Seaweed

This weekend is Memorial Day.  The weather is beautiful.   Public schools are finishing up the year.  The oil spill is spreading out in the Gulf of Mexico despite attempts to contain it.  My mom is here on vacation.  Why am I listing these seemingly random facts?  Because they were all reasons why my family needed a day trip to Galveston in the middle of the week.

We spent a gloriously beautiful day together on the west end of Galveston Island.  Driving through the island there are reminders everywhere of Hurricane Ike, but it was nice to see the progress that has been made.

Looking out over the relatively calm sea, it was hard to imagine a beast of a storm charging toward shore about 18 months ago.  A flashing sign on the street corner reminding everyone that hurricane season starts in a few weeks left me with sober thoughts.  I had avoided the island since Ike struck until this week.

To my relief, the beaches looked good.  The beach we chose was past the seawall on 8 Mile Road.  The only thing I found undesirable about this beach was the mounding strip of seaweed that had rolled onto shore.  You had to walk over the dried, dead plants.  Fortunately most of the seaweed was on shore and not floating out in the water.

Hermit Crab

My children enjoyed their day of sea and sun.  Jake collected a bag full of shells.  He also found a hermit crab which he showed everyone.  They observed and played with it so much that I finally insisted that he leave it alone.  We also saw at least three sting rays feeding in the shallow waters of the shoreline.  I had never seen a sting ray in the wild before.

The sting rays stayed away from the people.  They were only feeding on a deserted part of the beach.  Although I have to admit that I kept my eyes peeled for them where we spent most of our time.  My two smallest boys were playing with their big dump trucks and shovels in the same shallow waters just 500 yards away.

Sting ray Near Shore

We saw brown pelicans which once were endangered.  We liked watching fish jumping out of the water and the seagulls and pelicans trying to catch dinner.

The older children and I spent the majority of our time past the first set of waves.  They were breaking pretty fiercely close to shore.  You had to work to get past them.  But once you swam past the last big breaking wave, the sea grew relatively calm.  You could swim and/or float while you rose and fell with the sea.  Beyond us was still another sand bar where the waves were breaking on their way to shore.

My family needed a fun day together.  We work all the time.  We live together, work together, and learn together every day.  It was nice to drop everything and devote an entire day to having fun together.  A trip to the coast was just what we needed.  Have a great Memorial Day!!

Jake doing his MEP math.

Growing up I never enjoyed math.  It was one of the few subjects I actually had to work at to make a good grade.  So when I began homeschooling, I wanted to give my children a solid understanding of math.  I did not want them to just memorize facts and formulas as I did in school.

There are many good math curriculums available to homeschooling families.  I want to share which one we use and why I’ll be sticking with it.  It is called MEP (Mathematics Enhancement Programme).  As you probably guessed based on the spelling, MEP is from Britain.  As far as I understand, the program was originally developed in Hungary, which is a country ahead of students in the United States in mathematics.  In the 8th grade, Hungary is ranked 6th in the world in mathematics with the USA in 14th place.  To see it for yourself, click here.

This of course immediately intrigued me.  Then I find out that the whole program from Year 1 past Calculus is absolutely free.  It is all on-line; you just have to print out the student worksheet pages.  You simply download the year you need and print it out.  It sounds too good to be true.

A video documentary of Hungarian students doing math in class sold me on MEP completely.  The children at all levels seemed to truly grasp the mathematical concepts.  They were trained to do most of their figuring mentally.  I sat back and watched them work complex problems in their little heads with amazement.

I know that we live in a technological world, but as a parent and teacher, I want my children to be able to do math without the aid of calculators and computers.  I want them to be able to function when the electricity goes out or the batteries in their calculator die.

Now that three of my children have almost finished a complete year of MEP math at their own level, I have decided to use MEP all through their schooling.  MEP teaches math differently than how I was taught.  Sometimes I have to refer to the free teacher’s notes in order to figure out what the program is teaching.  I have honestly learned as much if not more than my children this year.  I actually enjoy math for the first time in my life.  My husband is amazed at the way our daughter, Kyla, can figure out math in her head.  The strategies are unlike any I was exposed to in school, including college.

Since it is a British program, it is heavy in the metric system and uses pounds instead of dollars.  Science is filled with metric units; therefore, I feel my kids are getting great exposure to this way of measuring.  Additionally once I explained to my children what pounds were, my children never had a problem with the symbol on the page.  They just pretend the question is asking for dollars.  These “problems” were not problems in my household.

I highly recommend watching the documentary produced by the BBC called “Primary Maths – How Do They Do It in Hungary?”  To view it, you do have to register at teacher.tv.  It is free and easy.  Then download the video.  If you like what you see and want to know more, go to http://www.cimt.plymouth.ac.uk/projects/mep/default.htm to see what the program offers.  Keep in mind that the program is advanced.  I placed my children a year under their grade level.  This was recommended by the MEP-homeschoolers yahoo group.  As this article could not possibly address all the information, questions, and concerns you might have, feel free to contact me or search out the yahoo groups posts.  They have a lot of information for beginners in their group’s files.