"Why Is There an Apple with a Knife Stuck in It in the Fridge?"

Husbands and fathers of homeschoolers have to put up with all kinds of weirdness. When we were staying with Steve in Kansas, he wondered why an apple with a knife stuck in it was in the refrigerator. I explained that we were modeling why seasons occur. Then, he asked why I had the string and tacks out. I told him I forgot to put them away after drawing an ellipse with a string. He had never heard of that before, so it was our turn to teach our resident engineer something new!

When we read science books, we don't just read them. Often we try to live them. Pamela and I were learning about the seasons and why they occur. I had a feeling that the diagram in the book and written explanation might not be enough to make it clear. I labeled an apple with the letter N for north pole and S for south pole. Then I drew a line representing the equator and labeled that. I stuck a knife in it to represent the polar axis.

Then, we took a piece of cardboard and practiced drawing circles and ellipses with a piece of string. We drew an ellipse on a big piece of cardboard, and I made four marks to represent the four seasons. I did not label them because that is what we were going to discover! We darkened the room, removed the lampshade, and placed the lamp in the middle of the ellipse. The plan was to tilt the apple, move it around the lamp in an elliptical orbit, and mark the seasons.

We did something similar to illustrate night and day way back when I homeschooled Pamela and David. David caught on immediately to the idea that day was where the light shined and night was in the shadow. Pamela could not make the connection at all but, at least, she learned that the earth spins. Last year, we revisited the day and night demonstration, and it clicked for Pamela. I suspected she might be ready to grasp the connection between the earth's orbit and seasons.

Her background knowledge played a role in how I structured this. Pamela, a savant in calendars, knows many facts about the calendar. She taught this to herself by researching it on Google.

• A common year has 365 days.
• A leap year has 366 days.
• February 29 only occurs in a leap year.
• Spring begins around March 20 or 21.
• Summer begins around June 20 or 21.
• Fall begins around September 22 or 23.
• Spring begins around December 21 or 22.

Unlike most people I know, Pamela has an advantage: not only have we lived in Alaska where days are really long in the summer and nights are really long in the winter, we have visited family in two countries near the equator (El Salvador and Guatemala). We have also stayed in South America for nearly a month. In 2006, we left Carolina on a hot summer day before the equinox and arrived in Santiago, Chile on a chilly winter day. Three weeks later, we said adios to the spring blossoms of Chile and hello to the cooling fall temperatures of Carolina. Pamela saw for herself seasonal oddities that other children must be told. Life experiences have given her more facts.

• When it is summer in North America, it is winter in South America (and vice versa).
• When it is spring in North America, it is fall in South America (and vice versa).
• Days are longer in summer, and shorter in winter, especially when you live closer to one of the poles.
• Some countries never have snow (the ones near the equator).

Since she understood why we experience day and night last year, I had hope the seasons would make sense to her. First, we tried the day/night demonstration to tie into her prior understanding and she had no trouble pointing out to me which part of the apple had day and night. Then, I tilted the apple and began moving it along an elliptical orbit. I stopped at the location for summer in North America, and Pamela could easily see how the sun was shining very constantly on the North Pole while the South Pole was stayed in darkness. Because of her previous experience, she saw right away how it had to be summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern. We marked that on the elliptical cardboard. We continued working through the seasons, and the next day Pamela copied the diagram from her book into her science journal.
After she drew her diagram, we spent the week reading about the seasons and their connection to the motion of the earth. We drove back to Carolina and read another chapter on the northern lights the following week. We studied the seasons three weeks ago and have not reviewed any of the material. I did not drill her on facts because that is not part of a Mason paradigm. The video is a short clip of what she narrated about the chapter on seasons. While the transcript does not look like much, you have to watch the video and see how she uses her hands to illustrate the orbit of the earth and demonstrate her clear understanding.

The earth was spinning from year. Days—about 365 and 366 days leap year and common year. Around Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter.

You Know You're Taking a Science Exam in a CM School When the First Half Minute Is about the Government

One thing you learn early on with living books is that it's hard to confine them to one subject. They have a delightful way of taking all sorts of rabbit trails. Yesterday Pamela did several examinations. The one about a science book started off like this:

They making a, they doing a bill. Congress. They wrote for your vote. Congress, they're in Washington. House, they had the bill. C-SPAN, they have President. Senate.

Was Pamela adding filler to the exam like so many of us have done in our blue books in years past? Nope! The first chapter we read in this science book was about politics. What does science have to do with politics? Money! The topic of this book is technology, the kind of technology that alters forever how the world communicates. Sometimes, expansion of such technology is funded privately as consumers drive the widening of a network. At other times, the project is so grand, linking nation to nation, requiring large amounts of money, treaties, and legal minutia. The first topic of Pamela's exam narration accurately represents the material she read, taking into account her struggles with aphasia and how well she can communicate.

This week, Pamela and I will wrap up the last few exams for Term 1. Pamela did nothing to prepare for exam week as suggested by Charlotte Mason: "Children taught in this way are remarkable for their keenness after knowledge, and do well afterwards in any examination for which they may have to prepare" (Preface). She had been preparing for them during the entire term by reading and narrating living books every day. Whenever I gave her a choice of narrating one of two stories from a book for an exam, she opted to do both! During exam week, she has smiled often, chuckled and giggled many times, and talked about what she knew supplemented with the most lovely body language. If you doubt me, I dare you to watch the video.



Compare those sweet moments to your experience with exams as a student or as a homeschooling parent. Don't you wish you had had that much fun when you took exams in school? Compare it to the typical experience of cramming as described by Charlotte Mason,

When the schoolboy 'crams' for an examination, writes down what he has thus learned, and behold, it is gone from his gaze for ever: as Ruskin puts it, "They cram to pass, and not to know, they do pass, and they don't know"...we learn that we may know, not that we may grow; hence the parrot-like saying of lessons, the cramming of ill-digested facts for examinations, all the ways of taking in knowledge which the mind does not assimilate. (Pages 155-157)

Here are some points to keep in mind about elementary school examinations:

• The point is for the child to share what they know and what they think. Exams are a record of what the child knows, not an exercise in tricking the child or uncovering what they don't know.
• Young children narrate their exams orally: teachers or parents record the narration. In Pamela's case, I pay attention to nonverbal communication.
• Examinations are done at the end of a term.
• Questions are open-ended: "Tell the story of..." "Tell the history of [a particular person]." "Describe [a particular event]." "Describe a journey through/to [a particular place]." "Tell what you learned about [a particular place]." "Tell a fairy tale." "Describe your favorite scene from [a book or play]." "Tell about the..." "Draw a diagram or map of..." "Describe [a process in nature]." "What have you noticed yourself about..." [We did worms this term]" (Appendix II)
• Some things to be narrated involve opinions: "Why do you think?" "What do you think this means?" "What is [an idea] and give an example?"
• Examinations include singing a song or line from a instrumental composition, describing a favorite painting, reciting a poem, acting out a scene, and speaking or singing in a foreign language.
• Because of Pamela's theory of mind gaps and difficulties in sequencing thoughts, I do have to make additional declarative comments to help her share more fully what I know she knows.

Lessons Learned about Pamela

• Pamela takes great delight in narrating. She enjoyed exam week.
• Her sense of time and technology is exceptional. She easily spots anachronisms.
• She sees connections between books.
• Her nonverbal communication emphasizes what she expresses verbally. Her body language continues to blossom.
• Her ability to retrieve names, pronouns, and verbs is limited. She knows them but she struggles to retrieve them while narrating.
• Her sequencing is still confused.

My Lessons Learned for Me

• Doing handwork helps slow me down and refrain from talking too much.
• I need to think through a plan to work on word retrieval issues and sequencing.
• I am so thrilled that Pamela uses her body to express herself, even when her words are limited.

The point that I insist upon, however, is that from his sixth year the child should be an "educated child" for his age, should love his lesson books, and enjoy a terminal examination on the books he has read. Children brought up largely on books compare favourably with those educated on a few books and many lectures; they have generous enthusiasms, keen sympathies, a wide outlook and sound judgment, because they are treated from the first as beings of "large discourse looking before and after." They are persons of leisure too, with time for hobbies, because their work is easily done in the hours of morning school. (Page 305)

The Proper Care and Feeding of Worms

In the past few months, I have touched on our vermicomposting experience. I had blogged more posts on worms in my head, and now I will share them with you. Yeah, it's been busy.

Sequence of Events

• We spent a few weeks preparing bedding for the worm bin: newspaper, toilet paper and paper towel rollers, cardboard boxes, egg cartons, drink cartons, etc. I plan to put some of our fall leaves to good use too.
• Since I did not want to invest in some pricey worm bin until we knew what we were doing, we made a cheap one out of Rubbermaid bins: Red Worm Composting's "Deluxe" Worm Bin. I blogged a bit about making the worm bin.
• We prepped the proper food for worms (basically, raw vegetable and fruit waste, coffee grounds, egg shells). We set up the bin with bedding, food, and a little bit of dirt and left it alone for two weeks as recommended by the guys at Red Worm Composting before ordering the worms.
• We ordered a pound of red worms from a supplier here in Carolina! The following video shows Pamela opening up the box of worms that came by U. S. Mail.

Here is how the worms looked on the first day they arrived. You cannot see them but they are there.



Here is a photograph of them today.



Every once in a while, we pull off the top layer of bedding and study the worms. Pamela has made two entries in her nature notebook so far.





Worms are more low maintenance than I expected if you keep in mind a couple of tips. I keep them in the laundry room with the light on at all times. They have a habit of trying to escape before they become accustomed to their new surroundings. We occasionally have a small outbreak of fruit flies, which I deal with in a natural way: (1) put a thick layer of bedding on top of the food and (2) keep a dish of cider vinegar mixed with dish soap near the bin (the vinegar attracts them and the dish soap traps them). I feed them only once a week and left them unattended for ten days when we went to Kansas. I am not sure how long is too long. January is the earliest we can harvest castings, but I can tell you we are already seeing a solid amount of black gold for the garden.

Since Pamela has learned quite a bit about worms through first hand experience, I picked the topic of worms for her nature study exam. Exams in a Charlotte Mason style of education are stress-free. All Pamela needs to do is tell me what she knows about worms. A couple of times I follow up with questions designed to let her narrate what she knows but has not thought to share with me. She did a lovely job of narrating what she has learned about vermicomposting this term.

This video illustrates the nature of aphasia well. Sometimes, Pamela speaks in full clear sentences. At other times, single words pop in her head. One thing that has really opened up her confidence, even when semantics and syntax are lagging, is what I learned from Relationship Development Intervention: keep a slow pace and give her time to think, avoid the temptation to correct her all the time, rephrase what she says with no pressure for her to repeat, encourage nonverbal communication, etc. In fact, following these three tips in communicating with a person with autism can forever change their ability to communicate back.

I love the ending when she says, "Feel happy," and kisses me on my arm. How many teachers do you know get kissed after an exam?

The worm was wiggling. It had small head, and it's eating foods. Worms had a hole. Go in. Worm's head doesn't have holes. Holes on the box. We have bananas. Yummy! Box, dirt, poop. Poop look yucky! BROWN POOP! It has dirt yucky. It's pink line. No legs. Get ready for the food and box. Paper was ripped: the bags, papers, white paper, newspaper. They set up the home. They get the new worms from the mail. Feel happy.

101 Plus One for Good Luck

Around this time last year, I shared Pamela narrating a fairy tale in Spanish (Ricitos de Oro y los tres osos). We spent the fall listening to another fairy tale (Caperucita Roja). New readers to my blog may wonder why Pamela is learning Spanish when she is still working on English as a first language. My husband was born and raised in Latin America. Half of our extended family is fluent in English and Spanish, and we occasionally travel to El Salvador to visit them. More importantly, Pamela enjoys learning her father's language.

Back in 2010, I shared our plan to build an ear for Spanish. We teach Spanish completely orally through audio books while we study and point to pictures and sing folk songs. Last year's blog post explains our rationale, so I will not repeat it here. Because Steve is in Kansas, we found it hard to record series, so we are testing out a program for CLUSA that meets the criteria of focusing on audio and pictures in the early stages of picking up a second language. The two of us are making progress in hearing Spanish and speaking it a bit.

While we are focusing on receptive language, her expressive language is coming along, too. I assessed how her Spanish is coming along in several ways. I said words in Spanish and she pointed to pictures and I said words in Spanish and she told me what they meant in English. Pamela sang two folk songs that she learned this year ("El Coqui" and "Al Tambor"). She also narrated "Little Red Riding Hood" in Spanish while looking at pictures scanned and printed from the storybook (which I keep hidden to prevent her from seeing written words). Pamela correctly identified 102 words or phrases covered this term. She knows even more words from last year, so her understanding of Spanish is improving. She is doing so well, I think she will be ready for copywork and reading next year!

Vocabulary Words: la abuela, la abuelita, adiós, adónde, allí, amarillo, el amigo, el árbol, el autobús, el automóvil, auxilio, el avión, bebiendo, el bocado, bonita, el bosque, la cama, caminaba, la camisa, el camisón, cansado, cantar, la carne, la casa, cerró, comerte, comiendo, comió, el coqui, corría, la cuchara, la cuchillo, de, de bajo, despacio, el día, el diente, dijo, donde, dormido, en, enferma, enorme, está , la flor, fuera, las gafas, el gorro, grande, guapo, la hacha, hasta la vista, el huevo, el lápiz, la leche, el leñador, el lobo, malo, la mamá, la mano, la mantequilla, la manzana, el médico, la mesa, morado, muy bien, el nariz, la niña, el niño, nunca, el ojo, olerte, la oreja, el pan, pasa, pequeño, la piedra, el plato, el pollo, por favor, la puerta, qué asco, quién es, rico, rojo, la señora, la silla, sobre, socorro, soy yo, el tambor, la taza, el tazón, el tenedor, tengo hambre, tengo sueño, el vaso, a ver, verte, vivan, y, la zanahoria

Spanish Folk Songs


When you watch the video of Pamela, you might think she is reading. She is not. She is looking at pictures of the story and narrating what she recalls. I love how Pamela references me by turning to look at me face-to-face when she needs help with a word. She did this three times for orejas, nariz, and leñador. Her narration is a combination of memorized script but also her original wording. Many times in her narration, she uses different words not originally in the book.

"Little Red Riding Hood"

Caperucita Roja: Su mamá. She’s so bonita. Un día su mamá Caperucita Roja, “Capericita Roja, abuelita enferma. Por favor, llévale cesta.” “Muy bien, mamá,” dijo Caperucito. Caperucita Roja, cuando de repente salió un lobo detrás árbol. “¿Caperucita Roja, adónde vas?” “Mi abuelita, alli.” “Adiós, Caperucita Roja. Hasta la vista.” “Adiós, Señor Lobo.” Caperucita Roja caminaba despacio, muy despacio bosque. “Una flor bonita. ¡Flor, qué bonita!” Y el lobo corría y corría. Caperucita Roja caminaba despacio, muy despacio. “Bonita flor. ¡Qué bonita!” Y el lobo corría, corría. Caperucita Roja caminaba despacio. Esta bien bosque. “Bonita. ¡Qué bonita!” Wolf corría, corría. El lobo tan, tan. “¿Quién es?” dijo abuelita. “Soy yo, Caperucita Roja.” “Pasa, pasa, querida.” Lobo comió se. Y lobo. “¡Yuck! No me gustó abuelita. Tengo hambre... Caperucita Roja.” Lobo camisón, gorro, gafas. “¡Qué guapo!” Caperucita Roja despacio. “Flor enorme. ¡Qué bonita!” Caperucita Roja tan, tan. “¿Quién es?” dijo lobo. “Soy yo, Caperucita Roja,” dijo Caperucita. “¡Abuelita, qué ojos!” Dijo lobo. “Abuelita, abuelita ¡qué tienes más!”—What’s nose?“ Nariz, nariz más grande. Abuelita, abuelita ¡qué tienes más!”—What’s ears means? “Orejas. Abuelita, abuelita dientes los.” Y el lobo comió Caperucita. “¡Muy rica! ¡Una cestita! ¡Leche! No me gusta leche. ¡Fuera! A ver... ¡mantequilla! No me gusta mantequilla. El pan.” Lobo. Caperucita Roja. “¡Qué sueño tengo! ¡Lleno estoy!” Dormido. Poco después lobo—Woodcutter means? Y leñador see lobo. “¡Auxilio! ¡Socorro!” Un leñador say, “Crash!” Un leñador, Caperucita Roja y abuelita. Caperucita Roja y abuelita más y más. El lobo is done. !Ohhhhhh! And lobo nunca más volvió. Caperucita Roja dijo y abuela, “¡Muy rica!”

Little Red Riding Hood: Her mother is so pretty. One day, her mother to Little Red Riding Home. One day, her mother Little Red Riding Hood, “Little Red Riding Hood, grandmother sick. Please take basket.” “Yes, Mom,” said Little Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood, when suddenly came a bad wolf from behind a tree. “Little Red Riding Hood, where are you going?” “My grandmother, over there.” “Good-bye, Little Red Riding Hood. See you soon.” “Good-bye, Mr. Wolf.” Little Red Riding Hood walked slowly, very slowly woods. “A pretty flower. Flower, how pretty!” And the wolf ran and ran. Little Red Riding Hood walked slowly, very slowly. “Pretty flower. How pretty!” And the wolf ran, ran. Little Red Riding Hood walked slowly. It is good woods. “Pretty. How pretty!” Wolf ran, ran. The lobo knock, knock. “Who is it?” said grandmother. “It’s Little Red Riding Hood.” “Come in, come in, dear.” Wolf eats her. And wolf. “Yuck! I don’t like grandmother. I’m hungry... Little Red Riding Hood.” Wolf nightgown, cap, glasses. Little Red Riding Hood slowly. “Large flower. How pretty!” Little Red Riding Hood knock, knock. “Who is it?” said wolf. “It’s Little Red Riding Hood,” said Little Riding Hood. Said wolf. “Grandma, grandma, what you have big!”—What’s nose? “Nose, very big nose. Grandma, grandma what you have big!”—What’s ears means? “Ears. Grandma, grandma the teeth.” And the wolf ate Little Riding Hood. “Very tasty! A little basket! Milk! I don’t like milk. Get out! Let’s see... butter! I don’t like butter! The bread.” Wolf. Little Red Riding Hood. “I’m sleepy! I’m full.” He slept. A little later wolf—Woodcutter means? And woodcutter see wolf. “Help! Help!” A woodcutter say, “Crash!” A woodcutter, Little Red Riding Hood, and grandma. LIttle Red Riding Hood and grandma more and more. The wolf is done. “!Ohhhhhh!” And wolf never came back. Little Red Riding Hood said and Grandma, “¡Very tasty!”


A Broad Range of Communication

Communication is more than text. We have been doing exams, which are narrations of what Pamela learned in Term 1. I have been recording the exams so I can write a transcript of them. We made it all the way through Act III, Scene I of Shakespeare's play "Julius Caesar"—yes, we are really reading the entire play, unabridged, bits at a time, after watching a BBC recording of the passage. Reading just the transcript only tells you the words she used and what she remembered to share. Since Pamela struggles with aphasia, you might not be impressed by what she had to say.

He is marching: Caesar. Caesar! Caesar! Caesar! They saw Brutus. They saw a fortuneteller. Ides of March. Beware of the Ides of March. They had a fortuneteller because they had a rain. Caesar was sick because party. Brutus whack Caesar. Caesar death. They had Mark Antony. Mark Antony was angry. They are having a funeral.

There are many things you cannot tell from pure text. Does Pamela enjoy reading Shakespeare, or is it a deadly dull droning of meaningless words for her? Would she be able to act out any of the play? Does the story affect her emotions? Since Pamela said so little about over two acts of a five-act play, should I give up on the bard? Why give a person with autism a task that befuddles high schoolers who speak English and understand emotion perfectly well?

Now try reading the text with a description of Pamela's nonverbal communication. Clearly, she could act out some scenes in the play for Pamela was quite active even though she sat during her narration. Her emotions change appropriately throughout the narration. Her shifts of attention to me reveals a high level of comfort with the material.

He is marching: Caesar. [Turns her head to me abruptly. Almost like a soldier. Chants and pumps fist.] Caesar! Caesar! Caesar! [Giggles and recovers her composure.] They saw Brutus. [Gazes at me.] They saw a fortuneteller. [Laughs. Turns hand as if doing an aside.] Ides of March. [Looks to the camera. Imitates the tone of the fortuneteller in the BBC play.] Beware of the Ides of March. They had a fortuneteller because they had a rain. [Looks at me again.] Caesar was sick because party. [Leans head back. Strikes her chest.] Brutus whack Caesar. [Feigns death.] Caesar death. [Turns head to think. Looks at me again.] They had Mark Antony. [Quickens pace of speech.] Mark Antony was angry. [Acts angry and covers face.] They are having a funeral.

You still do not have a clear picture of how the play captures Pamela's imagination until you see how she narrates it. As you watch Pamela narrate, keep in mind, as my friend Di points out in her presentation on communication,

Children with ASD found to experience particular difficulty with:

• gaze shifts,
• shared positive affect,
• joint attention,
• using a range of communication means and functions,
• use of gestures/non-verbal's,
• social affective signaling and
• imitation.

Relationship Development Intervention helped me become a better guide to Pamela so that she could broaden her ability to communicate more effectively (among other things). By decreasing my verbal communication, I gave Pamela the chance to be an equal and competent partner. By increasing my nonverbal communication, Pamela learned to understand it and communicate nonverbally herself. By slowing down and feeling comfortable with long pauses, I gave her time to process what I communicated and think through her own response. (Check out Di's presentation for more specifics on this.)

I edited out my part in setting up and keeping the narration going. My role was completely opposite to what is usually recommended for teaching autistic children to speak.

• I began with a very open-ended question: "What do you know about the play Julius Caesar by Shakespeare?"
• I did not interrupt her to correct grammatical errors.
• I gazed at her attentively, smiled (because I truly enjoyed watching her narrate), and affirmed her with nods.
• I did not hit her with a bunch of nit-picky questions that would cause her to falter.

The whole point of narration is to share what you know, which comes instinctively to most of us anyway. If you are a bit foggy on this effective, quick, and inexpensive way to assess children, check out this classic article: We Narrate and Then We Know.

Exams and Assessment

When Pamela was six years old, she could only echo back what you said in the last three seconds. When she was twelve years old, she could process a word or two and cue off that, usually misunderstanding what was said, leading to a meltdown. Her auditory processing has made huge strides since then.

Yesterday, Pamela wanted to go on a health food store run. I wasn't in the mood to sit in the car for an hour, so I made an excuse about not having time for I had to put away the Christmas decorations, which were down, but not stored. Pamela eagerly joined my in wrapping and storing the ornaments and even made three trips upstairs to find the paper towels. We finished after only a half hour of effort, so I lost my excuse.

Steve joined us because I was under the weather with a slightly sore throat. We stopped at McDonald's to pick up two small cappuccinos for the road. He told us about the difficulty of the folks at the Mickey D's in Monck's Corner have with making a cappuccino without flavor. He asked, "And what do you think they added?"and paused expectantly. From the backseat, Pamela chimed in, "Flavor!"

After we made it home, Steve asked me if I was going to church. I told him it depends. David asked why. Since Pamela discourages us from talking about illness, I spelled out my dilemma with the military alphabet, "Charlie Oscar Lima Delta." Even though she was in another room, Pamela bolted into the television room to ask, "Who's Charlie Oscar?" Before long, she's going to have us speaking in pig latin . . .

When I assess what helped Pamela make such wonderful progress, I can boil it down to three things: (1) three hours a day of reading books aloud to Pamela sharpened her auditory processing, (2) three years of the association method helped her with the mechanics of language, and (3) Relationship Development Intervention enabled her to think flexibly and engage socially.

What does this have to do with exams, you ask? For me, exam week has verly little to do with blue books, bubble tests, and sharp pencils. It is about discovering what Pamela knows, how much larger her world has become, and what milestones are in the making. It is about deciding how I am doing as her guide and about changing the curricula to make it work for her. Exams include not only assessing her, but also assessing me and the curricula.

I consider her exams a resounding success:

• Pamela narrates better when I talk less (a lesson RDI taught me).
• I need change to our old Ambleside Online standby A Child's History of the World for our history spine. Pamela lacks the background book for the book we were using and her narrations proved that point.
• Pamela needs to build a background for world history before going to a detailed, chronological retelling. I plan to pull out another old Ambleside Online standby Fifty Famous Stories Retold and read one story about a post-Roman Empire person a week.
• Next year, she can focus on history past the fall of the Roman Empire and will have the background stories to make her ready for it.
• Pamela processes absolutely nothing about Greek mythology. I plan to table it until next year and, perhaps, build from a known (Disney's Hercules) by picking stories of gods and goddess from that movie and going from there.
• Pamela needs two years with RightStart Intermediate Math rather than one.
• After all these years, Pamela has a newfound sense of story. In her narrations, I see a beginning, middle, and end starting to emerge. Last year, all she could do was three unrelated sentences.
• When she alternates reading aloud, Pamela needs very little guidance from me. She listens to me read and knows I will stop at the end of a sentence. If her eyes were not tracking, she remembers the last word I said (she repeats it aloud on her own) and finds it. Only occasionally will she ask me, "Where?"
• Pamela definitely lives in a larger world. She learned about new people, new inventions, new plants, more about familiar animals. She learned new songs and new paintings and drawings. She understood more about the seasons and geography. She added more words to her vocabulary, which now has many Spanish words.

The Case for Narration
Over a hundred years ago, Charlotte Mason chose narration as the most efficient way to assess true understanding and to store new knowledge into long-term memory. Pamela didn't study for her exams. All last term, she took turns reading aloud sentences from her books and narrated what she knew. She drew maps for geography, and added drawings to her drawing notebook and drew pictures and wrote narrations for her timeline notebook. She did some nature study and experiments, recording her observations on paper. Education researchers call this "retrieval practice procedures and reconstructing knowledge."

A recent study compared the test preparation techniques of four groups. The first read a science text for five minutes. The second read the material in four consecutive five-minute study sessions (more is better, right?). The third made concept maps by filling in hand-drawn bubbles to connect ideas and concepts, the golden standard of modern study techniques. The fourth read the material, put the text away, spent ten minutes writing what they recalled in a free-form essay (what Mason called written narration), reread it, and wrote some more.

Note: Too many headlines are calling this taking a practice test. We all know that typical tests involve multiple guess and lots of WH questions. These researchers tested through essay, which is another way to say written narration, and, at least, Science Daily got it right!

The scientists found several advantages to retrieval practice procedures for storing new knowledge in long term memory:

• Students show greater gains in meaningful learning.
• Performance generalized across texts identical to those commonly found in science education.
• Essays were effective for comprehension questions and inferences and for creating concept maps.

These surprising results have lead to speculation about why narrating what you read works. Education professor, Marcia Linn said students in the fourth group may "recognize some gaps in their knowledge and they might revisit the ideas in the back of their mind or the front of their mind." They can "retrieve it and organize the knowledge that they have in a way that makes sense to them." Psychologist Nate Kornell stated, "Even though in the short term it may seem like a waste of time, [retrieval practice appears to] make things stick in a way that may not be used in the classroom." More importantly, "It’s going to last for the rest of their schooling, and potentially for the rest of their lives."

My favorite education psychologist Daniel Willingham concluded with the howler of the day, "It's not totally obvious that this is shovel-read--put it in the classroom and it's good to go--for educators this ought to be a big deal."

Has he not been reading my blog? Written narration has been shovel-ready for over a hundred years! I can forgive him for he wrote an important article about why stories are so effective in the classroom.

I have a very simple lesson plan for almost everything. "Tell me what we read yesterday." If she has a blank, I might give her an anchor like "Yesterday, we read about poor King Alfred. What happened to him?" If it is a completely new topic, I might tie it into something she already knows. "Do you remember the book we read about Francis Marion? Well, today, we are going to start a new one about another patriot named Thomas Sumter. Sometimes, we consult a map before a reading or copy a picture.

Then, we read. Pamela and I alternate reading sentences aloud because it improves her oral expression. When we get a reasonable chunk of reading done, she stops and narrates. Then we read more and she stops and narrates. When finished, I look for connections to my life or other books. In one book, a ship was setting sail from Port-aux-Basque, Newfoundland. I told her that I had taken a ferry from that same city to Nova Scotia when we moved back to the United States. Sometimes, Pamela will tell me her connections: John the Baptist dressed like a caveman, the Swamp Fox reminded her of the movie The Patriot, and Lot's wife turned into a sculpture.

During exam week, I tried very hard to limit questions to generic things. "What happened next?" If she is having trouble with that, I tell her the name of the chapter and usually that is enough to job her memory. Sometimes, Pamela forgets to include the name of the person, the time, or the place. If I'm not sure she knows, I might say, "I wonder where he is from" or "I don't know who you are talking about." If I am absolutely sure she knows, I ask her a more direct question.

Julius Caesar Transcript and Video

He [Julius Caesar] was a little boy. He wasn’t strong. He was growing up so fast. He has a sword. They went to France, Spain, and England. No London bell. They want to fight the soldiers. He was strong. He was strong enough. He was fight with the enemies. They fought. They won. Caesar had an election. They had parties [she means parties Caesar held to win supporters, not political parties]. [He grew up] in Rome. [He] lived in one B.C. century.

Drawings
The new thing this year was a drawing notebook. Some of our books have diagrams and illustrations. The process of copying them into her notebook is one more way to learn. During our exam, we talked about things she had learned about the weather. I was curious to see if she understood a new vocabularly word that we had only read about, discussed incidentally, and drawn in her notebook. We never drilled it. When asked "What is precipitation?" Pamela replied, "Rain, snow, flakes, and hail."

Pamela drew two maps to illustrate two topics. She is one-third of the way through the book on the Lewis and Clark expedition. She started the journey in Pittsburgh because that is where the keelboat was built and mapped their progress so far. She also drew the plans for laying the first transatlantic cable. She hasn't finished the book yet, so the exact locations will become clearer and clearer. Pamela drew the phases of the moon too. For sculpture, she drew the Sphinx. When asked to draw a column for architecture, she pointed out the window to the column on the front porch and said, "Over there." She added the flowery flourishes at the top to be like the Egyptians.

Our First Exam Week: Spotlight on Recitation and Music

In an effort to be authentic and transparent, I'm going to reveal the shocking truth about exam week in the Glaser homeschool. We never did it. You thought all Charlotte Mason homeschoolers did them. Well, I never got the hang of it. At least, I never lied to you and said I did. That would be hypocrisy.

Because I always felt like we were behind (behind what, I wonder), I hated to lose even more time doing exams. It didn't kill David who ironically just exempted all of his exams for first semester of his senior year at high school (does God have a sense of humor, or what?). It was extremely difficult to assess Pamela because of her major stumbling block: aphasia! Five years ago, the oral language she is doing today didn't exist. I was still suffering from Enlightenment Thinking, so I would have either felt defeated when my children didn't seem to know what I thought they should know and I would have made the next term miserable for all of us.

Now that I am a recovering Enlightenment Thinker, I think it is safe to try exam week with Pamela. What is Enlightenment Thinking?

• Viewing Pamela as a performer.
• Having a list of things she ought to know.
• Correcting her mistakes and adding them to the list of things to fix.
• Viewing her efforts as purely solo.
• Trying to measure and collect data to prove to the world homeschooling is working.
• Feeling bad about things that she missed because she did it correctly last week.
• Measuring her against other people with autism who are her age.

I am doing several things to inoculate myself from this destructive form of thinking. I am trying to view exams with an eye toward Pamela, the person, and her relationships by considering the following questions:

• Is Pamela's world larger because of this book or activity?
• Do I see her recalling or exploring ideas outside of our formal day?
• Is her known in this area expanding?
• Is this book or activity worth her time?
• If not, is she ready for this level of thinking? Could I find a better resource?
• Is she reaching any new developmental milestones?
• Were there times when her face filled with joy?
• Did she share any knew connections she made?

Spanish

Pamela's narration of Ricitos de Oro in Spanish stunned me, and Steve couldn't get over it. We have come a long way in Spanish since August. She has this story, the nursery songs, and all the audio stories Steve narrated loaded up on her i-Pod Touch. She loves listening to them in her free time. The other day, I caught her watching I even catch her watching The Fox and the Hound in Spanish. Pamela sometimes speaks Spanish in context such as saying "Tengo mucha hambre" before lunch or "No hay más!" after finishing a bowl of food. Once I sang, "Food, glorious, food" while David was feeding the fish and Pamela said, "La comida" (the food in Spanish). Pamela spoke what Spanish she could on our trip to El Salvador and even communicated with Rosa, who spoke no English, through Spanish and gestures. Starting to acquire a second language spoken by half of her family is a major developmental milestone.

I plan to keep using all our resources although the songs are in a challenging key for us. Pamela and I keep switching octaves to sing with the singer on our recordings who must be a baritone. We will press on. I might try a free two-week trial of Speekee, an online program recommended by friends Penny and Queen Mum. It is geared for younger children and might suit her well. If she likes it, we might subscribe and have her work through the ten programs instead of the homemade stories when my schedule gets too full.

Recitation

Pamela loves recitation. She enjoys reciting what she learned last term. Sometimes, she will recite "The Lord's Prayer" and Tennyson's "The Eagle" for fun. She smiles during "The Lord's Prayer" at church. On two different occasions, Pamela spoke Tennyson's lines: while looking at live eagles in Awendaw and at a stuffed eagle at a wildlife refuge visitor's center. It reminded me of a Jane Austen novel when a character quotes a beloved poet. I can tell by her unusually crisp annunciations of the hard c sounds in the first two lines of the poem that Pamela can hear the alliteration and finds it pleasant. I can tell in the pace of her delivery that she feels the poem's rhythm.

Were her recitations absolutely perfect? No! But I loved how Pamela put her own twist on "The Lord's Prayer" by blending the two different versions:

And - our - forgive our debts.
And we forgive our debtors.
And we forgive those who trespass against us.

She got stuck on the fifth line of "The Eagle" and turned to me, "What? What?" She knew it was on the tip of her tongue. She even tried to give me her only clue, "Thunder," because she knew it was in the closing line. Rather than look at it as a failure, I took the opportunity to show her two strategies. First, I repeated the fourth line. I was stuck, too! Then, I started the whole thing over and, as soon as I said, "He watches from," Pamela echoed from and flew solo until the end. It reminded me of what happened to Elizabeth Hughes at the Norfolk Admirals Game--how forgotten lyrics can quickly blossom into a beautiful moment when surrounded by people filled with heart.

Music
Music is going well. Pamela loved our folk song selections. I picked two songs from South Carolina ("I Got a Letter This Morning" and "When the Train Comes Along") and one familiar one ("Skip to My Lou").


While Pamela may not be a candidate for American Idol, she captured that slightly off-key twang of the songs, which melted my heart. She nailed the lyrics of the first verse perfectly in only one song. In another, she artfully wove lines from several verses to make her own version, which is how these songs were created in the first place. In the final song, she used her own unique words. Her inventiveness captured the essence of what folk music really is when you think about it.

Pamela loved the hymns I chose. She needed help finding a good key with Rejoice the Lord Is King and stayed right with me once she got going. Her version of Open Our Eyes, Lord is absolutely precious because she sings with her heart in that one.


Pamela loves classical music. She has it on her i-Pod Touch and alternates between listening to Bach and Beethoven CDs in the car. She can accurately name composers of familiar music if we hear it piped in the store or on the soundtrack of a movie. Last term, we enjoyed exploring Vivaldi. She was already familiar with The Four Seasons and his mandolin concertos. We added the Magnificat and Gloria to her repertoire. Her favorite piece was Spring from "Four Seasons" and Pamela even hummed a few bars for me!

Rethinking Assessment

I attended Lisa Cadora's take on assessment, which was the second plenary session on Thursday morning, right after Amber's talk on geography. Last year, I did not have the opportunity to know Lisa in real life, but her 2006 breakout session entitled Charlotte Mason Meets Veggie-Tales helped me know how she deeply thinks. I have a confession to make . . . when I first read Veggie-Tales in the title, I flippantly scoffed and bypassed her session completely. However, when I actually spent time reading the description, I realized what a gem I had missed because of my complete ignorance (and arrogance)! I ordered the CD from SoundWord. Her talk helped me figure out why I felt a vague uneasiness about the Sunday school curricula I had seen all my life and enabled me to become a better Sunday school teacher. Because of the spiritual growth her talk inspired last year, I was eager to hear more from Lisa in real life.

Lisa calls her talk, "Knowing What Knowers Know: Rethinking Assessment for Human Learners". Lisa begins dramatically with a cold reminder of our collective experience with assessment, "We are weighed, measured, and found wanting" (a paraphrase of Daniel 5:27). This painful pronouncement reflects our culture's view of assessment: we wish to weigh and measure retention of information through examinations and a battery of tests. We nearly always end up finding our students wanting. This leads us to find our teachers, schools, and curricula wanting and, in an effort to escape blame, teachers catch themselves teaching to the test. If test scores continue to drop, then we toss the curricula and replace it with the new and improved curricula on the horizon, only to find ourselves in the same situation as few years down the road.

Americans have developed a theory that we can measure knowledge and knowers through standardized testing and hammer it into a reality of producing better-informed knowers. Charlotte Mason took a different tack: she hit upon narration, her primary assessment tool, by observing how children picked up and retained knowledge. Her observations led her discard oral lessons and textbooks and to favor reading living books. Experience teaching real-live knowers ruled out testing by standards and pointed her to assessing through narration. She refined her ideas by testing them out with students, striving to secure knowledge (children in the PNEU schools). Thus, she applied the exact opposite approach by observing reality and developing a theory based upon that reality.

Lisa Cadora points out factors that affect testing are not taken into account when using standardized tests to critique students, schools, teachers, and curricula. Some students might already know the material, so the educational environment had nothing to do with learning it. Likewise, the student might have learned it through other methods (tutor, self-education, etc.). Unfortunately, the students (and/or teachers) might have cheated. Many students might have simply memorized and promptly forgotten it after the test, a phenomenon covered by Frank Smith in some of his writings. (I called it "pump and dump" during my eighteen years of formal education!)

I would like to add two more factors to Lisa's list. First, we assume that the person who cannot meet the standards cannot reach certain goals. Temple Grandin could not learn algebra for she thinks in pictures and found nothing to visualize in the traditional instruction of algebra. She was told she could not be a cattle chute designer unless she earned a degree in engineering and that required her to master her mathematical nemesis. She settled for a doctorate degree in animal science. She ended up designing cattle chutes anyway: nearly a third of all cattle chutes in the United States are hers! Her chutes are innovative because she thinks of ways to make them more humane by imagining how a cow might perceive her equipment (and, thus, remain calm). Since she can visualize equipment in her mind just by looking at a blueprint (i.e., her brain works like a CAD), she is much more effective in quickly designing new plans. By the way, she pioneered a smaller version of a cattle chute to make a squeeze machine, a device used by autistic children to calm themselves.

The second factor I would add is how inaccurately tests measure achievement of these standards. When we lived in Pennsylvania, homeschool laws required that I test Pamela because her age would have made her a third grader. I reported her as first grade for math and reading based upon her abilities. I chose the Peabody Individual Achievement Test, which requires the child to point out the answers. Due to Pamela's expressive language delays, I thought this might be the best testing format for her. Wrong! The test ends when the child misses five questions in a row. The pre-kindergarten portion of the test required more knowledge of language than math: when shown a picture of a dime, she could say it was ten cents, but could not remember the word dime! She missed five questions in a row like that, so this standardized, normed test assessed someone who could add and subtract and count coins at a pre-kindergarten level! Three months later, I had her tested on the math portion of the WIAT, where she scored at a third grade level! She must have had a lucky day for I know she really was near the end of first grade in math.

Then, Lisa transitions to our official view of knowledge, the scientification of education. At the turn of the century, assessment of education shifted from the literary to a standardized, normed known product. We started to prize certainty over subjectivism, or, to quote Esther Meeks, we began "chasing the carrot of certainty." We take knowledge from the "Knower of All Knowers", God, and chop it up into tiny pieces. The teacher, "our showman to the universe" (page 188), spoon-feeds an isolated piece of knowledge to the student. The student focuses his whole attention on that isolated morsel of knowledge. Like blinders on a horse, the teacher blocks out all other related pieces of knowledge and cuts off access to the knower of all knowers.

At this point, Lisa presents an altered view of knowledge. In this case, knowledge is in its proper context and not chopped up into tiny pieces. Knowledge in this form exerts a force on our mind. Many things affect the student, a knower: the knowledge being studied, knowledge learned previously, other students, the teacher, and the Knower of All Knowers. Likewise, many things affect the teacher, who is also a fellow knower: the knowledge being studied, knowledge learned previously, the students, and the Knower of All Knowers. This model of knowledge is much more dynamic than the formulaic "official" view.

Lisa points out a great example of pursuing knowledge for its own sake from the 2007 Scripps Spelling Bee. An ESPN reporter was interviewing contestants before the bee began. When asked what he thought of the spelling bee, Evan M. O'Dorney disappointed the reporter by gushing about math and music, instead of spelling. In one press report, Evan explained,

I like the way that math works. It's not like spelling, where you have to memorize all the exceptions to all the words. Math is orderly. It makes sense. You can always figure out whether something is true, and once you figure it out, it will always be true, if the logic is correct.

After Evan won the final round of the contest, that reporter hurried back to Evan and asked what he thought of the spelling bee now that he had won. Evan told him he was still more excited about his performance in math contests like the Sandia Go Figure Mathematical Challenge. In fact, the Associated Press article begins like this,

The winner of the spelling bee sounded as if he'd rather be at a math Olympiad. Thirteen-year-old Evan O'Dorney of Danville, Calif., breezed through the Scripps National Spelling Bee with barely a hitch Thursday night, taking the title, the trophy and the prizes in a competition that he confessed really wasn't his favorite. . . Afterward, Evan spoke more enthusiastically about attending a math camp in Nebraska this summer than about becoming the English language's top speller."

Lisa concludes that Charlotte Mason, like Evan, knew the secret behind life-long learning,

The question is not,––how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education––but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him? (page 170-171).

In an earlier post, I mentioned that one expects a richer vocabulary after hearing Jack Beckman speak. Well, one thing I expect from Lisa Cadora is a longer book list: her session added four more books to mine!

* Book of Learning and Forgetting by Frank Smith (Book Review by Derrel Fincher)
* Personal Knowledge by Michael Polyani
* To Know as We Are Known by Parker Palmer (Book Review by Elizabeth Leborgne)
* Longing to Know by Esther Lightcap Meek

Assessing through Narration

Every day of the conference featured keynote speakers, who provided a broad overview of the theme of the conference (assessment). The breakout session speakers delved into the details and gave practical applications of Charlotte Mason's principles.

Thinking about assessment (page 6) is challenging in a “no child left untested” world, which is much like the educational reforms Charlotte Mason faced in her day. To educate all elementary school children inexpensively, England developed six standards of education that covered reading, writing, and arithmetic. The Elementary Education Act of 1870 offered a series of grants to schools based upon student performance in tests that assessed these standards. This method of doling out money to schools became known as “payment by results” (*ahem*, does this sound familiar?). At the time, Charlotte was teaching young children at the Davison School in Worthing and was pioneering a girls’ school. She must have witnessed first hand how the precursor to standardized testing affected children and teachers.

On Wednesday night, Dr. Jack Beckman, Associate Professor of Education at Covenant College, spoke on the topic, "From Enigma to Educationalist - Assessing Charlotte". In my narration of his talk, I am going to begin at the end to remind everyone of an important point! Reality is fixed and objective, but is interpreted by subjective knowers. I, one knower, sat in a frigid auditorium (on about five hours of sleep the previous night) and heard the same presentation as other knowers. The fixed reality of the talk will be available online in the near future. Because I am subjective in my interpretation and may have made errors in my notes, I might unknowingly misrepresent his talk. Thus, this narration is my take on what was said, not an exact transcript!

Jack Beckman began his talk with a practical example of assessment. In one of his classes, he gathers a collection of items for his "Beckman Box": he puts photographs, pictures, and objects that have meaning to him. Then, he asks the students to assess his life by writing an obituary. Because he is "dead" to them, they must immerse themselves in the clues he left behind in his box. With these objects, the students try to describe him and begin to analyze the meaning of the items. When they put all of the knowledge of him gleaned through his objects into a narrative, they end up evaluating what kind of man he was.

Comparing these obituaries to fixed reality, Dr. Beckman finds them to be authentic, but not perfectly accurate. When they encounter gaps, the obituary writers rely upon imagination to make sense of the objects. The students who have prior knowledge (i.e., have attended his classes previously) are often more accurate because they fill the gaps with what they already know.

He mentions the British historian Richard Evans, author of the book In Defence of History, equating the work of a teacher assessing a student to that of a historian. The subjective knower attempts to describe a fixed reality and must become immersed until a narrative becomes clear. The knower might need to rely upon imagination to make sense of the details.

One thing any person with prior knowledge of Jack Beckman ought to expect from one of his lectures is a richer vocabulary. In this case, he chose two German words, which I imagine relates to the fact that Richard Evans specializes in German history. I made a connection to one of the words he shares, verstehen, which means to understand: my German mother dolloped us with tongue-lashings in her native tongue that always ended with an emphatic "Verstehst du das?" (Do you understand that?). The second word, erklären, needed more explaining (pardon the pun, for it means to explain). Apparently, these competing concepts of assessing history have been and still are rigorously debated.

You may be asking what history has to do with assessment. When assessing a student, a teacher must gather the student's work (narrations, nature notebooks, copywork, studied dictations, handicrafts, etc.) and become immersed in better understanding the student. With the student's work in mind, the teacher tries to describe the student and begins to analyze what the student knows, strengths, interests, and weaknesses. A student with a consistent error in math needs targeted lessons, while a student with major gaps might need a complete review (however, if all of the student's work is slipshod it could be related to attention or accuracy). In this way, assessment affects lesson planning. After gleaning enough knowledge about the student, the teacher ends up evaluating the student's abilities.

Sometimes, historians bump into gaps of knowledge. For example, not much is known about Charlotte Mason's life from 1878 to 1889. The historian must imagine what she might have done. We know that, during this period, she wrote her geography book about the forty shires of England, lectured on home education, and published the first volume of her six-volume series. She left no diary or memoirs, so we imagine she must have spent this period traveling, reading, pondering, and thinking through her philosophy of education. Likewise, we find gaps in our knowledge of our students.

When we view Charlotte Mason, we must assess the person she was, fully alive and human (susceptible to foibles like the rest of us). We assess her writings for they say much about the person she was. While we are tempted to put her on a pedestal, it is important to compare her ideas to what science has revealed about the neurology of learning.

Narration was Charlotte's greatest tool for assessment. Narration is knowledge touched with imagination. When we narrate, our mind force requires attention, assimilation, retention, and reproduction. Dr. Beckman closed with seven principles of assessment ala narration. I am sure the details here are sketchy because he flew through this point. So, beware of mental fog permeating the following list:

* Narration is holistic for it includes personal and prior knowledge. The narrator creates something new.
* Narration is open in its interpretation of knowledge. The narrator provides informed opinion.
* Narration is thinking made tangible. The narrator reveals thinking to the teacher in a concrete way.
* Narration reveals knowledge instead of ignorance (except for the occasional howler).
* Narration accounts for natural development of thinking skills. The teacher sees progressive understanding (not oppressive expectations).
* Narration shapes instruction due to diagnosis of errors.
* Narration unfolds instructional criteria to determine future curricula.

In short, teachers are historians when it comes to assessment, which requires a teacher to gather, immerse, describe, analyze, and evaluate. Narration gives teachers a more authentic and more accurate glimpse of a student's thinking than standardized testing.