Another week full of drafts and snippets, words squeezing into the teasing interstices of busy days. Most of what I jotted down had to do with the subjects that got their hooks into us: a chronicle of paths wandered, links explored.
(detail)
During our Balboa Park day last week, Jane strolled through the Timken Museum of Art. One piece she found particularly compelling was Benjamin West’s Fidelia and Speranza, painted in 1771. West was a friend of Benjamin Franklin (his portrait of Franklin’s famous moment with the key and the kite is a hoot). Jane was struck by the image of the girl (Fidelia) holding a chalice with a serpent looking out from it. A little digging informed us that the sisters are figures from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: Faith and Hope, who reside in the House of Holiness to which Una (Truth) guides the Red Cross Knight.
XII
Thus as they gan of sundry things devise,
Loe two most goodly virgins came in place,
Ylinked arme in arme in lovely wise,
With countenance demure, and modest grace,
They numbred even steps and equall pace:
Of which the eldest, that Fidelia hight,
Like sunny beames threw from her christall face,
That could have dazd the rash beholders sight,
And round about her head did shine like heavens light.
XIII
She was araied all in lilly white,
And in her right hand bore a cup of gold,
With wine and water fild up to the hight,
In which a Serpent did himselfe enfold,
That horrour made to all that did behold;
But she no whit did chaunge her constant mood:
And in her other hand she fast did hold
A booke, that was both signd and seald with blood:
Wherin darke things were writ, hard to be understood.
XIV
Her younger sister, that Speranza hight,
Was clad in blew, that her beseemed well;
Not all so chearefull seemed she of sight,
As was her sister; whether dread did dwell,
Or anguish in her hart, is hard to tell:
Upon her arme a silver anchor lay,
Whereon she leaned ever, as befell:
And ever up to heaven, as she did pray,
Her stedfast eyes were bent, ne swarved other way.
Well, that led to a lot of Spenser-related digging. We can’t undertake to read much of Faerie Queene right now; we dove into The Odyssey this month and I think one epic poem at a time is enough!
The week’s other big research project (for various children) had to do with Tamagotchis—the craze has resurfaced here, after a year of dead batteries. Growth charts, game strategies, daily logs: it’s like living in a research lab. One of the sites that turned up on our search was this critical analysis of Tamagotchi use, which I found quite interesting, especially this bit:
I was reminded of Professor Ken Goldberg’s Tele-garden, a web-based project where users can plant and water seeds in a small garden through the use of a remote robotic system. In a presentation on the project, Professor Goldberg mentioned a shift from the Paleolithic Hunter/Gatherer state of the World Wide Web (brief forays into the world of technology for the purpose of apprehending some piece of information) and the Neolithic Husbandry model supported by the project (where users must devote sustained interest and effort to foster growth).
The Tamagotchi is indicative of a similar shift in video game modeling. The majority of video games (especially popular video games) hinge on a model of conquest and succession – temporally limited tasks with set goals attainable through skill and reflexes. Key examples range from Pac Man and Galaxians to Super Mario Brothers and Mortal Kombat. Player/users identify with the “main character” of a simple narrative – “destroy or be destroyed”. Having completed a set amount of destruction, the player/user rests for a moment before taking on a progressively difficult level.
Notable exceptions exist. The most popular of these is the Maxis line of Sim- products, including SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimEarth, SimAnt, and others. Here we see the stirrings of the “Neolithic shift”. The user is responsible for the growth and maintenance of a town (or world, or ant colony, or whatever) and the ultimate goal is to simply “flourish”.
What do you think? Do you prefer Hunter/Gatherer internet experiences, or Neolithic Husbandry?
Speaking of hunting, I fell into a research project of my own last night, as you know if you’re my friend on Facebook or Twitter (which seems to be a synthesis of the hunter/gatherer and husbandry models, if you ask me). For fifteen years I have wondered which version of the Te Deum was the one referred to by Sheldon Vanauken in A Severe Mercy. Vanauken writes:
St. Ebbe’s sang the Te Deum to a setting that made a triumphant proclamation of the line: “Thou art the King of Glory, O-O-O-O-O Christ!”—the O’s ascending to the mighty ‘Christ!’
St. Ebbe’s is the Anglican church in Oxford the Vanaukens attended around 1950. Between YouTube and ChoralWiki, I have investigated, well, scores of scores (ba dum bum), looking for that particular setting of the Te Deum. A commenter at the MusicaSacra forum suggested it might be Benjamin Britten’s Festival Te Deum: that’s the only score I’ve found that has ascending O-O-Os, so perhaps he is right.
But most lovely and stirring of all is this piece a Twitter responder reminded me of: not the Te Deum, but rather the Non Nobis. I remember how I was moved to tears by this music (and this scene) when I saw Branagh’s Henry V several years back. I meant to buy the soundtrack (score by Patrick Doyle) but forgot all about it. How is that possible? This—this is unforgettable.
This quiet blog must make it obvious I’m still taking it slow and easy after last week’s excitement. We’ve kept mostly to home, except for piano lessons. Our old high-tide mood is upon us, has been for a couple of weeks, so there are lots of read-alouds and lively discussions going on (this I can do from the sofa!), and Jane is in love with a giant tome on chemistry, and Beanie and Rose are elbowing each other for FlashMath turns on my iPod Touch, unaware that this game is nothing but math drills. I guess if it’s on the Touch, it’s automatically fun?
Yesterday Beanie asked for a turn on the computer to play “the typing game,” which means the Mavis Beacon typing tutorial CD-rom. Jane hunted it up for her. But I think she might enjoy this new discovery even more: the BBC’s online Dance Mat Typing site. I found the link at Educating Emme. Personally, I’m a little mixed on these lessons—the whole rock-and-roller goat thing wears thin very quickly. I mean, he’s a goat. On the other hand, I love his Scottish accent. On his tongue, banal phrases like “use either of your thumbs on the space bar” become delightful dialogue.
On the other hand, he’s a goat.
(And his cartoon hands—a goat with hands?—in the keyboard demos: shudder.)
Originally published in November, 2005 as “The Purple Cow Hula-Hooped Boisterously.”
This is a game we played in the car yesterday, all the way to town and back. I assigned each of the girls a part of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb (one girl had to take two parts in each round). From there it went something like this:
Me: Miss Noun, what is it?
Beanie: A giraffe!
Me: Miss Adjective, what kind of giraffe?
Jane: A hungry giraffe.
Me: Miss Verb, what did the hungry giraffe do?
Rose: It bounced!
Me: Miss Adverb, how did the hungry giraffe bounce?
Jane: Enthusiastically!
All together: THE HUNGRY GIRAFFE BOUNCED ENTHUSIASTICALLY!
Particularly Cool Stuff My Kids and I Have Learned a Ton From or Just Plain Had a Good Time With:
Settlers of Catan, the board game. Jane got this for Christmas last year. We’ve been obsessed ever since. Except when our friends hijack it and keep it for weeks because it is that great a game.
Signing Time DVDs. Catchy songs, immensely useful vocabulary in American Sign Language. I trumpet these wherever I go. We talk about Rachel like she’s one of the family.
Prismacolor colored pencils. Indispensable. I was amused to see that Jane mentioned them in the first line of her “I Am From” poem. She’s right; they have helped color the picture of her life.
Uncle Josh’s Outline Map CD-Rom. Because maps are cool, and maps you can color (with Prismacolor pencils, hey!) are even cooler. The kids are constantly asking me to print out a map of somewhere or other. You can find other outline maps available online (for free), but I like Josh’s for clarity. And once when I had a problem opening a particular map (it’s a PDF file), I called the help number and it was Uncle Josh himself, a most amiable gentleman, who quickly solved my problem.
The Global Puzzle. Big! Very big! Will take over your dinner table! (So clear off that laundry.)
Set. It may annoy you that your eight-year-old will be quicker at spotting the patterns in this card game than you will. There’s a free daily online version as well.
Quiddler. Like Scrabble, only with cards. This, too, can be played online.
Chronology, the game. Like Trivial Pursuit, only with history.
Speaking of online games: the BBC History Game site is awfully fun.
And Jane was fairly addicted to Absurd Math for a while there. Need more free math puzzles? Nick’s got a bunch.
A Case of Red Herrings and Mind Benders. Logic and problem-solving puzzles: a fun way to pass the time on long car trips or in waiting rooms.
Zoombinis Logical Journey computer game and sequels. Stretch your brain trying to get the little Zoombinis to a village where they can bounce in peace.
Wild Goose Science Kits. Fun experiments with a low mess factor. Note to self: remember the Wild Goose Crime Kit come Christmastime. (Sadly, these are no longer available. Wild Science offers similar kits.)
If the scope sparks an interest in dissection, there’s a way to do it online with no actual innards involved: Froguts! The site has a couple of free demos to occupy you while you save up for the full version. (Which I haven’t seen yet, but it does look cool.) HT: Karen Edmisten.
Klutz Books. Over the years, we’ve explored: knitting, embroidery, origami, magic, Sculpey, paper collage, paper dolls, beadlings, and foam shapes. Look under any piece of furniture in my house and you will find remnants of all of the above.
Which reminds me: Sculpey polymer clay. Is it possible to get through a day without some? My children think not.
Refrigerator poetry magnets. I gave Scott the Shakespearean set a couple of Christmases ago. Note to self: You are not as brilliant as you think! You were an English major, for Pete’s sake, with a minor in drama. Thou knowest full well old William was a bawdy fellow. If you don’t want your little ones writing poems about codpieces, stick to the basic version. But oh how I enjoy the messages Scott leaves for me to find and then pretends he doesn’t know who wrote them:
I am so in love with my delicate wench.
And of course of course of course, Jim Weiss story CDs. I rave about these every chance I get because they have added such riches to my children’s imaginations. For years, they have listened to Jim’s stories after lights-out. Greek myths, Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, folk and fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, the Jungle Book: of such stuff are dreams woven.
Continuing our best gifts for homeschoolers (or really any kid) series, here are a couple of big-hit items my kids have received on holidays past.
Settlers of Catan. Our favorite board game EVER. You play that you’re settlers in a strange land, using natural resources to build homes, villages, and cities. Sound dry? Not a bit. It’s absorbing, exciting, and addictive. There’s a Knights of Catan extension set, too.
WEDGiTS. These plastic stacking toys have been one of my most successful toy purchases ever. They’re popular with every single kid in my house, from the eleven-year-old on down. Wonderboy (almost three) plays with them all day long. They nest into pyramid shapes, or you can turn them on end and build tall structures and contraptions. We keep a large basket in the living room, and hardly a day passes that they don’t wind up taking over the rug. Timberdoodle used to have the best price—I haven’t compared lately as we’ve had our big set for several years now.
(Attention non-homeschoolers: big long list of Fun Stuff below! Scroll down to below the Dali painting.)
I’ve been hearing from a lot of people who took the “What kind of homeschooler are you?” quiz and came up as unschoolers, much to their surprise. It seems many of us recognize those muddy children in the first question as our own, and our families do a lot of experiential learning. To learn about Native Americans, we might try our hand at grinding corn to make our bread. Our dining-room tables are buried under “3 marbles, 2 dominoes, 5 Scrabble tiles, a 1/2-eaten jelly sandwich, 1 basket of unfolded clean laundry, 4 broken crayons, 3 markers (1 without a cap), a can of fish food, 2 screwdrivers, and a hammer.” When Life interrupts our plans with a sick relative or a cross-country move, we scrap the plans and learn what the roller coaster has to teach us.
Home education is a lifestyle as much as it is a school choice. Its rhythms and possibilities are so utterly unlike institutional education that it sometimes takes us a while, as homeschooling parents, to shake off the years of training that told us “education” was answering enough questions correctly on enough tests to earn us the grades that satisfied our parents and teachers. Whether or not we would remember the answers to those questions a year later seemed to be beside the point.
But once we do shake off that notion, we discover that there are a lot of other notions out there about what a good education is and how best to achieve it. And here we are back at the how.
Let’s look at some of the different answers to how and talk in very practical, specific terms about what stuff you can use if you want to educate your kids according to a particular how or method.
First up: Unschooling.
“Melting clocks are not a problem in your reality. You are an unschooler. You will tolerate a textbook, but only as a last resort. Mud is your friend. You prefer hands-on everything. If your school had an anthem, it would be Dont Worry, Be Happy.” (From Guilt-Free Homeschooling’s What Kind of Homeschooler Are You quiz.)
I’m laughing here, because the rest of this post has a completely oxymoronic premise. “Hi, I’m talking about curriculum! Let’s start with unschooling!” And unschooling is about learning through following your interests, not following a predetermined sequence of skill-building exercises and fact memorization. Unschoolers don’t try to recreate school at home, so who needs curriculum?
But I think of curriculum—all those books and schedules and lists and kits and guides and videos—as tools. Just because I have a good tool set, that doesn’t mean I’m a carpenter. I might just be a person who likes to make stuff, in which case a good hammer and saw come in handy.
So what are some of the tools a household of unschoolers might use? Besides the obvious, I mean, the good books, the art supplies, the kitchen, the garden, pretty much the whole wide world. Here is a list of Some Particularly Cool Stuff My Kids and I Have Learned a Ton From or Just Plain Had a Good Time With:
Settlers of Catan, the board game. Jane got this for Christmas last year. We’ve been obsessed ever since. Except when our friends hijack it and keep it for weeks because it is that great a game.
Signing Time DVDs. Catchy songs, immensely useful vocabulary in American Sign Language. I trumpet these wherever I go. We talk about Rachel like she’s one of the family.
Prismacolor colored pencils. Indispensable. I was amused to see that Jane mentioned them in the first line of her “I Am From” poem. She’s right; they have helped color the picture of her life.
Uncle Josh’s Outline Map CD-Rom. Because maps are cool, and maps you can color (with Prismacolor pencils, hey!) are even cooler. The kids are constantly asking me to print out a map of somewhere or other. You can find other outline maps available online (for free), but I like Josh’s for clarity. And once when I had a problem opening a particular map (it’s a PDF file), I called the help number and it was Uncle Josh himself, a most amiable gentleman, who quickly solved my problem.
The Global Puzzle. Big! Very big! Will take over your dinner table! (So clear off that laundry.)
Set. It may annoy you that your eight-year-old will be quicker at spotting the patterns in this card game than you will. There’s a free daily online version as well.
Quiddler. Like Scrabble, only with cards. This, too, can be played online.
Wild Goose Science Kits. Fun experiments with a low mess factor. Best prices at Timberdoodle. Note to self: remember the Wild Goose Crime Kit come Christmastime.
A microscope. Sonlight sells a nifty set of prepared slides with paramecium and other fun stuff for the kids to peer at.
If the scope sparks an interest in dissection, there’s a way to do it online with no actual innards involved: Froguts! The site has a couple of free demos to occupy you while you save up for the full version. (Which I haven’t seen yet, but it does look cool.) HT: Karen Edmisten.
Klutz kits. Over the years, we’ve explored: knitting, embroidery, origami, magic, Sculpey, paper collage, paper dolls, beadlings, and foam shapes. Look under any piece of furniture in my house and you will find remnants of all of the above.
Which reminds me: Sculpey clay. Is it possible to get through a day without some? My children think not.
Usborne’s calligraphy book and markers. I think Anne-Marie sells Usborne so she probably has more information if you’re interested.
But while I’m on Usborne, my kids also love and use at least weekly: Usborne Science Experiments Volumes 1, 2, and 3.
Muse magazine. The highlight of Jane’s month. From the publishers of Cricket.
Classical Kids CDs. Beanie’s favorite is the Vivaldi. Alice’s daughter Theresa does a fabulous Queen of the Night impersonation from the Mozart.
Refrigerator poetry magnets. I gave Scott the Shakespearean set a couple of Christmases ago. Note to self: You are not as brilliant as you think! You were an English major, for Pete’s sake, with a minor in drama. Thou knowest full well old William was a bawdy lad. If you don’t want your little ones writing poems about codpieces, stick to the basic version. But oh how I enjoy the messages Scott leaves for me to find and then pretends he doesn’t know who wrote them:
I am
so
in love
with my
delicate
wench.
And of course of course of course, Jim Weiss story CDs. I rave about these every chance I get because they have added such riches to my children’s imaginations. For years, they have listened to Jim’s stories after lights-out. Greek myths, Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, folk and fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, the Jungle Book: of such stuff are dreams woven.
A good source for much of the above (and lots more): FUN Books.
I’ll continue to add to this list as more good stuff occurs to me. Your suggestions are welcome and encouraged!
Coming up next: Charlotte Mason. But bear with me: these linky posts take a while.
The week’s other big research project (for various children) had to do with Tamagotchis—the craze has resurfaced here, after a year of dead batteries. Growth charts, game strategies, daily logs: it’s like living in a research lab. One of the sites that turned up on our search was this critical analysis of Tamagotchi use, which I found quite interesting, especially this bit:
, the board game. Jane got this for Christmas last year. We’ve been obsessed ever since. Except when our friends hijack it and keep it for weeks because it is that great a game.
. These plastic stacking toys have been one of my most successful toy purchases ever. They’re popular with every single kid in my house, from the eleven-year-old on down. Wonderboy (almost three) plays with them all day long. They nest into pyramid shapes, or you can turn them on end and build tall structures and contraptions. We keep a large basket in the living room, and hardly a day passes that they don’t wind up taking over the rug. 
. Because maps are cool, and maps you can color (with Prismacolor pencils, hey!) are even cooler. The kids are constantly asking me to print out a map of somewhere or other. You can find other outline maps available online (for free), but I like Josh’s for clarity. And once when I had a problem opening a particular map (it’s a PDF file), I called the help number and it was Uncle Josh himself, a most amiable gentleman, who quickly solved my problem.
. Big! Very big! Will take over your dinner table! (So clear off that laundry.)
. Like Scrabble, only with cards. This, too, can be played 
, the game. Like Trivial Pursuit, only with history.
and 
. Logic and problem-solving puzzles: a fun way to pass the time on long car trips or in waiting rooms.
computer game. Stretch your brain trying to get the little Zoombinis to a village where they can bounce in peace.
. The game that launched a massive 
. Plant a sunflower house! Up-end a Giant Bucket of Potatoes and dig through the dirt for your rewards! Grow lettuce in rainboots! Boots! With lettuce growing in them!
magazine. The highlight of Jane’s month. From the publishers of Cricket.