I just finished the 2007-2008 school calendar. It is located
here. The main reason that I produce this is so that those enrolled in VCA will know when to send the tests at the end of each quarter. I also like to post the vacation schedule that is lined up to public schools in our local area in Maine. If you are from another state, I suggest calling your local public school and obtaining their vacation calendar if you are interested in having your children take breaks at the same time.
I just finished the 2006-2007 school calendar. It is located
here. The main reason that I produce this is so that those enrolled in VCA will know when to send the tests at the end of each quarter. I also like to post the vacation schedule that is lined up to public schools in our local area in Maine. If you are from another state, I suggest calling your local public school and obtaining their vacation calendar if you are interested in having your children take breaks at the same time.
Well everyone should be gearing up for the 2006-2007 school year. Things have certainly gotten busy around here as everyone is making their orders just in time to start the school year in September. If you are considering homeschooling for this coming year, be sure to contact us soon, as it takes a couple of weeks to get through the process to get your son or daughter the curriculum they need for school. Also, I will be posting a calendar for this coming year hopefully by the end of next week. I hope everyone has had a blessed summer!
The home school calendar for this year is finished and published
here. If you have any questions, feel free to
contact me. The permanent link is located in the Academy Information section under the "Enrollment" link.
Ok--for those of you who have been looking for the home school program calendar for the 2005-2006 school year, I will be publishing it to the Web tomorrow. The first day of home school will be Monday, August 29 (a couple of days before the public school). The usual Christmas, Winter, and Spring breaks have been scheduled to coincide with the public schools in our area (Augusta, Maine). If you would like to make sure these break times line up with your local area, just give the high school in town a call and they will be happy to share their schedule with you. Having a home school program calendar is important even if you are homeschooling independent of VCA. Just like having a goal in mind with what you are teaching academically, so having a calendar for the year gives you the basic structure that will help guide you toward your goals. One of the things that will hurt your home school program endeavor is if you do not provide any schedule at all. Students need to have a time frame from day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month. Goals need to be set and achieved by both the home school parents and the home schooled children. VCA helps you to not only meet your academic goals from year to year with our preset academic scope and sequence, but we will also help you with setting goals and achieving them--the basic concept behind having the calendar. Home school programs can be flexible, of course, but do not confuse flexibility with not having goals and structure. No schedule usually equates to little work...sometimes hardly any work. Don't get caught in that trap.
Accreditation is quite the "buzz" word in the academic world. This sometimes creates quite the hang up for some folks when deciding on what home school program or private school to enroll in. The reality is that accreditation is more a selling point for a private school than a one way ticket into a college or university. The truth is that colleges and universities look at several factors when a person is applying to their school--entrance exams, SAT scores, GPA, letters of recommendation, etc. Your student may have a diploma from an accredited school, private or public, and still not be permitted to enroll in the college or university of their choosing based on other factors. I have had students graduate from this program and attend colleges with no problem though we have never had any accreditation status. With all this said, I do see the value in accreditation for the purpose of setting standards and displaying that a certain school is striving for the highest level of commitment to education. As stated on the
National Association of Private Schools website, accreditation means: "This institution is fulfilling its stated purpose with integrity and excellence." So, rather than focusing on accreditation as some college entrance "push button", parents should be thinking more of what that means in terms of quality of education while their student is still in high school. As far as the A.C.E. curriculum is concerned, it is recognized by the Legislature of every U.S. State as quality curriculum. Thousands of students have enrolled in hundreds of colleges and universities across the U.S. in the past several decades who had graduated with non-accredited diplomas from schools using the A.C.E. curriculum. Since I recognize the value of accreditation in terms of what it means to the school, the parent, and the student, I will be seeking out accreditation with a reputable, yet affordable organization. VCA is still very small; however, I think accreditation will go a long way toward establishing more credibility with those seeking affiliation with us in the future. I will post here when I find the right organization and begin the application process.
Still plugging away at the site. You will notice that I have added a "Foreign Language Learning Software" link to the right hand column. This is a link to the Rosetta Stone language software site. If you decide that you want to have your child take a foreign language in high school (or if you want to take one for that matter), you may simply purchase directly from them rather than going through me as I would have to charge you more money. Though I have not personally tried this software, I understand that it is quite good. They offer many different languages: German, French, Russian, Spanish, etc. I have one high school student that is going to be taking Hebrew this year! Brave young man... I guess I'll be asking him about his experience with learning this foreign language utilizing the Rosetta software, and I'll report back at a later time.
More modifications have been made to the site navigation to make it more user friendly. I also added a link directory which hopfully will become a useful resource. I anticipate that it will also have some themes that will help in the education of your children. It will be a work in progress, but hopefully over time it will become more useful. There is also a place to add your link to the directory if it is along the home school theme. Someone can actually advertise on the link section too! Lots to do...so little time.
I worked quite a bit on this site again today. I worked mostly on the format of the enrollment area and getting the "Conditions of Use", "Privacy Notice", and "Shipping and Returns" policy up. I am working as fast as I can as I really want this to be done ASAP. I know that many people across the country are going to be looking at their homeschool options for 2005 and 2006, and I want to be ready to process them. There are several forms in the enrollment area that I have not put up on the Web yet, and the online enrollment forms will be a little bit more involved as there is much coding that goes into a substantial form. At any rate, I am really getting excited and have several ideas bouncing around my head that should make this a useful home school site...even if you don't sign up through my program. I'm certain that many of those who were with me last year have not seen this site yet, so I will be sending out letters (hopefully Monday), letting them know about it. Enjoy the weekend my friends!
I have not made any entries for a quite a few days; however, I have been working hard behind the scenes here. Feel free to use the
Registration link above and see how I am incorporating the ability to pay for the annual tuition online. You will have to sign up for an account on that page, which is a good idea since this will help you track your current and past orders. You will have the ability to pay by check (nothing will be ordered from my distributor until I receive payment), or pay using PayPal. In case you are wondering, you do not need to sign up for a PayPal account to process your credit card payments. I will
not be keeping any credit card information in any database related to this site since PayPal handles everything related to credit cards on their secure and safely encrypted server. If you are waiting to get things set up for next year, I should be done with the ordering part of the site by next week...(Lord willing...). The other thing that I would like to do is somehow set everyone who creates and account on the "shopping cart" side of the site to be be able to log on here on this page and comment on any posts that have been made. I do not, at this point, think it is wise to just open things up to everyone on the net, as this may open us up to spammers or evil-doers that want to post malicious or crude things.
Today I have added two drop down menus. One that contains links to the homeschool laws for each state. The drop down menu is features links to home school associations throughout all the states. No doubt there are more than what I listed; however, this should give you a good starting point to get connected with homeschool groups in your area. I noticed in my travels that there are also Yahoo! Groups that you can team up with. I found one for the state of Maine here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MaineHomeschooling.
I have no personal experience with any of these groups; however, I think that I may join one or two to see how they are. Feel free to use the contact form if you have any suggestions about this site. Also, you will notice that the "Enrollment Procedure" link has nothing on that page as of today. This is because there are some details that I am trying to work out in order to make it more user friendly.
Ok. I added the a nice resource page containing links to the
Christianbook.com categories for homeschooling. Hopefully you will be able to find new and interesting material to help with your home schooling endeavor, and save money at the same time. I have also added the
RSS link in the top hand corner of this page. If you don't know much about RSS go to the
"what's this" link and find out how to utilize it. RSS, in a nut shell, gives you the ability and flexibility to subscribe to this site's information on a daily basis without it cluttering your inbox. This was a long day of programming. I will continue my work on another day. I have all kinds of ideas about how to make this site really useful, so please pray for my ability to implement as much as possible without losing the usability of the site.
Well, I got a lot done, but there is still much more to do. I need to add the RSS links and information about that. I also need to add a place to make payments for the home school tuition. We're getting there. Also, please note that I have added some legal resources on the right hand side, and I will be putting state home school groups for every state just under those links. Hopefully I will be able to get some quality resources in the resource area soon too. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via the contact link or give me a call (number listed on that page too).
VCA is currently undergoing a bit of a face life. The main reason is because I am changing the site over to a CMS (content management system) that will hopefully allow us to provide a more useful information that can be easily updated. With CMS, VCA will be able to provide you with an RSS (RDF Site Summary - formerly called Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) feed. RSS is a method of describing news or other Web content that is available for "feeding" (distribution or syndication) from an online publisher to Web users. If you are not familiar with news feeds and RSS, don't worry, VCA will provide all the information on how to set up a feed so that you do not need to come back to the site to obtain current information. You can have it go directly to your computer when you connect to the internet! So, please be patient as I will attempt to get this up and going ASAP. Thank you.
