Homeschool Helps is a free homeschooling help resource. I've been busily adding new helpful homeschool content for the past week. Right now, we have around 4.5 hours of free homeschool help videos posted.

Four and a half hours of helpful homeschool webinars, workshops and videos which help you:

• get started homeschooling
• organize your homeschool
• create homeschool high school transcripts
• homeschool with toddlers
• find things to do over the summer
• work with your student's learning style
• learn about standardized testing
• and even address the question of socialization

Did I mention this was all available right now for free?

Swing by Homeschool Helps to start watching free homeschool videos now!

You may be thinking, 'There's got to be a catch. No one gives away all that information for free!'

We do.

You can visit Homeschool Helps right now and start watching homeschool videos immediately. You don't need to sign up, you don't need to submit your email address, you don't need to agree to anything. Just click here to get Homeschool Helps and push play on the video you'd like to watch. That's it.

Why would we do this? Why give away valuable homeschool information for free?

1. We can host the videos for free. That means after doing the work of writing, recording, editing, and preparing the videos for the web, we don't have to worry about them anymore. So while we've spent considerable time and effort getting you these great homeschool videos, now that they're online you can watch them at no additional cost to us.
2. We want to support you on your homeschool journey. As a leader in the homeschool market, we have the unique opportunity to do more than merely sell you homeschool curriculum. We want you to succeed in your homeschool adventure. We want you to use the tools and resources that are best for your family. That's one of the main reasons for our 27 Reasons NOT to Buy Sonlight article: We don't want you to buy homeschool curriculum from Sonlight if it isn't right for you. How do you know what's right for you? Well, we hope that these free homeschool workshops will help you figure that out.
3. We're here to serve you. Sonlight Curriculum started with the goal of helping homeschoolers. We're still dedicated to that. These free homeschool help webinars are just one more way we can serve you on your homeschool journey.

Granted, I believe that by offering you our services and Homeschool Helps, you will realize just how valuable Sonlight is. And--if you decide that Sonlight is right for your family--you will get your homeschooling curriculum from a company that has already shown itself to be there for you.

Click here to access your free homeschooling help videos now.

 ~Luke Holzmann
Filmmaker, Writer, Empty Nester

My first play took place in the Garden of Eden. I was one of the animals. The costume ladies were kind enough to let us pick what kind of animal we wanted to be. Fantastic!

And, of course, the coolest animal in the world is the condor. So I was going to be a condor in the church play. Me. I was going to be a bird with a six foot wing span. It was going to be awesome.

Until the dress rehearsal.

The condor costume had proven to be a tad ambitious. Instead, the nice church ladies had made me a different kind of bird: A rooster.

I went from condor to chicken with a single glimpse of the felt feathers.

Luke as a Condor Rooster

I was devastated.

Thankfully, with 20 years of life experience--two of which involved weekly counseling--behind me, I have been able to recover.

...mostly.

Yesterday, I got to play the self-assured, smug, "come to Jesus" guy in the Christmas musical at my church. It was fun. I still get nervous when I have to remember lines, but I'm happy to be on stage. I don't mind public presentations. And this time, I put together my own costume, thank-you-very-much.

I've heard people voice concerns that homeschoolers don't have opportunities to practice public speaking. This is about as ridiculous as a boy in a rooster costume.

But if you'd like an excellent resource on public speaking to further enhance your homeschooling, check out Secrets of Great Communicators. And next time you're on stage in front of a bunch of people, just imagine them all in a rooster costume.

 ~Luke Holzmann
Filmmaker, Writer, Empty Nester

"I hate it!" she yells, not at me by in my direction. "I hate that logic can't win."

We'd spent the last two hours discussing the Bible with a couple from a different religious persuasion. The time had gone well--overall--but now that they were gone we were decompressing and things were tense. It was bad. But we were winding down.

The idea that logic can't win reminded me of Seth Godin's blog post about getting people to know what you know. He states: It won't help.

Raw information, a downloaded education, and even better logic all break down at the point of presuppositions. We can't get to truth through reason alone because we lack knowledge, understanding and a clear view of everything. Reason is great. Education is important. But it can't save us. You don't even need to step outside Orthodox Christianity to see that smart people, sincerely devoted to following Christ, come to some really different views on things.

So if education can't save us, what's the point? Put in a way that's more relevant to what I do promoting a homeschool curriculum provider: If education can't ensure we win, what makes a great curriculum?

Here are the top 3 things that first popped into my head:

1. A great curriculum helps you think through your presuppositions. Why do you believe as you do? What about this idea compels you? What underlying assumptions are you making? As you answer those questions, you will be better able to untangle the unspoken assumptions of others.
2. A great curriculum encourages you to learn more. There is always more to learn, and a life-long pursuit of learning opens us up to wonders of the world around us. We can tackle difficult and debated subjects with joy.
3. A great curriculum lets you see how others have thought about the same things and come to different conclusions. Looking back through history and seeing the outplay of ideas gives us a glimpse into truth. Hindsight allows us see how things turn out, which hints at the underlying reality.

Education can't save us. But a great education is one that is built on a love of learning and an examination of the past which can help us walk better into the future. Those are all things I see in Sonlight's homeschool curriculum.

What do you see as the purpose of education? What makes a great lesson/curriculum/study?

 ~Luke Holzmann
Filmmaker, Writer, Empty Nester

The longer I work at Sonlight, the more grateful I am that I have the opportunity to do so. Today's super-cool-part-of-my-job: I get to create things I've never seen before.

Introducing...

Sonlight's Virtual Booth

I've been working on this project since before September 15, 2009. The Virtual Booth is based on some of my favorite games. I took the first-person interaction and exploration idea of Myst, added the cut-scene transitions of Zelda and included the speech bubbles of Starcraft to bring you a virtual homeschool convention experience like none other!

This project is still in Beta, so your feedback and suggestions are most welcome. Please feel free to email me with any suggestions and insights you have. Please also let me know of any bugs you find.

Thanks!

Come be one of the first people in the world to wander Sonlight's virtual homeschool convention booth, learn more about Sonlight, experience some super cool technology, and help me test a project I've been dying to tell you about for over a year now!

Check out the Virtual Booth!^[Beta]

 ~Luke Holzmann
Filmmaker, Writer, Empty Nester

Today I was reminded of Gorillas, a game where you lob exploding bananas at your opponent. (You can play a Flash version of the game here)

You are given two variables to control: Angle and Velocity. Get the right combination of the two, and, blam! your opponent is a cloud of red pixels.

Think about that: At the tender age of nine I was working with angles and velocity--not to mention that pesky notion of multiple possible solutions based on two variables in a function. I would not return to these concepts until I was in high school physics. And, surprisingly, by the time I got there, the subject was at lot more difficult.

Why?

Because rather than learning how velocity and angle relate to each other in a parabolic arch--ignoring, as we always do, wind resistance--I was forced to memorize the mathematical equations and computations needed to solve for the function. It was dull and uninspiring. In fact, I really didn't like it. Except for the one assignment where we rolled a marble down a ramp and attempted to hit the center of a target on the floor. That was applied mathematics. And it was fantastic.

The thing about Gorillas is that it is not--at heart--an educational game. The "educational" bits are left off (e.g. equations). So, sure, Gorillas didn't teach me the formula, but it did teach me very high level concepts. And while Physics taught me the formulas and computation, it didn't really teach me the problem solving skills.

I found the TED talk linked from Mary Mimouna's post to be fascinating. In it, Conrad Wolfram argues that we should stop teaching computation and start teaching math.

On the one hand, memorizing the basics of computation and equation building helps a ton when you're trying to figure something out. On the other hand, I think a lot more kids would discover that they love math if it had more to do with exploding bananas and less to do with "show your work" and "don't use a calculator."

The more I hear about math education, the more excited I am about MathTacular. We designed these DVDs to teach the concepts and demonstrate the calculations. I think it's a great balance.

What do you think of the Experimentation/Computation tension?

 ~Luke Holzmann
Filmmaker, Writer, Empty Nester

The three Ms.

M1. A huge thank you to everyone who participated in the My Passport to India project. We're still waiting for all the money to come in via the mail, and we're praying that we'll meet the goal when it all arrives! Thank you, again, for your generosity.

M2. More than just MathTacular4 has been added to the MathTacular Family. We just launched the MathTacular Educational Kit for the Christmas season. This Manipulatives Kit is not going to be a permanent Sonlight item, but we are offering it now as an excellent gift for a friend or family member who may not homeschool and is looking for an excellent way to reinforce math concepts.

I just want to make sure this is absolutely clear: This Manipulatives Kit is a product Avyx created for a different market. This product is not part of the original MathTacular Tetralogy. Rather, it is an offshoot project aimed at getting the incredible educational benefit of MathTacular into homes which may not be inclined to homeschool.

M3. Malls. With the launch of the MathTacular Educational Kit, I was able to go check out one of the kiosks in a local mall. It's fun to see a product I originally created displayed in a mall.

MathTacular Sign

MathTacular Kit Display

I was even able to snag a MathTacular shirt and got a shot of the kit assembly:

MathTacular Shirt

That's it for this week. See you on Monday! ...hmm... the fourth M <smile>.

 ~Luke Holzmann
Filmmaker, Writer, Empty Nester