Capital Community College Foundation offers a sentence diagramming tutorial on its website, including an extremely cool Power Point presentation you can download. For free. Diagramming never made my heart go pitty-pat before, but I think I’ve just been swept off my feet.
Jane just hunted up all the historical-fiction-set-in-America she could find on our shelves. The girls’ bedroom, my bedroom, Wonderboy’s bedroom, the sewing room…it’s amazing how books migrate around the house. We shoved and shifted and managed to clear out one big shelf in the living room where all these great stories about American history could squeeze in together. Now Honest Abe can rub shoulders with Mr. I Forget His First Name Ferris, the “Really Big Wheel You Sit in and Get Kind of Queasy at the Top” guy.
Rose hasn’t read many of these books, so she was enchanted by the sight of a nice neat row of new stuff to read. Rose is a big fan of nice neat rows of anything, except cauliflower. I’ve put Jane to work arranging the books chronologically, because Rose insists upon reading them “in order.”
Since I proved a miserable failure at keeping up with the kids’ reading logs (you may have noticed their disappearance from the sidebar—I gave up the ghost a month ago), I thought I’d try a more focused kind of list. So I’m adding “Rose’s American history reading list” to the sidebar. We’ll see how it goes…
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EGGS.—To prove whether they are good or bad, hold the large end of the egg to your tongue; if it feels warm, it is new; but if cold, it is bad. In proportion to the heat or cold, is the goodness of the egg. Another way to know is to put the egg in a pan of cold water; the fresher the egg, the sooner it will fall to the bottom; if rotten, it will swim. If you keep your eggs in ashes, salt or bran, put the small end downwards; if you turn them endways once a week, they will keep some months.
—from The American Frugal Housewife
by Lydia Maria Child
Because, you know, who expects to see
a dead mouse
in a frisbee
on the welcome mat?
Kara of Cape Buffalo has put together a large-scale Mother’s Day tribute featuring posts by dozens and dozens of bloggers. Grab a box of tissues and get ready for a nice satisfying cry.
This ought to whet your appetite for Amyable’s Celebration of Heart and Home on Sunday…
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A raw onion is an excellent remedy for the STING OF A WASP.
—from The American Frugal Housewife
by Lydia Maria Child
This post really belongs in my comments, but it got so long I’m just going to post it here.
CityMom asked:
Here’s another question—how much of the fact that your tide has come back in do you think has to do wtih the girls being older now then they were when Wonderboy was born? I am starting to notice that my oldest will keep learning and helping us to keep on task with school routines even when I am sort of losing track of things, I would imagine that your older girls, with the true love of learning that you have instilled in them, are making this happen?
This is a point I wanted to add to my initial response to the kind mom who said:
My 5th is the same age as yours, so about 3 weeks. I have not been able to start school up again, ( of course they are always doing something educational….) I have been blessed with healthy children, so we have no unusual circumstances, and yet I look at your web site and I am flabbergasted! My oldest is 7, I have a 5YO, 3YO and a 2YO. Are you just really organized???
We have the same number of children, but where this mom has a three-year-old, I have an almost-eleven-year-old, and that is a major difference. I have an extra pair of helping hands where she has another pair of hands needing lots of help—busy, busy hands, to boot. Ten-year-olds can be an awful lot of help. (I always think about Anne of Green Gables taking care of three sets of twins before the age of ten. I mean, I know she was fictional, but Montgomery was reflecting the norm for her community.) Whenever I want to work one-on-one with any of the children, I can have either Jane or Rose entertain Wonderboy. It isn’t organization, it’s delegation.
As for CityMom’s point, I think she is absolutely on the mark: it was easy to slip back to our routine after the baby arrived because my three older children are old enough to maintain the routine without a lot of prodding from me. They know how to do their chores, unsupervised. And our lesson time together is a fun chunk of the morning which we all enjoy. We listen to our Latin vocabulary chants together (Beanie likes this best of all) and then Jane and Rose can do their Latin bookwork independently. Then Jane goes to another (quieter) room to do her Math-U-See page; if she gets stuck on any problem she is supposed to circle it and bring it to me when she has finished the page. Meanwhile, Rose sits beside me and does her math. For the most part, she completes the work without my help while I play with her brother. Both girls can check their own work against the answer keys, and together we go over any problems they’ve missed.
Those are our only formal lessons; after that work is finished, we spend the next hour or two with our various read-alouds (always accompanied by Mr. Putty, of course—Rose never lets me forget) while Wonderboy plays with Legos or Wedgits in our midst. Friday is our hands-on day for art and science: we move to the kitchen or porch for the messy stuff. Personally, I prefer the read-alouds; I had to carve out a day for the ooey gooey needs-seventeen-ingredients-and/or-a-microscope kind of activities—and commit myself by announcing it to the girls—or else I would never get around to making it happen.
Adjusting to life with this baby has been the easiest transition yet—really!—easier than when I had just one baby, or two. Having a couple of seven-and-ups makes a huge difference. And Wonderboy got off to such a rough start…probably anything would seem easy compared to that.
Speaking of the new baby, can you believe she’s a month old today? Snoozing here beside me, just as sweet as can be….
Time for another Carnival of Homeschooling!
UPDATE: Homeschool Country Fair.
And don’t miss this week’s Carnival of Kid Comedy.
Tomorrow will bring another Carnival of Education at HUNBlog. UPDATE: The Carnival is now up!
And keep those submissions coming for the next Carnival of Children’s Literature, right here in the Bonny Glen on May 22nd!
If the kind of education given to Shakespeare and C. S. Lewis appeals to you, you might want to swing by the brand-new Latin-Centered Curriculum website and forum.
Unlike the neoclassical approach to education favored by Susan Wise Bauer and Laura Berquist (whose books I consider extremely useful resources but whose systems or curricula strike me as bucket-filling instead of fire-lighting), “Latin-centered” or “traditional classical” education involves an intense focus on, in the words of author Tracy Lee Simmons, “Greek, Latin, and the civilizations from which they arose.” Simmons’s book, Climbing Parnassus, which I’m currently in the middle of, lays out a case for a simple curriculum revolving around Latin, Greek, and mathematics. (You can read an excerpt of his book here.)
Andrew Campbell, whose new book, The Latin-Centered Curriculum, is hot off the presses and shipping this week, describes the elements of a traditional classical education:
* Limiting the number of daily core subjects to a small number, typically Latin and/or Greek, math, and perhaps one or two others, such as Bible or music.
* Presenting English grammar and vocabulary through the medium of Latin.
* Making Classical Studies an ongoing subject, rather than approaching “Ancients” as part of a four- or five-year world history rotation.
* Teaching most subjects, such as composition, science, and history, on a weekly or semi-weekly rotation.
* Approaching science and history informally in the early years.
* Favoring writing programs based on the progymnasmata, such as Classical Writing or Classical Composition.
With its emphasis on slow and deep study of a particular few subjects, Latin-centered education lends itself nicely to a Charlotte Mason approach: one might begin the day with lessons in Latin and math; follow those studies with fine read-alouds in fiction, history, science, or poetry (perhaps rotating through several books in the course of the week, and having the child narrate some of the readings); and leave the rest of the day open for free play, nature walks, art, music, and curling up with good books.
Likewise, folks with unschoolish yearnings but who have reservations about completely letting go of structured pursuits may find that LCE offers just enough disciplined study to maintain Mom’s comfort level while allowing lots and lots of free time for a child’s interest-driven explorations.
Intrigued? Here’s more good reading on the subject:
An Apology for Latin and Math.
Multum non Multa: an excerpt from The Latin-Centered Curriculum.
Tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home education, unschooling, Charlotte Mason, classical education, classical homeschooling, Latin-centered education
