What Do You Want to Make Today?

It's not an easy question to answer, if we are used to doing what we are expected to do to graduate or to pass this portion of the class. We live in a pragmatic, utilitarian world in which our "bottom line" questions usually deal with questions of usefulness or profitablity; often these decisions are made in a Darwinian competition of who can win out the battle to be the most powerful, to take what you can out of life. In the scarcity mindset of such a dehumanized system, we usually ask "what can I take from you today?" What do I take from others, or to do as little as I can to get the maximum results, and we do not ask "What do you want to make today?" Deep questions of life are the same whether you are at a starting point or at an ending point. Would you make today a future that is worth beholding? Will you choose to dedicate your days to creating a world that is worth passing onto your children?

~ Makoto Fujimura

The artist Makoto Fujimura was the keynote speaker at this year's ChildLightUSA Conference. My dear friend Bonnie Buckingham instigated this after she read Refractions, a collections of essays originally written for Makoto's blog. A series of events led Bonnie to New York City to attend an arts conference and to see the Four Holy Gospels paintings on display at the Museum of Biblical Art. I didn't really understand why she saw connections between his thinking and Mason's until Bonnie gave me a copy of his book to thank me for speaking on mathematics and special needs for homeschoolers in the Charlotte area. I'm only half of the way through the essays, and his ideas dovetail very well with Mason.

My favorite essay is based on a blog post called Bert's Disappearing Weather Maps. Back in 1983,  Mako worked with special needs students who didn't fit inside the box of special needs programs. He saw extraordinary gifts in a young man named Bert who drew weather maps aired on the previous night's news broadcast on the blackboard with his spit. This perseverance disgusted and annoyed most adults, but not Mako. Treating Bert as a person with unique gifts, he invited unusual artist to make a mural of a weather map on the bulletin board with markers. “No one’s ever asked me to draw a weather map before in school; they just complained about it” was the enthusiastic response. Through their relationship of mutual respect, Mako convinced Bert that drawing with tap water was healthier because eating chalk every day might not be good for his health. He concludes with the same ideas I have about Pamela and her job prospects in this dead-end economy: "I also knew that the society that would make Bert 'useful' by giving him menial jobs after his graduation would not be as kind."

So, what do you want to make today?

Lately, I have been on a needlework binge. My basket of leftover yarn sits there blinking at me, waiting to be transformed into something other than a ball of yarn. I always have my eye on making gifts for Steve, who is working Kansas, away from our cozy home. To keep him from feeling lonely, Pamela and I have been making things for him that surround him with beauty and love. Everyone of Pamela's  watercolors that we have framed so far adorn the walls of his apartment. Last December, I finally finished my magnum opus (five years in the making, I think) to keep him warm on chilly winter days. I crocheted half a dozen coasters with the scrap yarn and still had scrap of the scrap yarn.

Then, I saw a pattern for making reusable Swiffer cloths. Why not make something beautiful that saves me a chunk of change? A small piece of something in Kansas is here in Carolina, and, whenever I do one of my least favorite things (housework), the colors will remind me of Steve.

A homeschooling friend sent Pamela and me handmade bracelets that her daughter knitted. So, I returned the favor and fingerknitted a pair of scarves.

What do you want to make today?

Then, a Facebook friend, who's also a skin friend, tagged me on picture of a knitted coffee cozy. What a perfect gift for Steve, who I think was weaned on coffee! Only it needs to be crocheted (my better medium when it comes to needlework) that will take advantage of colors in my scrap yarn. Ooooo, I really like that one! Only, it needs to have a steaming cup of Joe instead of a tea bag as an embellishment and a built in coaster. And, the potholder I had been crocheting for him disappeared to the backburner....

What do you want to make today? 

Pamela is learning to knit, and she has all but one little step of the garter stitch down (blog post to follow on teaching her to knit as well as making her own wooden needles). She picked out hot pink for a baby blanket for her four "babies".

Pamela loves to doodle, especially on church friendship pads. Something about them sets her creative juices in motion. Every Sunday, she fills them with doodles. Some might assume she isn't paying attention but do not let that fool you. Today, we were visiting a different church to hear my friend's husband preach. While we recited the Lord's Prayer, Pamela doodled. As soon as we finished, she looked at me pointedly and said, "Which!" She noticed that our church says "which are in heaven" while this church choses the more familiar "who."

Since I haven't posted any of Pamela's watercolors in awhile, I thought you might like to know that she is still going strong in making beautiful things.

Pamela's Latest Watercolors

Work of Our Hands

To give you a breather before another math post, I thought you might enjoy the work of our hands.

Pamela's Watercolor of a Wolf


Her Latest Drawings




My Scarves



My Potholders and Hot Pad

Come to the Feast!

We didn't get off to a great start last week. Sunday morning, I woke up with throbbing throat and plugged-up head. I felt bad enough to play hooky from church. I'm sure the choir will thank me later for having spared them from these miserable germs. I was well enough to launch the new term, having slightly adjusted our course after exam week. Lots of people are sick right now. Whether child or teacher is sick, we are soothed by listening to classical music, reading living books with interesting stories, studying art, and sharing poetry. Even sickly mothers like me can nurse a sore throat with a hot cup of tea sweetened with agave nectar and enjoy the feast with our kids.

How did our feast look this week? What captured Pamela's eye? What kind of delights did we sample? What relationships were renewed? What ones began?

We kicked off the week with an impromptu science lesson. We have been studying vapor. Early Monday morning, Pamela was walking on the back porch in temperatures cold enough for her to see her breath. I joined her and we huffed and puffed several times. She smiled and said, "Steam!" I added, "Yes, we're making vapor." Later in the week, we breathed on glass, generated vapor with a tea kettle, and condensed vapor on a plate. Pamela wrote notes in her notebook. While walking through a wet parking lot, Pamela noticed an oil slick and asked, "Is it a rainbow?" Last month, we had read a chapter about rainbows and how sun shining through water drops make them. Seeing a rainbow on pavement caught her attention! Pamela added a cold front to her notebook. She has come a long since she thought clouds were made of cotton!

On the artsy front, Pamela nearly finished her first finger-knitted scarf for her eldest baby Baby Alive. After doing a picture study of her first one by Millet, I asked her which artist Millet reminded her of: Monet, Vermeer, and da Vinci. Without hesitation, Pamela replied, "Monet!" Although she might not be able to fully explain it, Pamela sees the link between impressionist artists. We are reading about Mesopotamian mosaics. To make sure she understood how we use tile today, we walked through the house and spotted tile around our fireplaces and in the kitchen and bathrooms. She drew a lovely version of musicians playing for the king in the Standard of Ur in her history notebook. While delivering meals on wheels, we listened to two fugues by Bach and THE toccata everyone knows which I hope a young man from our church will play for us someday!


We started several new songs: Mary Had a Baby, One Small Child, and "El Coqui." After one line of the new Spanish folk song, Pamela exclaimed, "Just like Dora the Explorer!" Somehow, I had inadvertently stumbled upon a beloved song from her Nickelodeon days of yore. Since Pamela seemed so familiar with it, I asked her what cantar and coqui meant. Pamela told me singing and frog--even her tía Janet didn't know this alternative way of saying frog. We also started a new fairy tale, Caperucita Roja, and two more homemade Spanish stories about Pamela's grandmother and how to make pie. Then, when she turned off the audio, Pamela said, "Hasta luego!"

Language arts was neat. Pamela did the standard fare of copywork, studied dictation, and recitation instead of typical spelling and grammar textbook homework. She took notes on what we are learning about wild canines from In the Valley of Wolves for written narration. We started a new poet Carl Sandburg. An unplanned connection made our introduction sweet. The first poem was the closing lines of Windsong,

"There is only one horse on the earth
and his name is All horses . . ."

which we started reading right after beginning a new book about--horses! And, in the book on horses, the author wrote of a character who spoke "in a hoarse whisper" like Pamela's mother who read the passage in a hoarse voice! Pamela stopped me and asked, "What is hoarse?" So, I explained, "A hoarse voice is how I am talking right now--with a sore, scratchy throat." The next day, with another book, she instructed me to be the "narrator," so she could read the "quotated." To spotlight the idea of voice in writing, I introduced the word dialog to her: "Oh, you are going to do the dialog. I'm going to do the narrative." Several books later, Pamela observed "only narrator" and I added, "That's right! This chapter has no dialog." With yet another book, I read part of one character as if I were yelling across the house because he was talking through the window to a character in the back yard. And, what did Pamela do? She read, "YES," and continued to read her part in a very loud voice. Isn't interesting how the idea of homophones and voice arise naturally in living books without me having to crack open an official language arts textbook? We teach what Pamela needs when she needs it.

Pamela drew many things. She finished a book on the C.S.S. Hunley and began another set in Charleston at the beginning of the Civil War, so she drew a diagram of the submarine and a map of Charleston Harbor in her drawing notebook and entered another picture of the Hunley in her history notebook. She drew a picture of an Indian chief Lewis and Clark met on their journey. I revamped my approach to our book on American farm life during this era and scaled it back to one major topic a week: this week, Pamela learned about plowing the fields to prepare for sowing corn and added another picture to her notebook.



I am using carefully selected snippets of filmed material to help visualize the settings we are covering. Like many educators, I ordered The Story of Us for free last fall, and we spent less than five minutes a day watching a very specific topic. Since we read through the Declaration of Independence last term, we watched two DVD segments on that topic and Pamela made an entry in her history notebook. Since we won't find opportunities to observe wolves, coyotes, and foxes in the wild here in the Carolinas, we have been observing their behavior from afar by watching In the Valley of the Wolves for seven minutes a day. We are going to be brave and try full-blown Shakespeare by watching a filmed scene before reading it. Pamela got into the spirit watching the movie, chanting "Caesar! Caesar!" with me. Since she loves the story of Julius Caesar, I picked that tragedy for her first venture.

We began our revamped history program and narrations were much better. We do history very differently than most families. In the early years, we present it like a sketch to show the big picture through stories. Then we focus on different pieces of the painting, adding layer upon layer. Only she is the artist, painting the gaps in her mind as she sees them. Pamela has enough of American history sketched in her mind that we can continue as we did last term. For world history, we are making the second pass of ancient history, which Pamela loves, by reading an old favorite from Ambleside Online A Child's History of the World along with the chapters on ancient art from art history books. We are reading selected chapters from AO favorite Fifty Famous Stories Retold--already recorded at Librivox--to sketch European history.

I have learned not to fret over missing details I deem important. As we read through short stories about slaves last term, I realized Pamela did not have a grasp of an archetypal portrait of a slave. This book is grounding her in that picture, and, in future studies, she will be better equipped to focus on individual lives with their unique variations. Rather than viewing narrations as a way of extracting information, I look at them as a way of seeing what she knows.

There are plenty of topics we covered that I only have time to gloss over . . . the birth of Isaac and the travels of Hagar and Ishmael . . . the first public miracle of Jesus . . . political parties today and in Queen Victoria's day . . . the building of the transcontinental railroad and the transatlantic cable . . . the addition of four more states . . . the disappearance of a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition . . . one character arrested and another freed from jail . . . three lost in space--no, wait, FOUR are missing . . .

Even after the banquet is over, Pamela's mind still digests her meal. Last week we began a book about gorillas and a picture of the soles of a gorilla fascinated her, especially the black nails. While I sat here typing, Pamela initiated a short conversation on how dogs and bears have claws and humans and gorillas have nails. Then, she asked, "What about monkeys?" and mentioned an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer cuts his nail.

"Education is a life," the need of intellectual and moral as well as of physical sustenance is implied. The mind feeds on ideas, and therefore children should have a generous curriculum. Charlotte Mason

What about math? You'll be sorry you asked. I'm blogging it next.

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.