle. The pictures came with simple text explaining the actions.

A researcher read the story to each child while pointing to the pictures. Then the child was given the ball, jar, and stick and encouraged to build a rattle.

None of the 18-month-olds, four of the 24-month-olds, and six of the 30-month olds actually finished building the rattle. But many of them got it at least partly right — and nearly all of them were kids who'd been read to."

I already knew that The Cuteness learned from books, that's why we use them. After a week (and sometimes a few days) of reading a new book, she can point out almost everything in the book and can sometimes "read" it to herself by turning the pages and saying the names of the objects on the page.

It's just nice to have some evidence.