On Being Like a Child: Hildegard's Gift

Some of our special needs children face many illnesses, and a book like Hildegard's Gift by Megan Hoyt offers encouragement. In full disclosure, this review is biased because Megan is my friend. I did buy a copy for her to sign with my own money. And, if you don't believe my praise, read the wonderful review at Publishers Weekly. And, it happens to be on sale right now!



Hildegard was a composer, nun, herbalist, writer, and many other things who lived nine hundred years ago. From the time she was a young child, she suffered from terrible headaches that left her worn out and bedridden at times. Megan's book weaves many big ideas into this children's biography of Hildegard: not all gifts come in packages, with some gifts comes pain, sometimes our frail bodies need rest, sometimes we must persevere even when our body is not cooperating, sometimes our talents are as plain as day, and sometimes they appear in God's good timing. Megan sprinkled Hildegard's words throughout the text. The illustrations by David Hill strike me as Narnian, and that is the highest praise I can give to a piece of art. The tone of the book is sweet and gentle, but also gives children a glimpse of the dark times in Hildegard's life.

We were blessed on July 28 when Megan did a book signing event for us during Clockwise. My friends from prov.en.der came to Harvest and shared what they know about "unhurried time" with our teachers, parents, teachers from one of our sister schools, and homeschoolers.



Humility, being childlike, going through a day done Mason's way, helped us understand "unhurried time." We did copywork, studied dictation, recitation, picture study, history, poetry, prayer, hymns, literature, math, handicraft, nature walk, etc. Our special guest Megan introduced us to Hildegard, not just through her book, but in many ways. She gave us more details about her world and what life was like. She showed us paintings of how people portrayed this visionary woman.



Megan shared many delightful things about Hildegard in ways that tapped into our senses. Throughout the day, we listened to her music while we did work that required quiet thought. We tried singing "O Ignis Spiritus" in the best melisma style that we could. She invited one of our teachers, who grows all sorts of herbs in her garden, to share those that Hildegard might have enjoyed. I don't want to give it all away, but we enjoyed it so much I plan to invite her back so our kids can get to see a bona fide author who is published! If you live within a reasonable distance from the Charlotte area, I encourage you to contact her for a book signing.

Great Backyard Bird Count 2014

We've had a rare snowfall here in the midlands of Carolina. I couldn't resist taking pictures of birds and their tracks. We saw our typical favorites: northern cardinals, chipping sparrows, and goldfinches.





I also spotted two kinds of birds that are new to my feeder. How exciting! Truly! I squeal when I discover new birds. The first was something completely new to me: an eastern towhee. Its unusual behavior first caught my eye: the towhee was flicking leaves up as it foraged. Later, I spotted it perched on tree branches not far from a sparrow. Since towhees look like a large sparrow, the picture with the chipping sparrow clinched the identification for me.



The other bird that thrilled me is the slate-colored, dark-eyed junco. I first met them behind Pike's Peak where they live year round. In years of bird watching here, I've never seen any. Monday, I spotted a flock at the school. I loved seeing them at home today. Aren't they cute?



Long-time blog readers know that we celebrate the Great Backyard Bird Count every February. This year will be quite an event since Pamela and I will be counting at two locations: our schoolyard on Friday and our backyard the rest of the weekend. Because we needed to prepare an entire school for this event, I came up with several things to teach students and staff to identify birds. At the beginning of the new term last December, I incorporated a bird theme into some elements of our curriculum.

Living Books - At the beginning of the school year, the elementary students started reading UltraSwan by Elinor Osborn and The Wright Brothers by Quentin Reynolds. Now, they are reading John Audubon: Young Naturalist by Miriam Mason and the primary students are reading The Boy Who Drew Pictures by Jacqueline Davies. I also recommend a birthday present I gave to a young naturalist: For the Birds: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson by Peggy Thomas.

Nature Study - We have bird feeders stationed in the school yard, and students help us keep them filled. When playing outside for recess, students see things in nature and ask us about them. We give them proper names so that most of them have from saying red bird and blue bird to cardinal and blue jay. They also know mourning dove, robin, mockingbird, and tufted titmouse. Some students are quite advanced and know yellow-bellied sapsucker and Carolina chickadee. Instead just knowing the name of our state bird, many students can describe how the Carolina wren looks. They ask for the names of birds that they see while looking out the window at school and even at home. They have to give a good description, and then we head to our bird books.

Our staff and students have come a long way since the beginning of the school year. We are all more aware of birds and able to identify some and able to observe and describe them in enough detail to classify them. It's quite common for children to ask me about a bird that they saw at home or grab me at recess to take a picture of one. It's not unusual for students to flock around the big window near the bird feeders suddenly because one student exclaims, "I just saw a huge bird!" The other morning, one girl asked me to identify a bird. "It's brown on the back and has brown splotches on its chest. It's about the size of a blue jay. It was on the ground looking for seeds or worms." I showed her a picture of a brown thrasher, and she smiled, "That's it!"

One little boy's mother majored in biology in college. They were out bird watching and he said, "I think that's a tufted titmouse." She thought he was making up the name, so she looked it up on her smart phone. He was right, and she was amazed at what he knew about birds. We have a little flock of tufted titmice that adore our bird feeders.

For science, they have made detailed drawings of a dead yellow-bellied sapsucker that we found on the grounds one day. While recording observations in our science notebooks, a live sapsucker was bring into a red maple tree nearby, so we quietly stalked it and found the holes in the trunk. While we were gone, an anonymous bird dropped a "gift" onto one girl's notebook and we all had a good chuckle.






Science - To go along with the book on the Wright brothers, the students learned about Leonardo da Vinci's flying machines and built some models as described in this book. It also helped them understand some principles as flight and they saw how da Vinci used nature study to design his flying machines. They were quite amused at how da Vinci tested them.

Picture Study - The artist we chose for picture study this term is John James Audubon, specifically this book. Since we have about a dozen students per class on Fridays (our homeschooler day), we have two books and two pictures. They have to sit quietly and study the picture for at least two minutes. They are such chatterboxes it is hard for them not to talk. When they are ready, we close the books and each child gets a chance to say one thing. They go around in a circle until they run out of things to say. Then, they switch pictures.

Silhouettes - We've read several books about our state. Mama, Let's Make A Moon by Clay Rice, a silhouette artist who has been to our county many times, inspired us to study bird silhouettes. I've made about ten of them. Sometimes we hand out individual silhouettes to half the class and bird pictures to the other half. Each student has one. They have to match the silhouette with the picture. I used a picture from this GBBC blogpost as a guide.



Plans for February 14 - I plan to make copies of the checklist and count birds during the day. I'll have a small group of children with me to help me spot and count the birds. As always, I'll have my camera, bird books, and my Nook available for tricky identifications.

Experiencing the Fuller Life

Pamela and I have just finished our third week at Harvest Community School. We found this week quite hectic because the elementary class teacher enjoyed a week of vacation. That meant the headmaster and I took turns teaching. While I did not engage much with Pamela one-on-one, she still experienced a fuller life. She fascinates children because of her savant skill in calendars, her artistic abilities, her princess lunchbox, and her boldness in telling a teacher—me—, "Director! Director! Cut!" and "You're fired." When I am not working with her, she keeps herself busy, building puzzles and triazzles, swinging on the porch swing, playing with her calculator, and using a laptop. She has far more opportunities to interact with people in an environment similar to the kind of learning environment she has enjoyed for over a decade. Thursday, she helped the elementary class build a water filter for the school pond!







I have thoroughly enjoyed applying Relationship Development Intervention ideas as we help our auties (two full-time students in the spectrum and another part-time in addition to Pamela) adapt to this new way of learning. I glean so much from them in one-on-one moments when they take a break from the classroom. Thursday, I taught one boy who has a mechanical mind and nibble fingers to sew a needle case. On Friday, he hardly needed help in sewing a running stitch in the first line on his tic-tac-toe game. The other boy and I have been sharing many perspective-taking conversations to help him see that what he thinks is not always what another person thinks. Their parents are delighted to have a school where students are doing more than the three R's—where they are engaged with the kind of hands-on, meaningful tasks that Temple Grandin recommends for students in the spectrum: drawing, handwork (right now, sewing), cleaning the pond and surrounding area, building a water filter, etc.

Friday the 13th was delightful! While chatting with a parent dropping off her child, we spotted two hummingbirds seeking nectar from a can of bug spray with a bright orange cap. (Note to self, we need a hummingbird feeder!)



Friday is The Feast, a day in which homeschoolers join us for the whole day if they choose to do so. Pamela joins the elementary class in reading two science books that they only read once a week. She is familiar with one book (Project UltraSwan) but has never read the other book (The Wright Brothers). In this photo taken last week, you can see by the expression on Pamela's face how much she enjoys the class.

Yesterday, after the morning meeting (prayer, pledge, hymn, and Spanish), the elementary students headed to the reading room. Angie walked in and saw Pamela—all smiles—sitting in the teacher's chair. Having observed Pamela and I co-read books, Angie suspected that Pamela wanted to see the text. So, she sat in the chair next to Pamela. Angie was thrilled to see how Pamela felt like she belonged. First, every time, Pamela was asked if she wanted to narrate, Pamela said, "Yes," and then narrated. Sometimes, when other students were narrating, Pamela shifted her attention to the speaker! She smiled and stayed engaged the whole time (about a half hour). Finally, when Angie started reading the unfamiliar book, Pamela leaned in to see the book. Angie and I were so excited for Pamela to take so much delight in learning, side by side, with her academic peers!

Then, the whole school headed out for our weekly nature walk at Santee National Wildlife Refuge. After a little chaos the first week, we learned to assign a group of children to one or two adults and teens. We space out the departure of the groups, some walking the loop trail in one direction and some in the other direction. Last week, one of the school co-founders, who wrote a lovely blog post about nature walks the other day, showed her group how to "fish" for "chicken chokers" (tiger beetle larvae). This week, the children from her group, all assigned to different groups, showed their friends how to lure them out of their holes! None of the adults made this happen: the students figured it out all on their own!

We returned to the school for lunch, and the afternoon was so hectic that I neglected Pamela. The homeschoolers joined us at this point for readings about Egypt (Seeker of Knowledge, Voices of Egypt, and Tutankhamun), a van Gogh picture study, wool felt sewing, living science (projects about flight), and Shakespeare. In time, I hope to fold Pamela in once we figure out our rhythm and everything flows well.

A couple of lovely moments happened yesterday afternoon.

I watched one of our auties marvel over van Gogh's Village Street and Steps in Auvers. He kept staring at it, running his fingers over the brushstrokes, narrating the vivid colors and objects in the painting. The eyes of this boy, who has the same kind of word retrieval issues as Pamela, sparkled with delight as he gazed at the masterpiece.

Before I began reading aloud to the elementary class, one of the students recalled a discussion we had had about how to remember what they read more clearly. He said, "Remember we need to narrate from the beginning of the passage to the end, and not just jump around." In the past three weeks, we have seen greater mindfulness and improved attention.

Shakespeare's Henry V was a blast. Since Act I, Scene I, has only two actors, I broke up the reading into five pages, two students per page. I gave more experienced readers the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury. To help the viewers tell them apart, I made a tall archbishop hat with double horizontal bars on the cross while the bishop wore a shorter hat and a single bar on the cross.

I gave the younger students important actions to perform: posting signs to set up the scene and representing "the church" (by holding a picture of a church), "the angel" (whipping the Adam out of Henry V), "the king" (Henry V) and "the dauphin" (future king of France). Their "acting" was perfect, even though they had not rehearsed. I gave a purse of pennies to "the church" and, when I asked "the king" to try to take it, "the church" tried to take it back from "the king" and said, "It's mine!" That is exactly what the archbishop and bishop were discussing. I gave the "Gordian knot" to the autie with nibble fingers and, while the clergy discussed the studious nature of Henry V, "the king" worked hard to undo the knot. "The angel" giggled at whipping "the king." Our youngest student wore the crown of the dauphin and his lip quivered when "the king" snatched his crown (and I had warned him that is what "the king" was supposed to do).



The past three weeks brings to mind this quote from Charlotte Mason. You can read some thoughtful ideas about one mom's take on this passage here.

Every new power, whether mechanical or spiritual, requires adjustment before it can be used to the full... to perceive that there is much which we ought to do and not to know exactly what it is, nor how to do it, does not add to the pleasure of life or to ease in living. We become worried, restless, anxious; and in the transition stage between the development of this new power and the adjustment which comes with time and experience, the fuller life, which is certainly ours, fails to make us either happier or more useful.

Patience Rewarded

Something funny happened on the way to blogging math. Pamela surprised me again, and several perfectly timed articles got me to thinking.

Right now, our readings address the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. I chose In My Father's House, the autobiography of Corrie ten Boom, as a bridge from the period to World War II. Before leaving for Kansas last week, we read about her encounter with a mentally-ill man named Thys. As a child, Corrie prayed for the alcoholics and homeless people living on the streets near her home. She and her sister Nollie came across a crowd of children picking on Thys. The passage we read began,

I was so full of pity for poor Thys and angry at the cruel children that I shouted, "You leave him alone, do you hear!"

The children stopped at my bold challenge. They looked for his defender and saw a little girl, less than half his size. Suddenly he walked toward me and stooped down. I could smell the unpleasant odor of his unwashed clothes and matted beard. He put his hand under my chin and kissed me on both cheeks.

Corrie went on to say that her sister Nollie, appalled at the kiss, whisked Corrie home. After hearing about what happened, their aunt scrubbed her face. At bedtime, their mama noted that Jesus was the source of her pity and kindness and that praying for street people might be a safer thing for little girls to do.

Yesterday—about a week later—Pamela read the next section. First, she narrated our last reading. Her retelling of the heated emotion of the scene came out in a burst of loud, angry words. "Corrie sees bullies. ANGRY! Leave him alone! Go away! Went to bed. Mom said obey. That's citizenship." Many things struck me about her account in that Pamela:

• Clearly felt Corrie's passion.
• Accurately labeled the children as bullies, a word not used in the passage.
• Recognized what Corrie did as a good deed even though her mother was worried.
• Picked a perfect word to describe Corrie's behavior: citizenship.

We do not work on vocabulary directly. Children glean word meaning from context. They do not need to copy the definition and use the word in three sentences. Is that how you taught babies new words? Is that how you beef up your vocabulary?

Pamela enjoys looking up words in the red discovery book (dictionary) and encyclopedia for fun. Curious about her knowledge of citizenship, I asked her where she read about it. She said, "In encyclopedia." I asked why she thought Corrie was doing citizenship. She explained, "Citizenship stop the war. Corrie stop the fighting." Then, I began to wonder. She reads my planning spreadsheets where I loosely categorize her school books as subjects. I had this book listed as World History, not Citizenship! Her summation of Corrie's action was truly an original thought!

Many students with autism prefer textbooks. Expectations are predictable. Having to answer the questions of others means more black-and-white thinking. Much of the work required is mindless busywork. Even though Pamela would find textbooks easier, I think going the living book route promotes more flexible thinking and more experience sharing.

Several articles that appeared in my Facebook feed yesterday affirm the elements of our approach to education:

• Reading Aloud to Older Children Is Valuable - Pamela and I read books in the manner described in the article, "And they read the Bard’s plays together, divvying up the parts, because 'that's how they are meant to be experienced.'" (We are reading aloud Macbeth right now!) Reading aloud to older children offers academic and emotional benefits. It broadens the menu by adding more challenging books. One mom describes how more pleasurable reading becomes for her daughter with dyslexia, "Reading together–with her watching the words as I read, and then her reading to me–is a way to be together, to experience the world, to enjoy a common pleasure." Retired teachers who reconnect with former students online find the most memorable thing they did as a class was reading aloud.


• Multi-Tasking Equals Failure to Filter - The jury is out on whether inattentive folks are born that way or are the product of chronic media multitasking. When several modes of data stream in, heavy multitaskers cannot ignore the irrelevant. They find organizing and storing information into memory difficult. They do not even switch attention faster. In a nutshell, information overload slows down their ability to process. That sounds a lot like autism!


• The Mind Is Made for Story - Modern textbooks promote multitasking. My son switched to public school as a junior. I was appalled at his precalculus textbook. The math book looked like it had ADHD: graphics, sidebars, pop-ups, font variability, etc. When looking up information to help David with his questions about math, I found it hard to follow a train of thought. Living books embed the information contained in graphics and sidebars into a narrative account. We can follow the train of thought in living books because our minds respond to stories.


• Lingering a Living Book in a Term or Year Supports Long-Term Memory - Modern students have to pack a textbook into one semester, and their classes can take up to ninety minutes. Packing in information over a short, intense period of time is called massed studying. Science backs up common thinking that cramming is ineffective. Yet, students today have to learn that way thanks to block scheduling. My high school spread out a math textbook over two semesters in five fifty-minute periods five times a week. Distributed study is far more effective. My husband's high school offered one math class. It weaved algebra, geometry, trigonometry, statistics, etc. over the course of four years. He never took long breaks from algebra in order to learn geometry. He aced his math classes in college!


• The Real Issue Might Not Be Inattention! - Students today have so many entertainment choices they can avoid boredom. When something loses their attention, they tune into something else. Having no other option forces you to stick with what you are doing. Jennifer Roberts, professor of art and architecture history, assigned her students to write an in-depth research paper based upon a three hour study of any painting in a nearby museum. Continued looking at one thing revealed something new. The longer students the painting, the more they discovered. Patience was rewarded. Living books are another way to encourage sustained attention, and the joy of reading them is the reward.

And, folks, I am not the only person not giving up teaching an adult person in the autism spectrum to communicate! "the neuroplasticity necessary for new language learning that was not supposed to exist in this population, did exist. Many of the students desperately wanted to crack the code of conventional communication, and their brains were capable."

Amen!

Why Read Challenging Books? (Day One of Exam Week)

Pamela loves exams, or what she calls her term finale. She is still working on her ability to narrate orally and continuing to improve her communicate—imagine! She is in her early twenties and is making progress in her language! We keep questions pretty simple: tell me everything you know about . . . This first clip features snatches from some of the folk songs, hymns, and classical compositions from the term.



This year, Pamela read a couple of biographical picture books: one, a tall tale about John Henry, and two about Sojourner Truth and Sitting Bull. Because we have been doing exams at the end of every term, Pamela knows what is expected of her. Thus, she realizes that her daily narrations are not fodder for short-term memory because she will have to recall what she learned in the future.

Again, I see progress. Pamela's language is clear enough, and her train of thought is more connected. I think that even folks who do not know her can understand what she is saying. She can tell about a person's life from beginning to end (the Sitting Bull book focuses only on his childhood). She continues to supplement her words with gestures and emotion, strong emotion for Sojourner Truth, which we finished reading about six weeks ago. Now that Pamela is showing the ability to sequence in her narrations, I plan to focus on descriptions of people and places. At the end of the Sojourner Truth narration, I asked a few questions to tease out a description of her appearance.



Some books are very difficult for Pamela. Skeptics might wonder the point of reading material at the very edge of her ability to comprehend. But, then, I recall descriptions of Helen Keller's delight in books with language far, far, far beyond her ability. One of the teachers at a school for the blind noticed how much enthusiasm Helen had for reading a book in French when she had only a small vocabulary in the language,

Often I found her, when she had a little leisure, sitting in her favourite corner, in a chair whose arms supported the big volume prepared for the blind, and passing her finger slowly over the lines of Moliere's Le Medecin Malgré Lui, chuckling to herself at the comical situations and humorous lines. At that time her actual working vocabulary in French was very small, but by using her judgment, as we laughingly called the mental process, she could guess at the meanings of the words and put the sense together much as a child puzzles out a sliced object.

Researchers are finding that poetry and classic literature spark more electrical activity in the brain than abridged and modernized versions of the same. Unusual words, surprising phrases, and difficult sentence structures light up the brains of readers. Could novelty be part of the key? After the initial blitz, the brain shifts into high gear and is revved up for further reading. Poetry affects the area of the brain that processes episodic memory as readers "reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they have read." What did "the young and the staid alike" read? Passages from Shakespeare plays, including King Lear, Othello, Coriolanus and Macbeth . . . William Wordsworth, Henry Vaughan, John Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, T.S. Eliot, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes . . . The researchers will aim their next efforts at the reading of Charles Dickens. They conclude,

This is the argument for serious language in serious literature for serious human situations, instead of self-help books or the easy reads that merely reinforce predictable opinions and conventional self-images.

Walt Whitman was on the menu because of our readings connected to the Civil War. Pamela found his poems hard to memorize. In my efforts to learn "Aboard at a Ship's Helm", I completely forget "A Clear Midnight." Pamela, however, remembered the first few lines of it. While the poem about the sailor was too thorny, she captured the spirit of the poem in her narration. Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill was another challenging read. The last two chapters seemed particularly obscure, but Pamela persisted. She likes finishing her books, however difficult they may be. While typical students are able to glean far more than Pamela, she was pleased with what she did learn.



Thus, as we enter a new year of new books, I definitely plan to keep Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Robert Frost on the menu!

Taking this thinking a step further, we also read a book that had very difficult scientific ideas in it. While we were reading it, I wondered if Pamela would glean anything. Even though many concepts were beyond her grasp of science, Pamela picked up a good bit of vocabulary and understanding. In addition to being able to talk about the astronomer featured in the book, she could say something meaningful about supernovas, black holes, invisible rays, light, and the big bang theory. Can you?



One major point of reading living books is to develop lifelong interests. Pamela asked me if she could go to a planetarium. One of my homeschooling friends told me of Dooley Planetarium and Francis Marion University Observatory only forty-five minutes away. The planetarium offers free shows open to the public two Sundays a month (yes, I said FREE)! The observatory also has periodic open house events that we plan to attend in the coming term.

Hey, Pamela, I know you are reading my blog. When would you like to go?

"I Have Never Let School Interfere with My Education"

We are not big on pricey Christmas gifts. Steve gave me a cover for my Nook with the most perfect quote, and I plan to buy a camera since I finally killed my last one. I gave Steve his own boxed set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for the ones the kids and I read are worn out. While he read The Hobbit in college, he never got into three books that followed. Not even the Peter Jackson movies inspired him until he saw The Hobbit in the theater. He began to see enough connections between Bilbo's adventures and those of Frodo that LOTR finally caught his attention. We spent the next few evenings watching a marathon of special extended edition DVDs, and Steve now appreciates my wealth of trivial knowledge about Middle Earth. He just asked me if you can order lembas bread on e-Bay. If you don't know what that is—well, nevermind....

Mark Twain never spoke truer words when he said, "I have never let school interfere with my education." In this day of the state standards, I suspect students will find it even harder to get an education. I told my son about the requirement that only thirty percent of material read by high school seniors will be literary: everything else is supposed to be "informational texts." His knee-jerk reaction was, "They don't want us to think!" The Washington Post opinion page summarizes my concerns well,

The major problem with the new Common Core State Standards is that they further diminish something that is greatly undermined from the moment we enter school: our creativity.

School essentially limits innovation. The best way to succeed in school is to repeat exactly what the teacher says. But the most effective way to express one’s creativity in school has always been through the reading of fiction.

Through novels, we can let our imaginations run wild, assign meaning to complex passages and have a chance to attack certain situations and moral dilemmas without living them. Reading fiction is an active, involved process.

Information is easily standardized and testable. It is static, predictable, and consistent. We can break information down into pieces that are right or wrong. Either you know a given factoid or you don't. We can put it into multiple guess format for scanners to score. Students have a hard time cajoling a few points from the teacher because information is so cut and dry.

While so many in the autism world seek to pump our kids full of information, my aim is to see what Pamela does with it. Although language is flowing more readily now, Pamela has such a hard time expressing what she thinks. I often find myself in the role of observer, pondering what she does and says to elicit what she knows and understands.

Scene I. A conversation. Tammy checking Facebook. Pamela watching television.

Me: Wow!
Pamela: What?
Me: Stormin' Norman is dead.
Pamela: Is he an actor?
Me: No, he was a general.

We were both together, but doing separate things. When I left out vital information, Pamela grew curious. When I shared the news about Norman Schwarzkopf, Pamela assumed he was an actor. In the past, she has asked me about famous people who died. They are usually actors or musicians. Her knowledge of the latter is wider, so she assumed he was an actor. Even more important, Pamela took an active role in seeking out information. Instead of passively receiving information, she searches for it herself.

Scene II. The four of us are at the movie theater watching terrible trailers. The green preview screen appeared for an R-rated movie.

Pamela: I cover my eyes! [Puts her hands to her face.]

Pamela did not have to tell us what she was doing. In fact, we probably would not have even noticed had she remained silent. She wanted to share her thoughts with us. Pamela knows that R-rated movies are recommended for people over seventeen. Although we avoid those movies for the most part, we have never made any "rules" about it. She has probably figured this out based on her own research. She also has an accurate sense of her age. She sees herself as a big girl because she does not have many interest in common with her peers. She resists the idea of having to buy adult movie tickets. She enjoys having dolls and was quite thrilled that Queen Victoria had a large doll collection as well as Pamela's great grandmother. She even tells people, "I'm not [in a] grade. I'm Charlotte Mason." She seeks reassurance that she is not in elementary, middle, or high school. Now that her brother attends college, she declares she is not in college either. She has a strong sense of her true emotional age.

Scene III. We are enjoying a two-week vacation from school.

Pamela: I can't wait for the last week!
Me: It's almost time for exams.
Pamela: Term finale!
Me: We will say farewell to some books.
Pamela: Happy ending!

Pamela enjoys how we learn together. Unlike most styles of education, we spend a long time on some books. We would rather spend two years reading two years reading Oliver Twist together than zip through something abridged over a term. The end of a term means the beginning of new books. We are finally closing the door to the Civil War and opening the one leading to World War I. Pamela is intrigued to enter a new phase of history through our literary readings. She created her own analogy to television shows: a season has a finale and, therefore, her term has a finale as well: exam week! She finds our exams delightful because we record her telling everything she knows about what we read. She does not feel pressured because we avoid impertinent "gotcha" questions that focus only on information. Pamela is getting clever in choosing the right words to express her thoughts and she is eager to transition to make friends in far away lands of another time.

I think Mark Twain would approve.

Awe and Wonder in Bible Study

Children should have the joy of living in far lands, in other persons, in other times—a delightful double existence ~ Charlotte Mason

Since January 2011, I have had the pleasure, yes pleasure, of teaching young children a Bible lesson in my church's afterschool program every Wednesday. I shared my first reflection in June 2011 and my second in November 2011. Our class spent the first few months of 2011 studying Moses and the school year of 2012 reading most of the book of Mark. We ended the year three chapters short of our goal. This year, we plan to finish one whole book of the Bible: Daniel. When I looked up June's post, I noticed a new comment in which Courtney asked the following question about coordinating Sunday school curricula:

We started from scratch and I have attempted to implement Charlotte Mason principles from the beginning. I have done a fair share of the leading, but others have definitely caught on to some of the principles. However, I need a break from creating the curriculum. My hope is to find a curriculum, tweak it to free it from twaddle, competition, teacher pleasing techniques, etc and equip our leaders to lead the children with this method. We have about 20+ children in one room ages 3-8. It’s been a challenge to get in a rhythm. If you have any words of counsel on where to find a base curriculum that would free me from some labor – I would be so appreciative.


Unfortunately, I am rarely happy with children's curricula, so I stick with finding high quality pictures to immerse them in a time period, maps, and the Bible itself. Our class rhythm continues to be the same: play time, snack, song (I downloaded a version of Something about That Name that doesn't drag), prayers, Bible lesson, activity (sometimes related, sometimes not), homework time, and play time. After 2.5 hours, the children leave physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually fed!

We continue to use The Illustrated Children's Bible for the Bible lesson (for free samples, go here). I downloaded a copy of of the Old Testament, but you can order it in a binder with CDs with the PDF files. Every week, I scour the Internet and download a couple of high-resolution pictures of artifacts from the time of Daniel to give the children background knowledge and to help immerse them in all things Babylonia. It typically takes a half hour to find suitable images. For example, to go with the first week, they studied and talked quite animatedly about soldiers attacking the Jews in Lachish and another of soldiers carrying Jews into exile. (I didn't go into depth on the fact that the Assyrians are the masters here, instead of the Babylonians, because of the quick change of hands during this period of history.) Seeing men, women, and children heading into exile personalized Daniel to them: they were astonished to see children their age having to walk five hundred miles in the desert to live in a new land with a new language and new customs. They noticed all kinds of details: the differences in clothing styles, vehicles, weapons, hair styles, etc.

I introduced them to King Nebuchadnezzar and showed them what a document looked like in his day. We talked about the clay tablets and how they were baked in ovens. One girl was amazed that you couldn't simply close a book. I told them about how the king had build an amazing palace that had fallen apart and had been covered in sand over the past two-thousand years. I showed them a picture of modern mud-brick palace built by the late Saddam Hussein next to the ruins of Nebuchadnezzar's palace. I told them that a hundred years ago some German archaelogists started finding these beautiful blue bricks that are very much like the tile we use in fireplaces and bathrooms today. They realized it was the gorgeous Ishtar gate and reassembled it in a museum. We talked about the animals on the walls and how many represented Babylonian gods, which were animals, planets, the sun, and moon. I showed them a second picture to give them an idea of the scale of the gate, and they were impressed!

I used to worry about how children unaccustomed to a Charlotte Mason style of education would react. Looking at those pictures and talking about them together incorporates the study of architecture and sculpture, which I am quite sure is neglected in their education. I offer it in a familiar medium, television, but done in an active, not passive way. I created two slideshows into a DVD (which one could also do in powerpoint): one has the pictures just described and the other has pictures of the pages of the Bible we are reading, cut and paste from the PDF file). One benefit of using a DVD is that, if a child misses a week, I can send home the DVD for them to catch up on what they missed the previous week. I simply show a picture and pause it while we have a grand conversation. They love it! The children learn so much just by seeing the artifacts of Daniel's world and noticing little details. It takes me a half hour to prepare the weekly DVD.

Last week was a wonderful example of how our afternoon goes. Children arrive in stages because different schools have different dismissal times. They go to the gym or youth room to play. Once everyone has arrived, we go to the fellowship hall for a snack. Then, we go to the classroom, sing a hymn or two, and pray. Then, we have a conversation about last week's lesson. Typically, I have a student who missed last week. So, I said, "Laura missed the lesson. Who would like to tell her what happened to Daniel last week?" Hands flew up. I picked her friend, sitting next to her, who gave a narration that went something like this

There was this guy. I don't remember his name. [Someone pops up with, "Daniel!"] Yeah, Daniel. This king with a really long name came to his city and chose only young men who were healthy and good-looking. He took them to the palace to be a servant. First, Daniel had to learn a new language and learn to read and write. When he got to the palace, this guard told him he had to eat the king's food, which was really bad for you. But, Daniel only wanted to eat vegetables and water, but the guard wasn't happy. He might get in trouble with the king, and, when the king got mad, he cut off people's heads. Daniel asked for a test of ten days. If he and his friends looked bad after ten days, then they would eat the king's food. We don't know what happened because Mrs. Tammy stopped reading at that part.

Hands flew up after her narration, and I picked a boy who was eager to share his part, which went something like this,

Daniel used to live in a city that was surrounded by walls. When the king's army came to Daniel's town, soldiers were everywhere. Nobody could leave the city. They didn't have guns. They had bows and arrows and, if anyone tried to leave the city, the guards would shoot like this. [He demonstrates shooting an arrow with a bow.] Daniel's city didn't want to run out of food, so they gave up.

Another boy added something like this,

We wondered why Daniel didn't run away when he was in the palace. I thought he should have waited until everyone was sleeping and then sneak out. But, Mrs. Tammy said that they had soldiers guarding them even in the middle of the night. Somebody was always watching them.

Reminded of another reason why, I added, "The other problem, Laura, is that the king's palace was five-hundred miles away from David's old home. He would have to survive in the desert to get home."

You might think that narrating comes easy to these students because they have been in my class for almost two years. This year, we have three new boys. They eagerly added smaller parts. One said something like,

Hey, do you remember the soldiers had pointy hats? Daniel's people had round hats, so that's how you can tell them apart!

Another added,

Oh, yeah! And, the king didn't take just young men. There were children, boys, and girls. Some were so little they rode the carts!

Another remembered,

Mrs. Tammy showed us pictures of the king's city. They had a wall with pictures of animals that were their gods. They had all kinds of gods, not at all like God.

My class is an even mix of public and private school children, so they  have never been in a Mason setting outside of my class. I teared up watching them narrate so happily and so beautifully. They have their own way of expressing their thoughts, and they enjoy sharing what inspired them the most. They were so excited to talk that I had to help them transition to the Bible lesson.

First, we studied the pictures on the television screen and discussed new artifacts from Babylon and a map of the area. Then, we read Daniel 1:15-2:12. I still read all the parts by the narrator and hand out the dialog to volunteers. We pause from time to time and the children tell what they notice or ask questions. Several gasped when I read Daniel 2:2, "So the king called for his fortune-tellers, magicians, wizards and wise men." They cried out, "Wizards? Magicians?" So, I asked them a question to encourage them to think it through. "What if you could bring King Nebuchadnezzar to our time and let him watch television? What would he think about it?" One answered, "He would think we were magicians." I added, "We know that televisions are based on science, but Nebuchadnezzar wouldn't." I stopped at a cliffhanger to leave them begging for more: Daniel 2:12, "When the king heard that, he became very angry. He gave an order for all the wise men of Babylon to be killed." The kids were properly horrified because they realized that Daniel and his friends were on the hit list.

After the lesson, we did an activity: they painted the clay sculptures they made last week. In the background, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue played. Pamela and I are studying it right now, and David's marching band is including it in their half-time show. Sometimes, our activities have nothing to do with the Bible lesson. This week, I'm brought in our temporary pet snail for nature study. Then, the children did their homework and had free play after that.

I want them to enjoy wondering about the Bible. The big question they asked me on the first day concerned Daniel 1:2, "The Lord allowed Nebuchadnezzar to capture Jehoiakim king of Judah. Nebuchadnezzar also took some of the things from the Temple of God. He carried them to Babylonia and put them in the temple of his gods." One of them popped up with, "Why did God let that happen?" Another was angry about the stuff he stole from the temple for, when we studied Moses, we built the tabernacle out of cardstock. I never answered the question about why God let it happen. I told them that, by Christmas, they might figure it out. Every time we come across the word "wise men" I hold my tongue because they will experience more awe once they make the connection themselves.

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.