Kames, No, the site is not down, but I recognize that problem. Have you changed the zoom text setting in your browser? For some reason, selecting to zoom just the text gives Drupal (my content management system) fits. If that is not the problem, email me at rob at krampf.com

I am sure this is way too obvious, but just in case, have you tried finding something that he will really enjoy reading? At first, forget about educational reading, and teach him to read for the joy of reading, or the joy of finding out things. What does he REALLY like? Video games? You can get a guide to just about any game ever made, filled with tips, hints, and secret information. Science experiments? Let him read the instructions and do the experiment himself. Sports? Again, there are kids books on just about any sport ever invented. If you can find the subject that he REALLY loves, and show him some of the marvelous information hidden in books, he may learn to love reading. Also, think outside the book. Text based computer games take the work out of reading, and stimulate not just word recognition, but reading comprehension. You have to read the screen to play the game. Does he like to cook? As a child, I love cooking, because I could make the food I like, exactly the way I liked it. Reading a simple cookie recipe is great practice, and there is a tasty reward at the end.

Faraday's lectures are amazing. Chemical History of a Candle is my favorite, but his lectures on The Forces of Matter are very good to. You can find them free online at: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1859Faraday-forces.asp

Florida's textbooks were written for Florida by National Geographic, to fit the state science standards. The ones I have seen (4rd, 4th, and 5th grades) are OK as modern textbooks go, but like others, they seem to fill up a LOT of space with photos and graphics, instead of with text information. You can find their info here" http://www.ngsp.com/tabid/271/Default.aspx

Wish you were closer to Florida. I have two sweet potatoes sprouting in my kitchen right now, and was just thinking of putting them in water to photograph.

What a marvelous thread! Lewelma, you have done an incredible job of explaining and keeping things on track.

As a science educator, I REALLY dislike the "Walking with" videos. In an effort to make the videos entertaining, they mingle science with imagination, and then present it as fact. As a video producer, I love their animation, but I have to turn off the sound to enjoy the program.

I have to disagree with you here. Answers in Genesis has improved. I was very pleased when they added their page on Arguments Creationist Should Not Use, but they have buried it, so it is hard to find. These are all arguments that AIG has used in the past, and surprisingly, articles on their site are still using many of the arguments that they say Creationists should not use. In spite of improvements, their science is often either inaccurate or misleading. There are other Creation oriented sites that do a much better job.

Thanks to the help of some homeschool families, I am making good progress. They volunteered to review and critique resources as I develop them, to help make the site more useful.

For the science/evolution side of things, I highly recommend the University of California Museum site: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/index.shtml It has clear explanations, lesson plans, links to explore further, and interactives. It is scientifically accurate and updated regularly.

Did you read the first page, second paragraph: As a reference for the common maternal ancestor, he cites: Behar, D. M. et al, The dawn of human matrilineal diversity. Am J. Hum. Genet. 82, 1130-1140 (2008)

That is why I also mentioned the transition from Latin to Spanish and Italian. No, my example is not an explantation of how the change happens. It is an analogy, to explain how scientists see evolutionary change. Here's a quote from Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species... First, continue reading past the end of your quote: Taking the quote in context changes the meaning quite a bit. Second, quite a few geologic discoveries have been made since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. All of those discoveries fit the current version of evolutionary theory. As I said in an earlier post, it would only take one human artifact found in Paleozoic rocks to turn evolutionary theory upside down, but with all of the paleontologists, petroleum geologists, structural geologists, and millions of amateur collectors, no one has ever found a single human artifact or fossil in those rocks. It would not even have to be a human artifact. Finding a fossil rabbit, elephant, ostrich, whale, horse, cow, duck, or other mammals or birds in those rocks would revolutionize evolutionary science. Again, with all of the millions of people looking, none has ever been found. That does not mean that it won't happen, and if such a discovery is ever made, it will be a very exciting time to be a scientist. Scientific revolutions are so much fun.

The University of California Museum of Paleontology has a great site that explains micro and macro evolution: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/index.shtml Under Speciation, their section on defining a species paints a very good picture of the challenge of determining "completely different species." If you are looking for a specific (:D) example, read about the hawthorn fly, Rhagoletis pomonella. This is speciation that is occurring naturally, not in the lab. If you REALLY want to do some reading, this is the scientific paper: ^ Feder JL, Roethele JB, Filchak K, Niedbalski J, Romero-Severson J (1 March 2003). "Evidence for inversion polymorphism related to sympatric host race formation in the apple maggot fly, Rhagoletis pomonella". Genetics 163 (3): 939–53. PMC 1462491. PMID 12663534. Hope that helps. As always, give a yell if that raises more questions.

To a paleontologist, most fossils would qualify as transitional fossils. No credible scientist believes that a fish suddenly produced offspring that were half fish and half salamander. The evolution of a species is much like the evolution of a language. Spanish and Italian both developed from Latin, but there was not a point in time which Latin speaking parents suddenly discovered that their children were speaking Spanish. Instead, the language changed slowly from generation to generation. You can easily see how the same thing is happening to English. Just read some old English: Fæder ūre þū þe eart on heofonum Today we would write it as: Father of ours, thou who art in heaven Looking back at written documents, we can see the gradual change, but there is no clear line where a linguist could draw a line, saying that everything before this point is Old English, and everything after this point is Modern English. If you asked for a transitional document, pretty much anything written between 1000 AD and today would work. That is very much the way that scientists see the process of evolution. Finding a fossil that was half fish and half salamander would be like finding an old document that started a sentence in old English and finished it in modern English: Fæder ūre þū thou who art in heaven Does that help? More questions?

Again we are back to definitions. The folks over at TalkOrigins are fairly rigorous about scientific definitions. Take a look at: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html Getting back on track, I do not see anything in the article you indicated that supported your statement that: I may have missed it. Can you direct me to the section you were basing your statement on?