Since I gave you one Mary Travers I thought it would be fun to add the other! Of course, she’s better known as La Bolduc! Here’s a song for my Dad, who just celebrated his birthday (if you want to know how old he is you’ll have to ask him, because I’m not telling…)

Daddy, this song ought to remind you of the last time we got the family together. (I still have photos where we look as though we’ve got some sort of tropical malady!)

For those who would like to include a study of Canadian singers and songwriters in their arts education, these links will be worth following:

The Wikipedia entry on La Bolduc has a good bit of information on her life and career

Historica has a one-minute vignette about the beginning of Mary Travers recording career - and her determination to be heard!

The Virtual Gramophone (Collections Canada) has a wonderful article about the rise and fall of our best known chansonnière

Montreal public libraries have a number of books and recordings to help you explore a bit further

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Photo of La Bolduc by Yousuf Karsh, public domain in Canada, is still subject to copyright outside of Canada

When I was about ten years old, Mom went back home for a visit and returned with a stack of mementos from her adolescence. She and her sisters had gone out to look at the old farm house and had later divvied up some 45’s, among other things. The records were so thick! They were old and faded, a bit scratchy in places. And the labels looked so different from the ones on the 45’s we owned. But we took them down to the basement and popped them onto the record player (I think it was the Disney one, with Mickey Mouse’s hand holding the needle over the record as it spun.)

We already knew Happy Days, with its theme song Rock Around the Clock. We’d heard Splish Splash, Great Balls of Fire, and Hound Dog. Now we discovered Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Teen Ager in Love, and Tom Dooley. We played them for hours! We enjoyed the music but also savoured, I think, the great difference between our parents’ music and our own. (If you we only knew then! There may be some of you reading this entry who have never held a 45 in your hands, never heard a record played unless it was being scratched by a DJ with baggy pants.)

Yesterday the Kingston Trio said good-bye to John Stewart, who also wrote the Monkees hit song Daydream Believer. I thought it would be fitting to share another of the group’s songs. It has long been a favourite of mine, and I’ve recently discovered that Dojogirl loves it too. This version is sung by the Kingston Trio and Mary Travers of Peter, Paul & Mary.

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Here are some links that may be useful for those wanting a primary math text or a supplement to their current text. These are all free materials, most of which are public domain textbooks from the turn of the 20th century. Some people may prefer more contemporary approaches to teaching math, but for those who are most comfortable with a more familiar, traditional methodology these books will surely include at least one that is helpful.

1 ) MEP Math (complete K-12 curriculum) and a collection of free texts - Old Fashioned Education

2 ) Ray’s Arithmetic
If you live in the United States, simply go to Googlebooks. You should be able to download a large number of texts free of charge.

If you are outside the United States you will likely not have the download links, due to international copyright concerns. You can find some of the books at the Internet Archive.

To get the right book for your child’s grade level, the general rule of thumb is as follows:

Primary Arithmetic: grades 1 & 2

Intellectual Arithmetic: grades 3 & 4

Key to Practical Arithmetic + Test Problems for Practical Arithmetic: grades 5 & 6

Key to Higher Arithmetic: grades 7-8 or even 9

You may also find it helpful to join the Ray’s Arithmetic mailing list, for more information about placement or links to free downloads.

Finally, here’s a brief biography of Joseph Ray.

3 ) First-Lessons in Arithmetic (Jones Bros., 1878) - courtesy of Don Potter - you’ll download ten free PDF’s

4 ) First Lessons in Numbers : Oral and Written (on the basis of works by Benjamin Greenleaf) by Henry Bartlett Maglathlin (Boston : Leach, Shewell, and Sanborn, c1881) - courtesy of 19th Century Schoolbooks (75+ lessons for on-screen viewing or page-at-a-time printing)

5 ) First Book in Arithmetic by Milton B. Goff (Pittsburgh : H.I. Gourley, c1876) - courtesy of 19th Century Schoolbooks

6 ) Amusements in Mathematics by Henry Ernest Dudeney (c1917) - courtesy Project Gutenberg, for children with established math skills

7 ) College Math Texts - a whole list, courtesy of Georgia Institute of Technology

8 ) Math eBooks - courtesy XP Math, includes texts for primary grades up through university

9 ) More College Math Texts - courtesy Textbook Revolution, where you can find many more free downloadable texts for other subjects, too

10 ) Contemporary College-Level Texts - Freeload Press (go to the booklist and click the subject tab to find math books) - requires registration and they ask you to answer a short survey - TANSTAAFL, but it’s close!

11 ) Wikibooks Math Bookshelf - High school and college level

12 ) College Texts & Math Software - courtesy of Jean-Marc Gulliet, NYU

13) Elementary Algebra, 3rd edition by Nustad and Wesner (Dubuque, IA : Wm C. Brown, 1992) - courtesy Totally Free Math

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Freeload Press would like to offer free, up to date college-level texts to students and teachers. In fact, they’d like to see instructors choosing their books instead of the $100+ commercially available texts most college professors order for their students each year.

Obviously, a free textbook is going to be a big hit with students. There are some college professors now supporting the idea, as well. They say that textbooks try to be too fancy & glitzy, and they try to cram in too much material in their attempts to compete for professors’ approval. But profs say no book can be all things to all people. Believe it or not, they’d rather see their students with an affordable text - or maybe a couple less expensive texts instead of a $400 that still can’t possibly cover everything.

Here’s another reason that Freeload e-texts are a viable option: they’re in a format students are already using for hours each day. Students are interfacing with technology more than ever today, and they don’t mind reading on their computer or portable device. The inserted ads help pay for the books to be developed and distributed. So the folks who produced the book get a fair living from it, and the student gets a quality book for free.

Here’s a video that introduces the idea behind Freeload Press, whose mission is to liberate textbooks and study aids:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o&rel=1&border=1]

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If you are using Ambleside Online (AO) you might want to get a free copy of a new pamphlet that gives some background on Charlotte Mason and AO. Use it in your homeschool records, to pass out to curious family or friends when they ask about homeschooling, or to point other homeschoolers towards a helpful resource.

The pamphlet is a double-sided PDF file for you to print & tri-fold. It contains a brief background of both Charlotte Mason and Ambleside Online, and describes some of the benefits of using the free AO curriculum. CM subject areas such as the biographies (Plutarch) and artist/composer study are mentioned. Several links are provided for those who need more information or support, and examples are listed to give an idea of the living books used for several subjects.

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Clipart courtesy of Clipart ETC. Many thanks for this tremendous educational resource!

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