Just a few quick bits to update the story of the pregnant 19 year old, Noellee Mowatt, who was jailed earlier this month on a material witness warrant:

1. It turns out the baby is not due April 15, but rather May 15. So while Noellee is still “very” pregnant, the worry over her delivering her baby in jail is a tad exaggerated;

Continue….

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One of my readers asked if I could recommend a CD for identifying birds in prairies and grasslands from their songs. I thought it would be fun to explore the topic of birding by ear, as I often hear birds but can’t see where they’re at.

Before I begin I want to say that I am not a birder. I know a little about birds from my childhood - from a crash course in winter birds in the fourth grade, I think, and from my Mom. I’m learning more as we read the Burgess, especially because the book is organized scientifically. I studied a lot of science in high school and CEGEP, and am a logical learner. I like things to follow some kind of logical sequence when I’m learning

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So, knowing that I’m not a birder I’d like to take a stab at recommending some resources. I have experience with the Peterson Field Guides for plants, and found them to be most helpful. In the Peterson series there are also Birding By Ear CD’s that can help a listener to identify birds by their calls.

Continue ….

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Have you ever tried to view a favourite web page and noticed that it was taking a really long time to load? Or maybe sometimes it just won’t load at all? If you’re really unlucky your internet connection may just shut down sometimes.

Customers of the bigger internet service providers have been complaining recently about not getting what we’ve been promised from their high-speed connection packages. CBC’s Marketplace did an exploration of these providers and determined that the country’s biggest ISP’s (Bell Sympatico, Rogers Yahoo, Shaw, and Telus) were not necessarily providing consumers what they promised.

Read more here….

If you learn better by watching video go here instead….

Noellee (also given as Noelly) Mowatt is nine months pregnant. She’s due to give birth to her second daughter next Tuesday. Instead of being home preparing for her baby’s arrival Noellee is behind bars at the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton, Ontario.

Noellee isn’t there because she committed a crime. She’s there because she was the victim of a crime.

Read more…

For the last few weeks I’ve been working on finding a new home for The Freehold. There was a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes: getting a domain name, checking out web hosts and content management software. I’m finally in the process of moving to my blog to its new little corner of cyberspace.

Things are still not quite the way I want them. You may find some boxes here and there, and you’ll want to look out for ladders and cans of paint when you’re looking around. I hope my readers will excuse any disarray - and please let me know if there are any broken links or missing content anywhere. I’m doing my best to hunt down the bugs and clean things up!

Please drop by my new digs at http://canhomeschool.com/freehold/ and share a wee cup of tea with me! The new site will have all the good stuff you’ve been enjoying here at WordPress; it’s just “my own” place and I can do a little more with it than just change the decor.

If you’ve got any feeds or bookmarks, please update them. The old blog will be here during the transition period, but I’ll probably only be posting to the new one (unless I find myself with oodles of free time!) So to be sure you’re not missing anything, remember to head on over to http://canhomeschool.com/freehold/

I’ll be watching for you at my new place

Cheers!

Ruby

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Clipart courtesy of Clips Ahoy. Thanks!

Just a quick reminder to those who watched the first part of Trojan Horse on CBC last week, tonight is the second part of the 4-hour mini-series.

I blogged about this Paul Gross production last week. Check out this entry for more details, and look here for some historical background on the original Trojan Horse to share with your homeschoolers.

Tune into CBC at 8:00 pm tonight to catch the second half of Trojan Horse!

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!

If you are a regular at CurrClick or you’ve been reading my posts about them, you’ll know they regularly give away free ebooks. So me announcing another giveaway at CurrClick (formerly HomeSchool eStore) isn’t at all unusual.

This time it’s a bit different, however. CurrClick is running a contest in which your homeschoolers are encouraged to create a video promoting the environmental benefits of using ebooks instead of hard copy texts. The best video will win its creator an iPod!

Here are all the details:

You could win an iPod Touch by participating in our Earth Day CurrClickCommercial Contest, running April 7th through April 20th!

Kids, ages 7-18, are welcome to participate.

http://www.currclick.com/

Earth Day is fast approaching! Help us celebrate and spread the word about the environmental benefits of eBooks by producing your own commercial and posting it on YouTube. Simply e-mail us the link to your video, along with the names and ages of the children appearing in the video, by April 20th. The 3 winning videos will be posted, Monday April 22nd on CurrClick. Then, our members will be invited to vote for their favorite video! The winner with the most votes will win an 8GB iPod Touch (worth $299 in value) and $25 in site credit. The winner with the second most votes will win a 1GB iPod Shuffle (worth $49 in value) and $20 in site credit. The winner with the 3rd most votes will win an iTunes Gift Card worth $25 and $20 in site credit. Prizes will be mailed out to the winners by May 1st, 2008.

Contest Rules:

1. Videos may include multiple children. But please remember that only one prize will be given out to the top three winners. The first names and ages of all participating children must be included with the submission.

2. Feel free to encourage your co-ops friends and family members to vote for your video. (Voting runs April 22nd-28th.) Voters are only allowed 5 votes per account. You must be a CurrClick member in order participate in the voting process.

3. Submissions should be sent to staley@currclick.com by 9:00 pm, Central Standard time on Sunday, April 19th, 2008 and must include a link to the YouTube video submission. CurrClick will not be responsible for missing or broken links.

4. Only one submission per child, please. Individual family members are welcome to create and submit additional videos.

5. Children, ages 7-18 are welcome to participate.

6. Parents are encouraged to help their children with the research, design, production and creation of the video. However, parents may not appear in the video and should encourage their children to do as much of the work as they are capable of doing on their own.

7. Videos can be funny or serious, but all videos must contain information about how eBooks can help the environment. Helpful links include: http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/print.htm http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/harry_potter.htm http://www.conservatree.com/learn/EnviroIssues/TreeStats.shtml

It is further useful to note that eBooks do not need to be delivered from overseas printing presses and distribution centers (using fossil fuels) and that they use very little energy to create.

8. All videos must be named with the prefix of “CurrClick,” a dash and then the name of your video on YouTube. This way, members, CurrClick employees and contestants can easily find and watch all the submissions on YouTube.

9. By entering this contest, you agree to keep your video live on YouTube until May of 2009. In addition, you agree to allow CurrClick to use your video for possible future promotions.

10. Videos must not last longer than 5 minutes. Videos lasting longer than 5 minutes may be disqualified.

Best of luck to everyone! And check back soon for the next free CurrClick download.

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Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!

Zain Bhikha presents a version of Harry Chapin’s “Flowers Are Red” (197 with the voices of kids in the choruses. My absolute favourite rendition is Harry’s own but this one is done quite well.

Heidi at Southpaugh Homeschool this week posted a video entitled “Not On The Test.” The song was written by Harry’s brother Tom, and John Forster. In a way Tom is echoing the message of his brother, thirty years later. He says:

Now we are teaching by rote again - where the test, and only the test, becomes the reason to teach and study.

It’s no secret that American industry has outsourced most factory jobs to other countries to take advantage of cheaper labor costs. So why are we putting so much effort into a form of education in which there is no creativity? This is the time that our youth should be taught to think ”out of the box,” not be put into a tighter one!

~ Tom Chapin

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Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!

Arabella Buckley’s Fairy-Land of Science is used by some homeschoolers for nature studies, and was recommended by Charlotte Mason herself. A little while back an excerpt from the book was offered as a free download from CurrClick. I promised at that time I would post some Arabella Buckley resources. Here they are. Enjoy!

Texts by Arabella Buckey (Free Downloads):

• Extensive collection of e-texts in multiple formats at Internet Archive
• Several formatted texts at the Baldwin Project
• Books by Arabella Buckley at Early Canadiana Online
• Fairy-Land of Science (plain text) at Project Gutenberg
• Fairy-Land of Science (scans of original book) at Google Books Canada
• A Short History of Natural Science (scans of original book) at Google Books Canada
• Wild Life in Woods and Fields (human-read audio) at Librivox

NB: Downloads from Google Books Canada may not work outside the country. If anyone from US or international locations tries to download the books, please let me know whether or not you are successful. Viewing of the entire book should be possible, regardless.

Texts About Arabella Buckley (Free Downloads):

• Engines of Our Ingenuity #943: Fairy-Land of Science (audio, text transcripts, illustrations)
• Engines of Our Ingenuity #1105: Mary Roberts (audio, text transcripts, illustrations) - significant mentions of Buckley
• Engines of Our Ingenuity #2144: Arabella Buckley (audio, text transcripts, illustrations)
• Arabella Buckley entry at Wikipedia

Hard Copies Free or Cheap:

• Books by Arabella Buckley at BookMooch
• Books by Arabella Buckley at ManyBooks.Net
• Books by Arabella Buckley at PaperBackSwap
• Fairy-Land of Science at LuLu - Yesterday’s Classics version, benefits the Baldwin Project

One of my friends is expecting her first child this summer. She just had an ultrasound last month. I assumed it was her first sonogram, because doctors here generally order the first one around 20 weeks. In actual fact it was her third such test! She is being followed at a different hospital than I was for my babies, but if that hospital is anything like mine she spent an awful lot of time waiting around to see the ultrasound technician!

With the new 3D and even 4D ultrasounds now available, I imagine there will be a good demand for the newly trained ultrasound tech. The greying or aging of North America means that health professions of all kinds offer good job potential in the coming years. Patient interest in sonography as a safer alternative to x-rays and other tools is also making ultrasound tech school a popular place to head for career training.

The NOC code for medical sonographers is 3216. Sonographers do often specialize in gynecology and obstetrics, but other areas of specialization include abdominal sonography, neurosonography, opthalmologic sonography and pediatric sonography.

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!