New Staff Members

Two new Staff Members have been added to the Staff page. Mrs. Brenda Rion and Mr. Randy Cabell have been contributing their talents to My Own Books for some time. Now they are listed and pictured on the Staff page.

Mrs. Brenda Rion does the editing of the stories to catch typos, grammar, spelling, and other errors. Mrs. Rion is a veteran English Teacher at Nottoway High School in Virginia. She is also a cat lover and enjoys being the preferred human to her five cats.

Mr. Randy Cabell provides the music to the History stories and some of the other stories and pages on Educational Synthesis. Mr. Cabell is retired and enjoying his life-long hobby in historical music with an emphasis on marching band music. Not only does Mr. Cabell find music that suits the subject, the time period, and the mood of the story, he also performs the music on the mp3 files attached to the stories.

This year, Mr. Cabell produced a CD for the 400th Commemoration of the Founding of Jamestown, Virginia, containing the music from the 1807 and 1907 celebrations, as well as music from "The New World" and Mr. Cabell's own march to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown. For more information on this CD, send email to Mr. Randy Cabell: rcabell@Jamestown1907.com

Holidays and Celebrations

See the new format and the many new holidays and days of commemoration added for September. The new page lists lots of days that can be commemorated and celebrated in the classroom. Each holiday has one or more links to holiday information, pictures, music, crafts and more. Here's hoping I will be able to create the new holiday page for each month this year on the new, expanded basis. Until they are all updated, please continue to use the old Holiday calendar at the bottom of the page. Updated months will appear on the calendar at the top of the page.

Famous Americans

Famous Americans continues to be the most popular section of Educational Synthesis. This summer some new categories were added to provide better organization for this growing collection of Americans worth learning about.

New entries for Famous Americans were added this summer. The new pages include: Sally Ride, Ellison Onizuka, James Monroe, George Mason, Thurgood Marshall, Dian Fossey, Sandra Day O'Connor, Sacajawea, James Madison, Theodore Roosevelt, Sojourner Truth, and Conrad Weiser.

Jonathan Chapman (Johnny Appleseed), including the music and words to his song, has been moved from the Holidays site to Famous Americans.

Check out the new names on the index at the bottom of the Famous Americans page.

My Own Books

My Own Books are the personalizable stories that help children develop reading skills while learning about history, their world, folktales, etc. With new additions this summer, there are now a total of 61 titles to choose from. First thing you may notice is a change in the opening page. The new organization features the series and includes a suggested interest age. This is only a suggested age. Your experience and the interest of your student or child should still dicate what stories to share.

Two new series have been added: Geography and Friends.

Friends is a subseries under First Readers which contains 1-2 lines of print per page. Friends allows the addition of a friend or sibling of the same sex as the Reader to share in the adventure. The first entry in the Friends subseries of First Readers is Go On A Picnic in which the Reader and a named friend go on a picnic.

There is one story in the Geography Series: Walk the World, which provides a song to learn the continents and oceans of the world.

A new alphabetized listing of all titles is now available at: http://www.educationalsynthesis.org/books/index-AlphaList.html