Try This At Home

At heart, I want to be a

no television,

live in the woods,

everybody drink from a shared tin cup we dip in the stream outside of our door,

type of family.

Or so I like to imagine.

But I married this guy and he likes movies and big televisions and gadgets.

And, uh, I sort of have found that I love gadgets too.

Plus, as much as I love the idea of a Laura Ingalls Wilder existence,

(and I do love the idea – I mean, I named a kid after the Wilder family so that should prove something)

I know that I would soon grow weary of an outhouse and the lack of a dishwasher and dirt floors.

(Actually, walking on dirt floors would probably not be all that different from walking on dirty floors – eh?)

(Oh yeah, another sign of my devotion to Ms. Wilder is the fact that for Riley’s fifth grade school year she and I studied the Little House on the Prairie books books as a complete curriculum and then traveled all across the country with two toddlers and an infant exploring where the Ingalls family lived and entering Riley into a Laura-look-alike contest where she wore a legitimate prairie dress and bonnet and braids and looked just like the Laura Ingalls we all imagine even if Riley did not win the actual contest despite the fact that Kevin and I and both of my parents thought that she should.)

Now, back to my regularly scheduled post here.

What was I saying?

Oh yes.

I sometimes envision operating a

nature-loving, tree-hugging, green-living

type of homeschool.

And in some ways,

maybe we are that too.

But we are also a

television-watching, computer-game-playing, gadget-owning

type of homeschool as well.

And although I truly pursue simple first and foremost

(handheld paper books, walking in the woods, learning to sew with a needle)

I must admit that a little technology and a bit of screen time has revolutionized one particular subject at our School of Keigley of late.

Apple recently introduced the ability to acquire apps for your desktop computer.

(Which I love, as it enables the children to click directly to an educational game without actually being online and therefore running the risk of accidentally clicking off the approved page and on to some inappropriate unapproved page.)

I downloaded a few games that I thought looked promising in a few areas that I think are a bit weak in our homeschool line up.

One such $1.99 purchase was a little game called Stack the States.

We don’t do a lot of geography work just yet since the kids are still rather young.

We have maps hanging on the walls of the bathroom and the hall and we often point out places like Tybee Island and Uncle Dean’s house in Wyoming or Heidi’s home in Switzerland.

But that’s been about the extent of our geography lessons.

Up till now.

Enter Stack the States game.

It features the shapes of states about which the player must answer questions to earn the states and then eventually earn enough states to fill in their blank United States map.

London is particularly infatuated with the game.

Yesterday, just for fun, I set a blank map of the U.S. in front of her and asked her to fill in all the states that she could name by memory alone.

And she did.

And I was impressed.

Look for yourself.

I’m not giving up on real books and watching birds and cooking in our kitchen.

But I guess I’ll have to merge my Laura Ingalls ideals with my Mac loving realities.