Archive for August, 2006
August 15, 2006 @ 4:40 am | Filed under:
Books Kelly tagged all the children’s lit bloggers, and Alice tagged me specifically, so here goes:
1. One book that changed your life?
The Lord of the Rings wasn’t written for children, but I first (and second and third, etc) read it as a child, so I’m counting it. The reason I say it "changed my life" is that it’s responsible for sparking my romance with Scott. At a college party, we fell into discussion of this mutual favorite and, well, suddenly the music and noise around us faded away, and you know the rest.
2. One book you have read more than once?
Ha, what book HAVEN’T I would be a harder question to answer! Limiting the answer to ONE I’ve re-read is harder still. If I’ve written about a book on this blog, you can bet I’ve read it a bunch of times. But let’s see. One book. Anne’s House of Dreams.
3. One book you would want on a desert island?
Again, sticking with children’s books: it would have to be something very very big. A complete edition of Grimm’s tales, maybe? Or no, I know: The American Boys’ Handy Book. (I think the boys’ version would be more useful in this circumstance than the girls’.)
4. One book that made you laugh?
The Anybodies by N. E. Bode.
5. One book that made you cry?
Old Yeller.
6. One book you wish had been written?
Betsy’s Baby (a sequel to Betsy’s Wedding by Maud Hart Lovelace).
7. One book you wish had never been written?
I have thought long and hard about this one since I first saw this meme, and I can’t do it. I can’t wish a book unwritten. There are books I dislike and books that I think have done outright harm. But still, something in me recoils from the idea of entirely erasing one from existence. What if IT was the book that sparked the idea for another book by another author down the line? I’m picturing literary dominoes that poof one another out of existence as they topple down the line. If I wish my most hated book away, I might take something precious with it.
8. One book you are currently reading?
I just picked up Susan Fletcher’s Shadow Spinner at the library yesterday.
9. One book you have been meaning to read?
Rules by Cynthia Lord.
10. Now tag five people:
I think everyone’s been tagged already!* Now, on to the Bookworm’s homeschooling meme. ::::rubbing hands together gleefully::::
*No, wait! I know someone! Heh heh…I tag Scott.
This morning I left three children sleeping in my bed (rather like a litter of puppies) and hurried downstairs to get the trash out. When I came back into the house, one of the puppies was howling at the top of his little puppy lungs. (Where "howling"="shrieking.") I hurried back upstairs and lay down beside him. He calmed down instantly.
I asked one of the other puppies (the five-year-old one) how long he’d been crying.
Her answer: "Till you came back."
He left for the other coast on July 13, which is to say: a hundred years ago. Here are just a few of the things I’ve learned in the past month of temporary single parenting:
• Check your gas tank, because no one else will.
• The second your husband leaves, every hard-to-reach light bulb in the house will burn out in despair. He’s GONE?? Oh, woe! Henceforth shall I shine no more! :::pop:::
• You and your five children will never, ever be on time for church.
• But laundry is easy, if you know the secret.
• The days will be long, and yet every Wednesday morning you will swear it has only been ten minutes since the LAST time you woke up in a panic because the garbage trucks were driving by your house and you forgot to put the trash out again.
• Except for the week you remember to put it out early, because that will be the week the waste disposal company decides to change its pickup day to Monday, which means you have already missed it again.
• You will not turn on the TV all month, because there is nothing to watch worth watching alone.
• If you post too many pictures of the baby doing new and adorable things, you will break his heart.
• If you do not post them, you will also break his heart.
• You will attempt to take your mind off how much you miss him by introducing your children to all the showtunes you never played while he was around because they drive him crazy.
• It won’t work.
• But the kids will think you are the coolest mom ever, because you know all the words to every song in Annie. And Fiddler on the Roof. And Les Miz. And Snoopy. But not Oklahoma, because that wouldn’t be cool.
• You will be shocked to discover how many different things in your house run on batteries—batteries which have apparently made a suicide pact with the light bulbs. You will begin to wonder how your husband ever had time to get any work done, what with all the shopping for and replacing of light bulbs and batteries he must have been doing when you didn’t notice.
• Sooner or later there will come a night when it takes you until 10:30 to finally get all the kids in bed, and afterward you will pace the house like a caged tiger because you NEED CHOCOLATE and you are OUT. You are out, of course, because you ate every bit in the house, right down to the bag of chocolate chips that was supposed to become cookies for your neighbor. (When you write about it, you will hope that your neighbor does not read your blog.) You’ll be on the phone with your husband and he’ll want to know what on earth is making that sound in the background, like the sound of kitchen cabinets being ripped out of the wall and shaken upside down. And you will explain that you are OUT OF CHOCOLATE. These are words that must always be said in capitals all the time because they are TRAGIC.
There will be a short silence on his end of the phone, and then he will say in a voice so tender it makes you want to cry (or else eat a lot more chocolate): "Go look in my office. On the shelf."
And you will find there what he stashed away for you before he left, because he knew this day would come, and he will never, ever let you down.
How does he love me? Let me count the bars.
"Supposing I said there was a planet without schools or teachers, study was unknown, and yet the inhabitants—doing nothing but living and walking about—came to know all things, to carry in their minds the whole of learning: would you not think I was romancing? Well, just this, which seems so fanciful as to be nothing but the invention of a fertile imagination, is a reality. It is the child’s way of learning. This is the path he follows. He learns everything without knowing he is learning it, and in doing so passes little from the unconscious to the conscious, treading always in the paths of joy and love."
—Maria Montessori
(With thanks to Donna G., local Montessori teacher and my fellow speaker at a recent alternative education panel, for bringing it to my attention.)
And in that vein, here’s what Rilla learned yesterday.
August 11, 2006 @ 2:16 pm | Filed under:
Poetry I asked her to pick out a poem for today’s contribution. She disappeared with Favorite Poems Old and New and came back with this one, (marked with a twig, appropriately enough).
I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill
by John Keats
I STOOD tip-toe upon a little hill,
The air was cooling, and so very still,
That the sweet buds which with a modest pride
Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside,
Their scantly leaved, and finely tapering stems,
Had not yet lost those starry diadems
Caught from the early sobbing of the morn.
The clouds were pure and white as flocks new shorn,
And fresh from the clear brook; sweetly they slept
On the blue fields of heaven, and then there crept
A little noiseless noise among the leaves,
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves:
For not the faintest motion could be seen
Of all the shades that slanted o’er the green.
Read the rest here.
August 11, 2006 @ 2:00 pm | Filed under:
Family …in the family album.
Thanks to all of you who are sharing your homeschooling plans in yesterday’s open thread. Keep ’em coming!
As for my plans, here they are. But I warn you: this post is going to be one giant oxymoron. First I’m going to tell you how we are pretty much unschooling this year, with the exception of Latin, and then I’m going to hit you with a big long list of curriculum and stuff. And then, just to confuse you even more, I’m going to link up to a bunch more Charlotte Mason posts. And you’re going to say, But Lissa, didn’t Charlotte Mason lay out a highly structured programme? You keep calling yourself an unschooler, and I’m going to say Isn’t it interesting how “programme” is so much classier a word than “program”?, and you’re going to say Sort of, but you haven’t answered the question.
So now that we all know our lines, I’ll begin. With Scott out in California already and the rest of us still here in Virginia waiting for the person who will walk into this house and say People have been so happy here! I want to live in this house and be happy too! I will buy it! Immediately! Here’s a check! Happy trails to you!, it is obvious that this fall is not likely to be a time of consistency and routine for us. Sometime in the next few months (we hope), I will be piling this horde of children into the minivan and we’ll embark on the most hands-on of geography unit studies, which shall be called “Wow, Mom, Kansas Really DOES Go on Forever.”
(Which reminds me. I’m assembling a list of books on tape we might listen to on the trip. By the Great Horn Spoon, On to Oregon, Little House on the Prairie (natch), I forget what else. Got any suggestions?)
Anyway, because of all this flux in our lives, I’m not really making Big Educational Plans for this fall. Before Scott’s job offer appeared, I was leaning toward a Latin-Centered Curriculum approach with (as always) a great deal of Charlotte Mason influence and our usual Real Learning flavor. In light of our big changes, I’m dialing back a bit but the elements are the same.
Latin will be our most disciplined, regular subject. The arguments put forth in Tracy Lee Simmons’s Climbing Parnassus
and Drew Campbell’s The Latin-Centered Curriculum
(excerpted here and supporting articles here) have sold me on Latin’s benefits. Rose is using Prima Latina because I like its simple format with manageable lesson size, and I love that it includes Latin prayers. We are using the book and CD only, not the DVD.
Jane completed Prima Latina a couple of years ago, and has resumed her studies with the highly engaging Latin for Children (ecclesiatical pronunciation—although the DVD seems to use only classical pronunciation—V is pronounced like W, for example—and when we watch the DVD we have to remind ourselves to adjust the pronunciation. The chant CD, which we use more than the DVD, offers both forms). All of us are enjoying the chant CD and I’ve written before about how delightful it is to hear five-year-old Beanie running around chanting declensions.
Jane especially likes the LfC activity book, which is heavy on puzzles, crosswords, and such. Puzzle = perfect, in Jane’s opinion. We also scored an ancient, battered copy of Using Latin: Book One
for a few
bucks, and Jane is really enjoying it as a supplement to Latin for
Children. It has you diving right in to real paragraphs in translation, and for both of us beginners, that has been a thrill.
Another Latin program I’ve heard great things about (for starters, Becky uses it, and her taste is impeccable) is Minimus. Does anyone care to weigh in with a review? I have to say, it looks extremely fun. I mean:
Minimus: Starting out in Latin is a unique course for 7-10 year olds, providing a lively introduction to the Latin language and the culture of Roman Britain with a highly illustrated mix of comic strips, stories and myths….The course centres on a real family who lived at Vindolanda in 100AD: Flavius, the fort commander,
his wife Lepidina, their three children, assorted household slaves, their cat Vibrissa—and Minimus the mouse! It features many of the artefacts and writing tablets from the Vindolanda excavations.
Comic strips! A mouse! A fort commander! Wish I’d heard of it before I spent my whole Latin budget last spring.
Greek. Rose’s interest in this language continues unabated. She is really enjoying Hey Andrew, Teach Me Some Greek, but I make that recommendation with one caveat, and I truly hope this does not cause offense. I am extremely sympathetic toward people with speech impediments. Bear in mind that my own son has, at this point, only two consonants. But as a consumer I must make note of the fact that the woman who narrates the Hey Andrew pronunciation CD has a strong lisp, so that instead of “sigma” she says “thigma,” and so on. Since correct pronunciation is one of a student’s goals in studying a language, I do find this to be a fairly serious flaw in the Hey Andrew materials. Rose loves the workbooks, however, and I like the gentle and gradual progression. Since the whole ancient Greek thing was totally Rose’s idea, I’m just running with her interest and supplying her with the materials she enjoys.
Math. We do math in spurts of intensive activity, with long relaxed lulls in between. Plus, you know, lots of what I call “accidental math”—the kind that comes up all the time in the course of daily life. If there are sixty-four Skittles in a bag, how many do each of us get, bearing in mind that Mom gets twice as many as everyone else, that sort of thing. (Scott is reading this now and going WHAT??? I’m gone for three weeks and you’re feeding them SKITTLES??? Have you completely abandoned our principles? And haven’t you read about the dead bugs in those things? Don’t worry, honey. I was only kidding. I get THREE times as many as everyone else.)
What we do use, when we’re using (heh heh, we’re math junkies, get it), is Math-U-See. And I have been singing the praises of this program so loud and for so many years that its creator, Steve Demme, really should be giving me a commission. Heck, we even named our son after him.* But he isn’t. He’s never heard of me. But his Virginia distributor has. That woman’s got to LOVE me. Big huge order every year since we moved here.
*I’m joking. Of course that isn’t true. We named him after Steve from Blue’s Clues.
Rose is still working on the Beta level, and Jane, my little math addict, is about ready for the Algebra 1 program. I find myself in the bizarre position of having to scold her about going through her Math-U-See materials too quickly. It’s like when she was a toddler (pre-chemo days, which totally changed her eating habits, as in eradicated them for a couple of years) and I used to have to say “No more broccoli until you’ve eaten something else.”
The reasons MUS works so well for us are:
1) The DVD lessons, which aren’t fancy but are funny and pleasant. Steve Demme’s corny sense of humor really suits our taste.
2) The explanation of concepts. He doesn’t just show you what to do, he tells you why it works. I always did fine in math class at school, but even so, I find that when I watch the lessons alongside my kids, light bulbs are going off right and left. OH, so THAT’S why you flip-and-multiply to divide a fraction! I knew HOW to do it, but I never got why it WORKS before. Demme’s explanations are clear and simple and fun.
3) The manipulatives. Hands-on learning works best for my kids.
4) No prep time required. Let’s face it, I’m a busy woman. (Aren’t we all?) Right Start Math and Miquon both required too much advance work on my part. I like to spend my time doing things WITH the children, not preparing things for them to do.
All right, moving on. After Latin and math, there’s the whole wide world. I’m not being glib. We’ll encounter big ideas and events in all the other topic areas—history, science, literature, geography, civics, and so forth—through books, books, books. Read-alouds and read-alones. Picture books (I’ve got a big post on that in the works) and historical fiction, biographies and science books. Also: maps, puzzles, games, food and the homeschoogler’s best friend. (See the unschooling links post for specifics.)
We’ll continue to steep ourselves in the arts through Charlotte Mason-style composer and artist studies, assisted by the generous volunteers at 4Real (art, music) and Ambleside (art, music)—not to mention Higher Up’s cool artist-study Flickr badges. Charlotte’s ideas on habit-training and character formation will aid us in purposeful and harmonious living, especially in the midst of upheaval.
Sherry Early’s Picture Book Preschool and Elizabeth Foss‘s awesome Booklist will lend inspiration for connecting with nature, the seasons, and what our pal Betsy Ray calls the Great World
. When I talk about picture books, I’m thinking primarily of five-year-old Beanie, but illustrated books speak volumes (so to speak) to older kids as well, so as is our wont, everyone listens in.
This all sounds lovely, you’re saying (okay, I don’t know what you’re saying, but the voices in my head think it sounds lovely), but what about language arts? Well, in this area too we are informal and experiential. We have drawn many ideas for sparking fun writing experiences from Julie Bogart’s The Writer’s Jungle. If you’re a regular reader of Bonny Glen and The Lilting House, you know I am a staunch believer in the benefits of reading aloud and in narration a la Charlotte Mason. Jane does several written narrations a week—sometimes on paper, sometimes on a private blog she has set up for her friends. Rose has one, too, and she’s beginning to do more and more writing on that. I noticed this morning that she was correctly spelling a couple of words that she had to holler for help with last week. The more she writes, the more she improves. And of course our Latin studies teach us a lot about grammar.
I doubt we’ll do much in the way of art and handcrafts this fall. I can’t deal with all those little scraps of paper and ribbon, not while we’re showing the house. Everything’s being packed up, anyway. Time enough for creative messes when we get settled in our new place. In the meantime, we’ve got the whole country to explore.
*UPDATED! I forgot American Sign Language! Pursuits continue apace!
Edspresso has had an ongoing debate about standardized testing all week. Dana Rapp is not a fan of testing; Richard Phelps is. I’ve been following their discussion with great interest.
Says Dana Rapp:
"Before I moved to Vermont in 2002, I lived in Ohio where standardized
tests and national frameworks created environments where recess was
eliminated, teachers’ salaries were linked to test scores, children
became ill during testing, teachers’ job satisfaction waned, and,
ironically, less appeared to be learned."
And:
"Testing is a booming market where companies like McGraw-Hill and
Harcourt-Brace are reaping record profits with the sale of the
textbooks, tests, practice tests, and improvement kits.
Schooled-to-order children force-fed on scripted curriculum also
benefit big business. As testing proceeds to earlier grades, even
kindergarten, CEO’s and industrial “leaders” can rest even more assured
that future employees will not have the skills, knowledge,
dispositions, and collective consciousness to recognize and act to
change disparities of wealth, loss of jobs, lack of health care, and
corporate corruption in the organizations in which they work."
He avers that standardized testing has "dehumanized" schools and has led to an increase in "sales of anxiety, depression, and attention drugs for children."
I am none too keen on standardized tests myself. I think the need to teach to the test can suck the joy out of learning and shift a student’s experience from connecting to cramming. Not always, not across the board, but in many, many cases. And being good at taking tests doesn’t necessarily mean you are good at thinking. Or remembering, once the test is over.
Rapp’s point about testing becoming a lucrative business is one that had never occurred to me. Interesting to contemplate.
Phelps responds with a reminder that "the U.S. Constitution grants (by deference) responsibility for education to our country’s original founding entities, the states."
"State executives and legislators have the right, and the
responsibility, to determine education policy. By implementing
high-stakes testing programs, state officials are being responsive to
their constituents, who strongly favor such programs."
Really? I’m asking seriously. I’ve never seen data on that question, it occurs to me. Are most average joes really in favor of standardized testing? Is the increase in reliance on testing REALLY a response to what the constituency desires?
You, for example. Reading this blog. Are you an advocate of standardized testing? Not all of you are homeschoolers, and I’m curious to know what you think. (I can hazard a guess as to the opinion of most home educating parents, but even there I don’t presume to KNOW.)
"The fact is," says Phelps, "standardized testing programs are an expression of
democracy. If the public was strongly opposed to them, politicians
would be, too, regardless what corporate executives might want."
Hmm. I don’t know about that. I guess it depends on what "strongly opposed" means. I don’t think this is an issue that the public spends a lot of time worrying about, and unless the public starts marching in the streets ("No more tests!"), I don’t think politicians are going to pay too much attention to what the "public" thinks.
You can read the rest of the debate as it unfolds at Edspresso.
Just saw this in the latest Project FeederWatch newsletter:
Citizen Scientists Needed for Acorn Study
Did you know that Blue Jays help oak trees spread by moving acorns?
You can help researchers investigate variation in the size of bur oak acorns and learn more about the distribution of this tree species. Like many North American tree species, bur oaks have moved northward following the end of the last ice age. The goal of the study is to determine the degree to which acorn size has been influenced by the primary dispersal agent of bur oaks—blue jays, which prefer small acorns, or whether size is primarily determined by environmental factors such as day length and the length of the growing season.
What will citizen scientists provide?
Volunteers will collect a sample of 25-35 mature bur oak acorns: 5 – 7 from each of 5 different bur oak trees located reasonably close to where you live. All you need in order to participate is access to 5 bur oak trees! Trees growing on their own in parks or forests are preferred, but trees in landscaped areas are acceptable as long as they are not watered regularly.
How can I participate?
The project coordinator will provide participants with all necessary materials, including information on how to identify bur oaks and a postage-paid envelope for sending collected acorns. The study is being conducted by Walt Koenig, Research Zoologist, University of California, Berkeley, and Jean Knops, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Who can participate?
U.S. residents living within the bur oak’s range are invited to participate. Bur oaks primarily grow in the following states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska (eastern), Kansas (eastern), Oklahoma, Texas (part), Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas (northern), Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan (southern), Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, New York (parts), Maine (parts), and Pennsylvania (parts). If you live in these areas and are interested in participating, please contact Dr. Koenig at koenigwd@berkeley.edu.
