Spending Per Student, By School District

Check it out:

The *NEW* "Spending Per Student, By School District" interactive map on NPR's website

Pretty interesting stuff. They will be rolling out a whole series of news articles over the next three weeks on how education funding imbalances happen and why they matter.

This is NOT news that made NPR but today is my birthday and I am now 40 years old! And to celebrate I got myself some new books (of course):

Don't Bite the Hook: Finding Freedom from Anger, Resentment,
and Other Destructive Emotions
by Pema Chodron

I've been writing a lot of personal things lately but, rest assured, we are still homeschooling. Natalie's main lesson topic is Shakespearean Drama. She is almost done with Romeo & Juliet and we will be starting Much Ado About Nothing this week. Leah is finishing up her Norse Mythology block. Of course, we also have daily math practice (last week included math facts, mental math, logic puzzles, coordinate grids and graphing ordered pairs for Leah, and graphing systems of equations for Natalie) and language practice (last week's focus was reading expository text). Weekly we have art and handwork (we have been dyeing silks and needle felting), continuing with their research papers (finishing rough drafts), gardening, hiking, and so on. We are still working on learning Latin and I have a friend who is fluent in both English and Spanish who is going to be spending more time with the children doing total immersion. The girls are designing their own Science experiments this week using our Puddle Questions book. This week we are also practicing editing passages with spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes (this is something they REALLY need to do daily), wet felting our story aprons and practicing puppetry, and doing basic math skills practice (which has to be CONSTANT), including reviewing how to use a protractor and measuring angles, as well as translations / transformations / rotations, ratio and proportion, area and perimeter, and the Pythagorean Theorem.