Three Plus Two: Charlotte Mason

New Work

Well, this is what I was actually going to write about when I started my post about New Year's planning. As usual, I got a bit side-tracked and longwinded. And out of order. Before I started tweaking the schedule, the kids needed something to work on.

We're beginning First Form Latin, and Katydid -- having learned the basics of long division and multiplying two digit x two digit numbers -- is ready to move on to Saxon 6/5. Farmerboy is nearly done with his handwriting book and wants to learn cursive, and I'm debating whether to stick with Handwriting Without Tears or go with New American Cursive, Memoria Press' new program designed to teach cursive to first graders.

Beyond that, I also had to make some more complicated plans for my older two.

Gareth -- 7th grade

Over the past year, I have been noodling around with the idea of using Ambleside Online's Year 7. Last spring I bought some of the books to preview them for this year. I bought How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children's Books by Joan Bodger, which I never finished because I am not well-read enough, and frankly, does not seem to be the kind of book I could get Gareth to read at all. (Katydid will be another story, but Gareth -- not so much.) I bought Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, which is an amazing, amazing book that I love, but -- not so sure about Gareth there either. Gareth himself snatched up Watership Down last spring and gulped it down, no narrations of course, and not as a school book. (This was the same time he read Animal Farm -- sans reading guide, book reports, or narrations either.) And then I kind of let things drop as we got into other "stuff" at the beginning of this school year.

Unfortunately, the chart I made for Gareth at the beginning of the year mostly bombed. He read a few of the books I had listed because they were sitting in a basket on the couch, I think. He did not want to do many of the projects. Sitting down each week to plan from the chart was a nightmare for both of us. The book report I had him write on Out of the Silent Planet using Kolbe's Junior High Literature Guide sapped the joy from the book for him -- and for me, too.

We picked up medieval history as a family beginning in early November and that seemed to ignite a few sparks for him. I had decided to use Our Island Story, another Ambleside Online selection from earlier years, as a spine and family read aloud. By this point, we had also switched grammar books to use Our Mother Tongue: An Introductory Guide to English Grammar, also recommended in AO Year 7. Remembering that AO Year 7 matched up with the medieval material and that I had been thinking about using it... I went back and looked at the booklist.

It made a lot more sense this time. And I had to scratch my head as to why I had picked up the books I had when obviously it was the history books that would make the big hit. And Beowulf. And maybe even Idylls of the King. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that he had read a number of books from the Year 7 Free Reading List. In the past year, growing from 12 to a few months past 13, he has also matured quite a bit. So it seemed like a good fit.

So now one can often find Gareth happily ensconced on the couch reading Winston Churchill, or Seamus Haney's translation of Beowulf, or practicing his Old English. He probably won't be reading every single book on AO's booklist, simply because there are A LOT of books, and also because AO is a Protestant curriculum and we would need to substitute the appropriate Catholic books for the Suggested Devotional Reading List. I haven't planned out his reading to a great extent, but I have begun making up weekly to-do lists for him:

We're still getting up to speed on these lists, and he doesn't really want to write twice a week, but so far I think they have proved to be a workable guide. Although Gareth likes choice, he also needs structure. For the moment, I think we've hit on a decent compromise. Did he finish everything on this list last week? No. But he did accomplish a decent amount of work, and he didn't complain about much of it.

Katydid -- 5th grade

Katydid has enjoyed working with Literature for a Young Lady this year and finished up with our version of the Sunflower Basket in the fall. During Advent and Christmas, she attempted our version of the Literature for a Young Lady Advent plans. (I say "attempted" because December was a bit rough around here.) So with the start of a new quarter, she was also ready for some new work. Fortunately I had made a bunch of hand written notes on the Ivy Basket back in November, so -- feeling somewhat less green by January -- I could finally sit down and add my notes to the Word chart which Jen so thoughtfully included in the plans. I had to make some fairly substantial tweaks in some instances -- to the literature section, because Katydid is 10 not 12 or 13, and because she has read the first three Anne of Green Gables books many, many times already; and also to the bits that were written with fall in mind, or a winter less snow-covered than ours.

(Did I make any of you cringe with my creative use of punctuation? Mmm. Sorry. I am overly fond of semi-colons.)

If you're curious, here is Katydid's version of the Ivy Basket:

Download Ivy-basket-

I'm not sure if Katydid will do everything listed for this basket, as she didn't do everything for her Sunflower basket, and some of the books have been carried over. We usually sit down Monday morning and write out a list of what she wants to work on over the course of the week, along with the daily work that I want her to do (math, Latin, grammar 3x a week). We don't map out page numbers or set specific goals or assign tasks (like reading Little Men or taking a nature walk) to specific days. When we tried that what invariably happened is that I would find her sitting down with her watercolors for a couple of hours on the day that she had written she would be working on Apologia Botany ch. 2 and reading In the Days of Queen Victoria. And if I suggested before she had a chance to start her work that today was the day she had decided to do xyz, she would sigh and huff. But if we just write a loose list for the week, she usually works her way enthusiastically through most of it.

The picture I put at the top of my Part 1 post?

Those are Katydid's books.

Since I do everything backwards, I posted about a day at our house and our first week before I posted anything about the kids' plans. I probably should have done it the other way around. But like I said -- backwards.

Anyway, I am at long last getting around to posting Gareth's seventh grade plans. I finally learned how to save screen shots, so I'm going to put up some copies of our plans saved in.jpeg format. You ought to be able to click on the image and see it larger. I did not do the original work on building the tables, however. The tables come from the Sunflower Basket at Serendipity. Jen was kind enough to send me editable files of the tables so I could use them to plan for Gareth, and also to tweak for Katydid (since I was making pretty heavy tweaks for her.) All I did to make them into "boy" tables was to change the yellow to blue and add a knight graphic. (And then my son said, "Why is there a knight on here?" And I said, "Because, you know -- Shield of Faith..." and then he looked at me with that look your kids get when they're sure you're slightly addled but they're humoring you.)

Before I start in on the plans, I should tell you a few things. First, they are not designed to be generic. They're designed specifically for Gareth, according to the interests he listed for me a month or so ago. (The list: "How to throw a spear/prehistoric people/evolutionary biology/military strategy/communications badge/archery/fishing.") I firmly believe that one of the best things about homeschooling is that it allows for quirky, individualized educations. So, if you can use something I've put together, then by all means feel free to use it. But if this all looks ridiculous to you, or like it would never work with your child... that's okay. Your family and your child just need their own quirky education. Quirky is good.

When Jen told me she was using the Catholic Girl's Guide for her daughter back some months ago, I immediately wondered if there was a Catholic Boy's Guide. Turns out there is, only it's called The Young Man's Guide. It's organized according to St. Paul's "armor of God". Since we'd already planned to start medieval history this year, I thought such a guide would tie in well. I thought it might also be good to emphasize chivalry at this age. Then Gareth threw me for a loop with "prehistoric people".

But I decided that a study of prehistory and evolutionary biology would go well with the first chapter of The Young Man's Guide, which is "The Shield of Faith." Not because we believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis and a young earth (we don't), but because after reading through many of the resources I thought would be good for Gareth to use, I became frustrated with the two polarized positions inherent in most of the literature. Apparently religion and science are "in a war", in which scientists must "fight back" against Creationists (and vice versa). What has really happened it seems is that "evolution" has completely lost its status as a scientific theory and become either a religion or an anti-religion, depending on which "side" of the "war" you're on. In the literature, evolutionists seem to be unable to mention God and so jump through lots of hoops which involve personifying the Earth and physical processes, as if they "sense" and "control" things, and of course anti-evolutionists must also try really hard disprove anything that seems to have taken a long time to form.

Thankfully, the Catholic Church has a different position on the matter, which brings the theory of evolution back into its role as a theory, affirms God as the creator of everything no matter what mechanisms scientists discover (or think they discover) at work in nature, and does not require the faithful to deny evidence which would seem to indicate that the universe has been around for a long time. (In fact the Big Bang theory of the universe was developed by a Catholic priest.) In this way, Faith and Reason are not at war with each other, and this is something I want to emphasize to my kids -- that there is such a thing as the Unity of Truth. But when you read any book that talks about evolution... ugh. You need a strong faith, because almost everything I could find was written from an atheistic viewpoint, in which evolution is either "random" or guided by some unidentified superorganism called mostly "Nature" or "Earth".

Fortunately, thanks to an enlightening old thread on 4real, I found Mary Daly's Creator and Creation. This book includes Pope John Paul's Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on evolution.

It's probably better suited to an older teen, but I've mentioned before that Gareth is "twice exceptional", and science is often where we run into that kind of asynchronous development.

Ok, so without further adieu... the actual plans. You'll notice they're pretty full, and that I did not always include page numbers. That's because I wanted Gareth to have some freedom of choice and I was not always sure which books would appeal to him most. So I listed some I wasn't sure about and made it clear to him which ones those were. These plans are also designed with our seasons in mind. Until mid October, we will be able to get outside... and should, as much as possible. Because after mid October we can get snowstorms.

Notes: This is Gareth's daily work, more or less. We've made a few tweaks. Logic is an experiment. I wasn't going to include it this year because Gareth really needs to work intensively on writing and spelling. But I do want him to be able to read critically for argument, especially in some of the selections regarding evolution. Traditional Logic says it's for "as early as 7th grade", but once I got the book, I got the feeling that maybe the authors thought it might be better left until high school in the majority of cases. The book was backordered, so it took a while to come, and Gareth just got started on it last week. I'm not sure he liked it much, but I want him to complete at least a week or two of lessons before we decide whether to delay it or not. (He is going to have to do it sometime.)

Notes: This is the first year I have actually assigned Gareth any reading. To be honest, the only reason I'm assigning reading this year is that Gareth's taste in fiction tends to be narrow. Using the Kolbe Junior High Literature guide, I chose two books I thought would have a high level of interest for him, to kind of ease into this assigned reading thing. All summer long I told him how I was going to assign him really boring books... you know, like Fellowship of the Ring. And he would laugh. So fast forward to now, two weeks into us being back to school. He's been spending most of his time doing literature. He gulped out of the Silent Planet in a matter of days before we even officially started, which sort of wrecked the plans to use the Kolbe guide to structure his reading and writing. Oh well. I'd rather him be excited about the books than just doing the bare minimum every week. He's working on a book report for Out of the Silent Planet now and reading steadily through Fellowship of the Ring. He did request the other two books in CS Lewis' Space trilogy and so we may scrap other parts of the plans so he can read through those.

Notes: Since I was just writing this for our use, I didn't always include on the chart details like author's names or (unfortunately) the whole titles of magazines. I'm actually still waiting for those back issues to be delivered, actually, and will be trying to get in touch with the Cricket Publishing group again this week. Five Boys in a Cave is a book I read when I was a kid and enjoyed. It's a classic adventure story about five boys who get lost in a cave which turns out to have cave paintings like the ones at Altamira and Lascaux. So it's not actually history, but it is a good read.

Notes: Gareth tends to have intense interests, and, like I said before, sometimes narrow reading tastes. He also has a tendency to be "bored". Anything that falls outside whatever his interests are at that time is likely to earn the label "boring". Unfortunately religious reading has always earned that label. We do many religious read alouds as a family, go through the Baltimore Catechism as a family, read the Bible as a family, pray as a family. But now that he is nearly 13, I want him to go a little deeper. So I assigned him some reading. I don't really want him to do it grudgingly, but I do want him to do it, so it's a delicate balance. You'll see we're using Seton Religion 7 this year, which may seem somewhat textbook-y for a child who tends to label subjects "boring". But I decided to include it because it has a lot of information in it that I, as a cradle Catholic who was basically uncatechized after the age of 11, am still learning about. I found value myself in reading through the book, and so I decided to have Gareth read it, too.

Notes: I wasn't sure whether or not to include the Zoology Coloring Book, which now turns out to be OOP (or something) because it is "currently unavialable" in its latest edition and only available used. So I didn't buy it over the summer and left it up to Gareth. It should probably have been listed in the "supplemental" section anyway. (My thinking was that building up a decent knowledge of how animals are put together would help in understanding their evolution.)

Notes: This summer I could tell a new interest was about to develop because Gareth would say things like: "That might be interesting, trying to make a new strain of corn." Or, "If you bred a chicken..." Then one day he said, "I think I'd like to breed that white Ameracauna hen and see if we can get any more that look like her." (Ameracaunas are interesting-looking, with beards, and lay "Easter eggs".) So I told him he needed to read up on genetics. I included the project on his chart, although I wasn't sure just how interested in it he really was. It turns out he was very interested in it, and has been reading Genetics of the Fowl before bed at night. He even brought it to the ER with him when he needed his leg stitched up... er, stapled... last week. (Actually, the illustrations in this book appeal heavily to boys... they mostly deal with genetic abberrations like, chicks with 4 wings, chicks with 2 heads... that sort of thing.)

I'm actually thinking that, together, the study of evolutionary biology and genetics would be for high school credit. I ran across a CD-ROM text/course from Duke University's TIP program called Foundations in Biology: Genetics, Evolution, and Ethics for grades 7-10. I thought, "Hey! That's what we're doing!" So I'll probably see about getting the CD-ROM for when the weather turns colder.

Gareth has added the book Swords: An Artist's Devotion to his "Military Studies". He also watches documentaries on the Military Channel. And he hasn't started the dulcimer. And his "Field Guide to Imaginary Creatures" is something he enjoys working on here and there, but not a requirement. I just wanted him to know it was an option if it was something he wanted to do during school hours.

So it's a lot. Stuff I haven't written down: chicken and turkey chores every day, and he'll have a chance to get his First Aid Merit Badge in October. New York State requires a certain number of hours in English, Math, Science, History and Geography every year for 7th and 8th grades, and a certain number of hours in Art and Music combined for 7th and 8th. The state also requires Practical Arts, PE, and Health. So I'm a little more regulated than some of you (an understatement, actually).

I hope to do a planning/scheduling post about all of this at some point, but right now -- it's Labor Day! Hope yours is good :-).