Since it’s BIRD MONTH at the Simple Homeschool, and I just happened to have a brand new addition to my family in the form of a baby parrot, I decided to post up some very informative images to help young learners understand that not all birds develop the same way.

Everyone has seen a chick or a duckling.  Both of which are born with downy feathers on their bodies and open eyes.  Chicks born in this fashion are called precocial.   Precocial chicks are strong enough to leave the nest very soon after hatching. Examples of birds that are precocial are of course, chickens and ducks, but also include most other gamebirds (turkeys, quail, pheasant) and shorebirds.

On the other extreme are the altricial chicks.  These chicks hatch from eggs with no body covering and with eyes closed. They require long and intensive periods of parental nurturing before they are able to leave the nest.  Most birds who make nests in trees and cavities are altricial.  In contrast, birds that tend to nest on the ground, like turkeys and ducks, must hatch chicks that have at least a few basic survival techniques (such as running!).

Since nothing in nature is absolute, there are degrees of each of these body covering strategies – some birds born with down and eyes open, but cannot walk away from the nest within a few hours like a chick and require feeding from parents.  Birds that have these characteristics include gulls and terns.

In addition, there are also birds that are born with down, but with eyes closed and unable to care for themselves such as hawks, owls, and herons.

Precocial birds tend to have larger eggs that contain more nutrients and this contributes to their survivability as chicks on the ground, near predators.  The extra nutrients inside the egg ensure that the muscles can move the legs and the lungs can draw in enough air.

This series of images comes from the breeder where I purchased my new Indian ringneck parakeet.  It begins with the bird at approximately 2 weeks of age and continues up to eight weeks of age.

As you can see, parrots appear completely altricial, but the mother parrot will produce a (relatively) large nutrient rich egg so that the chick will have the best of both worlds upon hatching.

In addition, parrots are born with (again, relatively) large brains that will continue to grow after birth, much like a human child, due to the heavy investment by the parent in feeding and care.

I have struggled teaching grammar in homeschool since, well – since the very beginning.  My oldest was in seventh grade when we started, so we had to jump right in with diagramming sentences and all that good junk.

Needless to say, it’s pretty boring stuff.

In addition, I am NOT a grammarian, nor am I interested in the opinions of others who think I should only use one space after a period instead of two.  If you tell me I have to use an ‘an’ before words that start with h, I’ll point to my sixth grade teacher Mrs. Sowards, who told me it was optional.  Hence, I option to not do that – until I option to do it, that is.

See where I’m going here?  I could care less.

But, I am in the business of writing.  So – yeah.  I really do have to care sometimes.  And since I have started to write a lot of fiction lately, this grammar stuff has been on my mind a bit.  When I was invited to review Grammarly.com to see if it would be helpful to homeschoolers, naturally I thought – heck, this would probably be helpful to me! It turns out I was correct.

Grammarly.com is extremely easy to use – simply log in, paste your text in a box, choose what type of grammar check you’d like to run, and press Review.

Ta da.

I checked three works to see how I did.  The first was a creative writing piece from my upcoming novel.  (see results below)

I scored a 78 out of 100.  Grammarly thinks that I had a few typos (I did, but they were on purpose) and that I could use some help with punctuation within a sentence.  Creative writing is hard to check for grammar because some of it is style.  Some of mine was style, but all in all I liked the fact that Grammarly gave me the option to double check things that looked suspicious.

The second was a homework assignment I found leftover from grad school that required me to critique an autopsy report.  It had a lot of technical jargon and two lists. (see results below)

I scored 83 out of 100 using the casual writing checker.  This piece was mostly marked off for using technical abbreviations for scientific terms and not using punctuation within my lists.

The third was another homework assignment that looked like one continuous run-on sentence.  Not a paragraph in sight. (see results below)

I got a 50 this time.  This piece contained almost all punctuation within sentence errors – in other words, commas.  Most writers, and probably all editors, have a love hate relationship with the comma.  It can do so much, but is often overused – or misused.  After reviewing my internal sentence punctuation, I found Grammarly to be right on the button with my lack of comma usage.  I can only vaguely remember this assignment, but I can tell you – you don’t get marked off for commas in toxicology class, so I never cared and nobody else did either.

Good job, Grammarly.

All in all I am very pleased with how easy it is to use Grammarly as well as the detail of explanation given for each error.  Students (and writers who didn’t major in English) can easily review all errors and see if they require fixing.

Not only would I find Grammarly.com to be useful for homeschool students who want to learn to edit their own work, this would also be useful to homeschool parents who don’t have the skill or desire to check all those pesky grammar mistakes when the kiddos write papers.

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Did You Know You Were RADICAL?

How the Nation Views Homeshooling

Like my last blog post - this one deals with the state of the nation's tolerance level for homeschooling.  I am, and have been for several years, under the assumption that the view of homeschooling in mainstream society was one of reluctant acceptance.  A view that had matured to a certain degree over the years to blossom into the idea that homeschool had become an accepted outer circle fringe choice for parents.  Maybe not quite mainstream, yet not the albatross of weirdness that it once was.

I was pretty confident in this assumption until I was browsing a National Review article called Coyotes in the State of Nature, by Kevin Williamson last week.  It is really a second amendment rights piece that illustrates how the Progressives hate the fact that the Constitution as it reads would allow just about anyone to apply for a gun permit.  Which just blew my mind anyway.  Living in Colorado gun permit means a conceal carry permit - not an actual permit to simply own a gun in your house.  Anyway - fast forward to page three of the article and he began to wrap things up with this paragraph:

"The horror that progressives feel for gun owners is in many ways like the horror they feel for homeschoolers, whom they recognize, correctly, as one of the few truly radical movements in America. Prof. Robin West of Georgetown University’s law school offers a typical reaction to the phenomenon: “The husbands and wives in these families feel themselves to be under a religious compulsion to have large families, a homebound and submissive wife and mother who is responsible for the schooling of the children, and only one breadwinner. These families are not living in romantic, rural, self-sufficient farmhouses; they are in trailer parks, 1,000-square-foot homes, houses owned by relatives, and some, on tarps in fields or parking lots. Their lack of job skills, passed from one generation to the next, depresses the community’s overall economic health and their state’s tax base.” God defend the holy tax base!"

I was, in all respects, a little taken aback to be honest.  People really see us as homeless vacant lot living weirdos?  Is that the mainstream image of homeschool?  Are we, as Williamson points out, "one of the few truly radical movements in America."  Really?

How did that happen?  I mean, I know how that happened - it is a rhetorical question.  But ask yourself - how did educating one's child become such a threat to the Progressive ideology?  I looked up the “scholarly piece” Williamson quotes in his article and read it for myself.  Yup.  Sure enough Prof. Robin West of Georgetown University does indeed feel we are tarp-living homeless people who refuse to contribute their fair share of the tax base by having mothers stay home to - gasp - teach their own children.

So, is it me or are these people the ones living in Bizzaro-Land?  Am I the only one who thinks sending your kids to school for brainwashing is abnormal?

I guess it just stuns me that after all these years people still hate the homeschoolers.  They make up outrageous lies about us and "respected publications" such as Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly, from The Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland would print an article filled with such non-scholarly work.  A piece filled with bigotry and bias a mile long.  A piece that is titled "The Harms of Homeschooling".  I won't bother to link to it - that rag doesn't deserve my backlink.  If you really want to read the garbage you can do a search and find it almost anywhere.

My point for this post is the same as the last post - homeschoolers are still considered "radical".  Heck, when a guy who writes for the National Review can print the sentence "The horror that progressives feel for gun owners is in many ways like the horror they feel for homeschoolers, whom they recognize, correctly, as one of the few truly radical movements in America." and say it with conviction - we have to know we have a problem.