Living in Spite of Yourself

This week, my wonderful church started a new women's Bible study: Living Beyond Yourself by Beth Moore. I took this Bible study five years ago, but life has gotten so busy that I need a refresher. How do you know if you need it? Well, if it is Wednesday morning and you know you cannot possibly get everything done that you need to get done by Friday without losing your mind, this is the study for you. Why? You learn to tap into a power, and a person, higher than yourself to get through the day without losing your cool or telling someone what you really think.

By relying upon the Holy Spirit, you end up enjoying Fruit whether or not everything on your to-do list gets a checkmark: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. What? Get rid of all your bad habits while doing everything on your list. Nope! Fruit like that doesn't come naturally: it comes supernaturally through the Holy Spirit working in your heart. If you really don't think you need it, check out how many times you whine or vent on a Facebook status.

Besides supernatural power, other things have helped us keep up with our studies (we just wrapped up Day 18 and are half way through Week 4). Today, I will share how I set up my audio disc. Some of our day is primarily audio: Spanish lessons, folk song, hymn, Spanish song, Spanish fairy tales, recitation, composer study, listening to Librivox recordings, etc. Having it all on the computer means it is not portable. Today, in between delivering meals to the elderly through meals on wheels, Pamela did all of her audio work: forty minutes freed up to do something else at home! I have a hard time keeping track of one CD, much less five or six. Plus, that means getting up and switching disks every time we transition to another activity. By putting everything I need for the week on one CD, the day runs more smoothly: we can take it to the car with us or we can flip through tracks with the remote control.

Here are some tips that have helped me:

1. I put everything in order of frequency. The things we do every day go at the beginning of the CD, so we avoid wasting time flipping through tracks. The stuff we do only once a week goes at the end of the CD.

2. I love Audacity, which lets you edit your sound recordings. Before making a CD, I edit individual files for various reasons.

• I edit the tempo (change the speed without changing the pitch). When someone speaks too quickly (Spanish or an audio book), I slow down the recording without making the changing the speaker's vocal quality.
• I remove any annoying background noise. 
• To introduce vocabulary words for Spanish, I copy and paste the person in the story saying the word. We listen to new words and point to pictures before the story begins to build our vocabulary.
• I include only the part of the story we are reading. Because the Spanish fairy tales are short, we listen from beginning to the current stopping point. I cut the ending out so we know exactly where to stop. For Spanish only, we listen to the same segment two or three times a week. Our goal is building our ear for we already know the story.
• I break up the English readings that are stories into day-by-day chunks. So, if we have five passages from the same book that week, I will have five different tracks with only the passage we need for each day. I have tabs and marks on the pages in the book so Pamela can find the right spot on the page on her own if I am driving.

3. I put all audio work in blue ink (not black) on our weekly schedule for quick reference.

For Want of Some Screws

For want of some screws a hard drive was lost.
For want of some screws two hard drives were lost.
For want of some screws three hard drives were lost.
For want of a hard drive the laptop was shipped.
For want of a computer poor Tammy was miffed.
And all for the want of some itty-bitty screws.

In honor of the folks at Dell's Technical Support who need to pay attention to the seven screws circled in red in the illustration above. . .

From Tammy, the poet who doesn't even know it, who sang the Hallelujah chorus when she saw this:



P.S. Beware of reading blogs with a full swig of coffee in thy mouth.

Learning Styles Pages

Just a quick note! I finally updated my original learning styles page and added a new one! The new page is a literary look at learning styles, based upon a presentation I gave at the 2006 Charlotte Mason Conference. My next goal is to convert my notes on narration into a web page, so stay tuned.

Speaking of learning styles. . . Pamela is visual, like many people with autism. For her, a picture speaks a thousand words. In this case, Pamela did not want to believe me when I told her in my most declarative voice, "Your sweater is dirty" with a scrunched-up face. Pamela could not see the stain from her angle, so she proceeded to argue and throw a fit. I had the camera nearby, took a picture, and showed it to her. End of argument. She whipped off her sweater immediately without another huff or puff.

We're Back

Last Tuesday, we received our new computer, a Dell Inspiron 1720, and she is a beauty. Since then, I have been busy wrapping up the old school year with required annual reports and planning the new year. We school year round, so my kids had the week off when the neighborhood kids started school. I will post my planned typical schedules later in the week.

I thought I would hate adjusting to Vista, but we have not run into any glitches yet, All of our old software has survived the transition (even a 1995 version of MGI PhotoSuite). The graphics are sweet on this machine, and the screen is wide enough for me to see the entire year in my Excel spreadsheet in one glance!

Keep It Simple Stupid!

The good news is that I resurrected my "dead" computer. The bad news is that I missed the obvious and reformatted for no reason!

When the computer was acting up, I fell back into my typical troubleshooting procedures: when things are really bad, make a copy of important files (which I had done the day before) and reformat. At first, everything looked normal and the computer survived long enough to download and install one service pack. Then, the memory began dumping and rebooting again. It appeared to me that I had not changed a thing by reformatting. Frustrated, I shut it down and called it a loss.

The next day, I booted up the computer and tried again. It worked great for about fifteen minutes and began the dump and reboot thing! Then it hit me! The computer might be overheating. Then, I realized DUH--the fan was not working! I spent the morning experimenting to see if my hypothesis might hold water. I placed the laptop on an air conditioning vent and continued doing all of the Windows updates for my computer, checked my email, and surfed the Internet. The computer stayed cool, and it worked beautifully for several hours!

We decided to pay a little visit to the Geek Squad and find out how much it would be to replace the fan. Feeling smug, I told them to skip the diagnostic because I knew I had three hardware issues: the broken fan, three inoperable USB ports (two dead and one half-dead), and a broken sound jack. The friendly geek checked out the USB ports and told me they were not cracked, and it might be dust. In fact, he said dust might be clogging the fan, too! He pulled out some canned air and blew through the USB ports and the fan. That was all it took to fix all three USB ports! The fan did not respond, so Steve and I decided to let the Geek Squad to ship off my baby to Geek Central in Atlanta. We will have to survive at least ten days sans a 24/7 computer.

I felt fairly stupid overlooking such an obvious fix for my USB ports! However, I redeemed myself because I already knew what a Chill Mat was, which I am considering buying to extend the life of our laptop, which turned three years old last May. The friendly geek saw my Targus notebook backpack and asked me how I liked it. Maybe, he was just being nice, but I felt a little bit better.

Giving Up the Ghost

Have you ever read a wordless picture book like Noah's Ark by Peter Spier? Well, try reading my practically wordless blogpost called "Giving Up the Ghost: Or, I Know What You Did Last Night."









P.S. I am at my parent's house right now and will be at one of those mega electronics stores this weekend! Yes, I reformatted my laptop. No, it did not work unless you count dumping everything and rebooting every two minutes as acceptable.

Filtering Ads

Since I know it will take me at least two days to blog another breakout session, I will go ahead and share a high-tech tip I discovered recently! I switched to Earthlink in 2000 and have stuck with it because I do not want to confuse people trying to contact me by switching email addresses all the time. One thing I despise about its online webmail site are the ads, usually featuring half-nekked gals in their undergarments. While I already block annoying pop-ups, I did not realize I could block annoying ads, too.

For this trick to work, you must have Firefox as a browser. I prefer Firefox because it is free and is more resistant to viruses, trojans, online scams, etc. One feature of Firefox that I like is the add-ons section of the website. Adblock Plus removes ads and banners. Not only did I kick out the half-nekked gals out of my house, I also increased the speed of downloading websites!

I also found this nifty graphic for Ambleside Online and plan to make it a permanent part of my blog.

Google Video

About a month ago when I started taking baby steps in RDI, I also began shooting short clips of some of our activities with my digital camera. Since these clips are memory hogs and my dear husband travels often, I uploaded them to Google Video, which I chose over You Tube because I can keep the clips private. I already had a Google account for my blog, so I had no problem uploading videos, which allows me to share videos in Aut-2B-Home in Carolina, too.

In spite of the cons (which I will explain in a moment), I am so thankful I did because about two weeks ago I had to reformat my computer: I lost everything, except the videos I had uploaded. One silver lining in a very dark cloud!

One con of storing clips at Google Video is that they are converted to .gvi or .gvp files. If you download the clips back onto your computer, you will need either Adobe Flash Player 7.0+ or Google Video Player to play the clip offline. Over the weekend, I downloaded the clips to my sister-in-law's Mac and found that selecting "Video iPod/Sony PSP" (located to the right of the download button) worked!

Yesterday, Pamela and I reviewed a series of small pictures extracted from video footage I shot on our digital camera. I retrieved these images by watching the video online at Google Video and clicking the word "Details". This causes still images from the video (taken at interverals) to appear taken. To save these images, I put my cursor on an image, right clicked, and selected "Save Image As".

Today, I stumbled across another con: Windows Media and Real Player do not like the Google format. But, I figured out a way to convert the .gvp files to .avi: first, I downloaded a nifty utility GVideoFix that makes the conversion to a format acceptable to Windows Movie Maker and then DivX so that the images would play. Right now, I am looping together and editing larger video clips to help me better see the big picture in Pamela's progress with RDI.

Okay, your eyes are glazing over--I can see it. Enough geek talk for one day!

High-Tech Happy New Year Tip!

Happy New Year! Click here for a cute card to ring in another year!

Yesterday on my email list Aut-2B-Home, people discussed how affected they and/or their children are by graphic images on the Internet. Still photos of Saddam Hussein with a noose around his neck part of their webmail sign-in page disturb them. Ads with scantily clad women often plague online sites for checking email (*ahem* Hotmail and Earthlink). I shared a high-tech tip for avoiding visual images that helps enough people to make it worthwhile to post here.

About ten years ago, I was struggling to keep a very old computer alive. It contained such a small amount of space that accessing a web page full of graphics would crash the computer. Frames, which were the latest Internet phenomenon at the time, gave the poor thing the blue screen of death! I solved my problem by turning off the graphics! I was able to surf the Internet and see only the images I absolutely needed by turning them on individually.

H is how to turn off Internet images in Firefox:

Click Tools, then Options, then Content.
There is a box to check off "Load images automatically". Click until you see no checkmark.
Click Ok.
If you want to see an image, right click the box for the broken image and click "View image".

Here is how to turn off Internet images in Explorer:

Click Tools, then Internet Options, then Advanced.
In the box that pops open, scroll down until you see the section called Multimedia and click until you see no checkmarks in two boxes:
"Play videos in web pages"
"Show pictures"
Click Apply.
If you want to see an image, right click the box for the broken image and click "Show image".

Keep these instructions and do the same to restore automatic loading of images, except make sure you see checkmarks in the boxes indicated.

Techno-queen

Before we bought a digital camera, I lived with clip art for Pamela's speech therapy stories. Good clip art was hard too find because I never could find exactly what I wanted. That is why I love googling images. More often than not, I can find the perfect image for a story.

Take today for example. This week I am introducing the possessive pronouns, his, her, and its. I am also introducing patterns on clothing and other material: striped, plaid, flowery, solid, and print--try finding free clip art for that! Pamela loves Disney, so I googled "Minnie Mouse" for images. Of 24,500 images that hit, I found toys in which Mickey's gal wore three different outfits: polka dot print, flowery, and bridal. For each image, I right clicked the picture at the web site and pasted it into the personal description story.

Here is one of the three personal description stories about Minnie Mouse's clothing. The color-coding focuses Pamela on the new syntax for the week.

My Name is Tammy, and I am a Techno-holic!

I love technology, especially digital cameras which are so handy in teaching children with autism. Yesterday my digicam helped me illustrate a difficult passage in a book. Pamela was reading the introduction of the second lesson of our science book. The third and fourth paragraphs discuss how distance affects how big or small an object appears. The lesson tells the child to look at an object outside that is far away and cover it up with their thumb. Since a sign of autism is difficulty looking at things pointed out or tracking moving objects, I was unsure how well Pamela processed those two paragraphs. So, we headed outside and took the following pictures. Pamela narrated, I wrote down what she said in correct English, and she typed what she understood about the pictures:

A lamppost is big. A thumb is small. They are together. The size looks right.

The lamppost is far away. The thumb is close. They are apart. The thumb is small, but it looks big. The lamppost is big, but it looks small. This is an optical illusion. It can trick the eyes. Something closer can look big. Something farther can look small.

Then I rewrote the material from the third and fourth paragraphs of the book with syntax Pamela can easily understand and added it to Pamela's typed narration. It extended what Pamela observed to the earth, the sun, and other stars:

The sun is big. It is far away. It looks small because it is far away. The earth is small. The earth looks bigger than the sun. It is not! This is another optical illusion because one million earths can fit in the sun.

The sun is a star. The sun looks bigger than a star. They sun is far away. Stars are very, very far away. They look very, very small. This is another optical illusion because some stars are bigger then the sun.

How digital cameras help me homeschool both children:

• Portray ideas concretely
• Set-up schedule or communication board
• Depict steps in a task
• Show when a bedroom looks clean
• Illustrate Social Stories
• Document field trips
• Display big projects in a portfolio
• “Scan” textbook pictures to study for a test
• Record steps in an experiment
• Transfer drawings digitally
• Magnify nature specimens
• Reveal the environment of nature specimens

What I did before I bought one:

• Order a CD when getting film developed
• Search for Google images
• Borrow one

Between my love affair with Excel and digital cameras, I can neither confirm nor deny the fact that I am a techno-holic!