My Daily Domestic Diigolet 11/05/2008

• OH HS-ALERTS : The Informed ParentSue Duncan’s HS-alerts compilationtags: Ohio, homeschool, HSLDA, reference
• Apollos Academy: COH ~ Week 149tags: carnival, of, homeschooling
• Grief and HomeschoolingA very good article about how grief is mishandled in our society and how the natural losses of a family can really be beautifully incorporated into homeschooling. This is an excellent essay!tags: grief, death, sadness
  •     Grief is normal and natural. If we weren’t deeply
    affected by the loss of someone we loved, how much could we really have loved
    them? It would be weird if we could go about our lives as if nothing had
    happened. And yet to children, that’s often how it appears, because they are
    separated from their families on a daily basis by school. They don’t see the
    grieving that goes on while they are gone.  
  •    Contrast this with the experience of a friend of mine.
    After several years of hemming and hawing over homeschooling, she finally bit
    the bullet one August and pulled her 3rd and 5th grade children out of
    school. Only a few weeks into their new life as homeschoolers, she received
    terrible news: her father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
  •      Since the children were no longer enrolled in public
    school, the three of them were able to fly to the eastern state where he
    lived. They spent the next three months caring for him there. The children
    were able to get to know their grandpa in a way that, up until then,
    geographic distance had never allowed. My friend spent far more time with her
    father than she had since leaving for college many years earlier. Those three
    months were a tremendous blessing to all of them.
            Sadly, her father passed away shortly after Christmas.
    Needless to say, she and her children did not “do school” that spring.
    Instead, they grieved together by sharing thoughts and feelings about their
    father and grandfather, and reliving the many memories they made during those
    precious last three months with him.
            No, they di
  • do any math that year. But they learned
    far more important lessons, and they learned them with their mother. Once
    they become adults, they will have a tremendous advantage in that they will
    know how to grieve and that it’s ok to do so. Most of the adults our grief
    support group works with do not have that knowledge. They come to us
    completely bewildered about what they are going through. They are in
    tremendous pain, made worse because they’ve bottled up their grief,
    encouraged by family and friends who are uncomfortable seeing them cry or
    repeat over and over stories about the loved one they lost.
  •    While locking our children up in the artificial
    environment of school prevents them from living in the real world,
    homeschooling lets them live a genuine life, complete with love, laughter,
    and yes, sometimes grieving. If every child learned at home, maybe someday
    there would no longer be a need for grief support groups.
• American Thinker: The True Name of Barack Obama’s Change: Intolerancetags: obama, politics
  • Since when did it become okay to hang a figure of a real woman — a mother of five — on the streets? Since when did it become okay to parade around with blood-covered guillotine decorated with the head of the President — a get not a peep from the media?
• Frozen mice cloned – are woolly mammoths next? | Science | ReutersThis is some freeky stuff!tags: science
• Catholics probe aid directed to ACORNtags: politics, Catholic
  • The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has hired forensic accounting specialists to investigate more than $1 million in church funding to voter-registration group ACORN, fearing the money may have been spent in partisan or fraudulent ways that could jeopardize the church’s tax-exempt status.

    The investigation is “thorough, serious and ongoing,” according to a July 11 letter to more than 200 bishops from New Orleans Bishop Robert Morin, chairman of the committee that oversees the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.

    The CCHD sent $1,037,000 to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in 2007, including a $40,000 grant to an ACORN affiliate in Las Vegas that was raided last month by the Nevada attorney general’s office in a voter-fraud probe.

  • The Catholic aid agency has given more than $7.3 million to ACORN over the past decade for about 320 projects, according to the Catholic News Service.

    In June, the Catholic Church froze a $1.2 million grant for 38 ACORN chapters after the community-organizing group was accused of voter fraud in 15 states.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.