Saint Daniel the Stylite Academy

Advent Homeschooling 1

2008-12-02T09:37:00.000-08:00

I hesitated to type that 1, for fear that it might lead someone to presume that there will be, in sequence, an Advent 2, 3 & 4. In real life there will be, of course, and thank goodness. But don't expect any sequence here. See that "unschooly" in the blog description above? It means we don't do sequence so much.

What we are doing right now is Advent. What does "doing Advent" mean at my house? Well, this week it means the following:

1. business as usual, mostly. Epiphany is focusing on Latin, for her final exam next week, and on math while she has a tutor available to help her. Once the college term is over, at the end of next week, we'll devote the next week or so to biology, English, and history. She's also knitting up a storm and doing some drawing.

Amicus also has been concentrating on Latin -- Father wanted them to have Lessons VII and VIII in Latina Christiana 2 finished by Thursday -- and on math and independent reading for science and history. We're in Chapter 3 of From Sea to Shining Sea, but he's been more preoccupied with National Review (civics, history, government, culture) and with his new National Geographic. The politics of the former and the politics of the latter should more or less cancel each other out, should anyone be worrying that we don't offer our children a well-rounded worldview, or that Amicus's political views are anything but his own. He's also still working on his Redwall fan-fiction story-with-no-end, and I'm letting Latin, since he has needed to get a good bit done for class, stand in for English grammar this week, as he's covering more or less the same territory as the diagramming text. Later we'll go back and diagram similar sentences by way of reinforcement.

Helier and Crispina and I have continued to read The Hobbit and to do Miquon Math. I love Cuisenaire rods: it's so easy to illustrate simple addition using them. You put, say, the two rod and the three rod together, and then you find the rod which matches them in length, and hey presto: you've just seen, in concrete terms, what 2+3=5 means. So we run through maybe four problems a day, two for each child, and they take turns putting the rods together and writing the correct number in the answer box. Today we took a break from the rods, however, and played our way through about half the games in the Funbrain Math Arcade. See "unschooly," above.

2. Special Advent stuff. I've been using collects for Advent instead of the usual prayers at the end of Terce, Vespers and Compline, and I've replaced the hymns which always begin the office hours in my prayer book with an Advent hymn for us to learn. This week it's Hark, a Thrilling Voice Is Sounding. The lovely thing about learning hymns is that they count as poetry, too; in this case, we're imbibing the poetry of Edward Caswall, translating a 5th-century Latin text. We're also reading some Christmas stories using a book from my childhood: The Tall Book of Christmas.

This is my best-remembered childhood Christmas book, full of lovely and evocative stories from around the world. Today we read "Everywhere Christmas," which details many Advent feasts and traditions including St. Nicholas Day, the feast of Saint Lucia, and Las Posadas. I also remember with great fondness the stories of Babouscka, the Christmas Rose, and Granny Glittens who makes incredible edible mittens at Christmastime. There are also poems: today we read an old Czech carol, "The Birds." This book was first published in 1954; the stories and poems are charming and I guess what we'd call "multicultural," though they utterly lack the political overtones which usually accompany that term, perhaps because what they're about is not pluralism, but mutual rejoicing -- in both overtly religious and quasi-secular "folk" manifestations -- in the birth of Jesus. Highly recommended!

We've also begun "making our house fair" for the coming of our great Guest, cleaning and dusting and putting away our everyday clutter in preparation for festive decorations. And though we've already made one round of Christmas gifts, we'll be making many, many more as the weeks progress: artwork, cooking, needlework, etc. It's my favorite season of the liturgical year, the most beautiful, full-filled time to be learning with children.

My Dream Middle-School Language-Arts Program

2008-11-25T06:15:00.000-08:00

We're doing it right now: Latina Christiana II (or some comparable Latin grammar course -- I'm not necessarily that in love with LC, though it's pretty good), plus sentence diagramming via Ye Hedge School's First Whole Book of Diagrams and Elementary Diagramming Worktext. I didn't plan things out this way, but the two courses dovetail beautifully, if serendipitously: this past week Amicus was simultaneously working on the accusative case in Latin and diagramming sentences with direct objects in the diagramming worktext, for reinforcement in both directions.

I've said it before, but I love diagramming. It's one of those things I didn't expect ever to do with my children, because I hadn't liked it or seen the point in it as a middle-school student myself, but we have found it both useful and fun. Just goes to show you that "I found/didn't find it interesting" is never a sound basis for a pedagogy. Even if a given child isn't wired analytically, as Amicus is, it's worth doing structural-language work at least as an exercise, because at some point one does have to admit that writing isn't merely an overflow of self-expression, but -- as William Carlos Williams says, of the poem -- "a large or small machine made of words." Latin helps to make this clear -- it's the Lego set of languages, with endings you pop on and off to connect ideas with each other in some kind of coherent fashion. English isn't so obviously that way, since we dropped the inflection business, but that's where diagramming is useful, so that you see how a given thought fits together and is coherent or not.

Add to that a lot of reading and, above and beyond the sentences you're asked to compose and diagram in FDWT, writing a lot of Redwall fan fiction, and there you have it, a program which encompasses all areas of English study and balances required seatwork (ie Latin and diagramming) with child-directed learning. Of course, if we hadn't stumbled into fan fiction, I'd be imposing some kind of composition program this year, but so far that's something I've never had to do. I thought I'd have to light a fire under Amicus to get him to write, but he apparently had his finger on that switch all the time, which is a great relief and will make formal writing instruction in high school that much easier.

Fridge Letters

2008-11-25T06:02:00.001-08:00

I forgot to mention that we found a box of magnetic letters as we were unpacking, and this has formed the backbone of our language-arts program in the last week. Crispina can spend hours sitting on a stool in front of the fridge arranging letters and asking me what they spell ("QMPAGBDL," of course) and, increasingly, asking me how to spell actual words and taking dictation. Helier's gotten in on it, too, despite his antipathy to anything which might possibly, remotely, in some galaxy somewhere, be construed as educational. Just now, as I was drinking my morning coffee here in the study, he called me in to witness the word he had just created: "WOPIG." Like a Blogger verification-code word, it sounds plausible . . . I should ask him what he thinks it means.

I Am Running Out of Zippy Titles That Amount to "What We Did This Week." (and other late-breaking news)

2008-11-24T17:13:00.000-08:00

No, really, this is going to be about what we've been doing, as soon as I can collect my wits and remember any of it.

Item #1: Amicus and books

We went to the library for story time two weeks ago, and I found a whole series of books, mostly set during the Revolutionary War, mostly in our very neighborhood (almost), so I checked them out for Amicus, and he's been reading them. The author is one Manly Wade Wellman -- you know, of course, that the more names somebody has, the more local an author they are, not that that's a bad thing. There's Alfred Leland Crabb, after all, who wrote all those Civil-War-Nashville novels, which are quite readable, even if the one about the building of the Parthenon offers a female love interest named "Neely Barrow," who says things like, "Are they really -- Ionic -- columns -- darling?" Anyway, Amicus has been reading away at Manly Wade Wellman and as a consequence knows more about the Battle of Kings Mountain than he formerly did.

I notice, by the way, in searching Amazon for Wellman's books, that in addition to a long series of local-historical novels, he also wrote lots of sci-fi, and possibly some quasi-occultish stuff, but the historical fiction seems straightforward enough.

At any rate, Amicus has read through that stack and is now reading

Item #2: Amicus and Latin

Our Latina Christiana II book arrived several weeks ago, so we've been playing catch-up on the lessons we missed. Fortunately Father's been in the Holy Land, so class didn't meet for two weeks, and we're now working, after skipping around quite a bit, on Lessons 7 and 8, which is where we should be. Amicus still seems to be suffering no ill effects from having missed all of LCI -- we're having to fill in gaps here and there, but the second year of this course seems to review the first year quite heavily.

Item #3: Amicus and Helier and Crispina and Scheduling

I think we're finally working out a rhythm we can live with, by which neither Amicus nor Helier and Crispina get too shortchanged. We all say prayers together in the morning, and then I send him to read -- usually either historical fiction or his history text, though today I just let him keep reading National Review (he calls it goofing off; I call it civics), while I either help Helier practice reading (this week: Green Eggs and Ham) or do Miquon Math or Anno's Math Games with both him and Crispina. Occasionally we'll do both. We follow that with a reward of read-aloud time, currently including both The Hobbit and another of my great favorites, Marguerite De Angeli's The Door in the Wall. It's such a beautiful book, and Helier especially was enchanted with it.

With the two of them I've also been doing an informal "circle time," with finger-rhymes and songs mostly taken from a book we got in a charity shop in England:

We only have the book in an older edition, not the CD, but these are great fun. Some of the rhymes are ones the older children learned in school in England. For people who really like to do circle time, this is a great resource; I do circle time, as it happens, because I have this book and like it.

So there you go. I finish all that with Helier and Crispina, not necessarily in that order, and then I turn to Amicus to work on sentence diagramming (1-2 days a week), science reading and narration (1 day a week), Latin (4 days a week) and math (4-5 days a week). He's just finished the chapter 5 test, on long division, so at last we can move on!

Item #4: Epiphany

It's hard to know what to say about Epiphany: she does her work, and that's that. She spends two long days at the college every week, attending her Latin class, working with a math tutor, and otherwise just getting her subjects done. The other three days she works at home, almost entirely on her own. Lately she's been knitting a lot while she listens to her history lectures: she's trying to get her knitwear business off the ground (again), so we spent quite a bit of time the other day trying to figure out sales tax issues-- file that under "economics," I guess. She's also been reading P.G. Wodehouse (The Small Bachelor, not a Jeeves and Wooster) in addition to all her English reading: Canterbury Tales and medieval mystery plays, currently.

Item #5: Dancing is Educational

One of the many wonderful things about our new parish is that it contains a family who are really, really, really into both folk dancing and historical re-enactment. The mother of this family (of five boys) teaches Irish step-dancing and calls folk dances, and every six weeks or so there's a dance at our parish, to which all ages are invited. This past weekend we had a Veterans' Day dance, with dances from every conflict ever waged on this continent, from the French and Indian War through Vietnam. We not only followed an historical timeline, but along that timeline we learned about the various cultures which had been a part of each era: French, English, Scottish, Irish, German, and so on. We did Irish reels, English contra dances, a Russian troika (can't remember what war that was supposed to go with -- maybe 1812, but not our 1812, obviously), a World-War-I era "rag," some swing dances, and a beautiful circle waltz. My kids, especially Epiphany and Amicus, adore these dance nights -- there are always lots of teenagers, and you can't just stand there and not dance. So we did not only some living history, but some dancing history, and a good time was had for sure.

Tightwad 101

2008-11-05T12:26:00.000-08:00

In our current economic climate, I'm sure we're far from the only people who have looked at what's been passing for their budget and acknowledged that particularly come the new year, reality is going to be a far tighter fit than whatever they'd been projecting. Just as I was arriving at precisely this epiphany, I opened a moving box -- somehow realizations and moving boxes seem to go together in my life -- and found a copy of The Tightwad Gazette, which a friend had thoughtfully given me last year sometime.

I sat down on the back porch, where all the book boxes are stacked, and started reading. Slash Your Food Budget in Half. Trim Your Energy Bill. Never Pay Full Price. &c.

Well, not only has all this been timely and useful information -- let me tell you about my new back-porch clothesline, for starters -- but it occurred to me that perfecting our own household tightwaddery could present all kinds of learning opportunities. And so it has. Only today, for example, I took Amicus, Helier and Crispina out comparison-shopping. Our challenge: find the cheapest milk in our town. Now, I have to admit that I quickly whittled down my ambitions: people were behaving fractiously, so we really only compared The Really Big Store That Sells Everything with Bi-Lo (there's one in a neighboring town that we refer to as Dri-Lo, but fortunately ours isn't: not that we're now buying wine, in our new tightwad life, but we CAN). We looked at gallons of nonfat milk first: $2.98 at TRBSTSE, $3.69 for the cheapest brand at Bi-Lo. I taught Helier and Crispina how to read prices; we also had a little lesson in greater than and less than. We also were glared at by a number of very stolid-looking elderly ladies in TRBSTSE, so we didn't linger.

We've also been looking at various brands of powdered milk, which is recommended as a means of stretching one's milk purchases. You use half a unit of regular milk mixed with half a unit of powdered-milk and water for baking, sauces, and, if you can persuade your family to stomach it, drinking. So I wanted to cost out how much, per cup, all these brands of milk cost. Fortunately Amicus has been doing a lot of long division, so I set us a division challenge: Cost That Milk.

And, um, there's clearly something I can't get my head around, because the powdered-milk option doesn't seem cheaper to me. If I can buy a gallon of milk for $2.98, which translates to roughly $.18 a cup (a measuring-cup cup, that is, not a drinking cup), why do I want powdered milk which -- at least, the brands I looked at -- comes to more like $.22 a cup? Even doing the half-and-half method, you end up saving only about 2 cents a cup. Granted, that adds up; still, Amicus and I didn't think that that seemed worth the bother of mixing the powdered milk, or worth the taste, either. The only thing either of us could come up with was that you wouldn't go to the grocery store as often, because your milk would last longer -- it evaporates straight out of the jug here, so I can appreciate the value of not constantly running out of it -- but otherwise, we're still scratching our heads.

On the whole, though, we're having a good time making a family project of frugality. That's not to say that we were all that extravagant to begin with: if I have to, I'll buy clothes from thrift stores, but I'd much rather have them given to me. There are whole categories of consumer goods which we just don't buy: makeup comes to mind, as do CDs, DVDs, furniture and home decor, and commercial toys (mostly). Still, especially in the areas of food and energy use and all-around waste, we can use more discipline than we've habitually exercised. It's providential that I unearthed this book in November, in time for us all to start making Christmas gifts. We've thought our Christmas budget was modest before, but this year . . .

So out of this book we'll get some habit-training, some budgeting skills (Tightwad Gazette is on the list of texts for Home Economics in CHC's High School of Your Dreams), some math practice, some arts-and-crafts projects, some cooking (which necessarily involves a measure of both math and science as well as creativity), and some values education: at the heart of all budgeting lies the question of what really matters to you.

Today also, in the spirit of frugality, Amicus and Helier hiked up to the bookstore with a load of Star Wars novels to trade, and came home with roughly $3.17 in store credit, as well as a burning desire to find more books to trade, so that they can rack up more credit. Amicus said something remarkable, I thought -- okay, I think that a lot of what he says is remarkable, but this really was, in a larger philosophical way. As he was meditating on the possibility of taking these books in to trade, he remarked that he thought he'd outgrown them. At one time he'd loved them, and he'd collected quite a pile of them, and I had sighed and looked the other way, because I think they're utter twaddle, but I couldn't bring myself to say, "Don't read those books." Instead, I banked on its being a phase from which he would eventually move on. And wah-lah, if it hasn't happened, and the reason it happened is that a friend turned him on to Redwall: better written, better characters, far higher literary worth. Having read the entire Redwall series, Amicus now finds that he really has no use for Star Wars -- not the novels, at any rate. All this eases my mind no end on the subject of twaddle. We don't, in fact, have a lot of that kind of thing lying around -- I don't have any patience with bad prose, so I don't tend to encourage its sojourn in my house, but children do go through these stages where all they want to read is X. Part of me hears the ghost of Charlotte Mason whispering that their brains will rot if I let them read X; the other part of me thinks that perhaps eventually they'll tire of brain rot, without my having to say a word on the subject. And then they'll have some idea, when looking at a shelf of books for sale, what's worth spending their $3.17 on.

Other doings:

Helier's reading has made a giant leap forward lately -- the other day I was in the bookstore using up my credit to buy birthday gifts for Amicus, and I saw a big Dick and Jane treasury which, since I had the credit, I bought as kind of a gamble. Somebody would read it, I figured, and if they didn't, I could always trade it back in. I brought it home, Helier picked it up, and the next thing I knew, he was doubled over with laughter. I'd never especially thought of Dick and Jane as funny, except as something to parody, but the little situations are sort of sweetly slapstick. We sat down together to read it, and he wanted to keep going, and keep going, and keep going.

Yesterday we were walking to the polling place to vote, and Helier wanted to take the book with him. We stopped in at the political party headquarters up the street from our house, so that Aelred could pick up some information, and Helier read an entire story -- "Go, Go, Go," I think it was called -- to a lady coming out the door with her arms full of campaign signs, who happened to ask him whether he was happy to be "off school" that day.

Still doing Anno's Math Games with Helier and Crispina. We're also reading More Milly-Molly-Mandy aloud.

These are sweet, simple, small-child stories about a little girl in an English village in the 1920s. The language sometimes strikes me as over-sweet -- Milly-Molly-Mandy's best friend is always referred to not as "Susan" but as "little-friend-Susan" -- but the plots all involve the kinds of innocent scrapes children get into, which particularly in a culture with a narrative diet of superheroes and Dora the Explorer we don't always think of as adventures. So maybe these stories provide a kind of boredom antidote.

As I write this, Amicus is reading The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, for something to do while he waits for the new Redwall book, which we ordered for his birthday, to appear on the doorstep. He's also been rereading Cheaper By the Dozen and reading Mark Twain's Roughing It.

Epiphany's been busily studying for her Latin midterm, which happened today, and reading Wuthering Heights. She's also working away at her new biology coloring book -- hooray for coloring books! and the various pages call to mind some lab experiments we might do, like testing our blood type -- and meeting with a math professor at the college for some tutoring. AND she's reading Canterbury Tales for English. I had the online class read the Prologue, and I assigned them each a couple of characters to "introduce" to the yahoo group, as well as summarizing the plot as it's laid out in the Prologue. She has not been un-busy . . . but I imagine we'll get in some tightwad home ec this term as well.

Mountains, Miquon, Math Games, and . . . uh . . . Some Essay-Writing and Stuff

2008-10-24T09:55:00.000-07:00

Otherwise I would have titled this post "A Look Back at the Week," or something exciting like that. I ought to go back and count how many of my posts on this blog have titles which include the word "notes" . . . Of course, now, judging from my last post over at Fine Old Famly, the word of the week is "stuff." Cause that's what we do lots of.

So, what did we do? Sunday and Monday were spent in the mountains, visiting Country Workshops -- see also here. There we did lots of running up and down trails and through woods; also we spent lots of time in a completely handmade house (visit that second link to check out the hand-carved wooden door latches), with acres of organic gardens and chickens. The children got to watch artists at work -- namely my woodworker brother and his painter wife -- and investigate the big woodworking studio at the farmstead. We hiked down to the original 1920s house on the 11-acre property and saw some old tools, a stove, sewing machine, etc. We learned what table scraps chickens will and won't eat, and why a woodstove burns fuel more efficiently than an open fireplace. Plus we nourished our souls with beauty, both natural and human-crafted.

The rest of the week: back to the usual routine. On Wednesday the three youngers and I went to the library for story time, while Epiphany went to campus for Latin. She was also busy with her Beowulf essay, which she finally finished today. She also, incidentally, hit the wall with the Barrons biology book, so I've bought her a biology coloring book to try and make things a little plainer. That should be here by early next week, and I think it'll make for an improvement. There's something about coloring that helps her process things -- she's learned a lot of anatomy via her Dover anatomy coloring book, and I know it's going in, because she comes and tells me about it. It's when she's silent about a subject that I start to worry. No news is not good news. We're also lining up a tutor at the college to get her out of her current mathematical quagmire.

Meanwhile, the others:

Amicus -- The rest of our schoolbooks, which have been in storage since last spring, arrived this week, and I've been busy unpacking them. This has meant that at last Amicus can start reading From Sea to Shining Sea, the American history text from the Catholic Textbooks Project, to provide some spine for the novels he's been reading. He actually prefers it to the latest novel I'd given him, Naca: the White Deer.

I love this author, but the book simply hasn't grabbed him. We might try it as a read-aloud, but for now he's genuinely enjoying ingesting straight information via the history text, which is quite well-written and vivid as textbooks go -- it's enough of a living book, despite its textbook appearance, that the Mater Amabilis online curriculum recommends it for American history at the late-elementary/early middle-school level.

Otherwise, he's plowing through more long division, with double-digit divisors this week, diagramming sentences with direct objects and dealing with simple and complete subjects and predicates, and -- not very happily -- doing chemistry copywork. I think next week I'll have him narrate in writing, rather than copy, information about the next element, and include it in his binder with his drawings of atoms and molecules.

And he's reading lots of Redwall, as usual, and writing fan fiction.

Helier and Crispina -- This has been a math week for the two of them. We've used the Miquon Orange Book

to work on addition facts with Cuisenaire rods. I love rods -- once you know what numbers they represent, it's so easy to demonstrate how these basic operations work. This week we simply worked on adding one to numbers from one to nine, and also on the various ways to make four and five. With Helier I followed up by beginning to teach him how to use a Learning Wrap-Up to practice addition facts.

We also checked Anno's Math Games out of the library and have been having great fun with it. So far we've done a chapter whose basic theme is categorizing -- identifying which item in a series is unlike the others and discussing what the criteria for categorization are -- and a chapter on "putting things together," which essentially teaches chart reading. All that sounds a little dull, maybe, but the pictures and puzzles are clever and funny, and both Helier and Crispina are enjoying the book.

Meanwhile, we've been doing lots of reading: continuing Rosemary Sutcliff's The Sword and the Circle, as well as reading picture books from the library, including Robert Lawson's beautiful They Were Strong and Good, the story of his grandparents and parents and their lives in the 19th century.

All of us went to the Latin Mass this week, which was followed by the Latin class which Amicus is taking. We've read Great Moments in Catholic History, talked about what saints everyone wants to be for the parish All Saints party, prayed various hours of the Daily Office, done lots of coloring and drawing (Crispina), lego-building (the boys), conversing, cooking and cleaning (everyone) . . .

It's been a week.

Morning Notes

2008-10-17T07:51:00.000-07:00

Aelred's van is still in the shop, so he took mine to work this morning. He also took Epiphany, who has Latin class today. Her professor has tracked the class into sections of better- and less-prepared students and given each "track" a day off: instead of Monday/Wednesday/Friday, Epiphany -- who I think is in the more-prepared group, thanks to Fr. Victor and Henle last year -- now goes to the college only on Wednesdays and Fridays, which gives her a bit of a break and makes the long days in the library a little more palatable. She does get a fair amount of work done in that setting -- it helps her to be away from home, with all home's distractions (though to be entirely truthful, I fear that Facebook, to which she has access on the college computers, provides a substantial distraction at times). Still, she's written an outline and a rough draft for her Beowulf paper this week, done a good amount of math and biology, and read her history, so I can't complain. I meant to suggest to her today that if she got tired of the library, she might go over to the beautiful and recently-completed Adoration chapel on the campus, and spend some time with the Lord. Adoration would be a good thing to work on -- good for her soul, and we can count it as religion class, too . . . Aelred and I will have to pull together some readings for her to take with her. This could be a very good thing, now that I mull it over.

Here at home, we're carless, and it's raining, so we may or may not carry through on our plan to walk to the library later on. So far today I've done more Miquon Math with Helier and Crispina -- we concentrated on the many ways of making 4 (4+0, 3+1, 1+3, 2+2) using the rods and practicing writing the numbers in the answers, while Amicus began work on a chemistry notebook, going back and drawing the atoms for the elements in the first Latitude. Another day we'll carry on with the copywork we began the other day -- I won't make him go back and copy ALL the entries for ALL the elements, because he'd be sure to see that as cruel and unnecessary punishment. Now he's reading Malory's Morte D'Arthur in a prose translation.

He picked it up off the porch, where I'd been reading it. We had a very Arthurian weekend with a friend who had brought along Tennyson's Idylls of the King to read to me, so the legends are very much in my mind. After math this morning I began to read aloud to Helier and Crispina, who were busy coloring and putting pages of art in binders, from Rosemary Sutcliff's The Sword and the Circle, which is a beautifully-wrought retelling of the legends managing to keep both the sense of the primal Celtic origins of the legends and the medieval chivalric overlay created by Malory and others. It's not really a little-children's book, and I have edited and abridged here and there as I've been reading, but it is very well-told, as all Sutcliff's stories are, and what's in the legends as she tells them is pretty much in any telling which isn't utterly bowdlerized and sugar-coated. You can't get around Uther and Igraine, for example -- though we did spend some time talking about David, Bathsheba and Uriah, and the way that God both levies consequences for sin and exacts penance, AND turns human evil to His own purposes (ie raising up a king like Solomon in the wake of David's sin). If you think you can't have conversations like this with kindergarteners, well . . . I dunno. I kind of think you have to. Anyway, the story is compelling, and it's in a very great sense a foundational epic for Western culture, in the vein of the Iliad, and I think that one can't begin internalizing the great stories too early, or thinking about the ways in which they point to the Truth.

So we did all that. In a while, Amicus is going to pick up with the chapter test on division which he's been doing in the MCP book, while Helier and Crispina and I are going to make gingerbread. They want to make men, but I'm going to make some hearts, too, for Saint Margaret Mary on her traditional feast day. Meanwhile, Crispina's playing with Moon Sand on the porch, and Helier's building with Legos upstairs. If the rain stops, we'll walk to the library -- otherwise, I'm not sure what we'll do to occupy the day. Read some more Arthur, possibly . . .

Oh, and I've been trying to pray an abridged and edited form of the Office, as found in this prayer book --

Helier and Crispina joined me voluntarily for Lauds this morning, and we prayed Terce at the beginning of our schoolday; I imagine we'll say Sext, with the Angelus, at noon. So we really are playing home monastery today . . . somehow I think that meshes with reading about Arthur, though I'm not sure at this moment that I can articulate exactly how.

More Good Stuff in Our World

2008-10-16T19:42:00.000-07:00

Miquon Math: Last year I bought the Orange Book for Helier and Crispina and didn't use it. I hadn't bought the Annotated Lab Sheets, which understand that you really need (though I still don't have them), and the book sat on the shelf all year. This year, however, I've pulled it out, with the Cuisenaire Rods, and decided just to look at what's on the pages and wing it.

So today Helier and Crispina and I had math lab. We did a lot of counting, and then we worked with the rods, first to determine what number each kind of rod stands for (little white square is one, red is two, lime green is three, and so on). Then we did some simple addition with them, seeing how many ways we could come up with 4, 5, and 6. Crispina, who loves puzzles, was enchanted; Helier less so. Still, it was a good way to spend 15 minutes.

Another good buy from the used bookstore:

It's a math book (counting)! It's a science book (more fascinating info about bugs than you thought possible in a quick-read book)! It's beautiful (seriously. You should see these illustrations)! It even has a secret alphabet-related puzzle (sshh -- you have to get the book to see what it is)! We've had a great time reading this book this week, covering lots of kindergarten basics while we read.

Epiphany's Recommendation of the Week:

She was grousing earlier in the semester about having to translate Ovid and Aesop's Fables in Latin class, but she came home the other day raving about these. I'm not sure exactly which book they're using, as I believe her professor's just pulling stories from it to have the students translate. But she volunteered that these are seriously fun and make Latin good.

The Amicus Recommendation of the Week:

Dibbuns Against Bedtime

If you or someone in your house reads the Redwall books by Brian Jacques, then you will know what this is about. It seems to be a carefully-moderated fan site, though I'm honestly going more on Amicus's word than on my own meticulous investigation. I do recall vaguely that they seemed to need several layers of approval from me, and lots of vouchsafing that he was a child and not someone pretending to be a child for nefarious purposes, before he could join. The reason that this is a Good Thing in Our World this week is that Amicus has been making enthusiastic use of the "fan fiction" part of the site, and is writing a long Redwall-inspired narrative which, like Jane Austen, he hides away whenever I come into the room. I have caught a quick glimpse of it, and he's doing well. At any rate, I feel comfortable letting this exercise stand in for whatever I might have done in the way of "composition" for the moment.

Everyone in the house has now read Rascal. No, we will not be getting a pet raccoon. Not no how, not no time. But it's a great book, and I love seeing the various ages pass it around and talk about it. It's hard to imagine another context in contemporary culture in which a 14-year-old and a 4-year-old could be talking about the same book, which they both were reading and loving -- at the same time, as they both were reading it (or in the case of the 4-year-old, having it read aloud). The beauty of homeschooling, all over again.

Another Monday Morning: Chemistry and Copywork

2008-10-13T08:18:00.000-07:00

Just as I like open-ended toys -- in other words, toys which let the child decide how to play with them, rather than dictating to the child how to play -- so I also, increasingly, like open-ended curriculum resources. Now that I think of it, I don't know why I said, "increasingly," because it's not as though I've ever used any other kind. But the longer I homeschool, the more I appreciate books and resources which offer themselves to be used in flexible ways.

Resources from Ye Hedge School fall into this category. I've never used their Universe in My Hands science program, which people seem either to love or -- well, not hate, but be flummoxed by -- but we did buy their Chemistry 101: Introducing the Periodic Kingdom to Its Heirs book and chart this year for Amicus, and I'm finding it to be a wonderfully flexible foundation for a growing literacy in chemistry (I say this, incidentally, as an almost total non-scientist).

It is one of those books I guess you'd wonder what to "do" with: there's no workbook, just a text with a little illustrated entry for each element on the Periodic Table, plus a chart which you can laminate and write on, to map where the elements go. I'm still figuring out things to do with it all; so far Amicus is working with the book, with the idea that we'll read through and learn about the elements, then go back and map them and learn more about them on the second pass.

What we're doing with that idea right now: chemistry copywork. Amicus has always struggled with handwriting and other fine-motor skills, though that's all improved greatly in the last year or so. Still, he's always benefited from copywork, and today it came to me that we could integrate that language-arts discipline with science. So he's working on copying the information about rhodium right now. I can have him draw the molecule, too. It's not that he loves copying so much, but aside from the benefits, which we've already seen, in terms of mechanical facility and the internalization of well-written English (I'd never have him copy from something twaddly or poorly-written), writing something down does help to imprint the information on the brain.

What we still need to do: invest in an experiment book and/or a chemistry set, so that he can play around with at least some of the more harmless elements. But I figure that the play will be that much more informed if he's got some schemata knocking around in his head. Of course, it could have happened the other way -- he could have played around with chemistry and had the play form schemata for the hard factual info. It just happens that we bought the book first.

Unschooling Catholics

2008-10-09T05:50:00.000-07:00

Thanks so much to Leonie and others for starting this resource blog for Catholics who tend towards the less-structured end of the homeschooling spectrum. I look forward to visiting often.

Me Online at First Things

2008-10-07T13:29:00.000-07:00

At long last, that review I've been talking about writing, about Gregory and Martine Millman's Home Schooling: A Family's Journey.

Literature As Curriculum

2008-10-06T19:37:00.000-07:00

I went into this year in literature mode, and more and more I've been thinking about how pretty much any work of children's literature you pick up can become -- with almost no effort or forethought on your own part -- a curriculum unto itself.

In fact, while forethought can be a good thing, right now I've been rediscovering what fun it is simply to offer children a book and let them run with it. Here's what Helier, Crispina and I did today: we read The Wheel on the School. The story, in case you haven't read it yet, is that a group of school children in a tiny village by the sea in Holland begin to wonder why storks never come to nest on roofs in their town. Their wondering becomes action to make stork-nesting -- which brings good luck -- a reality. In the course of things, as the children search for a wheel to put on the school roof for the storks to nest on, the people of the village are drawn into deeper friendship with each other. In particular, a bitter legless man, Janus, emerges from his despair to embrace life again. All the characters are dimensional and lovable, and like Epiphany and Amicus before them, Helier and Crispina have taken an almost incandescent delight in the story.

So how's it a curriculum? Well . . . right now we seem to be doing, among other things, geography -- the way I like to do geography (and history, and science, and pretty much anything else). Reading about a village in Holland, and about the things that the people do in the village, makes Helier and Crispina want to do the same things, especially when food is involved. Today we read about the schoolchildren's drinking hot chocolate milk with Janus while a storm raged outside, and also playing dominoes. Out came our own dominoes, and I made some hot chocolate (even though it was about 80 degrees and sunny outside instead of storming and cold). Maybe we'll try out the idea of a closet bed, too. We've got a big deep shelf in the study that's wide enough for a small child to at least pretend to sleep on. In the chapter we read tonight, somebody was eating "bread and syrup," so now that's what Helier wants for breakfast tomorrow. Hearing about these details of daily life in another place and time, and then being so enchanted by them that you want to play them out yourself, is the kind of learning that will stick.

You also learn, along the way, that Holland is a monarchy and that its capital is Amsterdam.

The kids also wanted to know whether we could put a wheel on our own steep, sharp roof for storks, so we had some conversation about the migratory habits of storks and the routes they follow, and about birds which come our own way. So there was some science/nature.

I always have Helier practice reading chapter titles, so we get some phonics/reading practice in. And reading excellent literature exposes children to the sounds of good prose, and to a wide range of challenging words. For pre-writers, that's a language-arts curriculum in itself. Also, because the names are Dutch, and the sounds are different from ours (J pronounced the way we pronounce Y, for example), and this is interesting to point out, they also get the sense of how other languages operate, that people hear letters differently in other languages from the way we hear them in English.

Given time, we'd probably think of even more to do using this book, but I'm very please with what the children have generated on their own as responses to the story. This is the kind of child-led learning I love: it's not really entirely child-led, because I choose what books I present to the children, sometimes overriding their clamors for Dora the Explorer, or for books we've already read a hundred times. In the case of Dora and her ilk, there are things which are meant to be "educational," in the vein of PBS children's shows, which means that everything about them is one-dimensional. Somebody's decided on an objective, and everything in the show, or the story, is designed to produce a certain learning outcome. Real literature, on the other hand, resonates in the mind, and it's in the imaginative reverberations that real learning takes place. You, the grownup, don't have to have an objective in mind. It will come to you; your children will teach it to you. And if the best way to learn something is to teach it . . . well, I think I'm having a little epiphany here (small e -- I had a little Epiphany a long time ago, but now she's taller than I am and stalking around looking for her purse).

Amicus is doing his usual complement of subjects and reading Rascal this week; Epiphany is doing her usual complement of subjects and struggling to master Beowulf so as to write a 5-paragraph essay about how the title character manifests the Anglo-Saxon heroic ideal. Good stuff -- but of course I think that, since I assigned the paper.

Feast of the Guardian Angels

2008-10-02T12:34:00.001-07:00

Thanks to my friend Debbie for suggesting angel food cake for dessert -- she actually brought some, and Heavenly Hash ice cream, too, to Latin class after Mass today. I'm wishing I'd bought angel hair pasta, too . . .

It's been a while since I last posted, largely because we were out of town again last week, and if educational stuff happened, I wasn't especially paying attention. But we're back again and not going anywhere for a long time, so this week has been expended in trying to return to some semblance of a routine and of deliberate schoolwork, at least in a settled core of subjects. Here's how it's going so far:

Epiphany:

Back in college Latin, though initially she didn't want to go back after our week away, mainly because she'd let the homework pile up alarmingly. Consequences will be consequences. Last week Aelred met with her professor, who confirmed that she's doing perfectly well -- in fact, she's one of the better students in the class -- so despite her objections (hard to get used to an inductive method of teaching after doing Henle last year, not to mention being young and a bit intimidated), we're encouraging her to stick with it for the semester. The experience seems worthwhile, and it will be useful to have at least one college professor poised to write recommendations to go with her transcript when it's time for her to apply to colleges for real. So all that's been the centerpiece of the week: lots of vociferous resistance, followed by a general sigh of relief.

She's also been plugging away at math and biology (last week she sat in on a "School of Tomorrow" co-op session with some of her hometown friends), and has been reading her history and listening to Teaching Company lectures. In English this week we're working on run-ons and sentence fragments, as a break from Beowulf before we plunge into essay-writing next week. Last week the hometown co-op kids, who've been taking my online class, also gave presentations on aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture, so everyone's done some integrated history/English.

Amicus:
Math: working on division with 3-digit quotients. The long-division process is starting to become automatic at last.

Science: read and narrated about elements in the fifth latitude of the Periodic Table (very Charlotte-Mason of us, to do actual narration).

Nature: reading Rascal, by Sterling North.

English: diagrammed a passage from Kipling's "The Elephant's Child" and has done lots of independent reading, including reading for history.

History: reading Carry On, Mr. Bowditch

Latin: went to class at church today after Latin Mass (which of course is an immersion experience in itself).

Helier and Crispina:

Math: I broke out the Miquon Math Orange Book, and we've been messing around a bit with some of the exercises in counting and number sequencing, using number lines, fill-in-the-missing-number games, and a big chart whereby we counted to a hundred by ones, and then by tens ("shortcut counting," I told Helier). We've also begun practicing "skip-counting" even and odd numbers using a zigzag-style number line. Helier likes tracing the lines and numbers, so he got in some handwriting practice, too. Crispina freehands the numbers, with interesting results.

Literature: We're currently reading one of my all-time favorite books: The Wheel on the School, by Meindert de Jong. Can I say how beautiful this story is? Epiphany, Amicus and I read it together our first year homeschooling, and I've been waiting for the younger set to be big enough to listen to it. It's a miraculous book, truly, and it also covers a lot of "subject" territory -- geography, in that you learn a lot about Holland by reading it; and science/nature, in that you learn an awful lot about storks, and about observing and wondering as ways of learning.

For religion we all continue to observe saints' and angels' feasts by reading about them -- yesterday, in honor of St. Therese of Lisieux, we talked about making sacrifices, and I encouraged the kids to use their sacrifice beads especially in her honor that day. It was a pretty good day, now that I think about it . . . everyone must have been pulling beads, at least mentally. We're also still reading Great Moments in Catholic History daily. Today we talked at length about the True Cross and about why the Persians would have wanted to capture it, as they did at one stage (though the Eastern Empire got it back in 629, as I recall). That led us to talk about the Ark of the Covenant, and how the Philistines had captured it in battle . . . we had quite the wide-ranging conversation this morning.

Meanwhile, we've also been busy planting pansies in the garden, as well as swamp sunflowers, purple coneflowers, blue mist, and obedient plant from our garden at the old house. And we put up a round swing in our front-yard tree, so everyone's been doing lots of PE in the fresh fall air.

Friday Notes

2008-09-19T08:41:00.001-07:00

As I sit here typing, Helier is "thinking" -- ie running up and down, making Star Wars blaster and explosion-type noises -- in the bathroom; Crispina is assembling an assortment of writing utensils in the whiteboard tray (none of which is appropriate for writing on a whiteboard); Epiphany is off at the college taking a Latin quiz for which she's supposed to translate some Ovid (film at eleven); and Amicus is reading Guns for General Washington. At first he didn't want to read it. I will admit, it's an easy read: 5-page chapters, and the guy who wrote it also wrote Casper the Friendly Ghost. But it's on lots of reading lists for American history, and I found it at the bookstore, so we have it, and I figured that he might as well read it. It seems well-written, if maybe something he'd have found more challenging several years ago. Also, the value of the opportunity it presented for a little impromptu lecture on my part, about hubris and the darker side of being smart and knowing it, is not to be discounted. It's good to be smart, I told him, in essence, but not if you begin to feel that you're above things. So anyway, he's reading Guns for General Washington, which I predict he'll like well enough once he's gotten over the mental hurdle of the day.

These hurdles do wear a body out -- and I'm not even the one doing the hurdling.

Before I had my little set-to with Amicus, I spent time with Helier and Crispina: we read about the Council of Nicea in Great Moments; we read about "Creepy Crawlies" in the Usborne Pocket Nature, which has been an invaluable nature/science resource with them; and we read several stories in the Catholic Children's Treasure Box, which I personally find kind of cloyingly sentimental, but which they adore and can't get enough of.

I bought the set we have -- a bound volume of the first nine issues of the magazine -- because I'd heard someone say that she credited her own daughter's change of heart to the stories she'd read in it; I can't say, myself, that my children have been transformed overnight into obedient little seekers after God, and the tone grates a little on my maybe-too-ironic sensibilities, but . . . well, Helier and Crispina now know a heck of a lot about Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, and they at least go through fits of wanting to pull sacrifice beads, and they at least like to hear little moral stories about things like lying . . . all of which I guess represents . . . something. Anyway, they eat this up, always, and we spent a good bit of time on it today.

In other religious-formation news, I took them to Adoration with me last night for the first time. Our parish has a lovely Holy Hour service on Thursday nights, with Solemn Benediction and Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament at the beginning, followed by the Rosary and then a long period of silent meditation, closing with the Litany of the Sacred Heart and the Divine Praises. I was not AT ALL sure how this was going to go over with my kinesthetic duo, but I thought that some time with the Lord in the Sacrament, with the added attractions of the beautiful monstrance and the smell of incense, might be a powerful thing. What I can say, looking back, is that they made it through, which was more than I'd really thought they'd do, and who knows what kinds of seeds were planted? Father came to dinner with us afterwards, which was great fun - I loved that the children could experience the juxtaposition of the solemn service, with Father at his most solemn, with the same person, in a more obviously flesh-and-blood way, being lively and funny and listening with extraordinary patience to six-year-old Star Wars talk and a ten-year-old's not-always-graceful attempts to participate in adult conversation. It occurs to me that this is one more manifestation of the priest's interactions with us in persona Christe (if I've got that ending right -- not sure I do). We think of him in that role most when we're in Confession, or at Communion, but in a good priest I think that role is always present, so that in him you see glimpses of the full range of what Christ is, at once sacrificial, solemn and terrible, and the kind of person you want to come to your wedding reception. As much bad press as Catholic priests sometimes get, I find it a real blessing that our children can see firsthand what's good and lovely about the priesthood, and to know their priest as someone they can talk to.

Thinking about all this right now because we went to a parents' meeting for the Faith Formation program at church last week, where Father elucidated his policy regarding homeschoolers and faith-formation requirements: essentially, he considers that homeschooled children are receiving a thoroughly Catholic education, and that homeschooled children may be admitted to sacramental preparation at his own discretion, rather than having to have, necessarily, passed through the whole parish program. This was a relief to us, but at the same time, it did cause me to reflect a bit on the religious aspect of our homeschool, as I'm not formally teaching catechism to anyone at this moment. I have done before, and I will in future, but as with any other subject, when I look at what we're doing without really formally trying to do it, I see that quite a lot is going on. So the real topic in my mind today is unschooling catechism . . .

I should also add, re the Guns for General Washington issue (the reader is question is now grudgingly admitting that it's "okay," and I'm reflecting that his objection to reading it may well have been that he'd been immersed in a Redwall book only moments before and didn't want to change gears. But for crying out loud, he's READ all the Redwall books about a thousand times . . . sometimes one does have to push people out of their ruts, in which regard I guess I'm not entirely unschooly) that many of our school books are still in stored in a POD, including many books I'd planned to use this year. Our move wound up costing far more than we'd anticipated, and having the POD delivered has been out of the question until we recover somewhat financially. Fortunately I think that will happen pretty soon, but in the meantime, I've had to scrap a number of plans and improvise on others, which is why I've gone to using whatever I happen on in the library or the used-bookstore. Also, I like to vary up the routine on Friday anyway, so that we're not simply doing what we've done all week. It's a good day to use largely as a reading day. So I foist books on people.

Anyway, it is Friday, hooray. Next week we'll be back in our hometown for a friend's wedding, so it really will be an unschooly week, though Epiphany will have to do Latin to keep up with her class. Everyone else, I imagine, will be thoroughly in party mode for an entire week. I do plan to have us listen to history lectures on tape in the van, though.

Now Helier and Crispina and I are going to walk to the library to get some more Carolyn Haywood "Betsy" books.

This Week

2008-09-17T10:22:00.001-07:00

As my online English class has heated up, my posting on other blogs has slowed down considerably. There's only so much time in a day, and I have only so much energy to devote to blogging right now. But here's a quick synopsis of what we're doing this week:

Epiphany:
*Latin at the college (I know she had a quiz today)
*reading Beowulf for English
*still filling in gaps in history, reading and listening to Teaching Company lectures about late antiquity, but also dealing with Anglo-Saxon England
*reading Galileo's Daughter for science this week; we'll go back to the textbook soon, however
*reading P.G. Wodehouse for fun (great way to absorb prose style, too)
*running (we'll call that P.E.)
*cooking dinner (home ec)
*following the presidential election (government)

Amicus:
*we'll start Latin at church tomorrow after the noon Mass
*diagramming simple sentences with adjectives and articles, including sentences of his own composition
*division with 2-digit quotients and remainders
*today, a chapter on propaganda in his Fallacy Detective book, which sent him down an election-campaign rabbit trail: he's been looking up websites for both major presidential candidates to try to discern where each side is using propaganda to advance its agenda (I told him he HAD to look at both sides, rather than concluding that ONE side was dealing in propaganda while the other was being unambiguously aboveboard)
*more note-taking on elements in the periodic table -- we're in the fourth latitude now
*lots of reading -- lowbrow stuff like Star Wars novels, middlebrow stuff like Redwall, and, um . . . I guess nothing all that highbrow right now, that I can think of.

He also does morning prayers and Church history with Helier and Crispina and me.

Helier and Crispina:
*a chapter a day in Great Moments in Catholic History
*reading about saints on their days (today: St. Robert Bellarmine) in Fr. Lovasik's Picture Book of Saints
*reading about fish in Usborne Pocket Nature
*just got through reading two Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books; now reading Betsy and the Boys by Carolyn Haywood
*Crispina is doing lots of coloring and writing (mostly her name)
*I'm having Helier do some light "buddy-reading" with me, in books like The Cat in the Hat

We've also played more Boggle and also Monopoly -- I recall that at Helier's age, Amicus learned a lot of addition facts by rolling dice in Monopoly. If ever there were a game rife with math manipulatives . . .

And we've walked to the Farmers' Market and talked to the farmers, who by now all know that Amicus, Helier and Crispina are homeschooled, and that's why they're at the Farmers' Market at eight on a Tuesday morning, instead of in school.

More of This Week's Highlights

2008-09-10T18:15:00.000-07:00

While I wait for the camera to dump its load, so to speak, into my iPhoto, I can reflect on today, at any rate. Not really our best day: everyone was very scattered, including me, and nobody really wanted to do anything, including me. Nevertheless, we did accomplish a few items of business:

*had morning prayers/morning offering
*read about St. John in Great Moments in Catholic History
*read Mrs. Piggle--Wiggle, which Helier declares to be the best book ever.
*writing practice: Crispina drew Mickey Mouse Princesses (don't ask) on the whiteboard, and Helier dictated a sentence to me, which I had him trace over. Not a very successful venture. He protested vociferously, and I wonder whether to drop it for a bit (I don't do more than about 3 minutes of anything he doesn't take to readily), or persevere in tiny increments.

On the other hand, he and Crispina and I played Boggle, Jr., this evening before dinner. Helier wanted to mix the letters up to invent his own words, which I was then to read aloud to him -- the less pronounceable, the better. This was frustrating in terms of trying to accomplish anything like a game, but I realize, with hindsight, that there was something interesting in his perverse way of approaching the challenge of Boggle. On the one hand, he can read, though I'm not entirely sure how fluently. Sometimes I think he reads more fluently than he lets on, out of wanting me to keep reading aloud to him. Hard to tell, really. But he will often spontaneously read things to me, like the title of my Catholic Prayer Book. Anyway, it occurred to me a little belatedly that what he was doing with the Boggle game was venturing a step beyond the mere copying of words on a card: he was trying to make up his own words, and experimenting with how spelling works. He knows what the letters sound like, and has the idea of putting them together to make a nonsense joke, in which he takes great delight. Willingness to risk experimentation seems to signal some kind of advance . . . I think. Anyway, it's how he does things. Crispina likes making the little letter blocks match up with the words on the card -- that she can do this is a revelation to her. Guess it's been a while since we played Boggle.

Amicus has been diagramming simple sentences with articles this week, and today we also had to deal with an auxiliary verb structure: is caught. We had some discussion about whether you could consider caught to be part of the verb, or a participle (he doesn't know that word, and I don't have a firm grasp on participles and gerunds anymore myself) modifying whatever the subject was. The answer page said, "Verb," however, so that's how we did it. And I'm sure they're right. Amicus was even more sure that I was wrong, and that he was happy to have caught me being wrong.

He's also cracked division with remainders and the basic procedure for long division, which gave Epiphany fits for years. In Introducing the Periodic Kingdom to Its Heirs, he finished reading about and listing the elements in the fourth latitude of the Periodic Table.

Meanwhile, I had a book review to finish, so once we'd worked through our little core of subjects, I turned my attention to that while the kids played and read in the same room. I was reviewing a book I've mentioned here before: Home Schooling: A Family's Journey, by Gregory and Martine Millman. I do a lot of this working at the computer while kids . . . exist? . . . around me, and I hate to admit it, because it betrays me as maybe a little less present to my children than people might have thought, or than I ought to be. Sometimes that concern is legitimate, because I can waste a lot of time just doodling around on the computer, which then makes it harder to tell Helier he can't play the Game Boy. But after rereading a passage in the Millman book, I think that maybe sometimes -- especially when I'm writing something for somebody other than myself and my legion of followers in blogdom -- being with me when I'm working, even if I'm ignoring them completely, is not a bad thing for my kids:

When we have studied a musical instrument, or tai chi, or judo, even cooking, real instruction has come through emulation, through seeing one who is more proficient do it and then trying to imitate the action. Similarly, there are so many little details involved in developing as a learning person that it is almost impossible to capture them in any other way than emulation.

Now, typing on a computer's not as inspiring to watch as someone doing tai chi . . . I guess. I've never personally been that inspired by tai chi, but maybe that's because I haven't been around the right person doing it. Anyway, a person typing on a computer could be writing the next War and Peace, or they could be writing, "K, Thxxxx" to somebody on Facebook who sends them a piece of flair (these, for the uninitiated, are virtual buttons to stick on a virtual bulletin board. My own personal favorite is the one which says, "Procrastinators: Leaders of Tomorrow."), so I don't know that imitating me at my typing would necessarily elevate the children's lives all that much. But it's what I do, and they understand that it's work -- I mean, unless I'm on Facebook arranging my flair. And I hope they get some idea of deadlines (or in this case, of writing something actually BEFORE the editors start sending you emails asking if you ever got the book, and if so, whether you think you might ever, ever, before you die, write something about it).

So that's what we did today. I've been trying to load some photos of our trip to the science museum on Sunday, because that was FUN: among other things, we got to see some people make ice cream with liquid nitrogen. But uploading takes so long, and it's late, and we have things to do tomorrow. So the photos will have to wait for another day.

Another Pinhole-Camera Link

2008-09-08T06:56:00.000-07:00

Actually, this one is more a pinhole viewfinder, as site says, designed to help you understand how light works, how a camera works (without having to get into the whole film/development thing), and how your eyes work. I couldn't find 126 cartridge film on my shopping trip on Saturday, so I think we're going to try to make this one. The directions say that this is more satisfying for smaller children . . . we'll see.

Here's the link.

UPDATE: We've now tried this. I didn't have shoeboxes, and I do have smaller people, so we made small cameras out of toilet-paper tubes. I had the kids paint the insides with black shoe polish (because I couldn't find any paint -- anyway, the shoe-polish applicator worked well for covering a weird, hard-to-reach surface), then we duct-taped one end (the pinhole end), and taped waxed paper over the other. These made highly imperfect viewfinders, as it's well-nigh impossible to duct-tape a piece of waxed paper flat over the end of a toilet-paper tube. Nevertheless, when we went out into the bright sunshine, put a blanket over our heads to block out light, and aimed at a large object (Lulabelle the big van, parked in the driveway), we saw some dim flickery shapes in light on our "screens."

I'd prefaced the whole exercise by having the kids look at the digital camera, which fascinates them, and observe that it's got an "eyelid"/shutter, and an "eye"/lens. Then we looked at our own eyes in the mirror and noted how our pupils expand and contract depending on the level of light. Not sure I did a great job of connecting all the ideas, but then, I was talking to a 6-year-old (who was inexplicably grossed out by the thought of his own eye) and a 4-year-old, so maybe that didn't matter so much. We had fun, anyway.

Amicus spent the early morning researching freshwater eels -- a trip to the science museum yesterday (about which more later, with pictures, once the camera battery's recharged) awakened an interest first in moray eels, which he saw getting fed, and then in the kinds of eels people would catch and eat in the fens of East Anglia. Now he's reading Fallacy Detective, having spent a good half-hour or so taking notes and drawing models of atoms from the third latitude of the periodic table. We plan to laminate our chart as soon as we can find a laminator, so that he can begin writing the elements in their proper places as he goes. He's also been diagramming simple sentences with articles, and we'll round out the morning with about 45 minutes of math: more division with remainders.

Epiphany has a Latin quiz at the college today; she's also got to write an Anglo-Saxon-style riddle and post it to our discussion group and then read "The Wanderer." (for more English details and links, visit Abandon Hopefully.) Hopefully Aelred will have some time to help her over a hump in math -- I got stumped over operations with fractions involving polynomials the other day. Tomorrow, when she's home, I'll have her spend a good chunk of time on biology and history -- she read a good bit of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization over the weekend, and we're covering a good bit of history in English as well. We're getting this rhythm down . . . already I'm seeing improvement in the area of time management this year.

Pinhole Cameras

2008-09-06T11:53:00.001-07:00

Helier and Crispina want to make cameras -- NOW, as it happens, but this project will have to wait until the coming week. We can study how light works, how to compose pictures, all kinds of great stuff.

Here's a link to instructions for making a pinhole camera using a cartridge of 126 film.

Images from the End of the Week

2008-09-05T17:16:00.001-07:00

Amicus playing Risk against himself . . .

Helier and Crispina birdwatching on the greenway trail near our house . . .

The nest they were looking at . . .

Beautiful eggs from the Farmers' Market which became a math lesson . . .

I let Helier use the camera, and he took this picture . . .

We also read about starfish and oysters, and examined a dried starfish which someone brought us from the beach, and Helier practiced reading, and Crispina drew starfish and whales on the whiteboard. Amicus, meanwhile, did some practice questions in a test-prep booklet I bought, and then read. What can I say? It was Friday . . .

Epiphany went to Latin, took a quiz, hung out on campus all day, and went to Mass with Aelred before coming home in time for dinner.

Thursday

2008-09-04T07:27:00.000-07:00

Reading practice for Helier

Nature study:
The Old Orchard Bully, from the Burgess Bird book for Children.

Here's an excerpt from A Summer by the Sea, which we also read today:

(the children are looking at sand through a magnifying glass)

"I've seen sand lots of times," said Stephen.

Tom whistled softly as he peered through the glass. Then he passed it over to Stephen.

"You may think you have seen sand," he said, "but just look through this glass. You'll see something you never saw before."

Stephen took the glass doubtfully, but one glance was enough to arouse his interest.

"Colors!" he cried. "Colors in the sand! Why it looks like tiny bits of glass and stones of every color!"

. . .

"And all this from a spoonful of common seashore sand," said Mary. She took a long breath and then added shyly, "I believe everything is beautiful if you know how to look at it."

That, with walking to the Farmers' Market and buying eggs (putting some of a dozen eggs on to boil, and leaving the carton open so that people can count empty spaces and eggs left over, makes a good subtraction lesson, as Crispina and I discovered), comprised school for Helier and Crispina. Big kids are working independently; I'm about to go up and work with Amicus on division with remainders.

Looks as though Epiphany will be taking Latin at the college; she felt a little "young," as she said last night ("I sat up really straight and thought, 'Olderness! Olderness! Olderness!'"), but she's ahead of where the college students are, thanks to good preparation last year via Henle and Fr. Victor. Aelred's going to speak to the college registrar today to figure out how best to classify her. I think she ought not to be just an auditor -- if she's going to go to the class, I think she ought to do the work and receive a grade. So she'll probably end up as an "unmatriculated student," or something like that, which classification will hopefully make it easy for her to register for more classes in future.

Off to the Latin Mass now, and hopefully to find out about Latin for Amicus with Fr. B & the other homeschoolers.

Of Whiteboards, and Other Mid-Week Notes

2008-09-03T07:47:00.000-07:00

I love whiteboards. If I taught actual, classroom, institutional school still I'd probably hate whiteboards, because I can remember from the days of the overhead projector what writing with a dry-erase pen does to your sleeve. But at home, a whiteboard, a nice big one, is a wonderful thing to have around.

I had meant to hang ours from the wall in the upstairs hall, where we have our "school space,"
but today I was glad I hadn't. I wanted to use the computer, to read a chapter from Padraic Colum's The Children of Odin, by way of talking about why the days of the week have the names they do, and also to read a chapter of Thornton Burgess's The Bird Book for Children as part of our ongoing nature study. So I just moved "preschool/kindergarten" downstairs to the study for the morning, while Amicus first joined us for morning prayers and saints' stories (Gregory the Great and Pius X, according to our kitchen calendar), then moved upstairs to do his own work, about which more in a minute.

So the littles and I used the whiteboard to write/read the day of the week, the month and the year, and to see the words "Woden/Odin." We read the first chapter of Colum. Then Helier, who was hankering to tell me a Star Wars story he had made up, too his turn. He had drawn "Darth Vader and Luke fighting with lightsabers" on the whiteboard before we'd done our lesson; while he told a story about a Jedi fight at Jabba the Hutt's barge, Crispina drew the rest of the story on the whiteboard. That's Princess Leia you see there with the knobs on the side of her head -- in case you couldn't have figured that out already.

I do so wish that something else captured their imaginations more than Star Wars, but . . . well, you use what you're given, right? I wrote some Star Wars words -- "Luke," "Jedi," "attack," etc -- on a sheet of lined primary paper (that kind with the dotted red line in the middle, to encourage good handwriting by small hands), and had Helier read them to me. At some point maybe he'll trace and copy them, too. In the meantime, one of the advantages of the whiteboard is that it encourages small-motor practice: drawing and writing. And it's hard to control that pen on the slick board and get the result you want, so I figure that this is fairly useful practice.

After we had finished with the whiteboard, Amicus, who had finished everything else, took it back upstairs to work on math. It's just easier to write out factor trees on a big surface

and then write the answers in the workbook. In the space of about a week he's gone from pounding his head in frustration to banging out factors, down to the primes, for pretty much any number I give him, so I think we're ready at last to move on to the next lesson: division with remainders.

He's also been working happily in the Elementary Diagramming Worktext --

(dang, I don't know why that's sideways. It's not in the desktop version I thought I was uploading) -- and yesterday began a study of the Periodic Table of Elements, via Mary Daly's new chemistry course for middle-schoolers.

(Dang again. I've been having no end of trouble with iPhoto lately. You can decide whether you want to turn the computer or your head to see this right-side-up. I'll fix it later and repost it, but I'm too frustrated with the whole photo thing right now).

So far he's written down a list of elements -- we want to know why "Promethium" is called that, and what it has to do with Prometheus -- and drawn hydrogen and helium atoms, to cover the first latitude of the Table. Last night he and Aelred had a long conversation about the instability of the hydrogen atom, which ended in the story of the Hindenburg disaster. Now maybe we'll have to rent the movie, which I don't remember ever seeing before. Better Living Through Chemistry.

Where is Epiphany, meanwhile, and what has she been doing? Well, at the moment she's at college with Aelred; he's taken her to sit in on a Latin II class. She's apparently already ahead of them, thanks to her work in Henle last year, though as she says, there's some vocabulary she hasn't learned. So she may or may not be taking college Latin this year. She may well look in on some other classes while she's there. At home she's been plugging away at the end of algebra I, reading Life is a Blessing, and starting my online English class, in which we're currently studying the Anglo-Saxons. She's read a selection of riddles from the Exeter Book and guessed at their answers, learned what "kenning" is, and defined "Wyrd." Discussion on the yahoo group for the class was lively yesterday, so I'm thinking we're going to have a fun year.

Yesterday afternoon, Amicus, Helier, Crispina and I walked to the bookstore, where I purchased this book for Amicus, who's doing US history this year:

I also found a book called A Summer By the Sea, by Jeannette Smith, published in 1935 by the American Book Company. It's a story in which a group of children spend their summer vacation holding an "Out-of-Door School" for nature study at the seaside. Helier and Crispina are eager to launch into the "fish" section which comes up next in our Usborne Pocket Nature, and I thought that this would make a good living-book accompaniment for that (and then maybe we can take a day trip to the beach ourselves, before the fall gets away from us entirely).

Finally, I'm very pleased with the progress of my school closet at the top of the stairs.

Ah, a photo that came out the right way up. You can't see it very well here, but this is a huge, deep closet with room for more bookshelves -- at the moment there's one shelf already in place, as well as a ledge for storing board games and other resources. The bulk of our school library is still in storage, but once we get it here, this closet will be transformed into a more complete and organized resource room. As it is, I love having a place to keep things like art supplies, which always get scattered and lost if the children can reach them too easily, and also field glasses and our microscope: if they're not visible and with the school things, I forget we have them, but I can't just leave them lying around to be played with, either. Anyway, it's not pretty, but this closet is one of my favorite things about our house as a learning space. I didn't necessarily want a formal schoolroom, just a place to keep things organized so that I'll remember to use them.

A Visit to the Used Bookstore

2008-08-23T09:36:00.000-07:00

One of the many felicities of life in our town is the presence of North State Books, right there on the town square. I took Crispina errand-running with me today -- we were looking for birthday presents for sundry people whose birthdays fall this week -- and we lingered long in the bookstore, breathing in the unmistakable smell of well-thumbed books stacked, in some places, 2 and 3 deep on the shelf, and fingering many covers longingly. Well, I fingered many covers longingly; Crispina got restless after a few minutes, so I parked her in the big leather chair near the register with a stack of old Little Golden books and went about my shopping while she quietly turned pages.

I did find birthday presents; I also found the following:

More good science reading for Epiphany: Galileo's Daughter, by Dava Sobel. Recommended for high school by Maureen Wittman. Our copy of the Jerome Lejeune biography hasn't come yet, so she can read this as a welcome break from the rather dry, but thorough, Barron's biology she's been doing.

Of course, it's not biology, but I can also put it down under the rubric of "General Science" from last year, and/or "history," and/or "astronomy." Who says you have to do just one science course at a time, in sequence? None of that linear-type thought for us! (well, not all the time).

Math reading for Amicus: I found this delightful book called Romping Through Mathematics,by Raymond W. Anderson, from Knopf, 1961. Explains, in friendly, lively prose, the histories and basic concepts of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus, as well as logarithms and probabilities. Again, should provide a welcome relief from the (necessary) drilling we've been doing. I love finding resources for making even math a literature-based study in our house. I can have him read this while we're travelling next week, and/or schedule it into our regular routine once or twice a week, maybe for twenty minutes at the start of his math time, which right now lasts for 45-50 minutes.

And I bought three older Little Golden Books for Crispina and Helier: gentle, nicely written, not about Dora the Explorer.

Amicus meanwhile went to the library today, got a library card, and walked home laden with books, so we have no shortage of things to read around here. Another of the felicities of our town: Amicus walks to and from the library safely. Today the bag he was carrying his books in began to split just as he was passing the Good Neighbor Thrift Shop, where he is also a regular customer, and they gave him another bag to carry them the rest of the way. He's also on good terms with the people in North State Books -- who are very homeschooler-friendly, by the way, so please patronize them! We want them to live long and prosper.

More Highlights from the Week So Far

2008-08-21T07:14:00.000-07:00

*Birds. We've been reading about birds in our Usborne Pocket Nature. It's one of those nifty Usborne internet-linked books, and while we haven't made much use of the internet thus far, yesterday we did go online to listen to bird songs here. We listened to a cardinal, a robin, a bluejay, several different owls (I heard one hooting last night, late, when I was sitting on the porch!), mourning doves, and a variety of woodpeckers. We've seen one in the tree outside our kitchen window, and I had also heard a weird catlike call which I hadn't been able to identify, but I'm thinking now that what we may have is a yellow-bellied sapsucker. The call sounded like what I've been hearing.

After we listened to birdcalls, we took field glasses and -- Amicus, Helier, Crispina and I -- went down on the greenway to look for birds. We didn't see that many, really only one finchy kind of seed-eater looking bird on a post, but it was fun scanning the trees with binoculars and enjoying the shady coolness of the overhanging branches. We also observed lots of kudzu because, well, there's lots of kudzu around here to be observed, and I told them how it came to be here. Today on the way to the Farmers' Market we observed some soil erosion underneath a bridge, and I told them that that kind of thing was what kudzu was meant to prevent -- if only the government had known what else it would do.

ETA: I think I'm going to add Thorton Burgess's Bird Book for Children to our reading about birds. Helier and Crispina like Burgess already, and it would be nice to do some living-book reading as part of our pursuit of this subject.

Helier and I sat on the back porch after lunch, listening to the birds in our yard -- and saw a thrush!

*Math. Amicus is doing prime factors, and yesterday he spent quite a bit of time banging his head against the wall. I can remember doing the same thing -- they seem so easy and obvious to me now, which is funny, because it's not as though I ever really got anything about math concepts while I was actually sitting in math classes. No aha moment, ever. But now I can look at the page . . . and I see it. Easily. Which, um, proves . . . something, I guess. About whether one really needs to be taught something, or the value of being taught, as opposed to the value of just having a certain maturity of mind. So, everybody, when you're 43, you'll know everything. OK?

He finished the lesson on prime factors in the MCP workbook yesterday, but I wasn't convinced he really knew his stuff, so today I put some random numbers on the whiteboard and said, "Factor these, boy!" And he did. Then I had him choose some numbers for himself, by which time factoring was just a game. Crispina came along behind him and traced over the numbers he'd written with another dry-erase pen, so she got a lesson in handwriting out of his math exercise.

*History. Epiphany has been listening to Teaching Company Foundations of Western Civ lectures and reading Thomas Woods's How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization --

-- and her conversation lately has been full of barbarians. English/history last year ended at about the time of Constantine, and we'll be picking up after Labor Day with the Anglo-Saxons, so the lectures on late antiquity and the fall of the Roman Empire offer some much-needed fill-in-the-gap. She likes to knit and listen, and her bringing up history-related subjects in dinner conversation saves my having to come up with narration assignments for her. The Woods book has the added benefit of also covering religion. Eventually we'll be buying the second book in the Didache series, but for the moment, two house notes are pretty much maxing out our budget, so we're having to make the most of what we already have. Hooray for integration. She's also doing some writing based on her history/religion reading, which covers composition as well as both the former subjects. Hooray again. Meanwhile, she's also working her way rather ploddingly through the Barrons Biology the Easy Way, a basic and not terribly exciting spine for biology, but it does provide a groundwork of concepts for pursuing more science-related interests, chiefly fetology and midwifery. I've just ordered Clara Lejeune's Life is a Blessing, a memoir of her father, Jerome Lejeune, who both discovered the genetic mutation for Downs Syndrome and championed the right to life for Downs children. This book should provide some ethical context for the study of genetics (maybe a little more motivation to be interested in the eye colors of drosophila) and, for the non-scientifically-inclined student, some understanding of how important and relevant and even urgent the study of science can be.

*Test Prep. We've just moved from a state which did not, under certain legal provisions, require any standardized testing of homeschooled students to a state which mandates yearly testing. We're not especially worried about this -- I'm not a fan of standardized testing, which I think falls far short, as a general rule, of being an accurate reflection of what a student can do, or is. Still, we can look on the exercise as a kind of game. I'm planning to administer the Iowa test at the end of the year: we can do this one at home, I believe, and I can administer it myself, which saves us no end of hassles, and now that I know that we can use it to get Epiphany into some college-level classes if we want, and she wants, that's one more reason to do it. Overall, I don't think I have any reason to worry about how they'll perform: I know what people's strengths and weaknesses are, and we'll just see how far the test scores confirm what I already know about my children.

One of the dangers of standardized testing in a classroom setting, where a school's ranking depends largely on its students' overall performance, is that the entire year gets devoted to teaching students to perform well on a particular test. That could be a danger for us, too, I guess; at the same time, I thought it would be illuminating to look at what we actually would need to know for, say, the fifth-grade test. I bought a test booklet and today, for a change of pace, after we'd done our factoring game, had Amicus read through the "For Students" section at the beginning, covering how to prepare for tests, how to eat a good breakfast, etc. At the end of the section there was a skills checklist, which I also had him fill out. What we gathered from this exercise was that if he had to take the test tomorrow, he'd ace the English portion of it handily, but there are a lot of math concepts we haven't covered yet. Well, it is the fifth-grade test, and we're only two weeks into the year, so that's hardly surprising. I had him go back to the MCP workbook and look through it for concepts and skills specifically mentioned in the checklist which he hadn't been able to check off, and dog-ear the pages so that we're sure to cover those things. Again, I don't want to fall into the trap of teaching to a test all year, but I don't want to miss things we know will be on it, either.

*Rabbit Trails.I've been going over the days of the week with Helier and Crispina, so that they'll recognize the words written out (we also do the date, with the year, so that they recognize a date written out and know their months, and we do the weather -- I let them take turns drawing whatever the weather is doing on the whiteboard, after we've written "sunny," "hot," or whatever). Today I couldn't resist talking about why Thursday is called "Thursday" (and then why "Wednesday" is called "Wednesday"), which led us to pull out a book about Vikings, write "Thor" and "Woden" on the board, and draw a Thor's Hammer. So we may be doing some more reading about Vikings.

Here are some living-book e-texts we can use:
Stories of the Vikings
The Heroes of Asgard
The Children of Odin by the incomparable Padraic Colum!

Tomorrow we're taking a fun day: some homeschoolers we met in our new parish invited us to go to the mountains with a big group of families, to a park with a creek where the kids can play and swim. It'll be fun to meet some new friends, and also to take advantage of how close the mountains are now! Thus far we've been staying close to home, and it's definitely time to branch out a little.

Now HERE'S a Thought

2008-08-20T03:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday up at campus, Aelred spent a long time talking to a colleague, a philosopher, actually, whose seven children had all been homeschooled. In fact, the man said, the two youngest, now twins of eighteen, were all set to graduate -- from the college. He asked how old our oldest was, and when Aelred told him that Epiphany's fourteen, he remarked, "Oh, well, time to get her up here."

But how do you do that, Aelred wanted to know. Had this man had his children take the SAT at 14?

Oh, no, no, no. "You don't want 'em taking the SAT or ACT," he said, "because that score will haunt them forever. We just had 'em take the Iowa tests, and the college let them in. You know," he went on in a confidential tone, "high school's just a waste anyway. Why not send 'em to a place like this now, then let 'em take the LSAT, or the GRE, or whatever, at the end and go straight on into what they really want to do?" Or words to that effect.

Aelred came home chewing over this conversation and posed the idea to me. What if? Maybe not this year, but next year? Maybe not this semester, but next semester? Maybe not a fulltime college load, but a few courses, adding more as we go? Maybe not graduating from college at eighteen, but transferring as a sophomore, say, to someplace else when she's ready to leave home?

Of course, there's something to the self-directedness of homeschooling as we do it here that I'd be loath to sacrifice altogether -- though maybe Epiphany would be more ready for that than I think. If not this year, then next year? . . .

Anyway, why not think about it? There's no real reason in the world why not -- anything.

Supernovae and Other Super Stuff

2008-08-19T08:37:00.000-07:00

Amicus began his day today by returning to the computer and the supernova. He continued the written narration begun yesterday, explaining the two ways a supernova can occur:

One is the core collapse, the other is nuclear fusion. We will focus on the core collapse supernova. How do they happen in the core collapse supernova?

So obviously he's given himself a question to begin with tomorrow. He came upstairs to tell me what he'd read about, and I had him define both "fusion" and "fission" for me.

He and I are both loving working with the Elementary Diagramming Worktest, which makes learning diagramming so easy and thorough. We've spent the last few days looking at simple sentences, writing simple sentences, and diagramming simple sentences; today's exercise called for dictation, as in dictating sentences from the First Whole Book of Diagrams for the student to write onto blank simple-sentence diagrams in the workbook. So it was an exercise testing listening, penmanship and spelling as well as diagramming skills. Tomorrow: making up simple sentences about beautiful things, and diagramming them. Composition, "creative" writing (like there's any un-creative writing), and analytical grammar, all in one, as surely they're meant to be.

Epiphany burned out on math this morning -- I'm trying to have the big kids double up somewhat on schoolwork this week, because next week we're going home to do some work on our unsold house, and my guess is that nothing (formal) will get done. That of course doesn't mean that learning won't happen, but for Epiphany in particular, a certain amount of formal stuff does need to happen. But what do you do when somebody hits the wall? I suppose you could assume that they were being lazy and just tell them to get on with it anyway -- but I can't make myself do that. For one thing, working past a burnout point, however quickly or gradually arrived at, just seems counterproductive. You can't learn when your mind's shut down. Furthermore, if homeschooling really is about personal relationship, as Gregory and Martin Millman maintain --

-- then it would also seem counterproductive to impugn the character of the person in question by assuming the worst about his (or in this case, her) motives. Sometimes it's hard not to do that: paradoxically, in trying to educate our children in virtue, we can operate from the assumption that God didn't give them any virtue to start out with, and I think that's a mistake. We're all fallen, but still, the spark is there of what we ought to be, and it seems better to me to blow on that spark and nurture it than to stamp it out, in the course of thinking we're stamping out something else.

So I didn't say, when Epiphany came down moaning about math and tiredness, "Go do it anyway." I said, take a break. Have a nap, even, if you want. The thing is, she knows she's got to do it sometime. Like the Millmans, we're not really a mathematical household, but we all know we've got to learn at least enough to get by, if not to appreciate the beauty of it all -- though getting to the point of appreciating the beauty would obviously be an ideal goal. Anyway, I figure Epiphany's conscience will catch up with her eventually, and in the meantime, if she spends time reading what she wants to read, or drawing, or daydreaming, or even dreaming, that time somehow will not be wasted. It will get her somewhere.

When the children raise [a] question, we explore it. We follow the trail where it leads. We don't have to say, "Don't you have math homework to do?" or "We'll get to that next year when we study contemporary history. Now we're studying the American Revolution." We might even put math and history and English and everything else aside for a while to do something else whose importance is more immediate -- such as looking out the window at something happening that won't happen again.

(Gregory and Martine Millman, 33)

Earlier in the morning, she went running -- her new discipline (and we can call it PE), while the other three and I walked to the Farmers' Market. If I had to give our program a name and a theme for the year, I think I'd call it "Learning to Live in a Small Town." We spend some time daily on formal work, but really what it's all about right now is learning our environment: what times the trains go by and what they're carrying (coal), which tells us something about our local economy. What people are growing on farms right now (local economy again and also science, because we learn something about what plants grow when, which is something you can't learn so easily shopping in the supermarket). Who's out walking in the morning, and what their dogs' names are (loving our neighbor, I guess).

And now it's lunchtime, and we'll read the Rule of St. Benedict, plus more Enid Blyton.

One Never Knows

2008-08-18T19:21:00.000-07:00

. . . what's going to prove "educational." Or to put it another way, one never knows how something -- a book, an experience -- might prove educational.

Take the play I took Epiphany and Amicus to see on Saturday night at the college: Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn. It was not in any way a "kids'" play, dealing as it did with the development of the atomic bomb and all kinds of questions of good and evil, of motive and intent, and of true historical mysteries, in this case the question of why German physicist Werner Heisenberg visited his old Danish mentor Niels Bohr in 1941, and getting at that central question by replaying the visit over and over again, to sift through the layers. As I said, not exactly a dramatic premise that screams, "Take the kids!" But there it was, playing at the college for free, and Epiphany and Amicus like the theatre, so at Aelred's suggestion we went.

Aelred had thought that Amicus would be interested in the science, and he was right. At intermission, immediately the lights came up Amicus turned to me and said, "Mom, is there such a thing as anti-matter?" I said I thought there was, and if he had questions he ought to write them down and google them, which was precisely how he began his school day today. He got out a new notebook for science, jotted down the questions he could remember having on Saturday night, and went to the computer. After a while he called me down to see what he was doing: he'd gotten off on the tangent of supernovae and had gone on YouTube to find footage of a supernova happening. Actually he'd watched a couple of them, and then he wrote the following brief narration of what he'd seen:

Supernovae

What are they? Supernovas are cosmic explosions that occur when a star probably a red giant or a white dwarf explodes. They can happen one of two ways

-- and that was as far as he got before it was time to move on to sentence diagramming and math. I'd have let him work on the supernovae longer, but I had to meet Aelred for a new-faculty luncheon, and I wanted to be sure to supervise the English and math, so I did cut him off today. He says, however, that he's going to start each school day this week by working on supernovae, so he should have more to say about them soon. I was impressed that he'd written even that much -- I knew he could think it and say it, but up to now writing has just been too labored for him to fall naturally into doing it. It's no end of satisfying for me to see that switch flip for him now.

Epiphany, meanwhile, was not as taken by the science or even the philosophical questions, though she and Amicus debated all the way home in the car the ethics of developing and using weapons of mass destruction. For her the experience was more an artistic one, though. This was a kind of theatre she had never seen before, and a kind of acting -- straight drama, excellently performed -- that she hadn't had much exposure to heretofore, for all her love of the theatre. The experimental aspect of the plot, the idea of going back to a moment and replaying it and pushing one's memory of it to get at some possibly unknowable answer, must have been intriguing, too. I don't know quite what's going on in her head as a result of seeing a play like this -- rather, I do know some of the things going on in her head, and none of them have anything to do with the history of the development of the atomic bomb or questions of physics -- but I can imagine both the acting and the writing percolating away at some half-buried level in her brain, waiting to turn into something. That's how her mind works. I did tell her I'd give her some science credit for going.

What the littles are doing:

*still working on days of the week, the month and the year.
*reading Great Moments in Catholic History
*reading about birds in the Usborne Pocket Nature
*coloring
*building with Legos
*going to the Farmers' Market and talking about food
*reading an Enid Blyton Famous Five book -- not great literature by any means, but fun and engaging, with good characters (good in the sense of being morally good and having a strong sense of right and wrong, not good in the sense of being especially round or complex as people)
*riding bikes on the greenway trail near our house, and watching the coal trains which come through town -- there' s a railroad crossing on our street as well

So that's the start our week is off to.

Highly Recommended Resource #2

2008-08-16T04:20:00.001-07:00

For youngers, as a daily read-aloud, and olders (10-12-ish), too:

Great Moments in Catholic History, by the Rev. Edward Lodge Curran, Ph.d, first published in 1938 by Grosset & Dunlap. Begins with the Annunciation and ends with chapters on "Catholicism and Communism" and the Church "Marching On," one historical event per page. This is a beautifully-written book, with a simple but striking black-and-white illustration of each event covered, which lends itself easily to daily or weekly lessons in either history or religion, or an integration of both. It would be easy to use this book as a spine for Catholic history, supplemented by age-appropriate novels or picture books to flesh out a given period or event in history.

For the Charlotte-Mason-inclined, it's perfect for short lessons and narrations; in the back, too, there are quizzes for each chapter, with questions like "What does the word Bethlehem mean?" "What do you mean by the word manuscript?" etc., taken directly from the readings. So it's really a perfect little self-contained curriculum. I've been reading a page aloud daily to Helier and Crispina, and Amicus has been reading it as well. I just discovered the quizzes in the back, so I think I'll start having him test himself on what he's read . . .

Highly Recommended Resource #1

2008-08-13T07:09:00.000-07:00

First Whole Book of Diagrams and Elementary Diagramming Worktext, by Mary Daly and available from Ye Hedge School. I'm using this with Amicus, primarily, this year, and already he loves diagramming and is gaining facility with writing. This time last year, the prospect of having to MAKE UP and WRITE DOWN sentences would have reduced him to tears of frustration, but he's tackled the first pages of the worktext with great enjoyment: so far he's been asked to identify subjects and verbs in simple sentences, then to make up simple sentences of his own. What he's come up with has sounded like poems (very much in the vein of the first two lines of "The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls"), and it's been easy, because he's had a structure to work with, and to concentrate on fulfilling the structure. This, in my own experience, is THE way around writer's block, especially when it comes to "creative writing." Assigning topics is lethal -- assign a structure (a form, a kind of sentence, etc), as if you were assigning a math problem, so that they're concentrating on the puzzle rather than on having something to say, and doing the puzzle unlocks whatever it was they had to say, which they wouldn't have been able to think of had they been trying to think about it. For a writer who's not a "natural", ie somebody who just thinks in great waterfalls of written prose (this would be Epiphany), this kind of approach is a Godsend. A sentence, then a sentence, then a sentence . . . Thus again I think I'm glad I didn't try to do "composition" as a separate subject, even though by the start of middle school one ought to be doing more writing . . . clearly this is answering that need, without my having to make it a separate concern.

Kinetic learning with little folk:

In the last Usborne order I placed, for which I received a nice little boatload of free books, I got the Usborne Pocket Nature, one of those combined volumes covering four or five different "nature" books. Right now the small folk and I are reading about birds, a double-page spread a day, which is just about right for a kindergarten lesson, short and sweet. So far we've looked at birds' body structure, then at flying and landing, and today at birds' feet. Each page has afforded an opportunity for some getting-up-and-moving -- we've tried flapping our arms for a solid minute, to see how much stronger birds' pectoral muscles are than ours; we've held our arms in "flying" positions to see how our shoulders, elbows and wrists bend both like and unlike birds' wings; today we tried walking on our toes, to mimic a bird's walking. Couldn't make our toes lock around a branch, however. So we've been noticing birds in the yard a lot as a result -- yesterday on the way home from the Farmers' Market, we saw a cardinal bathing in the gutter above our front door, a splash of bright red against the gray house and roof. Very lovely.

We're also enjoying reading Padraic Colum's The Golden Fleece, and the Rule of St. Benedict at lunchtime.

Beginning a New Year

2008-08-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

Weeeee're baaaaaaack, after what seemed like an awfully short summer break. It wasn't that "breaky" at all, actually: we didn't go on vacation (except Amicus, who went to the beach with his friend Ian), but we did move and so are beginning the new school year in a new house in a new town. This means, at least in the short term, quite a different year from last year, which was dominated by the high-school co-op. This year we're still doing high school, but my aim is to focus with greater intention on the younger children. After much reflection, I decided not to advance Helier to first grade, but to keep him in kindergarten for another go-round, mostly to give him time to mature and be more ready for more formal work next year. This year we'll simply focus on learning how to learn, how to enjoy learning, how to sit and follow directions, etc. At the moment Crispina is very happily along for the ride.

So here's what we've been doing today, to kick off the year:

1. I sketched out a rough weekly list for each child (or in the case of Helier and Crispina, children together), using functions at Google Calendar. I don't necessarily follow the schedules I make, but if I don't make something I won't do anything. So I did schedule a school day and a week's worth of fairly light work for everyone, to ease us into the year.

2. Many of our books and resources are still in storage, so we're beginning with an abbreviated roster of subjects. Epiphany is doing algebra, history, and biology this week, and reviewing Latin so that she can begin when the co-op class begins in our hometown after Labor Day. Her plan is to have friends send her the assignments, quizzes, etc, so that she can work alongside them and show up for class whenever we go back to visit. Amicus is doing math, English, history, and mythology.

3. What we've actually done today:

Epiphany is in her room right now listening to the next lecture in the Foundations of Western Civilization series she's been listening to since last year. I've also assigned her the first chapter in Barron's Biology Made Easy, which we're using for a spine for biology, the first chapter of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, and a writing assignment: to write a (mock) letter to someone unsympathetic to Catholicism, defending the Church based on what she reads about its history in this first chapter. My aim is to have her write a series of letters on this theme, collected in a notebook. I also plan to have her do a practice test in her ACT prep booklet sometime this week.

Amicus is upstairs in the window seat right now, working division drill problems by way of review. He's also read Great Moments in Catholic History this morning, and we spent a good 45 minutes introducing sentence diagramming via Mary Daly's First Whole Book of Diagrams. We looked at what a sentence is (subject+verb=complete thought), diagrammed a few simple sentences, read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Tide Rises" in The Harp and the Laurel Wreath, and then diagrammed the first two lines as a series of simple sentences (go look up the poem -- it's perfect for this. And you can see clearly how repetitive the syntax of those lines is, just like the rhythm of the tide falling on the beach). He's also read two chapters of The Fallacy Detective and done an exercise at the end of the second chapter.

While Amicus was reading and doing logic, I spent about 45 minutes with Helier and Crispina. I began by having them guess what I was writing on the board (the word "Monday," then "August 11, 2008."). We looked at unfamiliar sounds -- -ay and au -- and read the words together and talked about the date. We noted that today is the feast of Saint Clare and read about her in the Picture Book of Saints. We got out tracing paper and traced pictures of Our Lady and the Crucifixion -- my thought had been to prepare for the Feast of the Assumption on Friday, but it turned into all-purpose making-of-stained-glass, which was fine -- then I did another "guess what I'm writing" exercise, and wrote "Let us go to the house of the Lord" on the whiteboard for a memory verse. Helier read it with almost no problem, only stumbling a little on "house" (we talked about the -ou sound, too). Then I let them go. My plan with them is to spend a half-hour to 45 minutes at the beginning of each day, while the older ones work on their own, covering some basics and practicing the fine art of participating in a lightly structure activity, which heretofore, and of his own volition, Helier has had zero interest in doing. This year I'm forcing that issue a little.

Epiphany says, "WHY didn't Plato and Aristotle just keep their fat mouths shut?" She's not especially happy about biology, either, but last night Aelred took her out driving in the parking lot across the street, and I have told her that if she wants to do more of that kind of thing, she will do the biology, and the Plato and Aristotle, too.

Pushing to the Finish Line

2008-05-15T17:22:00.001-07:00

Not that there really is one, of course; it's just that mentally, by the middle of May, we are in a finishing mood.

Our tadpoles continue not only to survive, but to grow and flourish. They're still in the salad bowl on the kitchen counter, eating up lettuce and spinach leaves. I replenish their water with jugged spring water when it starts to get too low or look too cloudy, and they seem to be fine.

There's a Dover science book --

which I think of every time I look into the tadpole bowl. The book deals with amoebae, protozoae, et al.; my tadpole bowl, I'm sure, is home to those things in abundance, but it's also home to a remarkable abundance of living things visible to the naked eye. Besides tadpoles, I mean. We have several water snails, which in three weeks have grown from the size of a bead to the size of, um, a larger bead, plus a lot of what I'm sure are mosquito larvae: pink wormy things which wriggle around in the silt at the bottom of the bowl. I keep meaning to put a drop of our water under the microscope -- first I have to get new slides, though, and I haven't done that yet -- to see what other life we have going on. Anyway, a bowl of tadpoles is a wealth of science learning, and all four children have been observing it with keen interest.

I've been reading The Mitchells: Five for Victory

with the little kids -- Amicus and Epiphany have both read it to themselves -- and everyone loves it. It's provided a glimpse of life on the home front during World War II (their grandmothers' childhood era) and spurred interest on the part of Helier and Crispina in learning more about the larger context of the war. We have a fabulous book to pull out whenever they have questions: The Usborne Introduction to the Second World War, which is full of pictures of all aspects of the war. It's a good read for an older child, but visual enough to be intriguing to younger ones as well. So we've been doing that.

Amicus has almost finished his second Draw and Write book, and we're about to a stopping point in math, which I think we're going to continue over the summer, six weeks on and one week off. Alex the math tutor suggested this as the best way to deal with math, so that people don't forget what they've learned, and I think it's a sensible plan. Epiphany will be doing algebra all summer, and he might as well plow ahead also.

Thinking of buying Life of Fred for comic relief as we work towards finishing algebra -- my sense is that we need some reinforcement. Epiphany can do it; she just tends to freeze when taking a test and forget how to do -- anything. Alex suggests that she simply needs confidence, so I'm thinking that maybe if it's funny . . . Funny usually works for us.

In co-op we're reading Julius Caesar. Good to round out the year with Shakespeare and lots of dramatic reading.

Science group has been focused on frogs (surprise, since we all have tadpoles), insects (last week we had the Insect Olympics, with six-leg races and practice drinking through various kinds of drinking-straw probosces --? I'm guessing that might be the plural?), and this coming week, earthworms. It's just too pretty to stay inside, so we've been meeting in the park and doing as much playing outside as we can before the weather heats up.

Choir is winding down; Epiphany had her last violin lesson today, and her recital is Saturday. Today Aelred took the boys fishing, which I'm sure was at least as educational as whatever is going on in the schools right now: Amicus caught a bream, and Helier came home with a pet minnow in a water bottle. The minnow now occupies my best mixing bowl -- really, I must go and buy at least one tank at the dollar store to put our expanding aquatic population in -- on the counter next to the tadpoles. It's very small and silvery and transparent; you can see its brain through the top of its head, as Helier pointed out to me.

We are tired and heavily into house-selling and house-hunting and general-packing mode, but all in all I think we're finishing out the official year in good style, and it has been a rich year all around.

Best Curriculum Buys: The Dollar Aisle at Walgreens

2008-05-03T08:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had to go to Walgreens -- I forget what I actually went to buy. They've moved the dollar aisle from the back of the store by the office supplies to the very front, next to all the bubbles and sidewalk chalk and barbecue tongs and other seasonal stuff, so that you can't not stop and browse, if you're me. So whatever I'd gone in to buy, here's what I came home with: three fairly sturdy big magnifiying glasses (the real kind, for reading, not the flimsy kiddie-detective kind) and a giant book of crossword puzzles.

And oh, the lessons you can have with these items, as we have discovered. I bought the magnifying glasses so the little kids could look at the tadpoles, which they did, endleessly (it was a rainy day). We've not only observed the tadpoles and their habits in minute detail, but also the structure of the algae growing in the bowl (thin green filaments, like hair). Helier and Crispina took their magnifying glasses outside, too, and looked at plants, slugs, caterpillars, and each other's eyes, close-up and more than personal.

Meanwhile, Epiphany and Amicus took turns working the crossword puzzles, with help from me. It's amazing what cultural literacy these puzzles require, which means that if a young person is working the puzzle, you can have no end of fascinating conversations about what the clues and answers mean. You also have to think out of the box -- your mind may be supplying a noun as the answer to a clue, but the clue may actually be asking for a verb. And you have to be able to spell things right.

We've also been playing a lot of Scrabble, which I suppose I could file under "SAT Prep."

So if I had to come up, in retrospect, with a theme for "school" yesterday, it would be "Looking and Thinking: Observation and Reason." Or something like that. So much of life is renderable into educationese . . . which would seem to suggest that much of what we label "education" is really just a jargon-fueled attempt to approximate life.

Serendipitous Science

2008-05-01T11:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was co-op day, and as usual, Amicus, Helier and Crispina spent the day at Bess's house. Bess took them to the park, and they came home with a bottle of tadpoles, which now have taken up residence in my best non-lead-crystal salad bowl on the kitchen counter.

So, um, here we have some science. Helier and Crispina have observed them endlessly: their mode of locomotion (frantic tail waggling), their eating habits (some algae came home with them, and they seem to be feeding on it), their routines of rest and activity. If they live, we'll also get to observe their slow metamorphosis into frogs.

Amicus has done some research into tadpole care and feeding, finding plenty of useful information here, at How to Raise Tadpoles. Helier and Crispina are fond of a picture book from my childhood: Olly's polliwogs, by Anne and Harlow Rockwell. This is a gentle story in which a boy and his father find some frog spawn in the pond and bring it home to hatch into tadpoles, a process the reader observes along with Olly. Commendably, Olly and his father return the spawn to the pond when they have as many newly-hatched tadpoles as their tank can support; in the end, Olly lets his little frogs go. The story is quietly engaging and encourages a sense of wonder at the miracle of life -- rather than a sense of entitlement to be entertained by the miracle of life. Helier and Crispina love it, and I prophesy more rereadings of it now that we actually have tadpoles in our house. A good book to add to your literature-based science program.

Additionally, Amicus has been helping me to weed the gardens, with the result that he's learning a lot about tree seedlings and how to identify them (look at the leaves, natch -- you can match them to the big trees to see what kind they are, which may sound like a no-brainer but is something of a revelation when you're 10). Weeding also teaches you a lot about plant identification in general, since you have to know what something is before you know whether to pull it or not. So chalk up one more nature-study lesson for us.

Beautiful Homeschooling Moment

2008-04-30T05:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon: Epiphany sitting on the front stoop in the late sunlight, reading Acts III and IV of Julius Caesar aloud to Crispina. File that under "Things That Wouldn't Happen If They Went to School."

A Friend Asks

2008-04-29T06:15:00.000-07:00

What do Helier and Crispina do while you're reading out loud? Do they sit next to you, hands folded in their laps, staring attentively? How much inattention do you tolerate before saying "enough!" and moving on to some other activity? I'm having a hard time coming up with consistent ground rules for reading aloud from books without lots of pictures.

She wanted to post this question as a comment, but apparently I've got my comments set so that you have to have a Google account . . . I'd forgotten about that. Anyway, we've had some private email exchange regarding the question of reading aloud to youngers, but I thought I'd bring it up here as well, because while I know what I do, it would be interesting to hear how others handle read-alouds.

What I said to my friend was something along these lines: Heavens no, Helier and Crispina do not sit with their hands folded, staring attentively. Usually Helier is running up and down the room (I occasionally have to ask him to keep the sound effects down so that I can hear myself read), while Crispina is either coloring, playing with a dolly, or looking at another book while I read from the read-aloud book.

Helier and Crispina are almost-6 and 4, and I don't regard these behaviors as misbehaviors at all. Boys especially have a hard time sitting still -- if they're going to think, they've got to move. Meanwhile, there are girls who are kinetic learners in the same way, but I think that even for the less-kinetic sector of the population, there's something about engaging the hands while engaging the ears . . . playing while a story is being read may LOOK like inattention, but it's been my experience that this is HOW many children attend. I've often been reading to one child while another child was playing nearby, not even necessarily "included" in the read-aloud; just as often I've been surprised to have the playing child later talk to me about the reading, or to overhear that child "playing" whatever I'd been reading, or otherwise to be shown in some way that the child who wasn't listening in any apparent way had in fact absorbed whatever I'd been reading with pretty much perfect comprehension.

We have always liked books on tape, and maybe it's that experience, of having the children listening to a story while playing quietly, and then seeing that of course they'd heard the story, which has made me not worry about their "attending" so much. For a quiet something-to-do, I far prefer a book on tape, by the way, to any kind of visual, televised "story," even a good one, for this reason: that they do learn to listen with their ears only. Their hands can be doing something else, but their ears and enough of their minds are on the story.

Anyway, I don't have any rules when it comes to read-alouds. Usually my problem is that they want me to go on reading forever, and I do give out at some point.

I also mentioned to my friend, whose children are just-turned-four and two, that reading aloud, with more text and fewer pictures, does get easier as they get older. Four is easier than three in that regard. Five is easier than four, and so on. For most of my children, so far as I can identify a "first" (Epiphany is the only person of whom I can say this kind of thing with any certainty), Little House in the Big Woods has been our "starter" chapter book. There are pictures; the story is told in a way that's readily accessible and engaging for a fairly young child; the chapters read like stand-alone stories; and the events in their pioneering life are so engaging, and so suffused with family love, warmth and ingenuity that it's practically impossible for a child who CAN listen not to listen and be drawn in.

So that's how it works in our house. As I've said before, our "curriculum" is largely literature-based, so I have had some opportunity to observe people's listening styles -- at least, the listening styles of the four people in my house. I'm curious to know how it goes for other families, and what others' first-read-aloud-chapter-book favorites might be.

Our Reading This Week

2008-04-23T19:42:00.000-07:00

Epiphany and I: Julius Caesar

Amicus: Richard Halliburton's Royal Road to Romance and Chesterton's Lepanto

Helier and Crispina (and I, since I'm the Reading Voice): The Penderwicks

Random Moments of Learning

2008-04-15T10:40:00.000-07:00

Over at Fine Old Famly my late-night discussion of unschooling and utopia has raised some lively, if consensual, conversation. I was always better at defining and re-narrating than I was at doing controversial things; at any rate, it's interesting to me to look at unschooling/homeschooling as an essentially utopian gesture, and at how that can play out.

I was arguing, sort of, that in embracing "unschooling" wholeheartedly as an out-and-out philosophy -- which it is, with tenets and methods and everything -- you cease to "unschool" in a pure sense. In other words, there's no such thing as "unschooling," except as it exists in the gaps between philosophies and educational models and so forth. Yet it struck me, after I'd written the whole thing, that many, if not most, of my posts on this homeschooling blog fall under the label "unschooling." Funny, that. It's an easy word to use, I suppose, especially when there's no other convenient term for what you've been doing, when you haven't been teaching, or following a particular method, or paying attention to scope and sequence, and yet significant learning happens.

Take some things which have been happening around here lately. I catalog them in no particular order:

*Amicus has been reading Archimedes and the Door of Science, by Jeanne Bendick.

He didn't particularly want to read it, but we're coming up short for things to do for science, and the house is half-packed for our impending move, so I pulled this book from the shelf and said, "Here." In this I was NOT adhering to the unschooling method of allowing the child to choose his resources. I exercised authority, and I made a decision for him. Today he moaned about reading it, because the chapter was about levers, and he KNOWS all about levers, Mom. But he read it. At lunch he was sitting at the kitchen bar fiddling with Epiphany's iPod Shuffle, opening and shutting the little spring clip, and he remarked that this was an example of a particular kind of lever, because the fulcrum was all the way at one end instead of in the middle (I've already forgotten precisely what he said, and what kind of lever it is . . . I need to go look at that chapter again!). It was a serendipitious science moment, a little eureka (Look! This stuff exists in real life!), but the serendipity was a little bit engineered, by me. Still, I didn't deliver any lectures, or gather together examples of levers to show him, or put him through the paces of an actual lesson. I just gave him the book, and the book, plus objects we have lying around the house, supplied the lesson itself. (and it counts as history, too)

*Then there's the continuing saga of Helier and reading. New development: he currently converses almost entirely in spelled-out words. Leaving the house, he says, "B-Y-E!" He used to say "B-I," until I explained things. To communicate when he wants something, he says, "N-O-W!" So I've been reciprocating, and spelling things out to him (and he goes, "Huh?" and then I tell him what I've said, and we sound it out together). No book in this case. No lesson. Just something like a game of tennis, of Helier's devising. Someone else's child might not do this, in which case the game would be different. But this is our game right now.

*And there's the overhearing thing. For geography, Amicus and I have been reading Richard Halliburton's The Royal Road to Romance, which mostly makes us want to be world travellers in 1925.

It is wonderful fun. The best part of it is that in reading it aloud of a morning, I'm reading it not only to Amicus, sitting next to me, but to Helier and Crispina, playing with trains under the dining room table, and to Epiphany, working at the computer. Everyone's gotten caught up in it. The other best part is that in the old edition we have (it may actually be a first edition, but I'm not sure), the flyleaf is printed with a map of Halliburton's travels, with little cartoon drawings depicting his climbing the Matterhorn, riding a mule to Andorra, falling into a reflecting pool at the Alhambra, and peering from a jail cell in Gibralter. All very amusing, as the stories themselves are. This morning, as we were reading, Helier and Crispina crowded around me to look at these pictures, so we talked about where on the map these various places were, and the fact that they're real places, and so forth. I certainly don't do formal geography with a 5- and a 4-year-old; I barely do it with Amicus. But in reading to Amicus, I find I'm planting seeds of discovery not only in him, but in the little folk, too. And I'm sure that this is beyond obvious, but if they were all in school, this overflow of learning would not be possible.

Ah, Crispina has just appeared beside me to report that she and Helier have been having a "water experience," with the result that the front of her dress was all wet. I just didn't ask what the "water experience" had entailed: obviously it had involved water, and an experience of it, which is really all I need to know.

Roman Idol

2008-04-10T10:42:00.000-07:00

In history group we've moved on from Greece to Rome, and this week's theme was the transition from Republic to Empire. I decided to focus on the emperors themselves (including Julius Caesar, even though he wasn't technically an emperor, having been assassinated before he got to put on that hat), because they're no end of entertaining and memorable. That is, I'm sure that some of them were less entertaining actually to live under than others, but hindsight is not only entertaining but also . . . well, entertaining, in the same way that television is entertaining, giving every appearance of reality without being quite real.

So we played Roman Idol. I typed up little cheat sheets with zingy biographical facts about the first six rulers in the transition from Republic to Empire: Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. Six kids volunteered to draw a bio sheet and then stood up in chronological order to introduce themselves as contestants. Of course, the contestants were all voted off, either by old age, suicide, or murder -- the audience really didn't have a chance to vote, though we did do an applause-o-meter at the end to choose our favorite madman. I now can't remember whether Caligula or Nero won, though I rather think it was Caligula: dressing as a goddess and having your army invade Britain without ships (and end up gathering seashells) trumps even using Christians as tiki torches for your garden parties. At least, for sheer nuttiness it does. Nero gets the sadism prize, I think.

In other news: Amicus is sitting here doing math, even as I type, and moaning because the seven-times table is hard. We're into multiplying two two-digit numbers and are having to do more drill-and-kill than anyone really naturally likes, because there's just no other way to get the procedure under your belt. So we are accomplishing this slowly and painfully, with many tears and much ranting. What fun. Meanwhile, since we came home from story time earlier (where he read me a good bit of a book called Chickens to the Rescue -- that is, he read some of the actual words and filled in the rest by looking at the pictures and guessing), Helier has been catching caterpillars and observing them closely. Working with Crispina on asking for things without whining.

Now I need to administer some multiplication drill, using online flashcards.

Later . . .

Amicus scored 96.6 percent on his online multiplication flashcard drill, and is now all smiles over the formerly-loathesome multiplication.

Winners from today's library trip:

Helier split his sides over this in the library, and was motivated to try to read it to me, because I HAD to split my sides over it, too.

We don't really have anyone still learning the alphabet here, but this book is so gorgeous, with its woodblock-print illustrations, and so springy, that I couldn't resist. And we can all do with a little more letter-sounds practice . . .

We haven't read it yet, but it looks wonderful. My friend Alex was checking it out at the same time as a family read-aloud, and that sounded good to me, too.

Time to do the after-school/violin-lesson run.

Over at Fine Old Famly

2008-04-05T07:58:00.000-07:00

As many of my (five) readers know, this is not my only blog. In fact, Saint Dan's here is a spin-off from my family and culture blog, Fine Old Famly -- I wanted a place to keep a log of our homeschooling experiences, and to hash out administrative stuff, as in the booklist post from yesterday, and that kind of thing seemed not quite to go with the writing I was doing on the other blog. So I have two. Well, actually, three: I do all things high-school-English over at Abandon Hopefully. No, wait, there are four: I also have an Usborne Books blog, though I haven't updated that one for a while. One can only do so much.

Anyway, it's nice to be able to keep making new blogs as the need arises -- I like variety blogs (I especially admire The Common Room), but in my world, at least, "variety" starts to feel like a form of schizophrenia after a while. And I really do like having homeschooling-specific material all concentrated in one place, where it's easy to find.

At the same time, there's always a certain amount of spillover from one blog to the other. I talk about parenting- and homeschooling-related issues at Fine Old Famly, because these are clearly family and cultural concerns. And I talk about books over there, too: also a family concern. In fact, I've been posting a lot of that kind of thing over there lately, so if you've been visiting here but not there, you might like to hop over and check out that side of us.

Next Year's Book Lists, Round One

2008-04-04T19:32:00.000-07:00

I've already sung the praises of Maureen Wittman's For the Love of Literature, but I have to say again how helpful a resource it's been as I've tried to hash out plans for next year. I'm not a micro-planner, as in, here's what we'll be doing from 9:02-9:07.5 . . . but I am a macro-planner. I have an idea of the broad scope of things, and usually as I'm making big plans for the following year, my mind is filling in the blanks under each subject heading with, " . . . and we'll read some stuff." This year, I actually have an idea what stuff we'll read, and I think I have a shot at keeping us in books for the entire year (other problem: under-buying, and/or under-utilizing the library).

So here are our book lists for next year, so far:

Epiphany

Math:

String, Straightedge, Shadow
Flatland
Mathematical Quilts/Venters, Ellison
Teaching Textbooks Geometry

Science:

Darwin's Black Box
Barron's Biology Made Easy
Life is a Blessing/Lejeune
Fabre's Book of Insects, etc
Cartoon Guide to Genetics/Gonick
Anatomy Coloring Book
Midwifery/fetology resources per CHC

History:

Teaching company Lectures 25-48 in Foundations of Western Civilization
Augustine's Confessions
How the Irish Saved Civilization
de Wohl: Citadel of God
Bede's Ecclesiastical History
How the Catholic Church Built W.C.
Ballad of the White Horse
The King's Shadow
Murder in the Cathedral
Scott: The Talisman
Shakespeare's King John, or Ivanhoe
Magna Carta
de Wohl: The Joyful Beggar
de Wohl: The Quiet Light
de Wohl: Lay Siege to Heaven
Kristen Lavransdatter
Mantlemass Series
Man for All Seasons (movie)
The King's Achievement/Benson)
Lepanto
St. Edmund Campion/Waugh
Come Rack, Come Rope/Benson
Children of the New Forest
Outlaws of Ravenhurst

Latin:

Henle Latin Book I
Lingua Angelica

English:

Caedmon's Hymn
Dream of the Rood
Beowulf
Middle English Lyrics
Canterbury Tales
The Sonnet
Shakespeare
Cavalier/Metaphysical Poets
Paradise Lost

Amicus

Science:

Mystery of the Periodic Table
Periodic Kingdom
science biographies (library)
1000 Years of Catholic Scientists/YHS

English:

First Diagramming Worktext
Copywork: selections from reading
The Fallacy Detective (well, this is logic, but we might as well make it part of English . . . )

Latin:

Minimus Secundus
Latina Christiana

History:

From Sea to Shining Sea
Nacar the White Deer
Saint Juan Diego
Flint's Island/Wibberly
Reread Treegate books
Saint Martin de Porres
Priest on Horseback: Fr. Farmer/Betz
Rules of Civility/Geo. Washington
Early Thunder/Fritz
The Fighting Ground/Avi
The Captive/Hanson
Lewis and Clark/Henty
The Powder Monkey/Galloway
Cleared for Action/Meader
Thomas Finds a Treasure/Stromberg
Stonewall/Fritz
Willie Finds Victory/Stromberg
That Henty Western I bought
Secret of the Andes
Old Sam: Dakota Trotter
Sounder

Math:

MCP Book E
String, Straightedge and Shadow
Joy of Mathematics/Pappas
Whatever Happened to Penny Candy/Maybury
Conned Again, Watson!/Bruce
The Number Devil/Enzensberger
Multiplication Tables Colouring Book

Now, these aren't entirely complete syllabi yet. Especially in history, I've given us LOTS of choices, knowing we won't read them all. At the very least, when we go to the library, I'll have a handy printout to put in a child's hand and say, "Go find books." But just writing out my plans as booklists helps me to see the shape of things, the foci (guess we like history), and the shortfalls (hm, Latin looks thin . . . maybe some Latin word games, too?).

I'm still working on Helier and Crispina's list. With all the levels, one thing I've been trying to focus on is the integration of more living math, and especially living math books, into our program. I'm tired of being no good at math, and I don't want my no-goodness at it to keep my children from seeing the beauty and joy that's clearly there, though I've never seen it myself. I've also purposely left out things like "write a term paper" under Epiphany's English, or "violin" or "Webelos," even though all those things are part of "school," too. These are strictly book lists, our core: everything else will revolve around the reading.

So, it's a start, but there will be more to come.

Science Links: Camouflage and Mimicry

2008-04-01T06:39:00.000-07:00

As you see from the video posts, we've been spending some time on the idea of camouflage and mimicry, thanks to my friend Kim and her inspired morning lesson at science group yesterday. We watched a lot of video footage of various animals' camo capabilities, wrapped kids up in sheets and fabric swatches of various colors and patterns and tried to guess where they might blend in, and played a predator/prey game in which one team designed and hid camouflaged paper animals around the house (green bugs in houseplants, white bugs on candles, etc), while the other team, the predators, hunted for them. Way to go, Kim -- even Helier, who was determined at first not to be drawn in, quickly became captivated by the miraculous octopus below.

Here are some more good links for camouflage and mimicry, should you want to pursue this topic yourself:

Nova Online: Leopards of the Night

Cool Interactive Animation: Predators and Prey

Game: Disappearing Act

It occurs to me that if you had a lot of kids and a lot of outdoor space and some well-chosen dress-up costumes, you could play a massive game of costumed hide-and-go seek, in which kids would dress themselves in certain colors/textures to camouflage themselves, and then try to hide outdoors. This might work well as a sort of "Sardines" game, in which there's one hider (prey) and multiple seekers (predators), or else divide into teams, as in the "design-an-animal" game we did, and take turns being predators or prey.

More good resources to try:

We love Dover coloring books!

Usborne also has a good Camouflage and Mimicry book.

So if you're in a sciency-natury mood with the advent of spring, this can be a fun rabbit trail to explore.

Octopus Camouflage

2008-04-01T06:35:00.001-07:00

Underwater Creature Camouflage

2008-04-01T06:34:00.001-07:00

Here's a video we watched yesterday at science group. HT my friend Kim, who gave us a fun-filled day of camouflage and mimicry. More to come!

Spring Break Tuesday

2008-03-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

Spring break. Snork. As if. Actually, we are taking something of a breather in that I’m not making anyone do anything. We didn’t go to algebra yesterday. Choir is on break this week. The sun is shining. So . . . waddya do?

Well, last week I put in what’s turned into my annual March Madness Dover Books order. Like so many people, I tend to run out of steam in March, or out of ideas, or plans – to the extent that I make plans (though I’m getting better, I think . . . ), and we all need something to recharge us for the rest of the school year. Dover books are cheap; everyone gets excited about the selections in the catalog; if you place a $50 order you get free shipping, and if you’ve got $50 to spend, you can buy a LOT of books from Dover. We have had a wish list going for quite some time, and last week I finally placed the order. The box arrived yesterday: Amicus has spent today reading The Art of War, a 2,000+-year-old military treatise by a strategist named Sun Tzu, and coloring in his History of the Sword coloring book; Epiphany has been coloring in her human anatomy coloring book (“Oh, THAT’s why they call it a ‘scapular!’”); Helier and Crispina and I have been reading Topsys and Turvys, a delightful book of rhymes with pictures which make sense, if you know what I mean, both right-side-up and upside-down.

In the afternoon we went to the nature preserve with Virginia and her little girls and new baby, where we saw a Canada goose sitting on eggs, and many other Canada geese hissing, honking, whomping at each other with outspread wings, and other springtime behaviors. In the Backyard Nature Center, the children were simultaneously horrified and fascinated to observe a Giant Water Beetle consuming a small fish. Nature, red in tooth or, um, mandible, and, um, leg. Or swimmer. Or whatever you call Giant Water Beetle appendages.

Tonight our friend Miss Susan, mother to Hilaria, is taking all the big kids to hear a lecture on the Lucy Fossil. Bad mother that I am, I never manage to hear about lectures, or to get it together to go to them, never mind get my children to them, myself. So it is good to have friends. Meanwhile, the little kids and I will be packing books and trying to remember to leave some out actually to read.

Notes in Easter Week

2008-03-24T05:45:00.000-07:00

A joyous Easter to all, and welcome back to our regular posting schedule. Of course, technically we’re taking a spring break this week to celebrate the Resurrection, but things never seem to stop going on.

Last week, among other things, we went to the library for story time and picked up another math picture book:

This is Mr. Popper’s Penguins gone Euro-mod – the authors are French – with a Vespa-riding deliveryman who appears daily for an entire year, bringing another penguin to live with a beleaguered family who must, among other things, calculate the cost of feeding the penguins and figure out how to organize them.

“Laugh-out-loud funny,” say Helier and Crispina – well, they don’t say it; they just laugh out loud whenever we read it, which currently is two to three times a day. That’s two to three times a day that they’re exposed to counting, days in a week/month, addition, multiplication . . .

We’ve also been reading

another delightfully goofy, happy, sweet story from Arnold Lobel, of Frog and Toad fame. Grasshopper decides to find a road and see where it leads him; in the course of the book it leads him to a beetles’ “We Love Morning” club, an obsessive-compulsive housefly, a mosquito ferryman, and three routine-bound butterflies. I can’t begin to express my gratitude for this genius from which spring, miraculously, “easy-reader” books which are not a penance, but a joy to read. The simple language manages to be subtle instead of reductive in the standard “Nat had a bat” mode – well, these aren’t beginner books anyway – and the characters are characters, not simply vehicles taking a bunch of phonemes for a ride. Helier can’t manage Lobel’s books on his own yet, though we do practice reading some of the simpler sentences; the value in reading them, however, lies in the fact that they’re just over his head. He loves listening to books like The Hobbit, maybe because he knows I’m not going to be asking him to read them himself any time soon, but a book like Grasshopper on the Road – that’s just barely out of reach. He can read some of it, and he can envision reading more of it as time goes on. But the great thing is that it’s a book he’d want to read: with characters, about something, funny and engaging. Lobel is Tops! Make Mine Lobel! (sorry, you really do have to read the book . . . )

Amicus, meanwhile, has been working away at his battle timeline, reading, writing and drawing. We decided to limit this spring’s project to battles in the ancient world; he can add to it next year when we do a round of U.S. History. He’s making the timeline in a 3-ring binder, so he can add pages in the right places at any time. I’ve been toying with getting some kind of timeline-figures clip-art CD, but he enjoys drawing, so I’m letting him do his own thing with it. I had not really been drawn to the notebooking/lapbooking thing before, despite having heard many people sing praises to this approach to learning: I’m not remotely drawn to scrapbooking, which just seems fiddly beyond words to me, and notbooking/lapbooking seemed too much like that (ie, it seemed to involve the potential for far more crafty-type ideas than I’m really capable of coming up with, or even being that interested in). I would still not do this with a younger child, as an idea that I imposed and had to carry out myself. But somehow the idea of making a book on a theme he loves has taken Amicus by storm, and all I have to do is make occasional suggestions, which he may or may not take (he totally nixed the idea of having fold-out pages, for instance). So everybody’s happy.

Epiphany came to the end of her Teaching Company “Foundations of Western Civilization” lectures – we had borrowed Part I, which covers the beginning of human civilization to the end of the classical period in Greece. As luck would have it, the whole series of 48 lectures is on sale right now, so I went ahead and bought it: she can finish listening through the end of the Roman empire this year, then next year we can take up with the sack of Rome and into the Middle Ages. We’ve also been sketching out her program for next year, concentrating on biology, which she really must finish. Our plan is to use Barron’s Biology Made Easy as a spine, with liberal use of an anatomy coloring book, web resources, living books, and dissection specimens – I am not one to be grossed out by frogs in formaldehyde on the dining room table (so if you were planning to come to dinner and want to rethink that, be my guest. Or not). The CHC High School of Your Dreams program offers both a fetology concentration in biology and a midwifery elective (!) which has piqued Epiphany’s interest, so the thought came to us that we could combine these resources and come out with a biology course which provided a reasonable balance between reading, question-answering, and hands-on things.

Well, it’s almost breakfast time – I am trying, despite being back online full-time, NOT to be online full-time, so I’m getting my posting over with early in the day, before everyone’s up. At this writing, Hilaria is here (out of school for Easter Monday), and Amicus is the only other person up, but I’m sure the hordes will be joining us shortly.

ADDENDUM: My mother leaves for ten days in Egypt tomorrow, which is prompting us, despite its being spring break, to take our own imaginary tour of ancient Egypt. I have her itinerary, which we can "follow," "visiting" the sites which she will be seeing in the flesh as she sees them. This is "just for fun," of course, because of course it's spring break and we're not doing school . . .

Meanwhile, the big girls are staging a rather fraught Easter-egg hunt for the little kids -- why does "fun" have to involve so many frayed tempers, I often wonder. And after this we're going to the park. Tomorrow the plan is to meet Virginia and her little children for a walk around the nature center in the afternoon -- Tuesday's the free day -- after she finishes (we hope) sorting out her hospital bill. As she told me today, according to the hospital's billing department she simultaneously underwent a Caesarean section and had a pacemaker installed. Take something out, put something in . . . sounds reasonable, right? At any rate, assuming she doesn't have to spend the entire day on the phone convincing people that she only had a baby, not open-heart surgery, we will be doing some nature study tomorrow.

ADDENDUM #2: For news of our Holy Week, visit us at Fine Old Famly.

Home from the Homeschool Conference; Last Week's Highlights; Approaching Holy Week

2008-03-15T19:50:00.000-07:00

True to form, here's how my conference shopping for next year went:

As you can see from the wish list in my sidebar and from some of my earlier posts, I had contemplated investing in some prepared curriculum. I do this every year; I think that maybe somebody else's ideas would lift us from whatever slough we find ourselves in come March. And every year, checkbook in hand, pen poised, resources spread before me me in the Great Curriculum Hall, I -- I spend my money on literature. I can't not. When I'm weighing lesson plans I MIGHT use against books we WILL read, well, there's no contest. Books win, hands down, every single time.

But fortunately for me, literature was a major theme of this year's conference. One of our keynote speakers was Maureen Wittman, author of For the Love of Literature. Now, you'll think I'm exaggerating when I say that I have been looking for this book all my life, and you'll be right. I wasn't looking for it in third grade. Sorry, Maureen. But it's what I'd been looking for for, oh, the last five years: in short, as long as we've been homeschooling.

Homeschooling through literature has been our default mode. Even radical unschooling in our house has looked an awful lot like five or six people sitting on a couch reading a story. Other people's unschooled kids rebuild thirty-year-old vans and drive across the country in them; mine would read a story about it and then maybe fantasize a lot (Epiphany had a love affair of about a month's duration with the idea of an old Chevy van parked, with a For Sale sign on the windshield in the Walgreen's parking lot up the street. She had named it "Sheila" and was downhearted when it disappeared -- bought or stolen, we'll never know which).

So, anyway, we read -- like, a lot. All four of my kids, long before they could read (two of them still can't), acquired the habit of sitting with a book and turning the pages, for half-hours, if not hours, at a stretch. I don't know what exactly they were, or are, doing: looking at the pictures? Repeating the memorized text silently? -- they were, and are, mostly silent when doing this -- Pretending to be grownups? All of the above? I don't know. Anyway, we like books. And no matter how much structure I've tried to impose on our homeschooling, the only structure we can ever sustain is: we like books.

So now we have Maureen's book, which is essentially a booklist with ideas. The ideas come first: how to read aloud, how to build a home library, how to make the most of your public library, how to create a unit study. All very useful stuff. But what's thrilling to me is to have a LIST, broken down by core subject areas -- math (yes, really -- I bought a geometry novel today, too), science, art and music, history -- and by age-appropriateness. For years I've been printing out "Read Your Way Through X" booklists, putting them in page protectors in my big black binder, and then not taking them to the library or the used bookstore, because the big black binder is heavy and unwieldy, and I always open it upside down, and things fall out of the page protectors and waft across the floor, and my children either assume an attitude of extreme patience, such as I used to assume with them when they were lying on the library floor wailing because we had to give the Frances book back; or else they go, "MOM! MOM! YOUR PAPERS ARE EVERYWHERE! MOM! AND THE LIBRARIANS ARE LOOKING AT YOU!" So the big black binder does not get out much.

But now I have this marvelously handy book to slip into my bag and hand to a big kid while the littles are in story time. Now I can sit down and plan out an entire semester, if not an entire year, of reading in all subjects -- and once we've got the books lined up, we can think of stuff to do. And, well, if that's not a curriculum -- actually, I guess to some people it doesn't sound like much of a curriculum, but I'm just not convinced that you need that much more. Read and live: sounds good to me.

Other stuff I ended up buying, in no particular order:

Bethlehem Books. I could have bought the whole table, or at least all the ones we didn't already own. In the end I settled for

all three books in the Mitchells series by Hilda van Stockum
Nacar the White Deer, by Elizabeth Borton de Trevino
The Mystery of the Periodic Table, by Benjamin Wiker
Introducing Miss Austen -- I can't remember the author, and Epiphany has vanished with the book into her room.

Ye Hedge School

First Whole Book of Diagrams & Diagramming Worktext (for both Epiphany and Amicus)
Chemistry 101 (for Amicus -- he'll be reading that Wiker book, too)

Hillside Education

The City of Gold
The Sword of Clontarf
String, Straightedge, and Shadow: The Story of Geometry
A lovely book of saint coloring pages, arranged according to the liturgical year

Growing Scholars

Two ELP handwriting books, one for Helier and one for Crispina (Crispina's, appropriately, is hot pink). These are small, simple, basic handwriting practice books -- I bought a cursive one for Amicus last year, and loved it. No gimmicks, nothing fancy, just practice in forming letters. I figure that the littles might, in their "want-to-write" moments, find these appealing and rewarding.

And my sleeper hit:

As I had suspected he would, Amicus fell in love with this book. He sat at the dining room table reading it aloud to us in gales of laughter from the time I got home until I made him set said table for dinner. So, um, I guess we'll be doing logic.

***In other news***

Well, there's not that much other news. In history group on Monday we were ancient Romans and had to apply to the census to receive our names. The patricians ate all the devilled eggs, and the plebes revolted. Mid-week, Amicus began work on a timeline book: famous military battles of the ancient world. In fact, he was working on it with gusto just tonight. Epiphany continues to struggle with algebra, but we're soldiering on (and if anyone knows of a good algebra novel, do please tell us). On the other hand, her Latin is great, and she finished Draft One of the Dreaded Term Paper on Greek Art. Everyone, including me, would so much rather be doing skits or writing novels or making art projects -- a term paper seems so schooly and drudge-like. But we're all sucking it up and doing it because, as I figure, it would be a lot LESS fun to get hit with three or four such assignments at once, freshman year in college, and not know how to do them. So we're soldiering on with that, too, but are looking forward to taking Easter Week off.

Plans for Holy Week:

*to read the chapters on Our Lord's last days, Passion and death, in A Life of Our Lord for Children

*one Sorrowful Mystery each day for rosary

*family seder on Maundy Thursday before Mass

*Stations of the Cross at noon on Good Friday; silence at home between noon and 3; liturgy that night

*Easter Vigil

I love this holiest of weeks. I love the lingering chill lit by early flowers. I love the smells of spring and incense mingled, and the lighting of the holy fire. I love even the darkness, because out of it comes the light, unconquered. I want my children in this week to taste and see, to smell and hear, to feel in their bones that the waking world is beautiful, because God who made it lives.

Owl Pellets, More Projects, and Dreaming About Next Year

2008-03-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

I wish I had had time or a free hand to photograph our owl-pelleting activities last Monday, but it was a wild morning. We dissected four "standard" barn-owl pellets, containing small-rodent leftovers (Epiphany and Jacob's was prodigiously hairy); one "special" barn-owl pellet, which was larger and full of bird parts (much lighter and airier than the corresponding rodent parts); and a crow (or raven) pellet which we expected to contain seeds, but which instead was composed of -- even on a relative scale -- very tiny rodent bones. Shrews or voles, maybe? Anyway, the owl pellets provided one of those gross-but-fascinating CSI-type science experiences, and if you haven't done this, I highly recommend it.

The pellets all come pasteurized, which I find kind of amusing, but I covered the dining-room table thoroughly with newspaper all the same, and we all washed our hands when it was over.

Epiphany has been banging out her term paper (topic: Greek art). We have a first draft due this week, after two rounds of outlining. Visit our high-school English blog for details, and also for information about online high-school English classes for next fall. We're also plodding through algebra I; our tutor has switched Epiphany from the Scott-Foresman textbook she was using to the Key To series we had begun last year, just to get her through it. Their pace so far has been slow, but the tutor is satisfied that they will have made sufficient progress by the end of the year to move on to geometry next year. As we're moving, I plan for us to use the Teaching Textbook geometry program, rather than trying to find another tutor . . .

Trying to work out my wish list for next year in time to go shopping at the conference next weekend. Here are some of my thoughts:

* For Helier and Crispina

I'd rather spend my limited budget on good books to read to them, on hands-on science projects (right now we're hatching triops, aka "dinosaur shrimp," which I ordered from American Science and Surplus), on games for math and other subjects -- not on formal curriculum. I might buy some Bob Books, because Helier enjoys reading them; I've also seen some little science readers I think he might like. At any rate, I find myself more and more concurring with Miss Mason that formal learning is best delayed until age 7.

* For Amicus

I'm debating whether I want to buy the CHC Middle School lesson plans for him. We already have some of the books, chiefly From Sea to Shining Sea, and on one level I think that having a more detailed spine for his studies would be good for Amicus. He likes structure, and I think he needs a more consistent push to work harder at a higher level. On the other hand, I'm so tweaky that I wonder whether $54.95 spent on lesson plans would end up being a waste of money.

I'm also considering at least one online class through L.P.H. For him also: another Draw and Write book, and more just plain good books to read.

*Epiphany:

She wants to continue with Henle Latin, so we may opt for an online class through Memoria Press. English will be my Western lit survey course. Rather than buying the next Didache book, I may have Aelred make up a reading list for religion, using books we already have (if we go with this option, I'll post the list here; the English list will be available at Abandon Hopefully). Geometry with Teaching Textbooks. History will be Teaching Company lectures on the Middle Ages and Renaissance, plus primary sources read alongside her English reading. We may try to find an online science class, or else just do a Natural Science reading list, or another list compiled from resources in High School of Your Dreams. Electives we'll also do in an unschooly fashion. I think I'm going to bite the bullet and get Homeschool Tracker for next year, for all of us, but especially to help Epiphany manage her time.

So that's our homeschooling update for this week.

Our Seed-Growing Project, Plus Owl Pellets

2008-03-02T20:50:00.000-08:00

Here's a shot of our black-eyed peas, which we daily take down from the windowsill and examine. This photo is actually several days old; one of the shoots has emerged over the lip of the bottle now.

We have been in science mode lately, I guess because it's spring, the curiosity season. Several weeks ago at story time, we heard a story about barn owls, which made mention of their pellets. That put me in mind of the fact that you can order owl pellets for dissection, which we've never done before. But my turn to host science group comes around again tomorrow, and it came to me that we could do owls/owl pellets/the food chain for (I hope) a lively morning's activity. I ordered the pellets from Owl Brand Discovery Kits, and they arrived on Friday, all pasteurized and neatly wrapped in foil. I got four barn owl pellets, plus one great horned owl pellet (slightly different composition), and also a crow or raven pellet (different diet -- thought it would be interesting to compare). This was all very inexpensive, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the kids respond to having something to dissect.

I also found some owl video footage for us to view:

Great Horned Owl

Barn Owl Hunting

The Owl Brand Discovery Kits site also has some great links, interactive resources, and slide shows which I plan to work into our morning.

The littles really want to raise some tadpoles; we need to go looking for a lake . . .

Notes From the Past Two Weeks

2008-02-24T13:54:00.000-08:00

Last weekend was frenetic -- go visit us at Fine Old Famly for details -- and I didn't have time to post an update to our learning log here. So now I'm raking around the drifted leaves of my mind, trying to pull together what we did.

Here are some highlights:

* science group at Bess's. The theme was "forces," and we experimented with friction, effects of hot and cold air, and how sound travels. Our favorite experiment was one in which we shook pepper onto a sheet of paper on the table, then rubbed balloons on our hair and held them just above the sheets of pepper. The pepper literally leapt from the paper to cling to the balloons. Crispina was particularly enchanted by the "fork phone" experiment: tie a string around a fork, leaving two long ends, and make a little loop in each end for one of your index fingers to go through. Loop the loops around your index fingers and put your fingers in your ears. Leaning over so that the fork doesn't hit your body, swing it gently against a chair or table leg, or have someone else thump it with their finger. Nobody else will hear anything, but you'll hear a lovely metallic note, loud and clear.

* Magic Ink. Our friend Susan Redblur brought us a whole package of these "Magic Ink" sheets, mostly with math problems. They give you the problem -- 5+3, say -- with the answer in a gray box. Paint the gray box with water, and the answer appears. Easy, not messy (unless the cup of water gets knocked over), and keeps smaller people quietly entertained for long stretches of time. Oh, and they might learn some simple math facts, too.

ADDENDUM: I forgot to mention that the Magic Ink sheets are reusable. They dry, the answers fade away, and they're ready for another session. I'm not sure where Susan got these, but they'd be worth looking for, for children from preschool through 3rd or 4th grade, depending on what skills and facts are available.

*Mancala. Epiphany got a mancala game for Christmas, and she and Amicus have been playing a lot. It's a deceptively simple strategy game which requires you to think ahead in numbers, if that makes sense. So far I am the champion loser.

*library story time -- good sitting-still practice for Helier and Crispina, who need it, plus they see their friends, hear good stories and make a simple glue-stick-type craft. The big kids get some quiet reading time, and Amicus as well as Epiphany has learned to use the card catalog.

*With Helier and Crispina I read "Where Do Flowers Come From" in the Usborne Starting Point Science. We're currently sprouting black-eyed peas in a jar full of damp paper towels and noting how many different kinds of seeds we consume. We also learned the parts of a flower and have been observing what's coming up in the garden.

*Wednesday-morning Masses at Saint Michael's

*Stations of the Cross. We do one station a day, right before lunch, using our homemade booklets and our Saint Alphonsus Liguori booklets as well. We haven't done them every day, but about twice a week. Making them last . . .

Of course we did all the regular old things, too. Epiphany has been studying for a Latin test, reading Portrait of a Lady, watching Pride and Prejudice on PBS on Sunday nights, and working on her term-paper outline. Amicus has been drawing a lot, and we've done some work on Latin vocabulary. Everyone has gone to choir, and Epiphany is teaching herself hymns on the violin. Lots of playing outside and rollerblading. Lots of reading, painting, coloring, cutting with scissors, etc.

And as you can see by my wish list in the sidebar, I'm starting to think about next year.

Lenten Learning I: Chant, Stations, Links

2008-02-09T19:17:00.000-08:00

We're (mostly) offline for Lent, but not off-task -- any more than usual, anyway. Our normal routine continues, with this past week's variations:

1. We are daily singing the Lent Prose, Attende Domine, which the big kids and I both sang in our respective choirs for Ash Wednesday. Read about it and view a YouTube video here. As chants go, it's quite simple and easy to sing, and I'm hoping the littles will pick it up soon.

2. I've been gearing up to start Stations of the Cross again. It looks as though we'll be doing them at home; the Wednesday afternoon Stations at our parish conflict with co-op, and our other option is dinnertime on Friday night -- not great for littles. We actually quite enjoyed doing them at home last year, using various prayer books' versions of the meditations and singing a verse of the Stabat Mater for each station. This year, however, I wanted to try to get the littles more invested in what's happening with the Stations, so I decided that we would make our own Way of the Cross booklets.

After searching around the Web, I found a link to some coloring pages here, as well as many other potentially good Lenten links for children. The line drawings of the Stations are simple but dignified, and the accompanying explanatory text for each Station is brief, clear, easy for a young child to understand, and blessedly un-schmaltzy. Helier and Crispina wanted to paint their pages with watercolors -- we had to schedule in an impromptu trip to Walgreens for more art supplies -- and this turned out to be a good choice. They could paint away in their usual impressionistic fashion, and the lines of the picture still showed through the paint. Here's how they turned out:

Pretty cool for coloring pages, I thought. I would give them one, we'd read and talk about it, they'd paint away, and then I'd give them the next one. We also looked at an online Stations for children here.

So my plan is to staple each child's pages together to make a book which we can use for our own Stations of the Cross once or twice a week all through Lent.

Here also is a link to my friend Kathryn's site, where she offers a series of Montessori-style cards depicting the Stations (it's a pdf file; they look lovely).

And here is a link to a thread at the 4Real Learning forums which includes discussion and helpful links related to a unit study/lapbook project on the Mass. I plan to revisit these and maybe incorporate some ideas into my Lenten days with Helier and Crispina.

Other highlights of the week:

*pancakes, sausages, King Cake and tornadoes on Shrove Tuesday
*starting Ash Wednesday by going to an early Mass with Epiphany
*library story time with Helier and Crispina on Thursday; Epiphany came along and did debate research, and Amicus tracked down more Redwall books.
*checking out Bob Books for Helier (among other things); he reads The Vet independently and with gusto, hooray hooray
*Mass with Helier on Friday (big kids were singing in the choir; Crispina had had a fashion meltdown and stayed home with Aelred).
*hitting the library's used-book shop with Epiphany today. She's currently immersed in Portrait of a Lady; she also found a series of nifty little art-history books.

And now it's Saturday night. We'll feast until sundown tomorrow, then it's back to our austerities.

Monday: History Group, With More Cool Links

2008-02-04T13:12:00.000-08:00

It was our turn to host again, and this time we concentrated on scientific, mathematical and medical discoveries in ancient Greece.

Here we have Chaos With Catapults (and other experiments involving levers, a la Archimedes):

. . . followed by

recess, which is so much more fun when it's seriously multi-age (we had ages 2-16 tearing around outside in the nice warm sunshine).

In between, we did a computerized Archimedes-in-the-bath simulation, made buoyancy experiments in the sink via some ideas from the UK's Educationsense Home Educators' Theme Guides, read about the ancient Greeks' approach to science, and about the discovery of the Archimedes Principle. We also learned about Galen and principles of ancient medicine and pharmacology.

ADDENDUM: We read this

with the littlest kids, who had good fun getting the kitchen floor wet, experimenting with dropping things into the sink.

Not bad for a morning's fun, I thought. Afterwards, Amicus worked on multiplication drills by trying to beat the Multiflyer game at Multiplication.com, while Epiphany went to her algebra tutor, and Helier and Crispina engaged in some roly-poly hunting. Now Epiphany and Hilaria have gone out for a run, their new pastime and Epiphany's P.E. endeavor.

And now it's time to make dinner.

Random Learning Events This Week (thus far)

2008-01-30T21:27:00.000-08:00

* Epiphany and I read The Four Loves together, and she wrote what looks like, from the paragraph-and-a-half that I've read so far, a seriously good little mini-essay on it. She didn't like the book, griped about reading it, claimed not to understand it, said her essay was rubbish -- and I was really kind of knocked over by the bit I read. We've also been doing her Latin together. That is, she does the exercises (lots of translations of paragraphs about winter quarters and things being carried into winter quarters; we also have lots of leading men and battle lines all of a sudden), and then I quiz her to make sure she's got the cases right. She and Aelred have done battle as well with her algebra assignments for the week.

*Amicus read Plato's Crito. I was printing out a copy from an e-text (find it at Abandon Hopefully), and he said, "Can I read that?" Go, homeschooler, go.

*I made homemade playdough with the littles yesterday, and they had a grand time "cooking" with it. They have both been doing a lot of drawing, and we're reading The Hobbit as our current read-aloud. Again. But it never gets old.

In my co-op English class, I've been teaching grammar right out of Lynn Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Today we talked about rules and conventions governing the comma, as well as a little history of punctuation. A good time was had by me.

More as events develop.

Quick Monday Log

2008-01-28T21:08:00.000-08:00

*Science group at last -- finally all the kids in all three families were well. Kim, who hosted, led a lesson on magnets for a group ranging in age from 5-16. Helier, the youngest kid at the table, lasted through hands-on demonstrations of magnetic poles (opposites attract); the older kids experimented extensively with magnetic force, getting needles to levitate and so forth.

*Amicus brought home two big DK books belonging to Zack: Weapons and Battles. He's spent most of the day regaling me with highlights of the Boer War, and has agreed to write a report on "Battle Strategies Through the Ages." I think I'll try to make the spelling sentences this week double as a pre-writing exercise for this assignment.

*Epiphany did algebra, listened to two Foundations of Western Civ lectures, finished some Latin exercises, and knitted while I read The Four Loves out loud. In the evening she went with Aelred over to the university, and they checked out several books on Greek art for her to read for her term paper while he taught his class.

*Helier and I practiced reading the chapter headings for the last few chapters of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, practiced addition facts by way of my holding up fingers and seeing how fast he could come up with the answer to 2+3, and so forth. He drew some quite impressive jellyfish while Hilaria tried to draw a portrait of him. Also, Epiphany has begun giving him basic beginning violin lessons; right now he is very keen to practice with her.

Crispina: Had a long sleep this afternoon, which we all needed. We did some reading aloud, and she took crayons to bed with her this evening for some after-hours coloring.

We all read about Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose feast it was today; and I've resumed reading through the Bible with the little kids -- we had let it slide in all the Advent excitement and hadn't picked it back up again until now. I mean for this to be a very deliberate Lenten discipline for us.

Some Latin-Centered Curriculum Links

2008-01-26T21:48:00.000-08:00

Running River Latin School

LatinClassicalEd Yahoo Group

Addenda: Latin-Centered Curriculum

Latinteach

Leonie comments that LCC interests her, albeit in an unschooly way, and I would have to agree. I think we implement the spirit far more than the letter of a Latin-centered curriculum, though Latin has always been a constant in our homeschooling from the beginning.

What It Is: On Feynman and Being Educated

2008-01-25T12:53:00.000-08:00

In case you're wondering, I heard a fascinating presentation on Feynman's life and work this morning, which knocked right up against some of the anti-homeschooling/anti-minimalist-curriculum arguments still rattling around in my head from the other day at Vere Loqui. I promise I'm going to let go of all this any minute now. And it's quite possible anyway that the conversation's either gone on without me in other directions, or else dried up. I rather hope that's the case, and everyone else isn't still obsessed with these questions. Though on the other hand, I hope they are.

I at any rate am still thinking about some of the issues raised in the course of the conversation, especially the idea that children are well-served by being well-rounded.

This will, no doubt, seem like a stupid thing to say. And by it I don't mean what looks like the obvious and only alternative: raising a kid in a closet with the Bible as his only textbook. If a person were to have only one textbook, I can think of worse ones than the Bible to have, but that's really not what I'm talking about.

So what do I mean? Well, I mean to unpack what we mean by a "well-rounded education." First of all, I'm not sure Richard Feynman had one. We hear of his early precocity, nurtured by his father, in scientific and mathematical inquiry. We know that at university he took every available physics course. We also know that his exam performance in English and history was weak. Clearly he had to have taken some English and history, but he took as little as possible, apparently -- with which I utterly sympathize, by the way, having taken as little math as I could get away with -- and his academic ability was distinctly one-sided. In his adult life he took up painting and music with vast enthusiasm; we have no record, that I know of, of his studying either as a child.

Why did Feynman excel at science? One plausibly complete answer is that before he was born, his father declared that he would be a scientist and devoted his paternal energy to nurturing a scientist: reading his the Encyclopedia Britannica, exhorting him constantly to observe how the world worked. In interviews, like the one excerpted below, Feyman described numerous instances of his father's dismissing the names of things. On showing the boy a species of thrush, for example, he ran through its name in seven or eight different languages, then said, in essence, "That's only what it's called. You want to find out what it is."

Now, this is an instance of privileging one way of looking at the world over another. Had Feynman's father been a poet, the words by which the thing is called would have been at least as important as the thing itself, if not more so. But that dichotomy offers a good analogy for talking about what people usually mean when they say well-rounded.

I'm thinking now of that poster that used to be sort of popularly risque some years ago: the one of the man in a raincoat, his back to the camera, flashing a demure, if naked, female statue. The caption said, "Expose Yourself to Art." I think of that poster every time I walk down the hall of the parish school, on my way to choir practice. The walls in that hall provide gallery space for a revolving collection of what are all too clearly class art projects: this week it's self-portraits made out of wire suspended on card stock; a few weeks ago it was self-portraits composed of photographs of various sizes, so that a tiny, distance-shot body might have an enormous zoom-lens head. Now that I think of it, the art curriculum does run heavily to self-portraits, as the catechesis runs heavily to self-esteem. And you know, they're cute. I'm sure they were fun to do. They all look impressively, if overwhelmingly similarly, competent.

But -- but -- I always think. What's the point? And then I remember the poster. The point is to expose children to art. Just open up that raincoat and give them a look. And then on to the next thing, like reminding ourselves why we're so special again.

What the point is not is to make artists of children. While it is true that all great artists have learned by imitation and repetition of technique, there is another ingredient without which no child, no matter how he labors, will ever become an artist. The crucial ingredient? Desire.

Desire can be awakened and nurtured by a parent early in life, or by an encounter with a good teacher; or it can be entirely self-generative. Benvenuto Cellini's father, back in 16th-century Florence, vowed that his son would be a court musician; the son dutifully studied music and became a great proficient, as Lady Catherine de Bourgh would say -- but loathed it. What he wanted was to learn the high art of the goldsmith, and this he did on his own initiative, even running away to Rome to pursue it, "because of the music." Had his father wanted him to be a goldsmith instead of a musician, doubtless Benvenuto would have practiced his art with less inner conflict over the prospect of displeasing his father. In the end, when his education ran counter to his desire, he chose the desire, because there was no other possible course. Educated to be a musician, he ended a sculptor who by the way knew how to play.

The poet Phillip Lopate, in an entertaining book called Being With Children, describes his experiences as "poet in the school" in a New York City public elementary school. Early on, he contemplates the role of "visiting writer," noting that the normal M.O. for the poet-in-the-school is to "parachute in," run a few unruly classes through some exercises designed to make them spit out something resembling a poem, and then leave -- having succeeded in making a writer of nobody. So when Lopate accepts this position, he makes one stipulation: that only children who WANT to participate be allowed to participate. The others can stay in class.

On the front of it, this arrangement looks unfair. Why deny the other children the opportunity to "discover a passion," by exposing them to a little creative writing? Why let some children be more "well-rounded," while the others have to sit listening to Miss Prinks talk about grain elevators? What could it hurt to include them, too?

Lopate's answer: he is interested in nurturing writers, not in babysitting. The writers, the ones who care about writing, who think that an hour spent in writing is an hour well spent, reveal themselves by raising their hands. So, to be sure, do a few goof-offs, but if they goof off, back to Miss Prinks they go. There's no point in letting them stay, when they're only interested in how much disruption they can generate and in drawing the school-poet's attention away from the kids who don't think poetry is boring. If on the other hand they don't goof off, but get caught up in it all, then of course they really are the poets who didn't know it.

Having done some time myself as a poet-in-the-schools, I see the wisdom of Lopate's thinking. No, make that: The Man Is Right. Everyone (mostly) agrees in the abstract that poetry is a good thing (except lots of English teachers, who rather mystifyingly don't like to teach it). Everyone agrees in the abstract that it would be a wonderful thing to be able to write poetry. Everyone agrees in the abstract that children ought to be exposed to poetry-writing, to discover whether they themselves might grow up to be poets (advice: get a genius grant or a day job). Everyone, that is, but Phillip Lopate and me -- and Dorothy Parker, using "horticulture" in a sentence.

So you can expose children to any number of very good things -- tie-dyeing and paleontology and bongo-drumming and wave theory and what have you -- but these are names for things, not anything itself. And while it's always a good thing to encourage, and to broaden horizons, and all that, the lives of geniuses largely suggest that real passions are self-starting, self-sustaining, and one-sided.

Feynman :: Inertia and Fathers

2008-01-25T11:16:00.001-08:00

Here Feynman shares an anecdote concerning what he clearly believes to have been his real education.

Parent-Nurtured Autodidact Poster Boy

2008-01-25T11:07:00.000-08:00

Richard Feynman wasn't homeschooled, but accredited his drive to learn and his mastery of scientific and mathematical concepts largely to his father's zeal for teaching him about the world.

He also taught himself algebra on finding an old textbook in his aunt's attic and realizing that the whole point of every exercise was finding out what x was.

This is the kind of thing which can happen when a) a child has parents who love learning infectiously (and most homeschooling parents I know seem to, whether they just naturally came that way, or developed that love in learning with their children); and b) an awful lot of free time for self-directed exploration, and for conversation. Not all of us are scientists, obviously, but if a Richard Feynman could grow up to become a sort of latter-day renaissance man, scientist, writer, musician, and so forth, then it seems reasonable to suppose that the child of a literary family, say, while maybe picking up more of a literary education than any other kind, might also secondarily be exposed to enough science along the way to make him, too, a renaissance man.

Epiphany's Ancient-Art Sites

2008-01-24T20:41:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned, Epiphany is researching ancient art -- specifically the Greek amphora -- for her term paper. Here are some sites she used today in her research:

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Explore and Learn Page

The Fitzwilliam Museum -- one of our old Cambridge haunts!

The British Museum

A Minimal Day, With Minimus

2008-01-24T20:25:00.000-08:00

Wednesday is co-op and choir day, and on Thursdays we tend to collapse a bit. But here's what we did:

Epiphany: algebra, Latin, looked up the Metropolitan Museum of Art's ancient-art collection by way of research for her term paper. She also read and went to violin.

Amicus: wrote a paragraph using this week's spelling words. Read. Worked on least-common-multiples in math. Together we read one of the Latin cartoons in Minimus, went over vocabulary and discussed adjectives. We also looked at Latin roots for English words ("Oh!" he said. "That's why they call those scooters Vespas -- because they sound like wasps!"). We also read a section about food in ancient Rome. Roasted dormouse, yum. Helier and Crispina listened in on this lesson as well.

Helier: practiced writing some simple words like "pig" -- we had been talking about how our word "pork" comes from the Latin "porcus," for pig. In fact, we had some porcus for dinner tonight, in honor of our Latin lesson (and our friend Aaron who came over for some lively books-and-ideas conversation).

Crispina: dressed up, colored, played post office some more.

Still reading Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

The Minimalist Approach

2008-01-24T07:11:00.000-08:00

The other day I posted this link to a piece at Martin Cothran's Vere Loqui blog, which has turned into quite a discussion. At least yesterday it had; I'm restraining myself from going back, because I think I've said (probably over-said) whatever I had to say on the subject for that audience of commenters, who very likely would still not be convinced by ten more years of arguing. It's a bit odd, too, to find myself acting as spokesperson in defense of an educational model -- the pure classical paradigm -- which I don't actually embrace myself. Elements of it, yes. The whole package, no. And so in trying to explain how Mr. Cothran's 4-subject curriculum can produce well-educated, well-rounded, thinking children, I'm probably presuming all kinds of things (because they're what we happen to do) which Mr. Cothran may not have meant.

I'm always taken aback by the vehemence with which some people respond to homeschooling propositions. One commenter in this conversation fumes on about "narrow religious opinions" -- as opposed to what? The sweeping thought-vistas of Marxism? -- and the "soft bigotry" of expecting too little from your children by expecting them "only" to master reading, writing, mathematics and Latin in their formal studies. My own feeling about this is that it would be nice to think that people went to college having mastered as much. I see the papers Aelred is grading, so I know his students largely can't write; they moan and groan and say they can't understand a text like, for instance, Huston Smith's World Religions. In one of his college teaching jobs he shared office space with a woman who worked as a math tutor in the college's "student support" center. She said she'd expected to be helping people with calculus; instead she was teaching them how to add two-digit numbers. It's a grim reality of American public education for too many students that they haven't mastered -- haven't come close to mastering -- the rudiments of academic survival. In that light, it seems eminently reasonable to consider focusing a child's early learning on those kinds of mastery. Without the ability to read actively and with understanding, without the ability to put thoughts into coherent words, without a fluency in mathematical basics, his ability to progress in learning is severely hobbled.

One of the distinct advantages to the minimal curriculum which Mr. Cothran proposes is that essentials are covered, leaving plenty of room for exploration of interests and for "play" with things like science. The exclusion of science, particularly, from the proposed curriculum has virtually every commenter up in arms. We're doing our children a grave misservice, they argue, by not studying science.

Well, who says we're not studying science? True, Cothran says, "Fuggedaboudit," but I suspect what he means is "forget about buying a science textbook and scheduling 'science time' into your K-8 school day." I mentioned that my kids had done quite a bit of reading on scientific topics (actually they do quite a bit more than that, as I hope I've managed to convey in this blog), to be told that reading isn't doing, and children learn by doing. Doing what, I wonder. Reading a textbook chapter and answering questions? Listening to a lecture? Watching a video? I mean, I know that kids in school also do cool things like dissecting owl pellets -- I think of that one, because Hilaria mentioned doing it, and it's one thing we haven't done yet -- but, um, news flash, homeschoolers do things like that, too. We also do gardening, cooking, nature watching, microscope-building, ballistics, and stuff like that. It just seems unnecessary to me, in the early years, ie before high school, to clutter up our schedule with another discrete subject, when we cover the same concepts in the course of simply doing interesting things with our spare time.

I don't mean, by the way, to disparage the school model. Some of our best friends go to school. It just seems to me that much of what goes on is an attempt -- sometimes with great results, sometimes not -- to replicate what children left largely to themselves, without benefit of television or video games, would find interesting to do. Somehow in our day the replication has been mistaken for the thing itself, and the thing itself has become highly suspect.

The questions which really interest me, though, are the philosophical ones. One commenter raises the question of whether Mr. Cothran -- or I -- understands the learning process. The commenter proceeds to assert that (as everyone presumably knows) learning is a spiral. Those aren't the exact words, but that's what's meant. In other words, children learn by being exposed to the same concepts over and over. According to this paradigm, if you start talking about mitosis in kindergarten, or explaining the articles of the Constitution, your child will have a readier grasp of biology in tenth grade, or American government in eleventh.

Well, possibly. Or possibly they won't. I KNOW that we didn't talk about mitosis in my kindergarten class -- we also didn't learn to read and write -- and I did quite well in biology. I won the English award, too, come to think of it, and went to graduate school and became a writer by profession, which apparently I'm not supposed to have been able to do, not having been started on this road the day I started school. It's been a long time since I last sat in an education class -- thank my stars -- and Erickson and Piaget get muddled in my mind, but what I do know is that this spiral model of education is a fairly recent construct. Much of what we know as education has very shallow roots. The public-school model as we know it derives from late-19th-century Prussia. The prevailing philosophies of education, as taught in teacher-training schools and implemented in our public-school systems, date no farther back than the 1930s and John Dewey (the "Dewey Decimal System" about which Jem enlightens Scout on her first day of school in To Kill a Mockingbird) This is an awfully short pedigree for a system of belief regarding how people learn, and what they should learn. And yet on the strength of it, and often in ignorance of anything else, people discard a model which worked beautifully (if on a limited number of people) for centuries: that of the trivium.

Our prevailing cultural thoughts about education are so deeply rooted in pragmatism that there often seems to be no other valid question to ask about a subject than, "What use is it?" This certainly applies to the proposal that children should study Latin. "It's a dead language!" people chorus. "What's the use of this dinosaur? Why not study something you can do something WITH?"

Well, we can answer that argument first on its own terms by saying that there's quite a lot you CAN do with Latin. You can easily learn any of the "standard" foreign languages (French, Spanish, Italian, German) if you have a strong Latin background. Knowing Latin vocabulary sure as heck helps with the educated-guessing component of the verbal section of the SAT. Helps with scientific nomenclature. And, as Fr. Victor points out, it trains the mind to think logically and structurally. It's like Sudoku for verbal people. It teaches structural grammar, not only its own but also English grammar, which is often neglected in the classroom in favor of free-writing and story-starters. Both of which are good-enough things in and of themselves, but they teach writing as merely an affective response, not a thing you make. That's why William Carlos Williams's assertion that a poem is a "thing made of words" makes no sense. Everyone's been conditioned to think poetry is all about expressing your feelings -- because life is all about expressing your feelings. But I digress.

The real question, of which I do not want to lose sight, is, "Who cares what you can do with Latin?" And, "Why are we asking that question anyway?" And, "Is a thing valued in proportion to the use we can make of it?" I mean, babies are fairly useless -- which may be why we as a society find them so expendable. But I digress again. What I'm thinking of really is Peter Kreeft's excellent essay, "Why Study Philosophy and Theology?"

Kreeft notes Aristotle's definition of the three "sciences:" productive, practical, and theoretical. Note that our current use of the word "science" is limited and of quite recent vintage. The productive sciences include "farming, surgery, shipbuilding, writing, and tailoring;" their end is to "make, improve or repair," and thus make the world a better place. The practical sciences include ethics and politics; their aim is the improvement of personal behavior.

"The third kind of sciences," says Kreeft, "is the 'theoretical' or 'speculative' (contemplative), ie, those that seek the truth for its own sake, that seek to know for the sake of knowing rather than for the sake of action or production (though of course they will have important practical application). These sciences include theology, philosophy, physics, astronomy, biology, psychology, and math."

Kreeft's essay is aimed at high-school students considering college -- it appears in the Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College. Like Cothran, Kreeft is proposing a set of educational values widely at variance with the accepted cultural norm. Because he's written a published essay, and not an off-the-cuff blog post (blog posts by their nature are off-the-cuff, even when they're long), he has taken pains to establish the philosophical context he references in his claims regarding the goals of education. In short, the long historical view of education suggests that the right question to ask is not "What can I do with this?" which really only means, "Can I make money with it?" -- but "Does it lead me closer to the truth?" In the case of K-8 education, I suspect the question should rightly be, "Does this form me to be led to a desire for, to be prepared to develop an understanding of, truth?"

That's the litmus test, folks. I'd love to say more about Latin, and also music, but , but I need go and oversee some Latin and music even now.

Also of Interest

2008-01-22T20:28:00.000-08:00

A minimalist approach to K-8 curriculum

Highlights from a Wet Gray Day

2008-01-22T19:54:00.000-08:00

* Alex and her delightful children, Lily and Joseph, came to play in the a.m. Their visit was enlivened (I guess) by an ongoing argument between Amicus and the rest of the world over whether or not "knowledgeable" -- one of his spelling words this week -- is a word. Even my pointing it out in the dictionary did not persuade him; after all, I've had that dictionary since 1986, and we've probably had several Great Vowel Shifts since then.

I can't help noticing, whenever I'm at Alex's, how QUIET her homeschooling seems to be.

* Epiphany has been struggling through The Four Loves, so today I started reading it aloud to her. I read, she knitted or drew with Aquarelle pencils, and every so often we'd stop to make sure we knew what was going on. We've just finished the chapter on "Affection," with Amicus listening (and drawing) as well. His pre-middle-school education does take an awfully rigorous turn from time to time.

We also had a burst of spontaneous public declension:

and a post office

with a postmaster and postmistress who sat busily writing their own letters -- Helier asked me to spell out "Post Office," so I did, and he wrote it -- we laughed when he'd written as far as "Post Off." I tried to take a picture of the sign, but it turned out too blurry to be worth posting here.

I also read them two chapters of Dawn Treader and said a decade of the Rosary with them before bed (or, really, before they didn't go to bed, but thumped around in their rooms and the dark hall while the rest of us puzzled our way through Love.

A Little Science and Math for Little People Who Would Balk at Science and Math Lessons (And Other Productive Uses of a Chilly Monday)

2008-01-21T14:33:00.000-08:00

The next time your 5-year-old asks to play Monopoly, say yes.

Actually, Helier, Crispina and I began the day with two board games: Nature Bingo (got it in a museum shop; there are others in the same series) and Monopoly. Nature Bingo is great -- just like regular bingo, but the "numbers" you draw are cards, with pictures corresponding to pictures on the player cards, and information about herbivores or crustaceans or invertebrates or whatever the picture represents. It's a fun way to review a number of sciency-natury concepts at a glance, and good for pre-readers because it's so visual. The person "calling" the concepts has to be able to read, but the players don't.

When Amicus was 5 and 6, we used to play Monopoly a lot -- with Funbrain, Monopoly more or less constituted our math curriculum that year. I had not played in a long time, but when Helier got it out today -- well, at first I was going to say no, it was too much trouble, but then I remembered bygone days with Amicus, and I changed my mind.

No idea who won. We finally just had to stop, because Helier couldn't sit in his chair any more, but we both bought a good bit of property and wound up not broke. Rolling dice is a terrific way to drill basic addition facts -- by the end of the game, Helier could look at a 6 and a 4, for example, and know that they made 10 without having to count the dots. Monopoly also provides some practice in dealing with money, making change, and counting by 5s and 10s. Crispina couldn't quite participate in the game -- she melted down over choosing a game piece and had to spend a little time being contemplative in her room. But towards the end she too got to roll the dice and count the dots a few times.

They also played some Starfall and Funbrain games on the computer, and we read three chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Epiphany wrestled with algebra, Latin, and our current English assignment, while Amicus started a unit on multiplication (today: reviewing times tables) and read Tom Brown's School Days.

Narnia, Usborne Books, Reviews and a Giveaway

2008-01-19T14:40:00.000-08:00

We've been reading our way through the Chronicles of Narnia, mostly for the benefit of Helier and Crispina, who haven't heard it all before a hundred times. Even those who have heard it all before a hundred times are enjoying listening in and comparing notes about their favorites. I was a little surprised to learn that both Epiphany and Amicus like The Silver Chair best -- it was never a favorite of mine, but clearly that's irrelevant. They also really like The Last Battle.

We just finished Prince Caspian last night, in a marathon Friday-evening-by-the-fire read-aloud. This morning when I got up, Helier had already assembled a small army of metal soldiers of various sizes and historical periods, and assigned them roles: Caspian, dwarfs, Giant Wimbleweather, and so forth. We have a small metal castle -- by "small" I mean about the size of my fist -- which will do for Cair Paravel in the distance. And we have two metal dragons, which may come in handy later on, as we're now into The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. All this is why I've never bothered with reading-comprehension tests or reading levels. If you're paying attention and talking to your children, it's generally fairly clear whether they understand something or not. And I find that if they're interested in it at all, they will understand it. This may be a chicken/egg proposition, but there it is.

This morning when we sat down to begin Dawn Treader, I also got out an Usborne book I'd given Crispina over Christmas: I Can Draw Animals. This is a simple little book which can easily be used even by a child who's not reading yet, as the steps for drawing a lion, say, as we did this morning, are very clearly illustrated. You draw a circle for a head, some little semicircles within semicircles for ears, and so on. So we had a session of "drawing Aslan," and also of identifying shapes. Their Aslans turned out pretty well, and they drew and colored happily while I read to them.

Well, I guess I've written a book review -- I'll link to it from my Usborne Blogstore, where I'll soon be drawing a name for my January book giveaway. If you'd like me to put your name in, send me a short review of an Usborne book your family has liked, and I'll post it on the Usborne blog. Winner can choose from the assortment of titles I have in stock right now.

Meanwhile, Aelred and Amicus are off doing a physics lesson -- no, not Backyard Ballistics, but designing their Pinewood Derby car.

Shameless Boast

2008-01-17T18:43:00.000-08:00

Fr. Victor sent the high-schoolers home yesterday with all their Latin papers from first semester in a folder, so parents can sort out grades. Epiphany seems to have a 100 average. Not that I am proud or anything (especially when you consider how relaxed we have been in our pursuit of knowledge heretofore).

Go, girlie.

Writing, College Shopping, and More

2008-01-17T13:49:00.000-08:00

Amicus is generally a strong speller, but our last workbook page revealed that we haven't sufficiently covered suffixes -- adding -er, -ed, or -ing, especially to words like "begin." He tends to want to write "begining." So in addition to working through exercises, I've had him writing sentences using these words.

Now, I should note right here that last year, or even six months ago, if I had assigned Amicus five sentences to make up and write down, there would have been not only weeping and gnashing of teeth, but also snarling and "gollum" noises deep in the back of the throat. In fact, when I said, "I want you to write some sentences," I flinched and reflexively bit my tongue to keep from dropping bitter words about Abraham Lincoln and the back of the coal shovel and mamby-pambies who think writing a sentence is seven years' rock-splitting in Siberia.

But no. He sat down and wrote the sentences without a murmur. Wait: that's not quite true. He was chortling to himself as he wrote.

As you can see, he's been studying the Backyard Ballistics book, because here is what he wrote:

1. We considered many ballistic devices including a potato cannon.

2. We had problems deciding how many spuds to get.

3. We wanted a ten-pound bag.

4. We tried to fire it over the off-ramp; it hit a car instead.

5. I liked to fire the spud gun.

6. We built runners on the spud gun.

7. The tennis ball mortar was trickier than the spud gun.

8. The spud gun fired quicker than anything else.

(let me hasten to add that they have not actually done any of this yet -- this is an exercise in fantasy fiction)

Meanwhile, Epiphany is plowing through The Four Loves. In English this week we talked about G.B. Shaw and Pygmalion, ending with a discussion about what socialism is. This, as I realized, gives us a good segueway into next week's discussion of philosophy and ideas about the nature of reality. They're supposed to read either the Lewis book or Plato's Crito and write me a short paper discussing either writer's position regarding reality, truth, and so forth. I looked in on Epiphany a while ago; she was sprawled on her bed with the book and glowered at me when I put my head in; "I'm halfway through the introduction," she spat.

BUT she's motivated to get through it, because she's been researching colleges again. Fourteen is NOT too young to be thinking about this kind of thing. January and February, actually, are good months for reviving thoughts about college: looking at websites and reading college guides helps a body to remember why, exactly, she is doing all this work she does not really want to be doing. Oh, right . . . because she wants to be someplace like -- that! or that! Hm, well, better tackle Lewis again. Otherwise she's not going anywhere.

We've just ordered this, by the way

for some motivational reading.

Speaking of Lewis, the littles and I are reading Prince Caspian together. We had a lovely cozy time together by the fire after lunch. Now Crispina is sleeping -- we had friends over to play this morning -- and Helier and Amicus are outside persecuting Hilaria, but not with a spud gun.

Monday Morning Log

2008-01-14T09:06:00.000-08:00

We were scheduled for science group today, but Kim, who was hosting, has pestilence in her house. Just as well, actually, because as usual we can do with a long, open day in which to get work done.

As of now, 11:10 a.m. my time, here is what we have accomplished:

Epiphany: a tantrum-ette over having to do things she doesn't like to do, followed by a burst of industry in which she did an hour of algebra (she's having to re-do her exam; math retention is not our strong point here, so we are working on that); an exercise and a half in Latin; some research for her term paper, with plans to do more this afternoon; and a history lecture -- we're up to Lecture 3 in the F.X. Noble "Foundations of Western Civ" course from the Teaching Company.

Amicus: began a Draw&Write exercise; worked on suffixes in spelling; finished a chapter test in MCP Math, which tells us that he can add any numbers which happen to come down the pike, no matter how large, but that he still needs to work on subtracting large multi-digit numbers, which means that we know what the rest of this week in math looks like; worked on some drawing exercises from the Usborne Pocket Artist (fun, and good for this handwriting business as well); practiced adding suffixes -ed, -ing, and -er in spelling. We'll write sentences using these words later in the week for reinforcement (plus more writing practice). Now he's doing some independent reading -- not sure what.

Helier: built with Lego, looked at books, stencilled letters onto a sheet of paper, looked on as Crispina and I played with cuisenaire rods and the Miquon Math Orange Book.

Crispina: wanted to play with cuisenaire rods, so we got out those and the Miquon book. We made pictures with rods, did a lot of counting and identifying odd and even numbers and putting down the right number of rods to match a given number. Now she's in her room listening to an abridged Howard Pyle Tales From Robin Hood on CD.

And on Friday, Some Pirates Dropped In

2008-01-11T14:24:00.000-08:00

And tried to strangle each other, as pirates are wont to do.

Mass this morning, though I spent most of it in the car with the pirates, one of whom was behaving in a manner inconsistent with worship, even for a pirate. The other pirate and I prayed the rosary over her screams. Afterwards, Amicus read Zenit (news from the Vatican); Epiphany read her religion chapter; Helier painted pictures of Yoda (recognizable by his ears and his lightsaber); the other pirate slept a merciful sleep; and when Hilaria came over, she helped them to make hats and eyepatches, and everyone went outside to swordfight.

Now Amicus is off to swordfighting class, and I need to drag myself out of this chair to make something meatless for dinner.

On Thursday, The Lord Said, "Let There Be Tracing Paper"

2008-01-10T14:07:00.000-08:00

You know how you know that something is a good thing, and that you should buy it and keep it in stock always, and yet you forget all about it -- for like three years?

Thus it has been with tracing paper in this house. When we first began homeschooling, Amicus was a kindergartener, and I bought piles of tracing paper. He would dictate things to me, and I would write them down, and he would go over them with tracing paper and a pencil. Later he progressed to copying, and I stopped buying tracing paper so much, and eventually I forgot all about it.

Today Helier was tracing letters again -- we have one of those Memoria Press Copybooks, which have been wonderful for Amicus, but which Helier has regarded with apathy, until this week -- when it occurred to me that he, and Crispina, too, might benefit from the addition of tracing paper to their academic diet. So off I went in the rain to Walgreens to buy some.

There's nothing in this world like something new, which largely accounts for the amount of writing which has gone on here today. Helier traced most of the alphabet from the copybook before abandoning that as too -- impinging on his personal freedom, I guess -- and launching into writing his own letters, his own way. He also did some "math," which looked like this: 6-3+9. Only his 3's looked like capital E's, and his 6's and 9's were circles with sticks going either up or down. But he wrote a lot of it, and I praised it.

Eventually I guess we'll have to work on letter and number formation. I didn't do this with Amicus, and I'm sorry now, because while he can write reasonably well, in terms of composition, his letter formation tends to be more tortured than is conducive to easy, fluent writing, which is why I'm making him do so much cursive copywork. In truth, that's going pretty well. He wrote out two substantial paragraphs this week, with no more than the standard-model complaining.

Anyway, I'm already thinking how I can tackle this good-handwriting issue (not perfect, mind you; just good in the sense of being both easy to accomplish and moderately readable to the untrained eye) with a person far less malleable than Amicus.

Who plowed through his regular load of sitdown work today -- nothing unusual to report. He seems to be having one of those "steady but uninspiring" years. Already trying to think how to make next year both livelier and more challenging for him.

Epiphany read Pygmalion and did Latin. Both big kids went to choir this afternoon. I'll be posting more about high-school English soon at Abandon Hopefully, so stay tuned for a term-paper schedule for the semester, plus some grammar goodies.

Less > More

2008-01-08T19:15:00.000-08:00

I was going to call this post "Less Is More," but that's what Leonie titled her post of yesterday, so I had to be creative. I actually sat here at the computer pondering the <,>,= signs and wondering which one was the right answer. And the truth is that, whatever this says about me as an organizer (ha.ha.double ha.), we not only don't suffer from a dearth of lesson planning/daily scheduling, but we thrive on it. Really. I'm not just saying that to justify being lazy.

Take today. Here's what I had planned to do:

rosary/morning offering
make Amicus do math and maybe Latin and some handwriting, because he didn't do those things over the break
help Epiphany with her Latin -- currently she's trying to sort out direct from indirect objects
read to the littles some and kick them outside to play

I should add that although I have Helier registered as a "kindergartener" with our homeschool umbrella school, lately I've been rethinking the wisdom of this. Starting the school year, he was a young 5 with a July birthday. Had I been sending him to formal school, I probably would not have sent him this year. He's bright enough, and he CAN read a little, add a little, and so on. But he has shown zero interest in much formal learning, which he can smell as a cat smells the pill stuffed in the sardine, even when I try to make it look like "fun." He just isn't interested -- or so I thought. I had more or less let it go well before Christmas, and had resolved over the break to let it go even more, and just let him be a kindergartener again next year. No big deal.

All of which I mention because today of his own volition he traced several pages' worth of capital letters, learned about odd and even numbers, and shared in Amicus's Latin review. I had all three of them -- Amicus, Helier and Crispina -- asking each other, "Quis es?" as per the first lesson in Minimus,
and answering, "Amicus sum. Filius sum," and so forth. It was great fun.

We received for Christmas a wonderfully silly book about math:

It's yet another rhyming kids' book, and great poetry it is not, but otherwise, this is how kindergarten math ought to be taught: silly rhymes, goofy pictures with things to look for, and at the end a child-lucid explanation of the concept at hand. Both Helier and Crispina now know that an even number is one in which every item (as in four porpoises) has a buddy, while in an odd number, one is always left out. In fact, after we read this book, Crispina sat turning the pages, counting, and murmuring to herself, "That one has a buddy, that one has a buddy, that one doesn't have a buddy -- ODD!"

Amicus did all his work, read, counted his steps; Epiphany learned Latin and English grammar simultaneously. They also went to choir.

In case you're wondering, I'm trying myself to take the suggestion which I often give to people, that if they worry about "covering" enough then what they should do is to keep a daily log, noting what their children actually do all day, "schoolwork" or not. I did this assiduously the first year or so that we homeschooled, and it was most illuminating and comforting. I'm trying to reclaim that habit, because I think it was a good one and kept us on track far better than any planning of mine could have done.

(Not that I don't plan in larger terms, I should hasten to add. I DO think broadly about what we need to do in a given year, and I buy the books. So I macro-plan; I just don't micro-plan)

Back to Unschool

2008-01-07T18:45:00.000-08:00

Okay, so school started again today -- and what it officially involved was taking down the Christmas tree. Can't study, I reasoned, with the house still stuck in Christmas mode. So we unstrung the lights and unhooked the ornaments and packed away the candles and Nativity sets and stuffed the tree out the door. Now we have daylight again! And space! And the whole house-reclamation/Ordinary-Time-Re-entry Project took maybe all of two hours, after which a whole luxurious day yawned before us, during which . . .

* Epiphany knitted a scarf for her violin teacher while listening to the first two lectures in the Teaching Company's Foundations of Western Civilization series -- and then she practiced her violin. I believe some Latin also was accomplished, as well as algebra, and she made cookies. History, Latin, algebra, music, and home ec: not bad for a day when all we were doing was cleaning house.

* Amicus did drawing exercises from the Usborne Pocket Artist. Good for the fine motor skills/handwriting. He also received a little pedometer as a favor on Epiphany's birthday and has been trying to walk 10,000 steps a day, which is a project in and of itself. I'm counting this as part of PE.

*Helier and Crispina and I read about earthquakes and volcanoes in the Usborne First Encyclopedia of the World. We've also been reading stories of Robin Hood, and a story about odd numbers. Both of them have been drawing as well.

Everyone said rosary this morning and prayers tonight. Everyone has listened to classical music. Everyone has been outside to play. Everyone has done some pleasure reading and/or been read to. Again, not bad for a day when when the academic agenda was "nothing."

Homeschooling: Where School's Never Out

2007-12-28T21:32:00.001-08:00

. . . even though the people who matter think it is.

Here are some things we've been doing this week, which don't exactly count as school, but which cover an awful lot of learning bases nonetheless:

*reading

Epiphany has read The Jane Austen Handbook; Amicus has read Biggles. We've all been doing Biggles as a read-aloud, in fact, so are living either WWI or WWII, depending on which book we're in.

* game-playing

Amicus and Aelred have played Risk. Helier, Crispina and I have played dominoes. Epiphany has the Authors card game, though I'm not sure she's played it yet.

* making things

Helier and Amicus put together Helier's Playmobil pirate ship. Crispina has made cookies with her new tiny cookie cutters. Epiphany has been making sachets and bath potions from recipes in Alexa Lett's Home Made.

* art

Epiphany received some very nice Lyra colored pencils (the Aquarelle kind, that you can blend with water), plus another case containing pastels, pencils, watercolors, and so forth. Plus, we scored an easel out of the Redblur household's move. So Epiphany has been drawing faces and experimenting with various techniques at the easel, and her attempts are interspersed with Crispina's sessions with crayons at the easel.

So really, you know, for people who are technically doing nothing . . .

Our Week in Review

2007-12-21T20:02:00.001-08:00

OK, so we ditched schoolwork -- most of us, that is. Epiphany had to write a religion paper, study for a Latin quiz, take an algebra exam, and prepare an extra-credit project on The Odyssey. Oh, and get ready for a judged debate, which took place today. She and her partner didn't place, and she wasn't happy with her scores, but I thought that they both acquitted themselves well, especially in the unenviable position of having to go first. I took her out to lunch -- a rather spartan meatless lunch, since it's Friday (we had soup, but it wasn't black broth, so I guess I can't really say that it was spartan) -- and afterwards we wandered through Pier 1, which cheered her up.

Amicus's week:

*helped decorate the Christmas tree
*went to choir practice
*read Artemis Fowl seven or eight times
*filled Angel Tree Christmas boxes at church
*helped make chocolate truffles for Christmas gifts
*went caroling with a friend's family at a local nursing home
*came home sick, but is even now, I hope, sleeping it off

Helier's week:

*Christmas tree
*made truffles
*had A Gift for the Lonely Doll, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, and Julie Vivas's charmingly-illustrated Nativity read to him multiple times
*received a Disney Winnie-the-Pooh Numbers and Counting workbook as a gift -- I NEVER buy Disney-themed stuff -- and spent all day today tracing numbers, doing dot-to-dot pictures, etc.: In short, he did all the schoolwork I've been trying to get him to do all fall. A Disney workbook. Truly, who'da thunk it.

Crispina's week:

See above. She has also been playing Nativity a lot, with various dolls and other props ranged round the living room, and checking her stocking every morning on waking, on the off-chance that it's Christmas, and we just haven't gotten around to telling her. Because we're like that.

We've also -- as you know if you read Fine Old Famly -- been observing the O Antiphon days.

The truffle-making was messy but fun -- we used a basic recipe from Usborne's Christmas Fairy Cooking and adapted it by using different kinds of chocolate chips and different kinds of things to roll the truffles in: sprinkles, coconut, etc. These are super-easy to make, even for 4-year-olds, and they turn out remarkably well. Here are some highlights:

More Monday: a Photo-Essay and Some History Game Links

2007-12-10T13:38:00.000-08:00

Behold children whacking at marble scraps begged from a monument company. Lesson: marble is hard. You can't just, like, pick up a chisel and wind up with The Dying Gaul.

There was a lot of marble left over, and Bess was going to throw it away, which is how I came to possess a motley but lovely collection of rather oddly shaped and sized cutting boards/trivets.

Behold Crispina coloring in the Jesse Tree ornaments. I'll be doing well to remember what they're supposed to represent, or to make out the readings, but she is very proud.

Meanwhile, Amicus has co-opted the Usborne Knights internet-linked book (nobody complains about this sideline of mine), and he spent time this afternoon exploring some links which I agreed are worth sharing:

Refight the Battle of Trafalgar!

Refight Hastings!

Survive the Iron Age -- if you can!

and more, all from the BBC History Homepage

Advent 2: This Week in Our Domestic Church

2007-12-10T08:03:00.000-08:00

A quick sketch of our plans for the week, with many thanks to Catherine Fournier for the excellent resources on offer at her site:

* coloring and putting together a second week's worth of ornaments for our Jesse Tree. Another year we may make more permanent felt or wooden ones, but the advantage of simply coloring, cutting, and gluing paper ones is that Helier and Crispina can largely superintend themselves, making this project a "real" contribution on their part, and not merely an adult-managed craft activity with an adult-approved outcome. So we are loving our very preschooly-crayony-looking Jesse Tree.

*coloring Our Lady of Guadaloupe and making a paper-bag tilma to celebrate Wednesday's feast. Actually we'll have to do this tomorrow, as Wednesday is our co-op day, and we won't be home . . .

*continuing to light our Advent candles, stick stickers on our little calendar, and open the doors of the Advent Castle:

But now we're on our way out to history group, where we'll be carving marble, like the ancient Greeks . . .

On Writing and the Need for Writing Programs

2007-12-08T06:03:00.000-08:00

On the Teacher Training Forum at the Mater Amabilis online curriculum site (registration required to access the yahoo group), a discussion is not raging, because I notice that even "raging" discussions among Catholic homeschooling mothers tend to be far more quiet and polite than your average raging discussion. Still, writing -- how children learn to write, how best to teach writing -- is currently a topic of some debate.

At the center of the debate is the writing curriculum from the Institute for Excellence in Writing, a program universally acknowledged to be the best curriculum on the market. Friends online and in real life have used it and loved it. We have not used it, though I did review a friend's materials last summer, as I was putting the high-school co-op English course together. IEW wasn't quite what I needed for that situation: focused on microstructure, ie the sentence, when what we would be doing was macrostructure, the essay. Not that I imagined that everyone had utterly mastered the art of the sentence, but by 9th or 10th grade, you have to be moving on.

Anyway, this non-raging online debate was sparked by someone's asking, as you do in forums like TTF, whether people had used the IEW program and liked it. Many people wrote to say that they had used it and liked it very much.

But then someone wrote to ask whether you need a formal writing curriculum at all, prior to 8th or 9th grade. Now, this would have been my question. With Epiphany, the only one of my children so far to attain the age of rhetoric, as the classical educator would call it (actually the classical educator would say, the rhetorical stage), we have never used a program of any sort, partly because she's an anti-program kind of personality, and partly because she hasn't needed it. She is what is sometimes called a natural writer.

What does that mean? Well, in good old-fashioned parlance, she has talent, which can mean any combination of several things. First, she has an inclination to write. It's how she thinks about things. To become interested in a topic is to write a novel or a play about it. Second, she has an ear for language. Somehow, in the hardwiring of her mind, she has the necessary components for connecting the sounds of spoken language with the actions of written language; she also internalizes the written language of what she reads, and intuitively mimics it in her own writing (one more reason to make sure people are reading good books and not drivel, from an early age). Third -- well, I can't think what the third thing is.

Anyway, watching Epiphany over the first four years of our homeschooling, from the age of nine to thirteen, I came to realize that a writing program for her would be a waste of time and money, and a source of massive frustration to boot. She was writing. Over time, she came to write really well. The more she wrote, the better it got. We worked on editing and proofing issues as she worked on various personal projects. Last year, with the help of her adored drama teacher, she wrote, revised ("Boy, you can't spell," the drama teacher told her once, which led to a fever of proofing and practice), and produced a play -- what with all that, I didn't think we also needed to broach the term paper just then.

This year, in our high-school co-op, we've just finished our first 5-paragraph essays. I haven't read them all yet, but I have read Epiphany's. And it's good. If I do say so myself -- but then, I have graded a LOT of essays in my life, and if this one came to me anonymously in a pile of college-freshman papers, I would remark it as particularly non-inept. Clearly Epiphany is one of those students who flourish when given the freedom to write -- because that's what they want to do -- and then, when the time comes for more formal work (which means, when you really can't put off the formal stuff any longer), all you have to do is give them a structure to work with. They've got plenty to fill it in; all they need to know is what comes first, what to leave out, and so on.

If Epiphany were an only child, I would belong without question to the "less-is-more" camp. As it is, I find myself there more often than not anyway, and not just with regard to writing. But this non-raging debate has me thinking about Amicus, who's next up, and what I ought to be doing with him, because he is quite another creature altogether. Of course, 9th-grade girls and 4th-grade boys ARE different creatures altogether, so it's all apples and rutabagas from the get-go, but still . . . what I recall of Epiphany at this stage and what I know of Amicus now leads me to suspect that what worked for her -- ie neglect -- might not work for him.

But what will? I'm of two minds. Part of his reluctance to write, and his non-fluency in writing, has to do with the mechanical aspect of it: he still struggles with handwriting, though that's improved greatly in the last year, and his typing is painfully slow. So we still concentrate largely on making all that easier. I am convinced that it's almost impossible to compose a written piece, even a sentence, out of one's own mind when one still has to think how to form each letter. Writing, real writing, only happens when that part of it becomes automatic. So I'm back to thinking that copywork, my old favorite standby, is still the best exercise for someone in this position. I'm also really liking the Draw and Write book we're working through, for the fine-motor practice it provides. Amicus's drawing has become much better and less awkward in the course of this school term.

As for the rest, it's hard to know what to do. He's not my first child to pass through homeschool 4th grade, but he is my first child like this. For this child, what's too much? What's not enough? He reads, constantly and widely and fluently; he's an articulate speaker and a good thinker. My instinct is that he, too, will "get there" with writing. My instinct is also that we're just never, ever going to do a formal writing curriculum in this house, which may be the curse of a homeschool administered by a writer . . . no program I've reviewed or tried, including the one I'm currently supposedly using for composition in the co-op, ever quite fits. For me writing programs exist to be departed from.

All that to say that I've restrained my own impulse to leap into the non-raging debate, because I can see, in reviewing my own children and personality, that there's no one-size-fits-all answer here. I can't tell someone else to junk the idea of a writing program on the basis of my having found such a thing largely unnecessary, because my children aren't her children, and I am not she. This is the point at which homeschooling discussions often break down, actually, because they touch the nerve of what makes homeschooling homeschooling. You may decline, quite rightly, to be a moral relativist. You may decline to be a cultural relativist. But there's a kind of right relativism in homeschooling, a properly-ordered individualism. I would like to think about this more, but the bigs and Aelred will be coming from Mass soon, and the littles are waiting for their oatmeal.

Click Here to Watch A Lovely Little Film

2007-12-04T09:04:00.000-08:00

. . . made by some home educators in Wales. I won't claim that we're quite as unschooly as this -- we have days which look like this film, of course, like yesterday, when we played with microscopes and computers and friends; but then we also have days like today, when Epiphany's studying for a 6-chapter Fr. Victor Latin test and polishing her 5-paragraph Iliad essay, while Amicus is plowing dutifully through a math lesson, Draw&Write, a spelling exercise, and some Latin. But you know, we're free to learn in as many modes as present themselves, with the formal and the informal boundarying each other. It makes for a richly-textured life of learning, and for this life may we ever be grateful.

Hat Tip to Rachel the Catholic Unschooler

Monday, Monday: Homemade Microscopes and More

2007-12-03T11:43:00.000-08:00

This week was science week for our 3-family history/science group, and it was our turn to host. I opted for a lesson on the microscope (and the scientist as observer), based largely on this book:

(for more information about this book, visit Mrs. T's Usborne Bookstore)

First, after some talk about the scientist's desire to see things in greater and greater detail, and about the development of the microscope, we made little basic microscopes by punching a hole in the end of a strip of card stock, taping a piece of plastic baggie tightly over the hole, positioning a drop of water over the plastic-covered hole, and then looking at things through it. It really did magnify, though it also rendered the images upside down, like reflections in a spoon. Nevertheless, this really was a very fun and satisfying experiment, and so easy to do!

Here's what the microscopes looked like:

Next we played with a real microsope, looking at hair, cells from inside our mouths, swimmy critters from the puddle in our driveway, etc, played with a virtual microscope, and viewed microscopic images online.

This afternoon we'll be coloring images for our Jesse Tree, plus reading a selection from this list of Christmas stories at Baldwin Project,but now I've got to go fetch Hilaria from school. Happy Monday, all.

Read-Aloud Roundup

2007-11-29T13:03:00.000-08:00

I haven't said much this fall about our read-aloud books. This reticence is due at least in part to the stage at which we find ourselves as a family, with children of such widely varying ages. When Epiphany and Amicus were small, we constantly had a family chapter book going: whatever Epiphany liked, Amicus would make himself be interested in, because such is the nature of Amicus. In those days it was easy to throw ourselves, as a family, into the reading of a book or series of books, and to build our evenings around reading.

Now I'm finding it not so easy. I have to hold myself accountable, at least in part, because my tendency to get sucked into the computer doesn't help matters (though to be fair to myself, I don't habitually sit down at the computer before people are in bed -- and right now the littles are with Aelred in the kitchen, and the bigs are happily at choir, so honestly, I'm not sure I'm THAT neglectful . . . ). But on the other hand, our household dynamics have changed drastically in the past few years, and the change seems especially drastic this fall. It's all to do with everyone's getting older, of course. On a normal evening now, Epiphany doesn't want to be read to, and while Amicus does still like to be read to, the books I'm reading with the littles are ones he's heard, so he generally winds up reading to himself instead. We read saints' stories all together in the morning in the course of our family devotions, but that's about it for whole-family read-alouds these days.

BUT -- especially with Advent almost upon us, when we put aside most of our 'formal' schooling to focus on preparing for Christmas -- I am trying to build read-alouds back into our day, as well as our evening. I've made an especial goal of trying to read more of the fabulous offerings at The Baldwin Project, possibly my favorite site in the world, but one which overwhelms me with its riches. So many books, so little time! And though I mean to print things out and have them spiral-bound and Kinko's, I never get around to it. If I get something printed out, I inevitably just end up with loose papers all over my desk, an abundance I really don't need more of.

So, though it's hardly cozy, I've taken to reading chapters straight off the computer. Curling up with a machine doesn't quite fit the image I entertain, of all of us having a lovely read-aloud evening round the fire, but it's the only way we're going to read more of these books -- and to know about them, but not to read them before everyone grows up and leaves home, would be a colossal waste.

Herewith, our current reading:

(in actual paper book form):
Biggles Flies Eastby Captain W. A. Johns (a WWI spy adventure)

(in Baldwin-Project e-text form):

The Aesop for Children, by Milo Winter
Among the Night People, by Clara Dillingham Pierson (for science/nature for Helier and Crispina)
A Moral Alphabet, by Hilaire Belloc (just because!)
The Boy's Book of Famous Soldiers, by J. Walker McSpadden(a history booster for Amicus, who loves this kind of thing)

So that's it for now, but I'm eyeing some good Advent/Christmas reading at Baldwin. I'll post what we do when we do it.

Epiphany's Tip for Reading Antigone

2007-11-27T18:03:00.000-08:00

Epiphany: Check this out, Mom. At the top of every page, I've written out what's going on in the story. So I, like, understand it.

Me: !

I asked her where she'd gotten the idea of providing a gloss for herself like that; she shrugged and said that she had thought it seemed a good thing to do. So there you go. It does seem a good thing to do.

Current Events

2007-11-22T21:00:00.000-08:00

Today, of course, is Thanksgiving, which is a holiday as we all know -- but what are holidays to those who don't keep a school schedule? Here's what I read to Helier and Crispina at bedtime tonight in celebration of the day.

As always happens during a holiday week, the holiday expanded to encompass the entire week, so that very little serious schoolwork went on -- though as I write this, I recall that Amicus did copy, in cursive, two paragraphs about silk-making in ancient China (from Draw and Write Through History), read a lot of The Usborne Visitor's Guide to the Ancient World, which he highly recommends, did some math, went to choir and Mass . . . Epiphany worked on her 5-paragraph Iliad essay for English and did Latin and algebra . . . and Helier read three more stories in the first Little Angel Reader.

We also

Began the process of making our house fair for Advent

and made bread-dough turkeys (warm water + yeast/a little sugar + flour -- very plain! We let the dough rise, then molded it like play doh, then baked and ate it)

Epiphany got a jump on Christmas and racked up some credit hours in Home Ec by turning her old jeans into these nifty little bags, gifts for certain young cousins. She gets credit not only for designing and sewing them herself, but also for living creatively within a budget, and for turning something useless (her split-in-an-unmentionable-place blue jeans) into something useful and pretty and fun.

Also, last Friday was debate club day. The debate teacher told me afterwards that although she doesn't usually "call" an unjudged debate, Epiphany and Jacob had won that day's round handily, arguing against re-releasing wild and endangered animals into their original natural habitats. After debate, six extra teenagers got into my van and came home with the five of us, so I had to feed them pizza, and then they began making a movie of the Odyssey in our back yard, a process only fractionally hampered by the fact that nobody had remembered to bring a video camera. Clearly we will need some more dates in our shooting schedule, ideally some that include actual shooting of film footage.

Epiphany as dictator -- I mean, director (her joke, not mine)

A Boy and His Monstrance

2007-11-15T18:56:00.000-08:00

Some days back, Elizabeth's five-year-old made a monstrance with his pattern tiles, and clearly it's catching, because this is what Helier did with Tinker Toys today.

He and Crispina proceeded to clear off the top of the bookshelf and set it up as an altar -- all right, so maybe your church altar doesn't have four egg cups ranged on it, though now that I think of it, I've heard of worse liturgical abuses. They "vested" Helier in his "chain mail" Crusader's costume, which looks like a chasuble if you squint at it, and ransacked the house for a scarf to be a stole, because you have to have one of those, too . . . Crispina was the server, though she balked -- quite properly -- at also delivering the homily.

Now, Helier is -- how can I put this? He's the one who announces, as the rest of us are dashing around looking for shoes, "Well, I guess I'M not going to Mass." And, "Well, I DON'T love Jesus." Which pronouncements I pretend not to hear, because I'm sure that when I was five years old, I said a lot of things that weren't exactly prophetic, either. At any rate, I was gratified that he seemed to know an awful lot about the parts of the Mass and who the major players are (he does go roughly twice a week, besides Sundays, so he OUGHT to know by now . . . ). Later, when I was ready to put all the pictures and things back on the top of the shelf, I suggested that he clear off the top of his chest of drawers in his bedroom and make an altar there, an idea which seemed to capture his imagination. Later he showed me his cleared-off "altar" space, with monstrance set up; I told him and Crispina that I'd take them to the Catholic bookstore tomorrow to look for statues, crosses, and whatever else they'd like to put on.

Normally Helier resists participating in family prayers ("Well, I guess I'M not talking to God . . . "), but at bedtime he came in to tell me that he had "said the Saint Michael the Archangel Prayer with my monstrance." Whatever helps you pray, buddy, I said . . .

Science Monday; Creaking into High-School Action; Various Adventures in Latin and Reading

2007-11-13T20:18:00.000-08:00

Last week, Monday was history day at our house, and we spent the morning on Greek drama. This week, Monday was science day at Bess's, once again with a group of children ranging in age from 13 to 3. The theme for the day was "What Makes a Scientist a Scientist?" (answer: asking "how?" and "why?" a lot), and the gist of the morning's activities was coming up with hypotheses and either proving or disproving them. The experiments were simple ones to do with magnetism and water: what does and doesn't float, what makes an object floatable or not-floatable, what's magnetic and what isn't? Bess made the older children partner with the little ones, so that Epiphany, for example, had Crispina for a lab partner and thus ended up trying to prove the hypothesis "All pink things float." The little children lost interest fairly quickly, but the older ones had a lively time trying to explode each other's hypotheses. At lunchtime I took everyone home but Epiphany, who stayed to work on this week's debate club assignment with Bess's son Jacob, her partner for this go-round (topic: the release of exotic/endangered species into the wild).

Today has been largely a catch-up day for Epiphany, who was sick last Wednesday and missed co-op, then had a hard time wringing the assignments for this week out of her classmates and thus found herself doing a week's worth of homework in one day, an occasion for much weeping and gnashing of teeth. "Well?" I said rather unsympathetically. "Welcome to life, darling." I have to admire both her determination (a lot) and my own callousness (just a little): whereas several years ago she would have imploded with despair, and whereas I would have over-sympathised and let her off the hook, we have both apparently matured to the point of her being able to carry on in the face of her own sure and certain knowledge that she is doomed to failure, as well as to being up all night, and of my being able to tune out her manifold wailings on this theme. She's now gone off to bed at last, having written the three body paragraphs of a five-paragraph essay on the heroic ideal in The Iliad and done pages and pages of Latin exercises. I haven't heard her mention religion (tomorrow's other class), so either she's done it and feels good about it, or she hasn't done it and feels it's none of my business. Anyway, we labor away at adjusting to the demands of a high-school courseload, which is a subject all by itself. At least by the time she goes to college, the eleventh-hour panic will be old news.

Meanwhile, she's finally found our copy of Minimus, the very fun Latin program from Cambridge University Press, which I think is one of the selections available through the Saint Daniel's bookstore in the sidebar. Amicus has spent the last day or so trying to read all the cartoons; today I made him back up to the first lesson and copy some vocabulary into his Latin notebook. I notice that in Latin we're covering exactly the same grammar territory we were covering in English, so for the time being we're just doing Latin and noting that English works more or less the same way.

(behold Amicus genuinely engrossed in Minimus, ie not posing for this picture)

I haven't been very attentive lately to having Helier practice reading. He's not the most malleable subject in the world, for one thing, and at this stage, making him do formal schoolwork of any kind has not seemed a matter of great urgency. But today I dug up the first Little Angel Reader, pointed out to him that if we read a story a day, we can get to the story of Mary and Joseph and no room at the inn by Christmastime, and bribed and cajoled him into getting started. He CAN read, though not fluently yet, and while obviously I don't want to make it onerous for him, it seems to me that we can practice more than we have been doing. "Five minutes here, five minutes there" has lately become "five minutes nowhere," and I think we can improve on that. So we read "A Cat," all about Ann and her cat Nat who has some ham in a pan. I promised Helier that the stories do get more interesting as you go.

Read-alouds lately with Helier and Crispina
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Horse and His Boy
The Adventures of Lightfoot the Deer (our current read-aloud)

Amicus's recent reading:
The Dangerous Book for Boys
Eulalia (a Redwall book)
Cheaper By the Dozen

Tomorrow: 8:15 Mass and high-school co-op

Free-Time Friday

2007-11-10T10:33:00.000-08:00

Traditionally in our house, Friday has always been an "open" day. The other four days of our school week tend not to be terribly structured, either, and our schedule this year is unusually eclectic, even for us -- but on Friday, no formal schoolwork is assigned.

So what do we do on Fridays?

1. We go to Mass.

Epiphany and Amicus both sing in our parish treble choir, which sings two 12:15 Sunday Masses a month, plus the parish school Mass each Friday at 8:15. Normally -- Aelred teaches an 8:00 class and can't join us -- Helier, Crispina and I get up and go to 8:15, too. We park on the street to avoid the school-morning traffic, and Epiphany and Amicus walk in to vest and warm up before Mass; meanwhile, the rest of us sit in the van and either pray the Rosary or read some saints' stories until the crossing guard goes in. Then we drive on into the church parking lot and proceed to Mass.

Yesterday, however, we didn't do this: too much coughing and coldy stuff and interrupted sleep took their toll on our piety this week. So Aelred drove the big kids over on his way to class, and we picked them up after Mass.

2. Read-alouds. Friday is a great day for kicking back and enjoying a story on the couch together.

3. Crafts. Yesterday Helier and Crispina and I pulled out the Usborne Pirate Things to Make and Do and made pirate coins.

4. Coloring alphabet coloring pages printed out from Starfall

5. Paper Dolls.

6. High School schoolwork -- Friday isn't so "free-time" once you hit 9th grade. Epiphany devoted yesterday to history, reading and entering events into the timeline book.

7. Cooking. We do meatless Fridays all year round, and last night Epiphany made delicious vegetable soup from a recipe in the Usborne First Cookbook

I should add that while this cookbook is simple enough for Amicus to cook out of it with no supervision, the recipes are good enough that Epiphany wants to cook out of it, and the rest of us want to eat what gets cooked.

Homeschooling and The Question

2007-11-09T09:41:00.000-08:00

If you homeschool, you know what Question I mean. If you don't -- if you're like me, seven years ago, and you think that homeschooling is the exlusive province of wingnuts and whackjobs -- then you've probably asked The Question, at least in the privacy of your own mind.

I'm talking about the Socialization Question, of course, as in "What about --?" It's asked often enough to have become something of a cliche, and the answers border on the cliche themselves, though that doesn't make them untrue.

To sample the conversation, check out this post at Doc's Sunrise Rants, and this very astute observation posted recently at The Learning Umbrella. There's also this, from An Unschooling Life.

It's all been said before, but I wanted to add my own little anecdote about socialization and the homeschooled child. Well, it's not so much my anecdote as it is Amicus's Webelos den leader's anecdote, which she was kind enough to pass along in an email:

Last night at the meeting one thing we did was to try to work on our play we are doing for the showmanship badge. I had the boys in groups of 4 with me to brainstorm on ideas. It turned into a lesson of learning to listen to fellow scouts and not to put down other's ideas etc. Anyway, both [her son#1] and [her son#2] came home saying that the only scout who listened to others and complimented ideas was Amicus. Brainstorming is hard at any age and especially with 4th graders who haven't had much experience even trying this concept. I just wanted to pass along that I noticed how thoughtful Amicus was in doing this task and other scouts noticed too.

So, um, I hesitate to draw hard-and-fast conclusions from this report, but I will say that on Wednesday night, there was exactly one homeschooled Webelo present at this meeting, and I'm proud to be his mother. Of course, I hope he'd be as thoughtful and considerate no matter where he got his education, but I can't really believe he's that much better a person, objectively, than any other boy there that night. I know those boys, and they're all nice kids. They also all, except for Amicus and his homeschooled friend Jared, who wasn't there that night, attend our parish school, regularly rated the "top private elementary school" in our city. Soooooo . . . well, as I say, I hesitate to draw conclusions. I'll just say that I'm proud of my boy, and leave it at that.

Unschooling Voices

2007-11-08T14:27:00.000-08:00

Take some time to wander around the Unschooling Voices Carnival over at An Unschooling Life. You'll be glad you went.

This Morning: The Gnomes Count Their Gems and Smell the Flowers

2007-11-08T09:16:00.000-08:00

The last time I did homeschool kindergarten, we were brand-new homeschoolers, having just made a transatlantic move and had a baby. Kindergarten, last time, was a slapdash affair, even by my admittedly relaxed standards; of course, it wasn't especially relaxed, either. It was survival, pure and simple.

That kindergartener, Amicus, is no worse for the experience, but I am having a good time this year doing "early childhood" at my leisure. We just do a little bit here, a little bit there, as we feel like sitting down and focusing, and otherwise we have lots of conversations.

Lately our conversations have really been "greater-than/less-than" math exercises. We've begun our fall-winter run of birthdays, and Helier currently is obsessed with people's ages, who's older, who's younger, who was born first and last, which age is bigger, and so forth. This conversation becomes very tiresome after a while, but I'm happy to keep answering the same questions over and over because it's obvious that there's a concept working hard to lodge itself in his brain.

Today we did sit down and do a few purposeful things. I got out the gems, and we counted them. Here is a picture of "counting to twenty by fives:"

Our rows of five ones are a little crooked, but we did counting across by ones, then we counted how many rows of five ones we had, then we lined up our "five" gems -- the big blue ones -- one to each row.

Here the gnomes count their gems and put them into exquisite silver goblets:

We also spent some time writing As and Bs together. For a botany lesson, I went out and clipped us a specimen of the "B" plant still in bloom right now: native blue sage, one of my favorites. It's not a culinary sage, but the leaves do have a faintly herby smell, so we smelled our sprig as well as looked at it. I couldn't interest anyone else in drawing it, so I did my art lesson all by myself:

And now it's time for the Angelus and lunch.

Danger! Competence! Cultural Literacy! Caution Advised!

2007-11-05T11:56:00.001-08:00

I read with interest this post over at The Farm School on Conn and Hal Iggulden's The Dangerous Book for Boys, which we gave to Amicus for his tenth birthday last week. As Becky aptly points out, there's not much in this book that's really "dangerous:" no pipe bombs, no volatile chemical reactions, no incitement to revolution. The Anarchist Handbook this is not -- and a good thing, too.

What Amicus really, really wanted for his birthday was a Nintendo DS. He already has a Game Boy, however, and after some serious thought and consultation with each other, Aelred and I decided that this was enough. We're not totally out of the video gaming loop (almost but not quite -- and we might as well be, as Amicus has been prone to grumble in less heroic moments), but there's no reason, we have concluded, to keep upgrading and upgrading in order to play more and more isolating, obsessive, tunnel-vision-inducing hand-held games. Of which, in my opinion, admittedly non-universal, a little goes a long, long way.

So I was wandering around in a big-box-type store, which shall be known only as The Gettin' Place, trying to think what else I could find to give Amicus. I peregrinated through the book department, and there it was: big and red and rather cheesily faux-antique. It's cloth-bound, and the title's done in big gilt letters, but the placement of the authors' names, one above the title and one below, seems infelicitious, and the paper quality isn't quite what you'd expect from the packaging.

Still, I was reminded that in reading about this book, I'd been struck with the thought that this was the kind of book Amicus would like. He loves The American Boy's Handy Book

and The Dangerous Book looked like an expanded version of the same, as indeed it is: in addition to telling you how to make a battery, play stickball, build a treehouse, read the stars, and perform basic first aid, the Igguldens also renarrate the battles of Thermopylae, Hastings, and Crecy, provide a sampling of Shakespeare and basic Latin, explain elements of English grammar, and a whole heck of a lot else. In short, it's an omnibus education for a ten-year-old boy, which is why I bought the book. A little handwriting, a little math, and this book -- honestly, do we need anything else for fourth grade?

But "dangerous?" Well, only as in the kind of thing a little knowledge is. That phrase of course, is pitched more to the sort of situation in which a person does some internet research into a medical issue and assumes himself then to be "an equal partner in his own health care," instead of a patient. But there's also a sense in which to know anything at all is to become a little dangerous, or at least distinctly odd -- to be something other than a sheep.

I've just finished reviewing Diana West's The Death of the Grownup,

which argues that the blurring of boundaries, between children and adults, between culture and culture, will lead ultimately to the downfall of Western civilization. Not unpredictably, but also not inaccurately, multicultural education -- the education of tolerance if not outright elevation of any culture not our own, of "who are we to judge?" -- plays a major role in this projected downfall. A book like The Dangerous Book is dangerous precisely because it defies cultural amnesia in the form of forward-looking "world without walls" diversity training; it's dangerous in the sense that if you have an education on this "old school" order, and you believe in that kind of education, you'd probably be really stupid to expect that you might grow up to be a college professor.

So anyway, I bought the book. I'm not sure it's made Amicus not want a DS, at least not in the short run. But he's been carrying it from room to room, reading it, and it seems to make him happy enough.

A Few More Greek Drama/Art Links

2007-11-05T05:33:00.001-08:00

They'll be here in two hours! My printer is churning away! While the kids have breakfast, I'll share some more fun links I found, with craft ideas, coloring pages, and more:

Enchanted Learning: Color an Amphora

Make a Mask of Medusa -- We're definitely doing this one.

Coloring Pages (Greek masks, gods and goddesses, coins, etc) in downloadable pdf format

More Greek-themed Coloring Pages

Greek-themed crafts: masks, shields, terracotta pots, Medusa wigs. Big fat Greek fun!

I'm in Charge of History Group

2007-11-04T17:26:00.000-08:00

Like, tomorrow at ten. At my house. Involving roughly ten or twelve kids, ranging in age from 14 to 3. What to do, what to do?

We're studying ancient Greece, and I'm deciding here as I think about it, that for tomorrow's session we'll be focusing on Greek drama.

The little kids can make masks; I think I've even still got some paper plates.

With the big kids, we'll do a little lecture on the conventions of Greek drama, and then I'll have them choose a myth (I'll let them draw a choice out of a hat, so as not to waste time arguing about it) and dramatize it for us. We'll have enough older kids for 3 actors and at least a small chorus.

Some useful Greek-drama links:

Dr. J Classics

Staging an Ancient Greek Play (very fun link!)

A very powerful taste of what a Greek tragedy might have looked and sounded like:

This and That on All Saints

2007-11-01T08:26:00.000-07:00

It's been a quiet week around the blog academy, which means it hasn't been a quiet week in the real-life academy. But we always take Holy Days of Obligation as holidays -- "holiday" means "holy day," anyway, and not "woo hoo, let's be slackers," although of course slackers R us today, at least until Mass time tonight -- so I have a moment to catch up.

I had a minor homeschooling epiphany this week, on the order of those realizations which sometimes strike me, that what I'm doing actually makes some sense. In this case, what suddenly became clear to me was that my habit of "buying up" in schoolbooks -- that is, always tending to buy not the book for the grade level of a given child in a given year, but to buy a grade level or so ahead -- does have a reason. Of course it had a reason to begin with: this habit applies mostly to my buying books for Amicus, who likes to think he's doing "advanced" work. For example, I bought the MCP math workbook for fifth grade (Book E) this year, not fourth, because Amicus likes to think he's ahead of where he actually is, and will work hard to perpetuate that fantasy.

But here's the thought that struck me this week, as we were working through some subtraction-with-borrowing (because I refuse to call it "regrouping," which is totally confusing): why NOT, at least in math, buy a level or two above what you think you actually need? First of all, the first third of the book, at least, in almost every math series I've seen, is review. So maybe you didn't do decimals last year? Do it now, and take more time, because if the book is a fifth grade book, and your child's only in fourth grade, you don't have to worry about finishing that book by the end of the year. Instead of doing fourth-grade math AND fifth-grade math, why not do two years of fifth-grade math? One book, two years, plenty of time to work at your child's pace -- and as far as I can see, you lose absolutely nothing in terms of content and concepts.

Ditto grammar. Epiphany is learning most of her formal, structural grammar through Latin, but as I've mentioned before, Amicus and I are working through my old high-school text, the Harbrace Handbook, a solid and sturdy and time-tested resource for anything you want to know about grammar and usage. All we do with it is sit down together and read it, one or two days a week, and occasionally work a written exercise. Most recently I had Amicus copy examples of basic sentence patterns: subject-verb, subject-verb-object, and subject-verb-indirect object-direct object. Again, it's a high-school or college text -- and he likes that it's not kidded-down -- so we can take our own sweet time moving through it, instead of feeling that we've got to finish one level before we can move on. The beauty of this is that it's a way of doing serious work, work that stretches and disciplines the mind, without having to treat it like a school subject which exists to be completed.

Last but not least, it is the Feast of All Saints, a glorious feast, being about everybody. We read a saint's story almost daily, all year; this week we backed up in the catechism to examine precisely what is meant by "the communion of saints," and how this works. Helier, especially, was fascinated by the whole idea. I'm afraid I'm otherwise a total underachiever in making something special out of All Saints: we don't dress up as saints, or play "saints charades," or replace Halloween with an All Saints celebration (because it's not All Saints yet!)or anything like that. But we did mark it quietly in our devotions, and I'll think of something lovely to have for dinner before we all rush out for Mass tonight. The parish treble choir, which includes Epiphany and Amicus, are singing with the regular choir: we will sing the Greek Kontakion, and they will follow with the "In Paradisum." Which pretty much sums it up.

Gnomes and Gnumbers; Beans and Bringing Up Baby

2007-10-25T10:34:00.001-07:00

With Helier and Crispina this week, I've continued our informal living-out of the Waldorf-inspired lesson plans from Serendipity. These are suiting our style and personality range perfectly: while I adore and adopt the Charlotte-Mason emphasis on good literature (I could never opt totally for telling stories as opposed to reading them aloud), I'm finding that the children love and respond to these little teaching stories and the hands-on activities inspired by them.

We didn't do much alphabet this week, as it turned out. Aelred brought us back some beautiful beans (calico beans, maybe?) from a farmers' market in North Carolina, and we spent a wet, chilly Monday shelling them as a "B" activity, thinking of other words as we worked. Helier and Crispina and also Amicus enjoyed having something to do with their hands, especially something that was so concretely helpful and aesthetically pleasing. These really were very pretty beans.

We did, however, begin Gnomes and Gnumbers. We read the little tale, we went outside and found a stick to break up to make Roman numerals with, we drew Roman numeral ones in the "main lesson books" I bought them (actually just nice big spiral-bound sketchpads from Walgreens -- cheap, but with good-quality heavy paper. Still working on acquiring Waldorf-quality crayons, colored pencils, and modelling beeswax). I have been focusing on Crispina, who's a more malleable personality and who likes the idea of lessons just for her, but Helier, who has resisted any notion of doing school ("Well, I guess I'm never going to learn anything"), has been drawn in as well, and can't get enough of his "lesson book." Our week has been rather interrupted by co-op day and by, today, an irresistible invitation from a grandmother; but the lovely thing is that at this stage we can do a little here, a little there, and not be terribly linear about it. My thought is that next week we'll go back to the alphabet again -- a theme a week seems to work well, especially given that we have days when we aren't home to do regular school -- but if they're still into Roman numerals, we can certainly continue with more of the given lesson ideas.

It is funny how ideas crisscross in their minds, however: what both of them drew as their "Roman numeral one" lesson was "one apple," a holdover from our "A" week last week. They each wrote a "one" in crayon, then proceeded to illustrate it with an apple.

Amicus and I are continuing our one-on-one sessions in catechism, English grammar, and Latin. This week his great achievement was reading a Latin paragraph on the "Britannia insula est" theme. He also did cooking geography with his friend Jared: this week, Poland, and a kind of apple-based (they're everywhere, they're everywhere!) Christmas dessert. I notice, too, that he is now voluntarily writing in cursive.

Epiphany's achievement of the week was a 100 on her first Father-Victor Latin test. Hooray, hooray! Latin laurels all around. She and her friend Hilaria have also taken on a home-economics project (one of the electives we're informally working on) of the "real-life experiences" variety, which I guess really describes any home-ec project . . . yesterday they appeared out of Epiphany's room cradling baby dolls, for which I think they had to bribe Crispina, and declaring that for the next -- I don't know, however long they can stand to keep it up -- they were going to pretend to have these real babies, to get up and feed them, budget for them, the whole nine yards. So today Epiphany went off to her grandmother's with both babies, because obviously Hilaria's in school and needs child-care help, which is where the societal usefulness of the mother-at-home comes into play, and the only reason she's not taking them to choir, where they would be disruptive, is that I volunteered to keep them for her, which is where the societal usefulness of the grandmother who's not too busy playing tennis and going for Botox appointments also comes into play. Anyway, they've been paying for things with monopoly money, asking me how much formula costs (I guess pretending to breastfeed is just a little too weird, though I hope the real thing won't seem so when the time comes), proposing to have all these high-paying jobs and then realizing how much time high-paying jobs demand, and how much babysitting costs . . . As I say, I don't know how long they'll keep this up, but it's already made for some interesting reality-check conversations.

Meanwhile, we still have flying squirrels making themselves at home in the hollow mantelpiece. When nature study comes to you . . . .

Flying Squirrels

2007-10-22T05:55:00.000-07:00

If you've been following my general family/culture blog, Fine Old Famly, then you know that we frequently encounter flying squirrels. Last night, for example, while we were hosting our monthly reading and discussion group, we heard a scuffling in the bookcase by the fireplace, and the next thing we knew, two tiny young flyers were peering out at us from behind the books on the bottom shelf. I suppose that we're really going to have to do something about them, though I hope we can find some way to deal with them that doesn't involve killing them -- they are appealing, inquisitive critters, and they don't seem to do actual damage to anything, beyond knocking over the little hinged icons on the mantel.

Anyway, sometimes you go looking to do nature study, and sometimes nature study comes looking for you. Here's a flying squirrel link from Enchanted Learning, in case anyone else would like to join the flyer fun.

If You Happen to Have a Pink Fairy Girl in Your House

2007-10-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

Check out Crispina's new favorite site: Flower Fairies.com, based on the art of Cicely Mary Barker. Fairy games and activities, botanical information, fairy costume patterns and more!

Crispina and Helier have been outside collecting acorn "cups and bowls" for a fairy kitchen (or dollhouse), because that's the Acorn Fairy's secret, and we have LOTS of acorn fairies.