Weekend Open Thread
February 24, 2007 @ 8:36 am | Filed under: Fun Learning Stuff
What are your three favorite educational resources, and why?
Archive for February, 2007
Letters from Thailand: the Second
Another delightful missive from our globe-trotting pal…
Feb. 12, 2007
Bangkok
Dear Rose,
I think people in Thailand must love elephants. I’ve seen many statues of them as I explore the city. They are in different positions & as big as real ones. I think I’ve seen as many elephant statues in Bangkok as real elephants in India. I like the real ones the best.
Also in Thailand are a lot of geckos. They scamper all over the place & they move very fast. Do they have geckos in California? I think you’d like them.
The hardest part of being in a different country is reading maps & signs. The written language in Thailand is totally different than English so I can spend a lot of time standing on a corner trying to figure out which direction to turn towards. Usually someone comes along to tell me where to go. I’ve gotten myself lost many times, but I rather like the adventure of finding my way back again.
The most strange thing about Thailand is the potato chips. They are flavored with fish, crab, shrimp, & even seaweed. Rose, it’s as gross as it sounds! If you were here with me, I’d buy us a bag & we’d get lost together!
Love,
Keri
Must Get Milkweed, Stat!
February 23, 2007 @ 7:02 am | Filed under: Butterflies, Nature Study
I just read the latest Journey North Monarch Migration update:
Right Now… Monarchs Are on the Move!
It’s too early for spring migration, but the butterfly colonies are moving now. The butterflies are spreading down the arroyos (streambeds) in search of water. Mexico is nearly 5 months into the dry season now, and water is scarce. These early signs of colony break-up mean the wintering season is coming to a close—and the journey north will soon begin!
And it struck me (this keeps on striking me, and will take us all a while to get used to) that OH THAT’S RIGHT, WE ARE IN SAN DIEGO NOW, and Mexico is about fifteen minutes away. Not that the monarchs’ wintering spot is right near our border, but still…we are so much farther south now, it won’t be long before those butterflies will be passing through here, looking for a place to lay their eggs.
We filled our Virginia garden with milkweed and were dazzlingly rewarded. Looks like I’d better start scouting out a west coast source.
(You Easterners can find everything you need at ButterflyBushes.com.)
Comments are off
Letters from Thailand: the First
Our dear friend Keri is traveling in the far east. When her letters arrive, it’s a holiday here!
February 12, 2007
Bangkok, Thailand
Dear Jane,
It’s customary in Thailand to "wai" people. A wai is when you put your hands together in a prayer position, lift them to where your fingertips are level with your nose & then you bow slightly. You’d lift your hands higher to show greater respect to a person. I’ve only been wai’ed at nose level, but I haven’t done anything to warrant greater respect! A wai is given when saying "thank you," "hello," & "goodbye." Also, adults never wai children. When I do, they laugh at me.
In India people would quickly touch their forehead when saying "thank you." In Morocco & Egypt, they’d touch their heart. Tomorrow I leave for Cambodia & I’m looking forward to learning a new sign.
Bangkok is a beautiful city. It reminds me a little of New York City. It’s big & very busy. Because the weather is tropical, plants & flowers are very abundant and lush. It’s odd to see orchids, an expensive & difficult plant to grow, thrive in the sides of roads & vacant fields.
I hope you are enjoying California. I look forward to visiting you there. Until then, I think of you often & wish you were with me to smell the flowers!
Love,
Keri
Comments are off
Charlotte Mason Works! But Don’t Take My Word for It!
February 20, 2007 @ 2:29 pm | Filed under: Charlotte Mason
Got this delightful note from my dear friend Joann:
You know we have just not gotten to the "click"
point with Daniel and reading, right? Well, I read Home Education, specifically
the chapters on reading. I’ve read the method as interpreted by Karen Andreola and
Elizabeth Foss, but really needed to see it for myself.So I chose a nursery rhyme for Daniel that I
thought he would like and printed it out and cut it up and did just exactly what
she said in the book.And I cannot believe it, but the child LOVED his
reading lesson. And he learned to read. About 12 words! And he is picking up
every piece of printed matter in the house and trying to find words he knows and
trying to sound out other words. He’s known the sounds for ages it seems, but we
couldn’t find what was the hold up. I could see that he was having a hard
time with seeing where one word stopped and the next started. So I think that
cutting the words apart really, really was the turning point. Like a light
bulb, "OH! That’s a WORD!" He’s is beyond
excited.What a gift this woman is to homeschoolers and what
a shame her principles cannot be implemented more widely.
Hear, hear. And not just among homeschoolers. School-schoolers, too. Here’s a lovely account of one woman’s memories of her experience in a PNEU school (thanks to Mater Amabilis for the link).
And Willa recently posted a link to this Parents Review article about a family who enrolled in a PNEU correspondence school. I love this:
Now, nearly four years later, things have changed. The children’s
clothes are patched, their feet encased in cheap canvas shoes. Meals
consist largely of fruit and vegetables gathered from the orchard and
garden, dairy produce from our two cows, and eggs from the hens. They
cut and cart cattle bedding; they wash vegetables for market; they take
turns in milking the cows, and generally take on any job that
arisesmore or less cheerfully. A pretty poor little lot, you might
think.You could not be more wrong. Our bookshelves are full of good books,
recommended in the programmes; and conversation is sometimes baffling
to outsiders. For the children talk about John Masefield, Granny,
Monet, our next-door-neighbour and Socrates with the same degree of
familiarity.
And:
They have retained their sense of delight and wonder. These four
average children, who find some subjects easy and some difficult, are
full of curiosity about everything that goes on about them, and
everything that has happened since the world began. They chant poetry
in the bath (in English or French); they quarrel in the words of
Agamemnon and Achilles; they give our cows and calves Greek names. They
observe closely the possible colour changes of a chameleon, and argue
over the components of a certain rock specimen. They pester the curator
of the museum, and any experts we happen to meet, for information about
their various specimens. People fascinate them, be it Pithecanthropus
Erectus, Elizabeth Fry or General de Gaulle.Children whose epithets four years ago seemed limited to ‘pretty,’
‘quite nice’ and ‘sooper,’ now yell when flying a kite, ‘Mum, come and
look at that "bewildered" swallow! It can’t think what this kite is!’
Or I find my best pyrex dish used for a ‘suffering’ tadpole that must
be isolated from the rest. I am called to watch a ‘quivering’ Siamese
cat as she lies in wait for a bird, or a ‘baffled’ puppy trying to walk
through a glass door.Charlotte Mason’s statement about the ‘twaddle’ has proved to be
absolutely true. The most worn books on our shelves are not the Annuals
sent at Christmas; but ‘Heroes of Greece and Troy,’ ‘The Odyssey,’
‘Stories from the History of Rome,’ Stevenson, Kipling, and all our
poetry anthologies. Robert’s favourite book at the moment is ‘Memory
Hold the Door’; Charles is deep in ‘Children of the Archbishop,’ and
Colin is reading ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’ again while he is waiting for
‘Jock of the Bushveld’ to be available from the library. Just last
night, as I switched off her light, Alison chided me sleepily, ‘Mummy,
I can’t understand why you didn’t recommend me to read your Somerset
Maugham books. Gosh, that man can tell a story!’
The warm, lively, happy, eager, rich life depicted in this article: that is exactly what speaks to me in the CM method; that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. (Minus the cows.)
Carnival Time!
February 20, 2007 @ 12:28 pm | Filed under: Carnivals
Visit the 11th Carnival of Children’s Literature, graciously hosted by MotherReader! Many thanks, MR, for your hard work.
A Question for the Librarians Who Won’t Stock Lucky
February 19, 2007 @ 8:05 pm | Filed under: Books
You’ve heard, no doubt, of the controversy surrounding Susan Patron’s Newbery-winning novel, The Higher Power of Lucky. Of course you have; everyone is talking about it. The word "scrotum" appears on the first page of the novel (that’s where Lucky’s dog gets bit by a rattlesnake, poor creature), and some school librarians deem that too blue a reference for a children’s book.
The New York Times reports (in a truly irritating article; more on that in a sec):
The book has already been banned from school libraries in a handful of
states in the South, the West and the Northeast, and librarians in
other schools have indicated in the online debate that they may well
follow suit. Indeed, the topic has dominated the discussion among
librarians since the book was shipped to schools.
So here’s my question. Is James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small not allowed in these same school libraries? Maybe not, as that is technically not a children’s book. I remember reading it for the first time around the age of eleven, but I probably found it in the public library, not at school. Anyway, I’m quite sure that same word appears in at least one of Herriot’s books. I KNOW there is a castration scene in there somewhere. He was a country vet, for Pete’s sake. I’m pretty sure I heard the word "uterus" there for the first time, too, and I vividly recall Herriot’s description of having to lie down in the mucky straw, stripped bare to the waist despite the freezing cold, to insert his hand into a cow to deliver a breech calf. It was at precisely that moment that I decided maybe I didn’t want to be a vet after all.
I haven’t had the opportunity to read Lucky yet. Don’t have any idea whether it will or will not pass my pretty strict criteria for "suitable for the very young." I’m a book-screener for my kids, and I don’t have any problem with that. As I see it, it’s part of my job. I look forward to previewing The Higher Power of Lucky.
But I can tell you for darn sure that the correct name of a body part doesn’t earn any book an automatic bounce from my shelves. Scrotum is only a bad word if we make it so. Frankly, I’d like to reclaim a few words that popular culture has pronounced blue. My beloved Aunt Genia used to say to my uncle, "Oh, Roger, don’t be an ass," with an affectionate zing that makes me grin every time I remember it. Time was you could call someone an ass and it just meant donkey. That was a useful word. People are mulishly, stupidly stubborn sometimes. Alas, our culture labeled "ass" a swear word and slapped other connotations on it. I probably wouldn’t write it into a children’s book now, though I suspect my Martha Tucker would have pronounced someone an ass with relish, if the occasion warranted it.
After reading the Times article, I am tempted to apply Aunt Genia’s word to the reporter (with all the zing, minus the affection), on account of this truly idiotic remark:
Authors of children’s books sometimes sneak in a single touchy word or
paragraph, leaving librarians to choose whether to ban an entire book
over one offending phrase.
I’m with my fellow children’s-book author Gail Gauthier on this one:
Is it some kind of snide, superior accusation that authors "sneak in a
single touchy word or paragraph" for the purpose of tormenting
librarians? Or do they do it for some other reason? And where does the
writer of this article get her information? Does she know about some
kind of survey? Did some Ph.D. candidate do a research paper on the
subject? What is she suggesting that we gain by "sneak[ing] in a single
touchy word or paragraph"?How did that sentence address the subject of her article, unless it was meant as a slam at the author of Lucky? The word "scrotum" was on the first page! How is that sneaking?
Come on, NYT. You can do better than this. Sneaking. Sneaking?? I actually laughed out loud when I read that quote—it’s so completely clueless—but the more I think about it, the more annoyed I am, for exactly the reasons Gail articulates.
The Lucky brouhaha also renews the debate over the question of whether a librarian’s decision not to add a book to a collection is or is not censorship. And that’s a question I find intriguing, and not exactly clear-cut. But I am clear about one thing: scratching the book off the to-buy list solely because author uses the correct anatomical term to describe exactly where the snake bit the dog (the incident, by the way, is based on a true story)—that’s mulish behavior. I know just what my Aunt Genia would say about it.
It Isn’t All Sunshine and Roses (At Least Not on Paper)
February 19, 2007 @ 2:12 pm | Filed under: Charlotte Mason, Nature Study
I’ve been writing a lot lately about the aspects of the Charlotte Mason method that work so very well for us here in the Lilting House. Today I thought I would balance that by talking about the pieces that aren’t exactly clicking perfectly here at the moment.
You know what isn’t happening? Nature notebooks. One of my new California friends, upon hearing that I’m this huge CM enthusiast, said she can’t wait to see our nature journals. I had to laugh. There isn’t much to see. Jane and I started off great guns when she was, oh, maybe four years old. Her first journal contains charming if barely decipherable drawings of garden flowers, beach treasures, and neighborhood leaves. We glued in some pressed pansies, which are now crumbling out of the book.
It was a fine beginning, and a beginning is all it was. Fully half of the pages are blank.
A year or two later, we started afresh, this time in the manner described in Karen Andreola’s Pocketful of Pinecones. We got one of those composition books with the black-and-white covers, and Jane began carrying a clipboard with drawing paper on our walks. Her drawings were cut to size and pasted into the book, labeled, and then (if I made her) she might copy a short poem on the facing page. Again, charming pages—all six of them.
Oh, we have started afresh a time or two since then. I am a great one for fresh starts. And of course Beanie and Rose acquired their own journals along the way. I found the latest batch yesterday, the ones we were working on in Virginia, before we moved. Way before. The most recent drawings were labeled "April 2005."
Hmm.
Despite this inconsistent and unimpressive record, I have spent some six years now blithely thinking of "nature journals" as one of the defining factors of our family experience. Living books, narrations, deep discussions, and nature journals: I am sure I have rattled this list off a thousand times when people ask questions about how we homeschool. I didn’t mean to be deceptive. Mainly I was fooling myself: that comfy knowledge that we have done it sometimes translated into an airy conception of this is something we do.
(We really DO do the rest of the list, I am relieved to be able to say!)
What was happening was the muddling-together in my mind of nature study and nature journaling. Nature study is a regular daily occurrence around here. Hardly a day passes in which we are not observing and discussing and looking up various flora and fauna. We are passionately interested in birds; we get giddy about growing things; we run for the magnifying glass when a strange six-legged beastie shows up in the backyard, the butterfly net, or (in a shuddersome stretch of days some time ago, which I do not ever care to revisit) on someone’s head.
But here we are, in a new environment, making the freshest of fresh starts; and this time, we’re going to get serious about our nature journals. We are all agreed upon this. Yesterday we hunted up all our supplies and arranged them neatly in the patio room where they can be snatched up on a daily basis. Daily! All right, every-other-day-ly! Or weekly! I’ll settle for "often"!
We are all excited, the girls and I. But enthusiasm does not equal perseverance, so I shall rely upon my gentle readers for some accountability-assistance. Ask me in a month or two how our nature notebooks are coming along, and if I don’t answer, you may interpret that as a blush.
To aid us in our new endeavor, we shall keep in mind the guidelines for nature journaling which Miss Mason herself laid out. At the extremely useful website called Charlotte’s Daughters, a generous CM enthusiast has typed out some actual PNEU syllabi. These make fascinating reads for a number of reasons, and I will be referring to them often in days to come. For now, I want simply to focus on the nature-journaling aspect of these programmes. The science section of each level includes instructions for students to "find and describe" various natural objects and creatures: for example, six-year-olds are to find
6 wild fruits
6 twigs of trees
6 wild flowers
Watch, if possible, and describe 30 birds and 15 other animals.
and to "keep a nature notebook." The syllabus does not elaborate on what that means (presumably it was explained in other accompanying materials), but farther down the page we find instructions for the year’s drawing lessons:
Drawing and painting
Pencils should not be much used.
1. Observation
In season, in brush painting or in pastel, draw
6 wild fruits or berries, and autumn leaves
6 twigs of trees, especially with buds or catkins
6 wild flowers
Draw or paint 18 animals that the child has been able to watch.
Draw and paint occasionally from memory.
2. Technique
"Children should have exercises in brush strokes and should paint
freely on large sheets of … paper … They should draw with brush,
crayon, charcoal, or blackboard chalks. … Avoid pencil outlines
filled in with colour."
Simple flat color washes of shapes or clouds, sunsets, the sea, etc.
3. Imaginative work
Pictures of people or scenes read about in Literature
Christmas, Easter, birthday, and other greeting cards
This is for the first-year students, remember, about age six, and is an overview of the goals for the whole school year. I imagine a great deal of this happens spontaneously in most homeschools…but it is nice to have as a frame of reference, don’t you think? Especially in regard to the nature journals.
Drawing goals for eleven-year-old PNEU students (Year 6) were similar: over the course of the year, draw
6 wild fruits or berries, and autumn leaves
6 twigs of trees, especially with buds or catkins
6 wild flowers18 studies of animals that the child has been able to watch.
Draw from memory.
And (under Science)
Make special studies for the season with drawings and notes, e.g.,
seed dispersal
twigs, seedlings, etc.
learn the songs of 6 birds
visits of insects to plants
wild flowers that grow together.
Our pencils are sharpened. (Never mind that "pencils should not be much used.") Our most recent half-filled notebooks are ready and waiting. Our trusty Prismacolor pencils are handily arranged. We have the will; we have the way; now all that remains is to do.
“Guide, Philosopher, and Friend”
February 17, 2007 @ 10:07 am | Filed under: Charlotte Mason, Early Childhood Education, Homeschooling, Joy of Learning, Methods of Home Education
"In urging a method of self-education for children in lieu of the
vicarious education which prevails, I should like to dwell on the
enormous relief to teachers, a self-sacrificing and greatly
overburdened class; the difference is just that between driving a horse
that is light and a horse that is heavy in hand; the former covers the
ground of his own gay will and the driver goes merrily. The teacher who
allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to
be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere
instrument of forcible intellectual feeding."—Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education (CM Series Vol. 6), p. 32.
By "method of self-education," Charlotte means, of course, the method she developed and had seen in practice for some thirty years, the method we have been discussing here during the past several weeks.
Guide, philosopher, and friend. I was thinking about this quote and it struck me that my whole experience of motherhood has been shaped, since my oldest child was tiny, by Charlotte Mason’s ideas about how people learn and grow. I read Home Education when Jane was four years old, and my heart soared at the lovely vision of early childhood laid out in that book. We were coming out of her chemo years then and the immuno- compromised isolation that entailed, and although John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, and Sandra Dodd had sold me on homeschooling long before Jane got sick, it was Charlotte Mason who showed me in concrete images the kind of childhood I wanted to give this beloved child and her baby sister.
The other day I was writing about how well suited the CM method is to the roller-coaster ride of life with many children. The plain truth is that the more monkey wrenches are thrown into our works, the more grateful I am for the simplicity of a Charlotte Mason-style education. I am excited every single morning, honestly!, to spend another CM-inspired day with my children. On Friday afternoons I am actually sorry to put our books away for a couple of days. (The feeling is quickly swallowed by the joy of knowing we’ll have Scott home for two whole days. You know this Daddy-goes-away-to-work business is still new to us.)
I love that my children are eager to pull the books back out first thing Monday morning; I love that they actually beg me to read Homer and Shakespeare. You understand that there is no boasting in this statement; this is not a proclamation of my own merits as mother or teacher, nor of unusual virtue or genius in my children. Charlotte Mason believed her method produced similar results in all children, regardless of social class, family background, or natural ability. "Let me try to indicate some of the advantages of the theory I am
urging," she writes, "It fits all ages, even the seven ages of man!
It satisfies
brilliant children and discovers intelligence in the dull. It secures
attention, interest, concentration, without effort on the part of
teacher or taught."
Alice sent me a note this morning about her favorite quotes from Towards a Philosophy chapter 1. (I have implored her to turn them into a post for Cottage Blessings, and if she so treats us, I’ll let you know.) She included this gem, and I won’t add my commentary on it because I am hoping she will grace us with hers. I will only say that I agree, one hundred percent.
"I have attempted to unfold (in various volumes ) a system of educational theory which
seems to me able to meet any rational demand, even that severest
criterion set up by Plato; it is able to ‘run the gauntlet of
objections, and is ready to disprove them, not by appeals to opinion,
but to absolute truth.’ Some of it is new, much of it is old. Like the
quality of mercy, it is not strained; certainly it is twice blessed, it
blesses him that gives and him that takes, and a sort of radiancy of
look distinguishes both scholar and teacher engaged in this manner of
education…"
Related posts:
About all that reading
How Charlotte Mason keeps me sane
Accidental v. on-purpose learning
Do you write down your children’s narrations?
Reluctant narrators
Rose’s reading list
A CM term (Jane’s list)
CM on nourishing the mind
Big CM post
CM on habit-training