It’s Father’s Day at Life in a Shoe’s Carnival of Kid Comedy. And what fun to find some Rose-and-Beanie moments there via editor’s choice! It was a pretty funny week around here…
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My mail program is giving me fits. All my saved mail—including dozens of letters I needed to answer—has gone :::poof:::. Effective immediately, please use the following address instead: thebonnyglen (at) gmail (dot) com. Thank you!
(And if I owe you a reply to something, I would be extremely grateful if you would resend. Thank you so much!)
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“I did NOT hit you! I threw something at you and IT hit you!”
A ClubMom mom wrote me with a couple of questions:
I am trying to figure out a starting point with curriculum. Could you give some suggestions?
My other concern; do you have any insight into how colleges are accepting homeschoolers. I have this overwhelming fear that I’ll ‘mess’ up their chances of getting into decent colleges.
I’ll address the college question soon.* For now: curriculum. You’ve decided you want to educate your children at home; now what? How do you choose between the truckloads of curriculum possibilities—let alone define your “homeschooling philosophy”?
My first piece of advice: Don’t rush into anything. Don’t shell out a fortune for materials. Don’t map out a daily schedule crammed with ten or twelve different subjects. Take some time to read and think about how people learn. Watch your children; notice what makes them light up, what draws them in deep. Listen to them; let them tell you about the things they’re interested in.
And while you’re doing that, take this quiz. Unlike most internet quizzes, which are purely for fun, this one is a useful tool for taking your own pulse as a mother, a learner, and a facilitator of your children’s learning. (GuiltFree’s Learning Styles Quizzes are helpful too.) Take the quiz, then come back here, and we’ll discuss the results. I’ll tackle the nitty-gritty of curriculum-choosing next week, but first let’s begin with this survey of style and tone.
*And about the college question: I’ve been collecting links to posts on this subject for some time, but I’d also like to encourage input from readers who have already experienced the college admissions process with their homeschooled students. If you’ve got stories to share, we’d love to hear them.
Curriculum, Part 2 is here.)
Tags: homeschooling, homeschool, unschooling, Charlotte Mason, curriculum, education
It’s Friday, after all.
This is the final stanza of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s loveliest (in my opinion) work, “Frost at Midnight.” Please do go treat yourself to the whole poem. For now, for you, little cottage child:
Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
Especially when it’s Alice’s baby. I am thrilled to pieces to announce the arrival of another beautiful blessing to her cottage. Alice gave birth to her seventh child, a baby girl, on June 13th. I’ve been bursting with the news ever since. Everything went smoothly, and mother and child are doing very well. They came home yesterday and were received with immense joy by five doting big sisters and one proud big brother.
I can’t wait to get my hands on that scrumptious little one…in the meantime I will have to make do with hourly reports from her mother. Dear Lissa, the baby just turned her head to look at me.—Dear Alice: Not enough information. Which WAY did she turn it?
God bless you, little one. We are so glad you’re here.
So today I’m thinking about that turtle in the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath. It’s chapter three and he’s just an old turtle plodding along in the dust beside the fields of dying corn. We heard about the dust and the corn in the opening chapter, how the wind and the heat are blowing the life out of the crops, and how the sharecroppers are close to breaking but still hold on to enough stubborn grit that their women know somehow, no matter what happens, they’ll survive. As long as the men don’t break, Steinbeck says, and when he shows us this turtle a few pages later, we know he’s showing us how a humble, homely creature can be tough enough to endure a serious battering and keep going. Even after a car hits him, “flipping him like a tiddly wink,” like a pawn in some cosmic game, into the fringes of the crisping corn, he gets himself turned back onto his feet and resumes his steady plodding.
Some wild oat seeds get stuck in his shell and eventually they fall underneath him and his body drags dust over them as he goes along. Sooner or later, some rain will fall—it has to, sometime. And those seeds will sprout, and it will be the turtle who gave them a chance at life. Here, too, we’re seeing a glimpse of these men we’re about to meet, men whose accidental actions will cause chains of events, men whose steady plodding will bring life out of the dust—sooner or later.
And then along comes Tom Joad and he sees that turtle and scoops him up. Rolls him up in his jacket to take home as a present for a little brother he hasn’t seen in we don’t know how many years. Fresh out of prison, not even sure his family is still holding on to the forty acres they’ve sharecropped time out of mind.
I love how Steinbeck does this: how Joad is that turtle though he doesn’t know it; how forces so big he can’t see them will catch him up and carry him along, and at times he’ll feel as blind and helpless as that turtle he’s got wrapped up in his coat.
Only three and a half chapters, and Steinbeck’s got me trembling.
If you’re just tuning into this story, it begins here.
Today’s news: still no news. Herodotus continues to munch unmolested. There has been not the teeniest tiniest sign of The Monster’s presence. Is he pupating inside poor old Homer’s remains? We cannot tell. I’d post a picture but it’s not a pretty sight.
I find myself checking on Herodotus like he’s a newborn baby with respiratory issues. Jane originally found him on the same parsley plant as Homer, on the same day. We speak of the implications in whispers: What if the mother wasp laid an egg in Herodotus too? Horrible to contemplate.
The suspense is agony: Is he a ticking bomb? Will he suffer the same gruesome fate as his fellow? Or will he live to unfurl his wings and sail off into the paradise of blossoms that is our perennial bed?
Meanwhile, we found this: the tale of an ichneumonid wasp whose larva actually alters a spider’s behavior.
The orb spider is stung while on its web and is temporarily paralysed while the wasp lays her egg on it. The spider then recovers and goes about its life with the newly hatched wasp larva feeding on it by sucking its haemolymph (spider “blood”).
For about 7 to 14 days, the spider continues building its usual orb webs for prey capture. However, in the evening of the night when it is to be killed by its wasp parasite, the spider weaves a different web, designed specifically to suit the purposes of the wasp. The wasp larva then moults, kills and consumes the spider and pupates, suspending itself safely from its custom-built cocoon web.
The spider’s dying act is to spin a cocoon for its assassin! Talk about adding insult to injury!
And how does the timing work out? I don’t get that “in the evening of the night when it is to be killed” part. “The execution was scheduled for the stroke of midnight.” Or is it like Charlotte, knowing her time was nigh, urgently extracting her promise from Wilbur as the strength ebbed from her body?
**Bumping this back up to the top because the link was broken.
Some accomplishments deserve to be shouted far and wide. We can certainly relate!
Way to go, Elias.
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