Three Plus Two

Week(s) in Review: 8th/9th grade

I have really fallen off the wagon as far as recordkeeping is concerned.  December and January passed by in a blur of colds and teething baby.  February promises more of the same, I'm afraid, but I'm hoping to get my act together somewhat.  As with our learning life this year, I'm not looking for perfect, just "good enough".

Gareth: 8th/9th grade

Faith

Gareth's been using Seton's Confirmation Prep, in addition to our family time with the Baltimore Catechism (No. 2) and the CCC. 

Math

We had been stuck in chapter 4 of Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra for almost two months.  (The holidays didn't help.)  Chapter 4 is one giant word problem.  It is really, really, really hard.  It is a whole chapter full of the kind of problems that Jacobs in Elementary Algebra gives as "Set IV" (meaning: if you're a math whiz, you might want to try this, but otherwise don't worry about it) and divides into two or more chapters.  We battled to the end with me wondering how the heck I was going to give him a grade for something I suspected was far more difficult than your average algebra book, and then I pulled out Jacobs.  My suspicions were confirmed, as Gareth is whizzing through Jacobs chapter 5 with very little help.  So now my problem is: do we continue to try to struggle through Fred, going to Jacobs for explanation and review, and in essence, completing two algebra textbooks for Algebra I?  Or do we just switch back to Jacobs?  The cartoons may be funny, but Gareth's right; the problems are much more interesting in Fred.  They're just exponentially harder.

On the bright side, I think Gareth will have a much better understanding of algebra when he's done than I ever did, and I took honors classes.  (As a bonus, I know that I will also understand algebra much better, too!)

Languages

Still using First Form Latin.  But we've also managed to find a tutor to help Gareth with ancient Greek.  Andy sent an email to the classics department at the local liberal arts college, and the end result will be that beginning next week, Gareth will meet with a junior once a week at Andy's office.   

Language Arts

I'm trying to give Gareth a writing topic or two a week, and it seems to be working fairly well.  These writing assignments usually have to do with his reading in science and history, and I generally let him choose from a list.  So far he's done short papers on plate tectonics, the president's State of the Union address, and the Mongol invasion, and some creative writing about the Crusades.  That's in addition to his writing on his novel.  

He's also working in Grammar of Poetry (his choice), slogging through diagramming with Our Mother Tongue, and we have fallen off the wagon with Spelling Wisdom. 

Earth Science/Physical Science:

Gareth finished up Rocket Boys , Homer Hickam's memoir which inspired the excellent movie October Sky (which we also watched -- or tried to watch anyway, as the DVR cut off the end.)  In discussions we focused more on the science of building rockets than on literary themes... but really, I think this was just a good read.  

After he finished Rocket Boys, he picked up Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and started reading again where he'd left off.

He's also read many magazine articles over the past few weeks dealing with science -- from National Geographic, Smithsonian, Astronomy, and Natural History (which I would link you to except that my mouse has gone haywire) -- not assigned, just strewn.  And, as ever, television series remain a pillar of science learning around here: currently, Mutant Planet, How the Earth Was Made, The Universe, and NOVA and NOVA Science: Now! .   (Farmerboy and Katydid also like Meteorite Men, but Gareth thinks it's boring.)

Oh, and a couple of weeks ago he earned the Boy Scount Engineering merit badge.

History

Not too much reading here, as science has been more of a focus.  He's meandering through medieval Japan and China right now, The Story of Ancient China and China's Later Dynasties, as well as The 47 Ronin Story (Tuttle Classics) (I think).  He has a few books about Japan and the samurai in his basket, but I think he's been more focused on China lately.   

Art

We're not pursing art in a terribly organized fashion, but Gareth has been messing around with Artistic Pursuits (High School) and a "how to draw manga" book we picked up at Hobby Lobby the other day.  He just has to visit an art museum to get his Art merit badge.

  

Beginning to keep records for high school when you're on your own

We're taking a break for Thanksgiving, and I thought that I would take the time to share some specifics about the older kids' learning this year, including some issues I've been fiddling with for high school.  High school posts tend to be sparse in the blogosphere, maybe for a few reasons.

1) To respect a teenager's privacy.

2) Because many homeschooling families turn to traditional texts, courses, or independent study schools to help them through the high school years.

3)Because teenagers do fewer cute crafts.

4) Some homeschool families choose to send their teens to brick and mortar high schools.

There are probably more reasons, but those are the ones I can come up with on the spur of the moment.  While I certainly respect all of them, it does leave those of us who are just starting high school in a bit of a state of uncertainty.  I do intend to respect my teen's privacy, but hopefully I'll be able to share a bit about our high school experiences as well.

Gareth turned 14 in October and is "officially" in "8th grade", although we don't have to report him as such to the state and I tend not to think in those terms very often myself.  To complicate matters, much of his work is on a high school level... whatever that is, as what is considered "high school level" seems to vary widely, even among packaged programs -- compare Kolbe's high school history to one of Winterpromise's senior high programs, for instance, and you'll see the dilemma facing the parent and teen who attempt to chart their own course.  In any case, having reviewed various high school textbooks to get an idea of what "high school earth science" or "high school history" (particularly on a 9th grade level) might be like, I'm pretty sure that he's doing it.

There is some debate over whether or not colleges want to see (or care about) any courses done in 8th grade.  (There is an excellent discussion of the matter on Kind Conversation.)  From what I have read the answer is: maybe not.  On the other hand, I think it is better to have too many records on hand to choose from rather than too few, and so I am keeping track of all books, projects, field trips, papers, videos... etc.   If we were the types of homeschoolers who lay out year-long courses of study and complete them every year, I would perhaps be less worried about keeping track of Gareth's history, science, and literature selections this year, but since we are not, I am going more with age than grade. From Alison McKee's book From Homeschool to College and Work: Turning Your Homeschooled Experiences into College and Job Portfolios:   :  "Since we don't believe that homeschooled children are in traditional 'grades' we prefaced many of the portfolio's dated entries with Christian's age at the time the activity took place."   Elsewhere in the book she tells how they began the documentation process with an "academic journal" when her children turned 14.  Thinking of "high school" and the documentation process in these terms fits very well with our experience.  Since we began homeschooling (when Gareth was 4), I have noticed that I tend to think of him as a grade "higher" every January, even though he may still "officially" have several months to go in the grade in which he began in July or September.  This is because his birthday is in October and every fall and winter he experiences a period of both physical and mental growth.  By the time January rolls around, he's a different kid.

In any case, since we tend to pursue interests more than timetables, I fully expect most of our home-designed courses (in history and science, say, or literature -- not math or Latin) to spill over into the "official" years of high school.  It's my plan to -- as Alison McKee says often in her book -- "sort and resort" those learning experiences into official packages after the fact, and not before.

But "after the fact" reporting has its own pecularities.  When activities, books, etc. are written down, they need to be recorded in such a way that they will be easier to "sort and resort" when the time comes.  Alison McKee recommends doing this sorting on at least a 6 month or yearly basis.  Since her book was written before all the nifty homeschool tracking software was developed, she was simply doing her sorting from a notebook that her kids kept.  Also, she did not give grades or credit or write her "narrative transcript" to bear much resemblance to the kinds of transcripts produced by traditional high schools.  When her children applied to college, colleges had not seen many homeschoolers.  Today many colleges have policies in place to deal with homeschooled applicants, and I want to cover my bases.  I am tracking hours in subjects that are not textbook based (like math or Latin).  I plan to use the Carnegie Unit of 120 hours to grant credit, after the hours have been collected, sorted, and grouped.

(I want to be clear here that my oldest is just 14.  I have absolutely no experience with applying to colleges beyond the train wreck that my own college application process was.  I am not an authority on the matter -- just sharing the results of my own research process.)

This is how I have set things up for now. 

I'm using Homeschool Tracker Plus.  I don't enter assignments ahead of time.  Instead, I record as "assignments" activities already done.  I try to enter "topics" and "time spent".  Entering topics will give me a scope and sequence later on and will help me sort out the resources.  The software tabulates hours for me (and grades if anything is graded), and I can tabulate hours over more time than just a school year.  It will also generate lists of resources used.  When I assign courses I try to either be very broad or else -- in the case of science -- fairly specific. For instance, I have a course titled "High School History" right now to kind of separate what I tend to think as "junior high" stuff from the books I think probably ought to appear on a high school reading list; I'll sort this work into courses like "European History" or "Medieval History" later, when I see what we've got.  But I have broken down "science" into courses by discipline -- geology, paleontology, astronomy, evolutionary biology, etc.  This is because, depending on the number of hours accumulated, Gareth could end up with a course called "Earth Science" incorporating the fields of geology/paleontology, astronomy, oceanography, and meteorology... or he might end up with courses called simply "Geology" or "Astronomy".  At the time of application (assuming he does decide to apply to college, which I think likely), I would sort out and discard any dead ends or topics that just didn't add up or combine with anything else.  But until that time I'll keep recording anything I think might be useful.

 

Week in Review: October 25-31

It's been a long time since I've done a real week in review.  I keep meaning to do a summary of our whole term (quarter, whatever you want to call it) along with my somewhat nebulous plans for the future, but weeks pass and there is no giant review posted on my blog.  So I am just going to try to jump in with one week.  This in itself may be difficult, as at this very moment one of my five year olds and my three year old are running in and out of the house filling up containers (and a squirt gun) with water to pour on our multitude of swarming, stinging ant nests.  I cannot think that this is a good idea, but we have had the "stay away from ants" discussion ad nauseum and they have even been stung before, but they are boys.  'Nuff said.

So... what did we do this week?

Well, the weather made a bit of a statement.  We had our first trial run tornado warning on Tuesday morning.  The historic Midwestern storm arrived at our house just as I was leaving to bring the baby to the doctor for a well-child visit.

Katydid took a picture of the approaching front, about twenty minutes before the storm arrived and the sirens went off.

I'm not sure if there was ever a tornado actually spotted, but the rotation passed several miles south of us.  Andy worked from home in the morning so I wouldn't have to haul all 7 kids to the doctor's office (which turned out to be a blessing, since I waited for an hour and a half in a small, windowless waiting room much like a tornado shelter), and he and the kids dragged all of the stuff out of the wide but narrow hall closet in preparation for riding out the storm.  Katydid and Gareth remember tornado warnings from living in St. Louis, but we had a basement there.  One of the first things I did after we moved in here was to think about where we would go in case of tornado.  (I have a "thing" about tornadoes.  Really, I'm much better now.)  Due to the quirky nature of our floor plan, we have no interior rooms in this house.  We have two places to go: a long, skinny cedar closet in the hallway, and Katydid's walk-in-ish closet (which is piled high with craft stuff... etc., etc.)  So I am just praying that we have no actual tornadoes!

On the same day, we received via UPS the highlight of Farmerboy's week...

A couple of rock collections!

The Deluxe Introductory Earth Science Collection at Home Science Tools is about $25 off right now.  Their Stratigraphic Fossil Collection is about $20 off.  I don't know why we haven't collected any formal rock collections until now, considering the high levels of interest I and all the kids have had in the subject.  What pushed me over the edge this time were the discussions Gareth and I have had recently about high school earth science.  Because Gareth was more interested in history than science last spring and summer, I had planned for him to do a survey course based on A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.  I had planned for this to be roughly equivalent this year to a course in physical science.  But when we were unpacking, Gareth discovered The Eternal Frontier by Tim Flannery and started reading it.  The Eternal Frontier is a history of the North American continent beginning with the meteor strike 65 million years ago.  He left off that book around 1492 and picked up The Future Eaters, which takes the same approach to Australia and its surrounding lands.  (He's reading The Future Eaters right now.)  So we started talking about paleontology again, and upshot of that is we are now planning to cover the four traditional areas of high school earth science: Geology (including paleontology, unless we get SO much paleo by the end of high school that it can be broken out as its own course); Oceanography; Astronomy; and Atmospheric Science.  More details to follow (hopefully). 

I read the boys a Let's Read and Find Out science book, Let's Go Rock Collecting!  and we found more rock and fossil and dinosaur books when we went to the library.  Farmerboy and Katydid also set up an experiment to grow salt crystals up a string.

Halloween/Fall picture books read this week:

 

Other Picture Books:

 

School Books for K-2:

• Reading lessons from Phonics Pathways
• Narrations from Aesop's Fables (Farmerboy, grade 2)
• Read aloud from One Small Square: Backyard

Little Boys:

I bought a whole bunch of Kumon books for the boys to use independently.  The Mazes and Cutting books were big hits. Farmerboy then asked me to order a Mazes book for him, too, so I got him the Around the World mazes book.  Some of those are really hard!  

I'm actually quite happy to see them working with these mazes so much, given our past history with vision and occupational therapy.

Read-Alouds (Chapter Books):

• The Book of Saints and Heroes
  
• Mattimeo and The Bellmaker, Redwall books by Brian Jacques (Farmerboy and the twins)
• Finding the First T. Rex (ch. 1, Farmerboy)

Katydid:

• Finished Sun Faster, Sun Slower and Greek Myths
• Started A Wonderbook for Boys and Girls (Nathaniel Hawthorne) and Outlaws of Ravenhurst
• Made a walking stick and sewed a fabric bag
• Continued work on her tropical birds notebook
• Started dictation and copywork with Spelling Wisdom

Gareth:

• Read and narrated from Glory Of Christendom: History Of Christendom Vol 3 (History of Christendom Series ; Vol. III) , The Future Eaters, and The Golden Thread: A Novel About St. Ignatius Loyola 
• Started dictation and copywork with Spelling Wisdom
• About halfway through the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum

(I'm not saying anything about the dailies here: math, Latin, grammar, copywork for Farmerboy. I do hope to make some general "curriculum" posts, though.)

And, of course, there was Halloween and the All Saints Day party.

 

 

 

 

A few thoughts on writing

In the interest of full disclosure, I have a confession to make.

I am a writer.

Not a writer like the vast majority of homeschooling-mom-writers, though.  Not a curriculum book writer, or a funny parenting book writer, or a touching parenting book writer, or a writer of essays for moms. 

No.  My ugly confession is that I am a fantasy and science fiction writer.  (Among many Catholic/Christian homeschooling mothers, this confession may count as the sort that begins, I like to tear the wings off flies.)  I am not a well-published fantasy writer, I do not have a novel to my name, but I do have a few stories that have been published here and there.  One of my stories was even included in a "Best of" anthology, once upon time.  (Before twins, that would be.)

My purpose in revealing all these lurid details is not to brag or seek attention.  But before I start writing about writing, I thought I should give you a little background about how I think about writing.  I am a fiction writer, and the skills involved in writing fiction are often very different than those involved in writing expository (nonfiction) essays, research papers, or reports.  For instance, I know how to craft a metaphor, or a decent description of, say, snow lying in scars across the land, or maybe even the way a character turns his head.  Dialogue is not my strong point, but I can do it.  I have a sense of story and a sense of how different people might act in any situation.  I have a healthy fear of adverbs.  All of these elements of story and style do bridge the gap between fiction in nonfiction in many ways -- almost definitely more often than the techniques of nonfiction writing go the other way -- but I am a better writer of fiction than I am a writer of nonfiction articles or, say, blog posts.

All this is to say that while I have strong opinions about how to encourage fiction writing in my children (basically, to leave them alone and let them write, providing advice when asked), I have often been at a loss as to how to teach them to write an essay or a report.

This has always puzzled me.  After all, shouldn't I, as a writer, have more knowledge about the teaching of writing than the teaching of math or science or history?

I mentioned yesterday that I listened to most of Susan Wise Bauer's "A Plan for Writing" audio lectures over the weekend (I haven't listened to her lecture on literary analysis yet, but I have listened to the elementary, middle years, and high school lectures).  In certain circles, The Well-Trained Mind gets a bad rap, I think, mostly from people who have tried to follow it in every little detail and burnt out, or from people who envision following it in every little detail and burning out.  I just bought the third edition of the book (which includes the basis for Susan Wise Bauer's writing program) because I find myself picking it up every year, mainly to find resources, but also to weigh the advice on methods against what is working and not working in our house at the time.  As time goes on, I find myself agreeing more and more with her assessment on how to teach writing, and the audio lectures make the material in both the new and earlier editions of the Well-Trained Mind clearer.

First, I'll lay out the problems I have with most writing curricula:

• Many of them contain really ridiculous and pointless exercises along the lines of, "Imagine you are a pencil."  I've written fiction from about the age of 12, but I have always hated these exercises.  Why should I imagine I'm a pencil?  What reason can it possibly serve?  Can't I do something more interesting like imagining I'm a warrior on patrol in the jungles of Serabithia?  Why does anyone care what a pencil thinks?  In addition, if you are not creative at all I can see how this sort of exercise would make you hate writing.  It's not actually teaching you how to write, as in the skills of writing.  It's teaching you how to pull meaningless ideas out of thin air so you can finish your work.
• Many writing curricula provide examples of writing whose quality is mediocre to poor, stylistically.  It is the sort of writing that exists only in reading textbooks or on standardized tests or in writing curricula.  Examples of descriptive writing are usually adjective and adverb heavy and border on (and sometimes topple into) the cliche.  I cringe when I read it, and I don't want my kids to imitate it.
• Some writing curricula that I might otherwise choose to use require lots of parental time and involvement, making it very difficult to implement in a large family with lots of little ones.
• More creative writing curricula are sometimes also very unstructured, making them difficult to figure out how to use, OR they provide little preliminary how-to instruction for young writers who have a hard time deciding what to write, planning their writing, or simply putting their thoughts into words.

Now, add to this the fact that my oldest child is a child who, at various times in his life, has had to deal with fine motor difficulties, problems with putting thoughts into words, difficulty in organizing his thinking to write about it in the first place, and very strong opinions about what is pointless, and maybe you can understand why I have often simply thrown up my hands about writing.  Sometimes we have consciously let writing go, figuring that he simply needed time to mature.  (In many cases, this has been the right thing to do.)  And other times my search for the perfect curriculum has left me with no curriculum and an inconsistent approach to writing that I doubt did much more good than choosing an imperfect curriculum and adapting it to our situation.

Next year my oldest will be in 8th grade and my daughter will be in 6th.  My daughter is a much more natural writer (she is also a girl, which matters in this case), but I am beginning to feel that it is time for me to become much more organized about teaching (actually teaching ) writing to both of them.  While SAT and college application essays are beginning to peek over the horizon for my son, lessons I've learned with him (the oldest is the guinea pig kid, right?) have convinced me that I need to get my act together a little earlier for my daughter.  In the beginning, I was more interested in encouraging my kids' creativity.  As I've grown older and gathered more experience, I realize that there are some skills which can be taught and used in the service of creativity.  I've also learned how to ignore some grumbling. 

Susan Wise Bauer lays out a "plan for writing" that begins with only copywork, dictation, and oral narration in the K-4 years (Charlotte Mason homeschoolers will recognize this part), moving on to short written narrations and outlining in the middle years, and ending finally in high school with an emphasis on original, persuasive and argumentative writing (rhetoric).  She would require no original writing until high school unless the student wants to do original writing.  (At least this is how I understood what she was saying.)  She advocates supporting writing through the explicit teaching of spelling and grammar, focusing in the middle years on diagramming, which will be used later as a diagnostic tool in the student's own writing.   This is only for expository writing and not for creative writing, which she does not recommend "teaching" at all.  I appreciated this, because my own feeling is that if kids want to write fiction or poetry, they should be supported and encouraged but not forced to do so, and that they will mostly learn by reading lots and lots of good fiction and poetry and writing thousands and thousands of not-so-good words.  (One Year Adventure Novel is an excellent creative writing curriculum for teens, but I don't think it should be forced on anyone.  It can benefit those kids who like structure, though, and want to write their own novels but don't know how to begin.)

I don't agree with everything she says in her lectures -- for instance, I think that some kids benefit not from year after year drill in grammar and spelling, but in periods of hands-offness and logical summaries of grammatical and spelling rules in the 11 -13 year old age range. (This is one reason I really like Our Mother Tongue.) I don't agree with her approach to getting middle grade students to spell correctly in their writing (e.g., make it really difficult for them if they spell something wrong in a first draft by having them copy misspelled words over and over again).  We've seen the most improvement in spelling this year with Gareth since he's been using a hand-held electronic spelling dictionary.  Not only does he write more because he can use the dictionary, the spelling seems to have stuck because now his spelling is better even when he doesn't use the device.  But for the most part, I think her outline for teaching writing sounds like the most logical I've heard, and I am awaiting the delivery of her book The Complete Writer: Writing With Ease in eager anticipation.

What remains for me is to figure out how to implement such a plan in my house, with my mix of kids, challenges and talents.  It sounds simple, but as usual I'm the stumbling block.  My available time, energy, and my ability to organize assignments are all deciding variables here. 

New Year, New Plans, New Routines: part 2

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.

Week 13: A nice November

We're having a relatively warm November, which means that last week we were outside a lot.  The question here is not if it will get cold soon, but which day.  Our forecast doesn't look bad, but usually the snow moves in around Thanksgiving and stays until... oh... April... May... a long time anyway.  So I think we can be forgiven for ditching some academics to take advantage of the occasional warm spell.  It's a really long winter.

Anyway, the little boys spent a lot of time this week digging.

In a Montessori classroom, I guess "digging" would count as practical life.  The boys actually dug their deep holes so they could be "cities".   I have had a hard time making "cities" into a formal project, but I think that's because it's really a game.  They don't really want too much interference from me, because this is a kid universe.  So they dug deep holes and tunnels all week, and built up "volcanoes" and "cliffs", and told each other how people got around their cities, whether they could use cars or not because there were or weren't roads.  

One day I was trying to keep the little boys occupied while we read in the morning and I suggested they might like to draw a picture of their cities.  Somehow this became drawing planets and imaginary solar systems.

N. started it, and soon all the other boys (including Gareth) were doing their own solar system pictures.

 (My camera lens seems to have a tiny scratch on it which sometimes shows up as a smudge.  I dropped the camera a while ago and smashed the viewfinder, too, so I may be in the market for a new camera soon.)

The solar system pictures aren't finished yet, because the boys wanted to add background and didn't have time.  I'm hoping to give them time to finish their pictures this week in the midst of all our Thanksgiving cleaning. Or maybe next week while I cook.  Farmerboy started painting a model solar system, too, but hasn't finished it yet.

When I said we "ditched" academics, I meant that we didn't spend long hours on them.  The big kids did still actually do some academic work.  The One Year Adventure Novel  kit arrived and Gareth and Katydid actually gave up playing outside to go inside and start working on it.  So far, so good.  Gareth also finished his Life of Fred: Fractions book and is preparing to get started on the second half of the pre-algebra sequence, Decimals.  Life of Fred hasn't magically cured his math frustration, but he did like it more than Saxon.  Life of Fred is much less rote learning than Saxon, and much more application.  He covered all the fraction topics included in Saxon's Algebra 1/2 , but in a much more informal, applied way.   My only quibble with the book is that there's not enough practice available on topics that students stumble on (say, unit analysis). 

And Katydid started working on long division.  As with most things mathematical, she is not doing this the traditional way.  Which I suppose only proves the maxim that in order to really understand a concept, you have to teach it.  I'm 37 years old and have gotten through the last 20 years breezing through long division problems with aboslutely no idea why the method works.  Katydid has to know the why's and wherefore's, though, before she gets a concept.  Which means I have had to do a little thinking.  In the future, I'll try and detail our process, just in case anyone else out there needs a non-traditional approach to long division.

Our history reading in the morning continued to go well this week.  We began Beowulf: the Warrior, which is one of the best boy read-alouds ever.  This re-telling is awesome.  It remains faithful to the poetry of the original, and also -- for the boys in your family -- it still retains the scene where Beowulf rips off Grendel's arm.  So there you go.

And just in case you want to envision me and all my kids snuggled on the couch while we read aloud...

 
  You probably shouldn't. (Make sure you look underneath the table.  Also, I am sure that even the kind people who said they didn't notice the clutter in the other photos will notice the clutter in these pictures.  Why does decluttering always make my house look so bad?)

Not enough picture books this week to make a nifty widget, so I'll just have to list them...

• Destination: Space

 Our Solar System (revised edition)

I Can Read About Planets

 Yankee Doodle (illustrated by Steven Kellogg, one of my kids' favorites)

 

 
 

Week 11: Halloween Week

Just the highlights... I imagine everyone in the US is either tired of pumpkins by now or has at least moved on to turkeys.  Our turkeys are spending their last days out in the field eating pumpkin seeds, which gives one a completely different perspective on the usual turkey crafts that crop up during the month of November.  But, back to Halloween.  This is what we did during Halloween week:

• Gareth started his Teach Yourself Old English course.  He spent quite a bit of time with it, actually.  The new grammar book he's using, Our Mother Tongue: An Introductory Guide to English Grammar by Nancy Wilson, also contains some neat little sidebars about the history of English.  One of those sidebars happens to be The Our Father in Old English.  I have to admit that I like languages, and when I was in college I took a "History of English" class from an excellent professor and studied a bit (a wee bit) of Old English. So I attempted to read the prayer out loud to Gareth in Old English.  He, apparently, thought this was quite interesting, and so here we are.  The grammar book itself is also going well, too.  In addition to being much more interesting than your typical drill-and-kill grammar workbook, it also seems to be less... hmmm... condescending.  This quality is hard to explain, but what I like about the book is that it seems to treat the subject manner in a much more adult way than most 7th grade grammar textbooks while also being easily understood by 7th/8th/9th graders.  I think this, along with the historical selections and the use of real literature as examples, appeals to Gareth.  The book is recommended in Ambleside Online's Year 7.
• Katydid started First Start French.  This program is set up in a very similar way to Memoria Press' Latina Christiana program, which we also use.  She has been very excited to start French, but was a little daunted at the pronunciation when we first began.  She wants to be able to talk to my mom in French over the phone.

( I'm going to start calling the twins by their initials instead of "Pip and Pop".  I considered more pseudonyms like "Tom and Huck" or "George (Curious) and Dennis (the Menace)", but finally I thought that they will grow up one day.  So Pop -- pictured here -- will now be known as "J." and Pip will be "N." Not as colorful maybe, but easier for Mama.)

J. produced a whole menagerie of "good animals" using 2 lbs. of Model Magic. 

Chipmunk found Duplos to be good for squishing Model Magic.  Here he's also shining a flashlight onto the blocks.  Flashlights were also a fascination this week, probably as much for the way they could be put together and taken apart as for their light. 

Model Magic after it has been impressed by Duplos.

Chipmunk also informed me that he needed better activities on his shelves:

Yes, those are plastic counters (fish mostly).  And, yes, he did stick them all, one by one, through the bars of the fan.  I could hear the sound of the counters in the container and on the floor, and silly me, I thought he was pouring them.  But instead he invented his own Montessori activity.

We also did some painting, because J. wanted to paint his "good animals".  Farmerboy had some problems with the dinosaur painting he wanted to make, so I took a piece of paper and sketched out a painting in the style that Farmerboy had wanted, demonstrating how to sketch with a small brush, how to make drips of paint into something else (birds, in this case), how to hide lines I didn't want... My picture is at the top.  After watching me paint my picture -- just meant to help him learn to calm down, really, and deal with "mistakes" -- he decided to copy it.  We used acrylics.  Chipmunk mixed the blue paint for us. ;-)

We did do some pumpkin related "stuff" as well.

One morning while I read -- well, actually Gareth ended up reading more than I did, which has become a common occurrence lately -- I set out some construction paper shapes so the boys could make pumpkins.  I had tried to suggest earlier in the week that we paint pumpkins, but that suggestion went over like a lead balloon.  Nobody wants to paint the same thing.  So we just did collage pumpkins.

 
After they were done, I mounted them on construction paper and put them on the wall of their bedroom, by request.  J. (Pop) did the yellow pumpkin face and the pumpkin on the very bottom right corner. N's (Pip's) are the pumpkin that looks like it is set on a pedastal and the one mounted on green paper.  As you can see some of the pumpkins have arms and eyebrows, yarn hair, and -- because we are talking about boys -- "bottoms".  However, you cannot see the "bottoms" (insert wild giggling) because they are appropriately located on the backside of the pumpkins.

Farmerboy (I'll probably be changing his name, too, as soon as I decide on something) whisked his pumpkins away and taped them to the wall by the bed before I could mount them.  (The pumpkin on the left has a mustache and a beard.)

Katydid did her own version of pumpkin collages, but made the collaged illustrations into a Halloween book for the boys.

(She used oil pastel for the drawings.)

And we carved some pumpkins, too...

(It's not a knife.  It's a spatula.)

 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

  

Weeks 8, 9, and 10: End of quarter 1

Weeks 8 &9 --  We finished up quarter 1... or at least we decided that we would take a break.  Gareth attended a forestry program for Scouts, and earned most of his Forestry badge.  It did not snow... much. I chickened out and did not take Farmerboy or Katydid to swim lessons on the day Gareth and Andy were at the Scout program, because taking 2 hyperactive 4 year olds and a 2 year old to any place with a large, deep body of water and no barriers is not my idea of a good time.

Week 10 -- we take a housecleaning "break".  Mostly what we do is excavate the long hallway that serves as the playroom for Lego and Playmobil. (It has a door, so we can keep toddlers out.)  It also seems to serve as the place where containers full of dirt, rocks, and worms are tipped over, if what I found in there is any indication.  We also stripped the wallpaper off the boys' room wall, which was only half-wall papered because we'd stopped last year when it started turning out badly... and prepped it for painting.  And we did an intensive clean of the family room, which also needs to be painted.  Strangely, the family room doesn't look any better than when we started, but at least I know that the toys are all out from under the couch and the window screen and glass lamp shade are not full of dust and bugs.  This is enough.

Weeks 8, 9, and 10 in a nutshell. :-) 

A collection of photos from weeks 8, 9, and 10...

The biggest event: Gareth turned 13.  I thought about making a big blog post, but... I was worried I might embarass him.  So I'll just embarass him slightly here. ;-)  13 on the 13th...

And he even made and frosted his own cake ("Milk Chocolate Cake", from a 1950 Betty Crocker Recipe), by request.  The cake turned out great.  It didn't even stick in the pans like my cakes so often do.

I cleaned up and rearranged the nature area.  From left: basket of river rocks, basket of feathers, basket of pine cones, plant press, tray with paper and pens for drawing, Timeline of Life, wooden trays of fossils. (It doesn't look this anymore, mostly due to use.  I need to rearrange it again.)

Apples by Katydid, inspired by a drawing in Museum ABC...

Apples by Katydid, inspired by a photo from the Monthly Sketch Project...

Apples by me, inspired by the Monthly Sketch Challenge...

Farmerboy's plans for how to make a spear and kill a mammoth...

A little downy woodpecker that appeared on the kitchen window sill one afternoon...

A little nature printing...

A little Montessori...
 

Some collage...

Some toddler activities...

And a nature walk.

 
 

 

Week 4: We Catch Another Cold

Week 4 was this week, Sept. 7-Sept. 13.  I feel like I am writing a continuing saga with these colds.  "And then we got sick.  And then we got better.  And then we got sick again.  And then..."

It's just one of those years where I date events by the virus we had, I guess.

Anyway, I forgot to mention in week 3 that Gareth made his first ever trip to the ER.  The kids were having bike races down the hill in our yard and onto the driveway.  (The road is too busy to ride on.) Gareth hit the top of a metal trash can and fell off his bike, cutting his leg on the way down.  I was inside putting the little ones to sleep while this was going on.  So when Gareth came to tell me in a reasonably calm but somewhat loud voice that he had fallen and cut himself but that the cut wasn't bleeding much. I told him to try and take care of it himself so he wouldn't wake the boys up. 

When I came out in a few minutes (Chipmunk woke up anyway), I took a look at the cut and felt really, really bad for shushing Gareth.  Fortunately, Andy had just (as in, he'd been home for 5 minutes) gotten home from Boston, so he took Gareth to the ER for the staples that were removed on an extremely unplanned day in week 4.

Gareth and I are trying to work out a few kinks in the way the year is going.  I have tossed Lingua Mater... not because it's bad, but because it's just not working for him.  Katydid will probably use it next year, or perhaps even sooner, as she's using  Lingua Mater 6 with the grammar supplement right now and enjoying it.  I am thinking of using Our Mother Tongue: An Introductory Guide to English Grammar, which is what Ambleside Online recommends for Year 7.  For 2 reasons: 1) I own the book already and 2) it isn't as drill intensive as something like, say, Seton.  And then I think we're going to add in Editor In Chief Beginning Book: Grammar Disasters and Punctuation Faux Pas (Editor in Chief Beginining).  Because this is where we run into some of those learning difficulties I have mentioned before.

Another area we're tweaking has to do with planning -- his planning and his time management -- and also maybe a change in style to some extent.  What I've seen is that Gareth doesn't seem to be as motivated to work through plans that I make out of his interests after I have written them down and made them into "school" as he is if I just, say, leave the book out on the couch, or write down a series of choices on the whiteboard.  So I'm wondering again about unschooling vs. structured schooling, and how best to help Gareth learn to self-initiate, follow through, and finish projects, when goal-making on a weekly basis or making lists of assignments to complete both seem to some extent unpalatable. 

We also had to change the way we were planning with Katydid this week.  She decided she didn't like giving herself even vague assignments (like "botany") for each day of the week.  Instead we decided to make out a list of what she wanted to do for the week, broken down into subject areas.  In the morning she refers to the list and decides what she wants to do that day.  Katydid is mature for her age, motivated, and interested in what she's doing, so this works pretty well.  She knows she'll do some subjects every day -- math, Latin, language -- so those aren't written down; they're just assumed.

But the big deal this week was a visit to the NY State Museum in Albany. 

Your two year old throws fits when you attempt to make him leave the "mammufs", right?

Devonian era fossils found in our county... the bottom picture is a tree stump.

Playing in the Discovery Room...

Stopping to pose for a picture.

Seventh Grade Plans: Shield of Faith

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 :-).