Week 1

Welcome to your first day of school! I wanted to give you one important reminder before you begin. Many of your lessons below have an internet link for you to click on. When you go to the different internet pages for your lessons, please DO NOT click on anything else on that page except what the directions tell you to. DO NOT click on any advertisements or games. DO NOT click on anything that takes you to a different website. Just stay focused on your lesson and then close that window and you should be right back here for the next lesson. Okay?

1. If you didn’t get here through My EP Assignments, I suggest you go there and create an account.

Internet Review

1. Internet Safety Reminders:
   • Do not download anything onto your computer without permission.
   • Do not click on any advertising on a website even if it looks like a game to play.
   • You can also turn off advertising, so you don’t see bad images.
   • Don’t give out your name, address, phone number, email address, photo, etc., online without permission.
   • Do you remember these words: browser, desktop, window, crash, loading, refresh, download? If not, ask someone.
2. Play reality river.
3. This is the end of your work for this course for today. You are allowed to move at your own pace (this is homeschooling), but it’s intended you complete one lesson each week.

Week 2

1. Internet safe search — When you want to find something on the internet, you have to be careful how you look for it.
2. Here are some tips. Be as specific as possible in your search. Type as many words as you know that will help you find what you are looking for. That will help keep things you are not looking for from coming up.
3. Also, Google has the best “safe search.” It does the best job of keeping inappropriate images from coming up that you would regret seeing. Once you see it, it’s hard to get out of your head. Turn on Safe Search if you haven’t already. Most search engines have a safe search feature. Unless it’s a search engine designed for children, I suspect the safe search doesn’t work that well. I have tested several well known search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com and none of their safe searches protected against bad images. Google is the only one I’ve found that works.
4. Play mindful mountain. Just a heads up because it confused me, it says parents but there are four people. I guess it’s trying to be inclusive for those with divorced and remarried parents?

Week 3

1. Internet Safety — Again
2. Here are some tips for staying safe when you use the internet. Never sign up for anything online without permission. When a site asks for a username, you are not supposed to give your real name. Make up a pretend name for yourself.
3. Never tell anyone online your real name, address, phone number or email address unless your parents tell you it is okay. Even if it’s a friend online, don’t give them information about yourself unless you have permission.
4. All of that goes for photos of yourself as well.
5. Never agree to meet someone you met online unless your parents decided that your family will meet them altogether.
6. Don’t become “friends” with people you don’t know. If you do, they will have access to more information about you.
7. Always tell someone (like a parent) if you get weird or bad messages from someone.
8. Play tower of treasure. I find this ironic that Google made this and it’s teaching to take your messages and lock them up from hackers when they are storing up all our messages that they are telling us we should keep private and safe.

Week 4

1. Internet security — There are different tools that are used for security on the internet. One is passwords. A password is a secret word that you use to let the computer or website know that you are you. The best passwords have letters and numbers in them. I use a really good password for important websites (that you don’t use–like for my bank information) but I use a silly password for websites where it is not important, like to play a game. Use only one or two passwords or you’ll forget which password you used where! So many places ask for passwords now. Choose passwords that are at least 6 letters/numbers long. Sometimes 8 is required.
2. Another tool is software that protects your computer from viruses and adware. A computer virus is a command that sneaks into your computer and tells it to do something you don’t want it to do, like erase everything on your computer! Adware sneaks advertisers info onto your computer. You probably have anti-virus software on your computer. A free program is called Avast.
3. Your computer should block ads that are called “pop-ups.” Sometimes you’ll see a note that says a “pop-up” was prevented from opening. This was a website trying to force their advertisement on you. Sometimes worse. Most of the time you don’t want to see the pop-up that was blocked, but sometimes you need that pop-up for whatever you are doing. If you want to see the pop-up that was blocked, go and ask a parent if it is okay.
4. If something should pop up, just look for an X to close it down. It is often hidden. Look in the top right corner. Sometimes you have to click on “No Thanks.” It’s usually written in smaller letters and in a font that makes it harder to see. They don’t want you to close it and refuse their offer. But you can outsmart them. Don’t let them make you feel forced to accept whatever they are pushing.
5. One trick is to have a button really big that says play or download when they know you are going to the page to play or download something, but it’s really an ad and not what you are looking for. Try to stop, look, and read before you click.
6. Play kind kingdom. I feel bad for all these creatures who need thumbs up and emojis to feel better. This is a reason to stay off of social media. It depresses people. They need the comments and likes and comments or they feel bad about themselves. People will post things just so they can get that “love” from people, but it’s mostly not real love at all. Better to let your Creator decide your value and lovability. 🙂

Week 5

Word processing review

1. Open a word processing document. Make columns. Make a fake newspaper page with headline and pictures.
2. Make sure you save it in a folder with your name on it.

Week 6

1. You are going to be using a spreadsheet this year. But before we begin I want to tell you about databases. Databases store and sort data, information. They are useful for things like names, addresses, and phone numbers. You can add in new names at any time and then click on sort and choose to have them put in alphabetical order.
2. Let’s say you have an address book in your database. First name, last name, address, phone number, etc., would all be fields in your database.
3. When you want to find someone’s address, you would look up their record. A person’s record is all of the information in the database for that name.
4. Draw or make some sort of diagram that shows that fields are contained in records are contained in databases.

Week 7

1. You will be using a spreadsheet for computer. A spreadsheet is a tool for tracking numbers. If you don’t have Excel (Microsoft Office) or some other spreadsheet already, ask permission to download the Open Office version.
2. Today download, open and explore.

Week 8

1. Write a title at the top of the page. “My Finances”
2. Can you make it look like a title? Change the font size, color too if you like.
3. What happens if you hit the center button? Normally, you would center a title, right?
4. For now leave your title to the left.

Week 9

1. Hit enter several times. What happens? This is the normal and easy way to move around. It’s made so you can enter a lot of figures at once. Since this is how it’s set up, we should label columns, and not rows, and write our data up and down.
2. Label two columns “Income” and “Expenses.”
3. Make their font bigger. Underline them.
4. Enter some data. Put some numbers in each category.

Week 10

1. What happens if you click on a box and start typing? What do you need to do to edit a box, not replace it?
2. Now for a little example of what you can do with Excel. In the box under your income column, write: =SUM(
3. Now click on the top number of your column and drag down to the last number in your column. Let go.
4. Close the parentheses and hit enter.
5. What happened?
6. Do it for your other column.
7. How do you think you would find their difference?

Week 11

1. I left you with a trick question last time. Did you try and write =SUB()? It doesn’t work. You can’t subtract a range. You add negative numbers if they are going in the negative direction. If you just want to subtract two numbers, than just subtract them.
2. Type = then click on the income total. Then type – and then click on the expense total.
3. Now label your totals and your net worth.
4. Do you need to move things around to do that? How can you?

Week 12

1. Last time I left you trying to label your totals. I can’t see your screen, so I can’t tell you just what to do.
2. Can you make your screen look nice? Put a space between the title and the top of the columns.
3. Put a couple of spaces between the columns.
4. Put the first column in the B or C column.
5. How can you do all that? You can copy and paste just like a word document. It looks a little different but it has the same effect.
6. Now you can label Totals off the left of the row with totals.
7. Then skip a row and put your Net worth.
8. Make the totals bold.
9. Does it look nice?

Week 13

1. Now real income and expenses would be money, right?
2. Click on the letter of the income column. It should highlight the whole column. Maybe you see a section called number or cell format. Maybe you see a dollar sign or the word “General.” If you see General, click on that drop down menu. Choose currency. Otherwise, look for a way to add a dollar sign (or something else) and two decimal points.
3. Change the other column as well.
4. Is your page looking better? Anything else need changing? Add a dollar sign to your net worth as well.

Week 14

1. If you can, print the page see what it looks like. Or use print preview. Not impressive?
2. Click on “View.”
3. Choose page layout if that is an option. Or at least choose page break layout to see where one page ends and the next begins.
4. Use this to make your title in the center.
5. Make your page look nice.
6. You can print the gridlines or not.
7. To print gridlines go to page layout and page setup. Look for “sheet.” Click on gridlines.
8. If you do that, maybe you want to get rid of your title and write it in the header portion on the page view.
9. Fool around and make it beautiful. Print or print preview.

Week 15

1. Sorry, but I’m going to leave you to the tutorials. Do one video or one section a day.
2. Here is a written one. Here is the video one. (Here’s one if you are interested in using it for more math. Here’s one that asked me to link to them, and I’m a nice person. You can see what you like using.) Finally, here’s one with lots of versions of Excel if you want a video tutorial that’s for your specific version. Scroll down to “Office.”)
3. These are for Excel. If you are using something else, you’ll have to do a little more searching. Even with Excel everyone has different editions of it. Persevere.
4. If you want, here are courses on Excel. Enter code HOMESCHOOL and click validate coupon to get it for free.

Week 16

1. Keep working with your tutorials. Written Tutorial     Video Tutorial
2. Maybe your parents would let you keep a budget on the computer for them and keep track of income and expenses. Or you can set up a saving’s goal for yourself. Set up some sort of spreadsheet. You can probably learn this best by doing it!
3. There are 12 sections in the written tutorial and 30 in the video tutorial You have 22 weeks to work on it. If you use the written tutorial, then you can use videos when you finish, or make your own spreadsheet to work on weekly. Two ideas are income/expenses and keeping track of your grades.