Practical Arts and Research Literacy

2 courses in one printed volume: Home Base: Practical Arts and Life Skills and Finding, Judging, and Using Information: Research Literacy for the Web Era. A semester of the skills a household actually runs on, done for real with a parent nearby: cooking from knife skills to a family dinner, grocery pricing and food storage, sewing and mending, basic tools and small repairs, laundry and cleaning systems, and money and time management, ending with the student planning and running the whole house for one day. Every week produces something real: a meal, a fixed thing, a plan. Short spoken check-ins with Clara keep the record. This course teaches your kid that search results, library catalogs, and social feeds don't hand them "the truth," they hand them the output of a system with rules, and sometimes money, behind it. Over a semester they learn how those systems rank things, how to tell what kind of source they're looking at (someone who was there vs. someone summarizing vs. an encyclopedia pointing elsewhere), and a concrete four-step method (SIFT) for checking whether something is actually trustworthy without falling for slick design or a scary headline. It ends with them picking a real question they care about, researching it for real, and writing up not just what they found but how much they trust each source and why. The payoff isn't trivia about the internet, it's a habit of leaving the page to check, instead of reading harder.

Delivered by email within minutes as a PDF stamped with your name. Print any part as often as you need for the children in your household; the link never expires.