Most homeschool families have at least one student who either doesn’t like math or finds it more challenging. It’s just “one of those things.” Unfortunately, math skills are such a source of contention, both for parents and students that we often just toss our hands up and think that there isn’t going to be an answer to our woes in this area. The reality of it is this, though. Math will come easier to some students than to others, but math can be mastered. It will take time and an open-minded approach to curricula, but one tool can be easy to incorporate into any homeschool curricula, but is sadly often left out of the process.

The primary reason that students seem to spiral out of control in math is that they continue to make the same mistakes over and over again without getting any “intervention.” By doing this, they don’t allow themselves to come to an awareness of the execution problem they are having, and therefore, they reinforce the same bad habits over and over again, making them not only bad habits, but subconscious “systems” that are hard to break.

Instead, if we allow our homeschool students to figure out what they might be doing wrong along the way – gaining immediate feedback – they can break the pattern of bad habits and begin to reshape the way they think about their process. This isn’t only true for math, but math is the predominate area where application of this system can be quickly applied.

No matter what homeschool curricula you are using, what if you changed up the way you did math just a bit? Instead of having students do 30 problems in math or more, and then allowing them to get validation of correct versus incorrect answers at the end of their assignment, what if you allowed your student to get an immediate answer for each problem as soon as it was complete. If a problem is correct, your student can move on. If not, your student would be required to stop, identify the source of their problem, do a “Critique,” and then they can move on. Doing this will allow your student to get an awareness of what they have done wrong immediately for the purpose of correcting that habit right then and there.

The trick to the Critique is that it is not terribly time consuming, but that it forces the student to see what they have done wrong so that they don’t repeat that step or build on a bad habit. However, it should be “tedious” enough that the idea of doing a critique is not a lot of fun so students will pay enough attention while doing their work that they will be sure to apply good habits, not bad ones, and execute properly each time.

Over time, this process will do a couple of things. It will help students to identify their unique weaknesses with regards to things or processes that trip them up, and it will allow them to proactively take steps to avoid those traps. It will also focus their attentions more acutely on the work before them. (So many students, homeschooled and otherwise, have said that they made a math mistake because they, “just weren’t thinking.”) And finally, it will develop a series of good habits over time that will lead to improved confidence and skill in math.

For a free copy of one possible Critique System, click here. But by all means, if you are not teaching math with a tool to correct for the bad habits, begin doing so now and see if your child’s math skills don’t begin to improve as they work to reinforce the good habits and eliminate the bad ones as they work!

Are you looking for ways to make history come alive for your children?  Here are some easy ways to turn history lessons from dull to dynamic

1. Make Costumes - Invite your children to choose characters or occupations from the historic time you are studying.  Ask them to make costumes representing the style of clothing the people wore.  Suggest resources they can explore to help them learn more about what people wore. Why do they think their character dressed a certain way?  How is it different from the way people dress today?  Discuss options for making the costumes, encouraging students to use things they can find at home or make easily.  Choose a dress-up day to present their characters and answer questions about the costumes. If you are unable to make a costume, look at pictures or books to describe the period dress.
2. Have a Puppet Show - Make puppets of historic figures from time period you are studying. Children can act out key events in the lives of the characters they create. They can also make up their own stories about the time period, thinking about how the character may have responded to a situation that occurred during the time they lived.  Or they can bring the person to life in today’s world and have them interact with modern society.  What would surprise the historical person if they spent a day in today’s world?
3. Interview Historic People - Ask children to choose their favorite historical person to represent and guide them as they research the person’s life. Like a news reporter, conduct “interviews” with each historic figure, asking details about their life, the time in which they lived, the problems they faced, etc.  To help the children be prepared to answer questions from the perspective of their favorite historical person, the children can either make up a list of questions that they would like to be asked, or you can provide them with an outline of questions you will ask.
4. Act out Historical Events - Children love drama and acting out events, and this is a great way to immerse them in history. They can act out real events from history, or they can make up their own play by imagining imagine how people from history may have interacted with each other. What was a typical day like for them?  What was different about their lives as compared to the way we live today?  While costumes and props will make the plays more interesting, children can present the plays without costumes.  If you don’t use costumes, have each child wear a name tag that clearly identifies them so the audience can understand who the child is representing.
5. Bring out the Maps - Locate countries, regions, cities, or villages that are related to the person you are studying (birth city, where they lived throughout their life, location of death, etc.).  Using a reproducible map, trace the movement of individuals who traveled widely and locate their travel paths. Discuss how they traveled (on foot, by horse, on a ship, etc.), and talk about how long it took them to get from place to place.  Show how country borders may have changed during the person’s life and discuss how those changes may have had an impact on them.
6. Make a Game of Dates - When children study events and connect them with specific dates in history, it may be helpful to examine the different calendars used throughout the ages and those that are still in use today, including the Chinese, Christian, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, and Persian calendars. By looking at calendars that are no longer in use, such as the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian, Mayan, Roman, and French Revolutionary calendars, students can explore different worlds and relate them to what they are studying. This approach adds a different dimension to straight date memorization.
7. Read, Read, Read! - Bring history to life by reading stories, fairy tales, poems, novels, and classic literature of the time period you are studying.  Read biographies of famous people. This can be done with a read-aloud time (with you or the children taking turns reading aloud), or by making daily reading assignments and discussing them as a group.  You can also provide a book list (including historical fiction and graphic novels) so children can choose books that interest them.
8. Combine Art with History - Add a creative dimension to your study of history by using art to make history lessons memorable.  Children can color or paint portraits of famous people and the places they lived, or they can create paper dolls, clay sculptures, etc. These creations may be displayed or collected and used in a timeline as your study progresses. In addition to creating your own art, look at the relevant art history from the time period you are studying to help children understand the skills and values of the people who lived during that time.

Did you know food and learning math go together? We are going to use items in your kitchen to make learning math FUN.

• Have your child use gumdrops or marshmallows and toothpicks to create geometric shapes.

• Use pretzel sticks, popsicle sticks, toothpicks, and straws for addition, subtraction, and tally marks.

• Use pies, Hershey's chocolate bars, and pizza to teach the concept of fractions.

• Have your child use Teddy Grahams or Goldfish for counting activities. Tell stories while your child uses these objects to act it out, such as “There were a school of ten fish and three fish swam away. How many are left?”

• Use small objects, such as beans, raisins, and Cheerios, for counting, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In addition to these skills, you can use Skittles and M&M’s to create patterns.

There are even books that combine food and math! Here are two of my favorites:

The M&M's Counting Book by Barbara McGrath is the tastiest counting book yet! This yummy little counting book teaches the numbers 1 - 12, colors of the M&M's chocolate candies, and three primary shapes: the circle, square, and triangle. Hungry learners are rewarded in the last section of the book, where they learn simple subtraction by eating the manipulatives, twelve M&M's. The review page at the end ties it all together and reinforces newly learned concepts and skills.

To balance the sweets with something healthier, Apple Fractions by Jerry Pallotta uses a variety of different apples to teach children all about fractions. Playful elves demonstrate how to divide apples into halves, thirds, fourths, and more. This innovative and enjoyable book allows children to understand fractions at a concrete level.

Do you have to write for a newsletter, your business or other reasons? Are you a homeschooler who needs to teach writing to your children? Do you find yourself stuck for ideas, prompts, the “how-to”? Relax and take a deep breath! Writing can be fun and creative and a great way to express yourself. You no longer have to be afraid of pen and paper (or the keyboard, if that’s your style). Read on - and use the information to educate, motivate and inspire the “inner writer” in you!

How I started

I’ve never been “the writer” in our family. Throughout my married life, my husband’s been the one to put pen to paper. We lived overseas for awhile, and he wrote beautifully newsy and descriptive missives back to our family and supporters. Really, they were wonderful! Everybody said so! I agreed! So why should I write? As time went on, we continued homeschooling, and I realized that I would have to teach writing to our kids. Uh-oh. I scoured the internet and interrogated friends to find good resources. We hobbled along and they did, eventually, learn to write. Then I got “bit”. It happened innocuously enough. I started sending emails - and for a 40+ boomer, that in itself was something. Then my daughter went away to college and I joined Facebook - which kinda got my creative juices going a bit. Then I began developing a home-business - which put me in high-gear! I knew I had to write to get my message out, to “sell myself”; to create valuable content that others would want to read. And as I got started writing, I got hooked!

These Days, It’s So Easy to Write!

For me, the biggest reason it became easy to develop this skill was the availability of the exact things I had kind of scoffed at for so long - the computer and the internet. Writing while I was growing up and in school involved endless hours of putting thoughts on paper and then erasing or scratching out or drawing lines and writing in the margins or doing the whole darn thing over - and then you had to type it up (remember that?)! What frustration! Unless you were on the school paper, or had a friend who was - who ever thought of getting something published?!!?! Now, there’s no reason not to publish your gems for the whole world to see. There are literally hundreds of online publishing venues in cyberspace.

Writing has changed my life - it can do great things for you, too! Take some time to look at the thoughts, suggestions and resources here. Take pen to paper or hands to keyboard, and - go for it! Let me know what you’ve published - I’ll be your #1 fan...

A Day in the Life

A while back our family went to Florida to attend a car build-and-race event that my husband is involved in. That in itself is another story! I thought I'd list here how I found a slew of writing prompts in the course of one of the days we were away.

1. In the shower (I get the best ideas here!) - create a page for my website/start a series (?) for homeschool dads; check websites I've previously bookmarked for help with an article on writing; don't forget pad and paper.
2. At breakfast - after a fascinating conversation with a race-participant at breakfast, remember to interview others to start a "human interest" article on the race.
3. On the way to the race - sign on a church display "God uses the insignificant to do the impossible" (there's something there...); what to do in this town? (seed for a hometown website and related articles).
4. At the race, during downtime - meet and greet my husband's friends and start that human-interest story (as I met and talked to people, this produced ideas for LOTS of future articles...); "the mind of the backyard racer"; how can I apply/use this experience in our homeschool?
5. That evening - more ideas on utilizing this experience creatively for homeschooling (as I helped the kids journal)...

I took these ideas and developed them as:

• Blog posts (2)
• Squidoo pages (2)
• EzineArticles (1)
• Newsletter copy (1)
• Word articles yet unpublished (1)
• Website material (in development)
• Two ideas as yet unwritten about!

I went to sleep that night satisfied that I had plenty of material to keep me busy - for awhile at least!

So... Do You Get It Yet?

Every day there's tons of stuff going on around you. Experiences and feelings and thoughts that others ARE interested in and may also have experienced or felt or thought. Writing is communicating with and to others. No matter what your theological or spiritual bend, I think we can all agree that we're weren't made to be alone. Yes, quiet time is necessary and healthy to have; and we each have our own time requirements to maintain our emotional health, but... I firmly believe that inside each of us is a great communicator! See if you can find him or her inside yourself - I dare you!

Many homeschooling parents are afraid – afraid that their child will come to the conclusion they did as a child: That music is not much fun, I can’t play the instrument well, lessons are boring – I quit.

Parents don’t want their child to go through these experiences – but they want them to learn a musical instrument.  They realize that their parents spent a lot of good money on their lessons, but they quit.  And everyone agrees it was a waste of time and money.

So with their own children, they attempt to reduce the financial risk of providing music lessons for their children.  They do this by doing two things:

• They find the cheapest teacher in town;
• They buy the cheapest instrument they can find.

Here, I'm interested in the second point, cheap instruments. They might find a hand-me-down violin that’s been around for decades.  The strings are worn, the pegs can't be moved easily, the bow is missing half its hairs; anyway, there's no rosin for the bow and no chin-rest.  It hasn't been played in years.  But this is Little Mary’s starting instrument.

For parents who choose piano, the financial risks are higher because a piano costs more to buy.  Never mind.  Someone has an old one that just needs dusting, it hasn’t been tuned for 45 years, the ivory is cracked or completely missing.  And some of the keys don’t work anyway.  They stick after you press them down, and you have to pull them up in order to use that note again.

Now I understand the cost saving.  But it is also necessary to admit these instruments sound awful.  They sound awful to adults, they sound awful to the teacher – and they will sound awful to the child as well.  And they are no fun to play at all.  There's no possibility of the sound of the instrument getting the child excited.

No matter, say the parents.  When my child display a real interest in music, we’ll get him something better.

Except that day never arrives.  Little Mary or Little Albert never do take to music.  They  know they’re on a horrible instrument.  Why persevere.  Mom and Dad don't care enough to get me a good instrument.

If you want your children to succeed at music, make sure they have an instrument that is in tune, or that can be tuned, and in the case of string or wind instruments, have bows and reeds that are top condition.  They need to hear and make for themselves, musical sounds that are a reasonable quality, and you cannot get reasonable quality off a bad instrument. Then your child will know you care enough to insist they have something better.  Put them with a good teacher and they'll do well.

It does not cost the homeschooling family a fortune to have a reasonable instrument.  It just needs a commitment to quality education and quality music in the homeschool.

Ian Hodge, Ph.D, lives in East Lansing, MI.  A musician and business consultant, he is the creator of ReadWritePlay.com – a self-teaching creative music program that teaches students how to read and write music from the beginning.

Teaching kids to write is one of the biggest challenges that a homeschooler faces. Just how do we get those little guys to wax eloquently on paper? Doesn't it make your hair bristle when they groan, "Ah, Mom, I hate writing!"

We try everything to make it work. Don't we make them fill the page? Don't we circle every error, correct every misspelled word, harp about their grammar? What more can we do? Unfortunately, sometimes we do too much. Let's consider the following example to illustrate what I mean.

Yanking the garment from your hand, the toddler says, "Me do it! I do it myself." From a young age, children express independence by attempting grown-up tasks. They want to dress themselves, make a sandwich, set the table. We smile at their childish efforts. Colors don't match, the sandwich is sloppy and the table setting haphazard. A wise parent accepts the creation, resisting the urge to fix it. I confess that I wasn't always a wise parent.

How many times have I stepped in to help? "Here, Honey, let Mommy help." That statement is the kiss of death to the child's creativity and independence. When children complete a task with an adult-modified result, they know as well as everyone else that their creativity was lost in the shuffle. Grandma knows when the child carries that perfectly decorated angel food cake to the table while you gush ecstatically, "Just look what Zelda made, all by herself," that there's not a chance that she actually did. Everyone in the room, including Zelda, knows that there's a lot more Mommy in that cake than Zelda, but no one admits it.

Are you seeing the similarity? Now let's apply this principle to teaching children to write. How can we step back and allow them to write without over correcting, modifying, or rewriting--in other words, taking over?

But Dianne, I hear you thinking. How can I teach my children to improve their writing skills? I want them to do their best. Perhaps the child's best is far below your comfortable standard. Perhaps the standard that makes you comfortable is unrealistically high. The worst thing we can do is to do the work for the child.

When a child writes a story, a report or a math test, the end product should look as if a child wrote it. It should sound as if a child wrote it. A child's story with an adult voice begs the obvious question: "How did that happen?" It simply shouldn't sound that polished.

There should be mistakes because children have not yet mastered spelling, grammar, punctuation, word usage and style. If a story pops out of the printer perfectly formatted, paragraphs correct, punctuation flawless from commas to semi-colons, complicated sentence structure and figures of speech lined up like motor homes at a trade show, there's something wrong.

Like Grandma, we all know that there is no way the child produced that piece of work herself. The sad thing is that we broadcast our embarrassment of our children's imperfect work when we clean up all the errors in our desperate attempt to make the writing better. The truth is that it isn't better; it's just altered. By us. What's sadder is that we aren't even doing it to make the child look better. We are mostly concerned with how we look.

In a future article, I will share some more tips on how we can encourage our children to do their best at writing without taking over.

Dianne Dachyshyn is a freelance writer and a motivational speaker who lives in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.  She works as a home education facilitator, helping homeschooling families plan their programs and deal with challenges.  Dianne is passionate about teaching children to write.  Visit her website at HomeschoolWell.com.

He is not here: for He is risen! - Matthew 28:6

Every Christian knows that Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem at the time of the Passover, and in this way became the perfect Passover sacrifice, "the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29). Since the early centuries of the church, Christians have honored the death and resurrection of Jesus in the celebration of Easter. And while the observance of Easter has changed over the centuries, it is based on the Hebrew Passover.

* Hebrew Roots *

We read in the Book of Exodus how the LORD used Moses lead the Israelites out of Egypt. In Exodus 12, the LORD sent the final plague, smiting the firstborn of all Egypt. The Israelites were saved by sacrificing a lamb and covering their doorframes with its blood, so that the LORD would "pass over" the house and not smite the firstborn of Israel. And the LORD commanded that the Israelites remember the Passover in a seven day feast....

And this day shall be unto you a memorial; and ye shall keep it a feast to the LORD throughout your generations; ye shall keep it a feast by an ordinance for ever. - Exodus 12:14.

The LORD instructed Israel as to when the Passover should be kept:

In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at even, ye shall eat unleavened bread, until the one and twentieth day of the month at even. - Exodus 12:18.

In the lunar calendar, the New Moon is the first day of the new month. The Full Moon is at mid-month, the fourteenth day of the month. So Israel was instructed to celebrate the Passover on the Full Moon of the first month. The LORD even tells us the name of the month....

Observe the month of Abib, and keep the passover unto the LORD thy God: for in the month of Abib the LORD thy God brought thee forth out of Egypt by night. - Deuteronomy 16:1

The word "Abib" means "sprouting" or "budding" and is the first month of Spring, falling among our months of March and April. Abib is the only month of the year named by God in the books of Moses.

The Bible doesn't clearly indicate the calendar method used to keep track of Passover and other Hebrew holidays. However, for centuries the Jewish calendar has been based on the well-known 19 year cycle of the Sun and Moon. God in His providence established that 235 cycles of the Moon's phases is nearly equal to 19 solar years. This means that every 19 years, the Moon's phases will recur on the same dates of the solar year.

This 19 year "luni-solar" cycle was the basis for the calendar used in Babylon. In the west, its discovery is attributed to the Greek philosopher Meton, who may have learned it from the Babylonians. The 19 year cycle was generally well known and understood in antiquity, and was apparently used by the Persian rulers of Babylon after the restoration of Israel.

It appears that the modern Jewish calendar was directly influenced by the Babylonian calendar. In addition to using the 19 year cycle, the modern Jewish calendar uses months with names nearly identical to the Babylonian names. In the books of Nehemia, Ezra and Esther (which record events after the Babylonian exile) you can find the month names "Sivan," "Elui," and "Adar," nearly the same as their Babylonian counterparts.

Most notable is the month "Nisan," the first month of Spring, corresponding to the Mosaic month of "Abib." In the modern Jewish calendar, Passover occurs on the fourteenth day of Nisan. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, writing in about 90 A.D., gives us an astronomical reference for the month of Nisan....

In the month of Xanthicus, which is by us called "Nisan," and is the beginning of our year, on the fourteenth day of the lunar month, when the Sun is in Aries (for in this month it was that we were delivered from bondage under the Egyptians, the law ordained that we should every year slay the sacrific which I before told you we slew when we came out of Egypt, and which was called the Passover;....)

In the time of Josephus, the Sun was in the constellation Aries at the time of the Vernal Equinox, the first day of Spring in the northern hemisphere. And so in the traditional Jewish observance, the Passover feast begins with the Full Moon during the month of the Equinox.

* What's in a Name? *

The early church celebrated Passover in a similar manner to Jewish observances, though the customs changed over time. But our Christian Easter observance is still based on the Hebrew passover observance. For example, many churches observe the solemn, penitent "Holy Week" observance before Easter, based on the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread.

Many people today argue that "Easter" is really a pagan holiday, with bunnies and eggs symbolizing heathen fertility rites, not the resurrection of Jesus. Entire books have been written to show that the name "Easter" is derived from the name of the Babylonian fertility goddess "Ishtar" or "Astarte." Eggs and bunnies are clearly not of Biblical origin. But the name issue is mostly a matter of the semantics of the English language since other European languages paint a different picture.

The Hebrew word for "Passover" is "pesach." In Greek, the translated word is "pascha." Throughout church history, this name has been associated with the feast of Christ's resurrection. This name of this feast is translated in the following ways in the languages of the traditionally Christian nations of Europe:

Spanish = Pascua
Italian = Pasqua
French = Paque
Russian = Pascha
Swedish = Pask
Norwegian = Paske
Dutch = Pasen

However, in the English language, the feast of Christ's resurrection is commonly called "Easter." For example, in Acts 12:4 in the King James Bible, the word "Easter" is given as a translation of the word "pascha." If you read old-fashioned English writings, it's not uncommon to see the Easter feast called "The Pasch" (pronounced "pask") and Jesus often figuratively referred to as "the paschal lamb" and so forth. However, the word "Pasch" is out of style in our shallow generation of English speakers.

It appears that the word "Easter" is derived from the name of an old Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess associated with the east, who had a springtime festival. The German word is "Ostern," and since the Anglo-Saxons were originally a Germanic tribe, it's pretty clear that the words are related. While old habits apparently die hard in the English and German languages, it's pretty clear that most traditionally Christian nations name the Pasch as the proper name of the feast of Christ's resurrection.

* The Reckoning of the Pasch *

In the early days of the church, Christians kept the Pasch in the same manner as the Jews, beginning on the 14th of Nisan. But as time went by, Christianity developed distinctive observances that differed from Jewish practices.

In the church at Rome, it became customary to celebrate the Pasch on the Sunday following 14 Nisan, in order to commemorate Jesus's rising on the first day of the week. This became a controversy in the late Second Century. Victor I, the bishop of Rome, argued that the churches of Asia Minor should follow the Roman practice, rather than celebrate the Passover on 14 Nisan in the Jewish manner.

Since the early centuries, the Christian churches used the official Julian civil calendar of Rome to calculate the date of the Pasch. Since it was not always easy to know the date of the Equinox, calendar tables were prepared years in advance. The Roman method of calculating is explained here by the English scholar, the Venerable Bede, who wrote a definitive work on the subject around 700 A.D.:

The beginning of this month ought to be observed according to this rule: so that the fourteenth Moon of Easter never precedes the vernal equinox, but correctly appears either on the equinox itself (that is March 21) or after it has passed.

In the early centuries, during persecution by the Roman Empire, Christianity was a loose collection of local churches each led by an independent bishop. Since there was no central authority, not every local church agreed with the Roman method. For centuries, the various churches squabbled about the correct time for celebrating the Pasch.

A concord was finally established at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. The Council of Nicaea is best known for establishing and affirming the doctrine of the Trinity. Other proclamations were made, including the method of calculating the date of Easter. The synodical letter of the Nicene council reported....

We further proclaim to you the good news of the agreement concerning the holy Easter.... all our brethren in the east who formerly followed the custom of the Jews are henceforth to celebrate the said most sacred feast of Easter at the same time as the Romans....

The council emphasized that Easter should never occur during the Passover, due to antagonisms toward the Jewish people and some apparent inconsistencies in the Jewish calendar.

In this way, the Council of Nicaea established a common celebration of the Pasch. In the centuries following Nicaea, the church became increasingly uniform in other doctrines and practices, and centralized in authority. Nevertheless, the issue of Easter had come up again and again throughout church history, and there remain differences to this day.

* A Slight Problem *

As established by Julius Caesar, the solar year was reckoned as 365 days with an extra day added during a "leap year" every four years. In this way, the natural period of the seasonal year was understood to be 365 1/4 days in length. As explained by the Venerable Bede....

The Sun's year is complete when it returns to the same place with respect to the fixed stars after 365 days and 6 hours, that is a quarter of a whole day.

By this reckoning, the time from one Vernal Equinox to the next should have been 365 days, 6 hours. However, it was not known to either Julius Caesar or the Venerable Bede that in fact the solar year was precisely 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 42 seconds. As a result, the time from one Vernal Equinox to the next was overestimated by 11 minutes and 18 seconds.

We might be tempted to say that this is a tiny amount, what difference can 11 minutes make over the span of a year? Very little difference, but over a century of time, it can add up. This minor annual discrepancy amounts up to about three extra days every 400 years. And over many centuries, the accumulated days became considerable.

In the time of Caesar, the Vernal Equinox occurred on March 24. By the time of the Council of Nicaea, the Equinox was arriving on March 21. Throughout the Medieval period, the Equinox was arriving earlier and earlier. Consequently, the date of Easter was arriving earlier and earlier. Given enough centuries, Easter would regress backward through the calendar and begin to approach Christmas!

By the 1500s the Julian calendar had slipped 10 days from the Council of Nicaea, and the Equinox was arriving on March 11. Calendar reform became a topic for discussion among church authorities, in part because the nature of the problem was poorly understood. The revolutionary work of Mikolaj Kopernik (a.k.a. "Copernicus") was inspired by the effort to reform the calendar. In 1543 he wrote....

When the Lateran Council was considering the question of reforming the Ecclesiastical Calendar, no decision was reached, for the sole reason that the magnitude of the year and the months and the movements of Sun and Moon had not yet been measured with sufficient accuracy.

(Of course, Kopernik's solution included the novel idea of placing the Earth in orbit around the Sun, but that's another story.)

The final solution was adopted 40 years later, in 1582. Upon consulting with the learned astronomers of the time, Pope Gregory XIII issued a proclamation that restored the calendar....

So thus that the Vernal Equinox, which was fixed by the fathers of the Nicene Council at March 21, is replaced on this date, we prescribe and order that there is removed, from October of the year 1582, the ten days which go from the 5th through the 14th inclusively. The day which follows the 4th, when one traditionally celebrates St. Francis of Assisi, shall be the 15th.

In this way, the Equinox once again arrived on March 21, as it had in 325 A.D. To accommodate future drift in the calendar, Gregory made the following provision....

Then, lest the Equinox recede from March 21 in the future, we establish that a bissextile (a.k.a. "leap year") shall be inserted every four years (as with the present custom), except in centennial years.... Thus, the years 1700, 1800 and 1900 will not be bissextile, and then, as with the habit with which we are accustomed, the year 2000 will have a bissextile intercalation day, as the day February 29, and that the same order of intermittent intercalations in each four hundred year period will be preserved in perpetuity.

And so Gregory established that three out of four centennial years would not be leap years, so as to drop three days from every 400 years, and thus maintain the predictable order of Easter and the seasons. Remarkably, Gregory looked ahead from the Middle Ages to our lifetimes to establish that the year 2000 would be the first centennial leap year in 400 years. Sadly, our generation is so ignorant of classical astronomy that February 29, 2000 came and went with little or no notice, in the media or otherwise.
* Gradual Acceptance *

The reformed Gregorian Calendar was immediately adopted in October, 1582 throughout the Roman Catholic nations of Europe. But the Protestant and Eastern Orthodox nations resisted this "popish innovation." One early Protestant proponent of the new calendar was the astronomer Johannes Kepler. In 1597, he argued with his superiors that it was "small-minded to demonstrate Protestant independence of thought by protesting against a most useful reform introduced by the Catholic Church."

For a century and a half thereafter, the nations of Europe maintained an awkward system of keeping two dates for every notable event, one in the "Old Style" of the Julian Calendar, and another in the "New Style" of the Gregorian Calendar. For example, one might notice that George Washington's birthday is sometimes given as "February 11, 1732 O.S., February 22, 1732 N.S."

Over time, the Protestant nations gradually accepted the Gregorian Calendar. In 1752, England finally adopted the New Style, and its American colonies followed at the same time. Here's how it was reported in "Poor Richard's Almanack" by "Richard Saunders," a.k.a. Benjamin Franklin....

...the King and Parliament have thought fit to alter our Year, by taking eleven days out of September, 1752, and directing us to begin our Account for the future on the first of January.... wishing withal, according to ancient Custom, that this New Year (which is indeed a New Year, such an one as we never saw before, and shall never see again) may be a happy Year to all my kind Readers.

Nowadays, the Gregorian Calendar has become the civil calendar that regulates the affairs of the entire secular world, including nations far and wide that have no historical Christian roots.

The Eastern Orthodox church still retains the Julian Calendar for regulating its church calendar. By the 21st century, the seasons have slipped 13 days from the time of Nicaea. So the Vernal Equinox is now arriving on March 8, O.S. The Eastern church celebrates Christmas on December 25 as reckoned by the Julian Calendar, which is January 7 on the Gregorian Calendar.

One principle objection of the Eastern Orthodox church is that the Gregorian Calendar did not reiterate the Nicene prohibition against celebrating Easter after the Jewish Passover. As a matter of fact, we can witness this now in the year 2003. This month, Passover is on April 17, and the Gregorian Easter in on April 20. However, the Orthodox Easter is one week later, on April 27, in accordance with the decree of Nicaea.

So ironically, 1700 years after the Council of Nicaea established a common celebration of Easter, there is still disagreement over this very issue.

Jay Ryan is the author of Signs & Seasons, an illustrated, Biblically-centered homeschool curriculum for Classical Astronomy. He is also the creator of the Classical Astronomy Update, an email astronomy newseltter especially for Christian homeschoolers.  Visit his website at ClassicalAstronomy.com.

In the modern world, we use "Standard Time" in which the whole world is divided into 24 time zones. As a result, on any day of the year at any latitude, the times of actual sunrise and sunset vary depending on your location within a time zone -- the Sun rises and sets earlier in the eastern end of a time zone, and later in the western end of a time zone.

Standard Time and Daylight Savings are conveniences of our modern world, but this whole scheme tampers with the classical practices of astronomical timekeeping. Throughout history, time was measured according to "Sundial Time." "12 Noon" was simply the time when the Sun reached it's highest point in the sky, directly above Due South. Each person saw Noon at a unique time for that location. One sundial would point to Noon while a sundial 50 miles away would read differently by a few minutes.

This system worked fine until our current modern period where inventions of the telegraph and the railroad enabled high speed transportation and communication, requiring a common standard reference for telling time. The problem is, with the current system, the Sun no longer reaches its highest point in the sky at 12 Noon.

Nowadays with Standard Time and Daylight Savings, the Sun can reach "High Noon" in the sky as late as 1:30 PM. The modern system of timekeeping plays havoc with the natural order of "Sundial Time." Thus, timekeeping is now decoupled from God's natural timekeepers, the Sun and Moon. Perhaps this is one reason why so few people today understand or appreciate Classical Astronomy, since we no longer take our time directly from the Sun. Sundials can be corrected for Standard Time and Daylight Savings, but not many people today know the tricks. So nowadays most sundials are simply lawn decorations, but not useful as timekeepers.

Do you have a pre-schooler who is begging you to teach them how to read? If you want to guide your young child through the rewarding process of learning to read, here are some steps you can take to make the transition smooth.

Readiness - Teach your child all of the letters of the alphabet. They should recognize both capital and lowercase versions of each letter. As you teach the letters, teach the corresponding short-vowel sounds. For example, show your child the capital and lowercase versions of the letter 'e.' Make sure you let them know that the 'e' says the 'eh' sound. Don't worry about the long-vowel sounds yet; they will come later.

Blending - When your child has mastered the letters as well as their sounds, you can work on blending skills. This is where your child will look at a word, such as 'cat,' and use the sounds he has mastered to blend the letters into a recognizable word. Have him name each letter is first. Then, ask him what sound each letter makes. Now, have him repeat only the sound of each letter. C - A - T. You can use a pen or your fingertip to point to each letter. Have him keep repeating the sounds faster until you hear the sounds blend enough to form the word.

Note on Blending: This may take a great deal of practice. Patience is key here. Also, if your child is not blending after a few days of consistent practice and is showing signs of frustration, you may want to hold off for a few weeks and come back to it. Developmentally, some children blend sooner than others. When my son was four years old, he desperately wanted to learn to read. Blending didn't come right away, so we put it to the side for two months. When we tried after that break, it came quite quickly. For other children, blending skills may not develop until they are five or six-years-old. Blending is a very developmentally conditional skill.

Sight Words - After you have mastered three-letter, short-vowel words, you can try easy readers, such as the Bob Books. To read these books, your child will have to learn some of the basic sight words that are very common to the English language, such as 'the,' 'to,' and 'be.' While you are encouraging your child to sound out most words, you can explain that these words don't 'follow the rules' and that they need to be memorized.

Fluency - As you work on learning other sound combinations, your child will be able to read through some of the early reader books. Get excited for your child. He has worked hard to learn a new skill and the feeling of accomplishment he will have upon reading his first, whole book is well-deserved. Help him to keep practicing. Listen to him as he reads to you. You can then gently correct him as he goes. Your input will encourage him as well as keep bad habits from forming.

Read Alouds - Reading to your children is still the single, most important step you can take for reading readiness. By hearing good language often, the proper use of language is planted firmly in a child's mind. As they learn to read, children draw from that repository to correctly read sentences and take meaning from the text.

Take your reading instruction step-by-step, and be sure to listen to cues from your child. With patience and practice, you can teach your pre-schooler to read.

One of the biggest concerns of secondary school teachers and college instructors is that students are failing to learn the critical reading skills that they need to progress satisfactorily through the upper levels of their education. The prevailing concern is that students who do not learn these skills sufficiently in the lower grades will be unable to properly process the academic information they are presented with in the future. Commercial reading software developers have worked hard to create software that gives learners real opportunities to read critically and develop critical reading, and critical thinking, skills.

Computer Software is Interactive

One of the primary benefits of commercial reading software is its ability to engage the student. Most current reading software requires that a student do more than merely punch buttons. Most programs strive to develop real two-way communication with the student, allowing the student to become involved in the learning process. Interactive software provides students with the opportunity to generate their own questions and leads the student through guided practice situations. Newer software has even developed ways for students to interact with each other via the internet. Students work together in virtual groups to expand the learning experience.

Computer Software Uses Scientifically-Backed Research to Educate

The reality is that educational software that purports to teach without the backing of sound research and statistics often fails to hit the mark when it comes to really educating children. For this reason, it is important to use software based on established teaching strategies as well as credible research studies. Computer software also helps learners fill in any gaps in prior knowledge with supplementary video, PowerPoint, and other interactive presentations. Many in-class software programs also include an online component that encourages learners to access additional information and share that information with learners across the world.

Computer Software Creates a "Real" Learning Environment

Until the advent of desktop computers, reading experiences were limited to print materials. Early programs were only used as supplements to a general reading lesson, rather than acting as a stand-alone reading experience. These factors meant that early computer reading programs could not meet the needs of children learning to read critically. Today's reading software can be used in conjunction with traditional reading programs, instead of such programs, or as a supplement to them. This flexibility indicates that reading software has come a long way in providing real reading experiences which mimic those of print materials, yet yield readily to formatting changes. The ability of the new generation of reading software also lends itself easily to a collaborative social environment which studies indicate helps learners construct meaning from reading materials.

Reading software developers are working hard to keep up with the demand for increasingly technical reading opportunities. As the world goes digital, the next generation of readers accesses more information online than ever before via their computers and hand-held devices such as their mobile phones, X-boxes, Ipods and Kindles. Formulating reading programs that incorporate this trend will serve to make sure that technology keeps up with consumer preferences and will provide new readers with viable, interactive reading lessons that stimulate the imagination and increase learner knowledge.

Michael Levy is a teacher who has published more than 250 articles about learning. His latest project is Reading Buddy 2.0, software for teaching children to learn to read basic English using an innovative syllabics methodology. Would you like to know for sure if your child is really ready to learn to read? Claim your free copy of Reading Buddy 2.0.