Guest Blogger: Pamela's View of the Ice Storm

Composition with an Eye toward Development

Some professors wonder why educators even teach spelling instruction because of spell checkers. Hopefully, their students will not become sign makers (or cake decorators or church secretaries or ...) when they grow up.



While Pamela lags her peers in writing, she has come far. At least, she self-corrects spelling and grammar. She cares about how she writes for she changed grey to gray and was to were in her latest written narration of Fog Warning by Winslow Homer. She enjoys typing on Skype with my husband Steve through my account. The other day I found this exchange:

Tammy: I will buy a pizza today.

Stephen: ha ha

Tammy: I said Buy a Pizza today.

While I do not teach composition, I do assess what Pamela types. The first sentence is perfect. I have never corrected her writing with a red pencil as my English composition teacher did in high school, and Pamela can still write a perfect sentence. What a feat for someone who struggled with verb tense in her late teens! When Steve did not take her seriously, Pamela added emphasis with I said and by capitalizing buy and pizza. I love how subtly she made her point!

Pamela could improve upon that second sentence by adding punctuation, I said, "Buy a Pizza today." But, I do not plan to draw attention to it. Who wants to chat if someone turns everything into language arts lessons? Charlotte Mason's method works on composition without constant correction. The living books we read have many examples of dialogue. The copywork in her commonplace book has quotations. I need to teach her to enclose partial quotes in quotation marks and capitalize the names of countries, which I will incorporate into her studied dictation.



One sentence cracked me up! Commonplace books are basically written scrapbooks of items a person finds important. Pamela turned her old copywork book into a compilation of lists. In this one, Pamela summarized an episode of WordWorld which she watches at my parents' house: Frog helps Bug figure out a rhyme.




Dialogue is part of our recent studied dictation. While the swan dictation has no quotes, the one about Michael Faraday does. I can overlook the misspelling of Ribeau (a French surname) and massaging (a tricky word with French roots). Our next dictation will focus commas and capitalization for quotations.

Because of Pamela's aphasia, I tabled written narrations until this year. I am not alone in waiting for the right time developmentally. One mom at the Living Education Retreat shared that her teenager with autism struggled with writing. She found a therapy that helped him with his oral narration, and she had him spend a year retelling everything. Now, he is writing wonderful narrations with more confidence.

Early is not necessarily better! A recent study analyzing the lives of people over an eighty-year period concluded that, "Early school entry was associated with less educational attainment, worse midlife adjustment and, most importantly, increased mortality risk”. Why? “Most children under age six need lots of time to play, and to develop social skills, and to learn to control their impulses. An over-emphasis on formal classroom instruction—that is, studies instead of buddies, or staying in instead of playing out—can have serious effects that might not be apparent until years later."

This is exactly what Charlotte Mason stated over a century ago! It is why I am a purist in trying to apply her educational ideas before I try others.

It is why I trust recitation of nursery rhymes and Bible songs for children under the age of six. They need to play with words rather than endure formal lessons.

It is why I have not abandoned penmanship (even cursive) in the era of keyboards. Brain imaging reveals that "in children who had practiced self-generated printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and 'adult-like' than in those who had simply looked at letters." Cursive offers even more benefits: "multiple areas of brain become co-activated during learning of cursive writing of pseudo-letters, as opposed to typing or just visual practice" and "cursive activates areas of the brain that do not participate in keyboarding."

It is why Pamela and I write our own copywork, which John Piper chose as the number one technique for reading and understanding the Bible. The article on cursive noted that "writing letters in meaningful context, as opposed to just writing them as drawing objects, produced much more robust activation of many areas in both hemispheres."

It is why I do hardly any lessons on composition, which Mason discussed in her final volume. The building blocks of composition lie in memorizing beautiful language, reading living books, retelling them in your own words, copying your favorite turn of phrase, and writing passages from dictation. But, above all, oral narration is the foundation of written narration. Uncorrected, uninterrupted oral narration!

Here are my favorite quotes from Mason on the topic of composition in the elementary years:

Children of six can tell to amazing purpose. The grown-up who writes the tale to their 'telling' will cover many pages before getting to the end of "Hans and Gretel" or "The Little Match Girl" or a Bible story. The facts are sure to be accurate and the expression surprisingly vigorous, striking and unhesitating....

Two or three points are important. Children in lB require a quantity of matter to be read to them, graduated, not according to their powers which are always present, but they require a little time to employ their power of fixed attention and that other power which they possess of fluent narration. So probably young children should be allowed to narrate paragraph by paragraph, while children of seven or eight will 'tell' chapter by chapter. Corrections must not be made during the act of narration, nor must any interruption be allowed....

Children must not be teased or instructed about the use of stops or capital letters. These things too come by nature to the child who reads, and the teacher's instructions are apt to issue in the use of a pepper box for commas....

As the object of every writer is to explain himself in his own book the child and the author must be trusted together, without the intervention of the middle-man. What his author does not tell him he must go without knowing for the present. No explanation will really help him, and explanations of words and phrases spoil the text and should not be attempted unless children ask, What does so and so mean? when other children in the class will probably tell....

But let me again say there must be no attempt to teach composition.

P.S. For a modern look at Mason's ideas, try to get a copy of Dr. Jennifer Spencer's dissertation: "Self-Made Writer: A Grounded Theory Investigation of Writing Development Without Writing Instruction in a Charlotte Mason Home School."

Another Elaboration on Picture Study

In past posts, I have blogged many aspects of picture study, Charlotte Mason style: focus on theory of mind for Monet and Vermeer, making connections, videos of Monet study and da Vinci study in action, and museum visits.

What is picture study, you ask?

Mason taught pictorial art along two lines: appreciation and expression. We study masterpieces to see what a truly gifted artist can do. We focus on one artist per term, a new artist every term, to heighten their sense of beauty and foster a relationship with the work of an artist.

Mason outlined how to do a picture talk and basically you ask the child to (1) recall the previous picture, (2) study a new one carefully, and, when ready, (3) narrate the picture after you put away the card. Afterwards, you might have a conversation about the picture (the backstory, for example) or have child sketch the chief lines in the composition. You really do form a relationship with the work of an artist. You cannot imagine the exhilaration of seeing an original painting in its proper size and space with the finest detail of brushwork, form, and feeling before your eyes in a museum. The joy feel comes from our deep appreciation of an artist's accomplishments.

Since my last update, we have studied Millet, van Gogh and modern artist Makoto Fujimura, and Pamela met the latter last June as narrated in the following clip.



This term, we will be getting to know Winslow Homer, who, like Pamela, fell in love with watercolors. The "wrinkle" I added to picture study emphasizes the importance of theory of mind—knowing that what is in your mind may not be in the mind of another person unless you communicate. Pamela selects one picture from the stack of cards (the ones by Dover are quite handy and, once an artist I have in mind is available in one of Emily Cottrill's portfolios, I will try that). After she finishes studying the card, she must narrate the painting so well that I can figure out the one she had in mind. The following paintings illustrate the importance of describing a scene fully: Girl with Laurel (the upper painting) and Peach Blossoms (the lower painting). The two paintings have much in common: one young woman wearing a long dress and hat standing near flowering trees and a green field. If Pamela leaves out the wrong details in an oral narration, I might pick the wrong painting!





Since this was the first picture study of the term, Pamela probably did not realize how similar the two paintings looked. She selected Girl with Laurel, studied it, put away the card, and narrated the full scene. She described the girl and the background. Based upon her narration, I boiled down my selection to the two paintings. To spotlight the importance of offering a detailed description, I pointed out the information she had given me that helped me choose the right one. I said, "You told me there was a blue sky, but this one [Peach Blossom] has a gray sky. You also told me the girl was wearing a blue dress, but this girl is wearing a yellow dress. And, you said she carried a basket, but this one has no basket. So, it can't be Peach Blossom, so I am going to say it was Girl with Laurel." Giving her feedback on my thinking is an important part of helping see the effectiveness of her communication.

This year, I am adding another level of elaboration to Pamela's picture study. Because she is still learning English as a first language due to her aphasia, I let go of written narration a few years back. Pamela simply was not developmentally ready. Every day, she still works on the foundation for writing: oral narration, recitation, reading living books, copywork, and studied dictation. Her ability to describe paintings has improved to the point of being able to try her hand at written narration.

Because I would like her to write one narration a week, I plan to have her do picture study once a week as well. After she finishes her oral narration and I give her feedback, she will write a narration. I limited the scope of what she had to describe for her first attempt: I asked her to write about the girl while she was looking at the painting. I left the room to avoid influencing her in any way, and I am pleased with her efforts. She had already erased and made her own corrections before I returned. You can see the grammar glitches that come with syntactic aphasia. You can also see that her use of irregular verbs and personal pronouns is spot on!



The paintings themselves with offer natural elaboration: some will have two or more human subjects, several will have a crowd. The dramatic scenes will offer her the chance to describe actions and emotions. The seascapes and landscapes will require her to focus on background. When she feels comfortable in all of the above, then I can ask her to describe the whole picture while viewing it. Once she can do that well, I will remove the final piece of scaffolding and she will have to write her narration based upon her memory of the picture.

It is quite natural to make elaborations from Mason's ideas. There is one I plan to avoid. Some families try to take picture study from the line of simple appreciation to expression by making their own copy of the painting. I did this in the late 1990s before I came across Mason's ideas. It backfired on us because we were terrible at drawing and were clueless about elements of artistic composition. It became a chore, and we were never satisfied with our work. Mason was concerned for a different reason, "Beyond this of a rough study from memory of a given picture or of any section of it, these picture studies do not afford much material for actual drawing; they are never copied lest an attempt to copy should lessen a child's reverence for great work" (Page 216).

There is a time and place for art expression. Mason encouraged children to illustrate their favorite scenes from a book. And, if an artist has truly inspired them, perhaps they can try in the spirit of said artist.

Baby Steps in Writing

For many years, I have tried various writing programs until finally reaching the same conclusion as Charlotte Mason. Oral narration is the foundation of written narration. You will know when the child is ready to make the transition. Pamela is not quite ready, so I have backed off from encouraging written narrations. She did two things today that gave me hope for seeing them down the road. First, in our reading from a book about space, Pamela pointed to the word supernovae and announced, "It's a mistake!" I wasn't quite sure what she meant so I pressed for clarity. She added, "It's s, not e!" Suddenly, I realized that Pamela expected the plural of the word supernova to be supernovas. She wanted to share that mistake with me as a mutual joke. However, I turned it into a short grammar lesson explaining that, in Latin, plurals do not end in the letter s. They end in vowels like e. Second, she decided to do a combination of oral and written narration of her books today. While you might struggle to understand what she communicates in between doodles, these two pictures illustrate what we studied this morning.

Oh, if you look carefully, you see clear evidence of her firm understanding of personal pronouns which becomes more refined as Pamela's sense of self continues to emerge.

The Rabbit:

My furry, white rabbit with long, white ears, furry white hands, short, white feet, small, white tail, short pink bag and long, orange carrot was sitting on the grass. It slept.

Picture and Text by Pamela Glaser after her first lesson Writing Strands Level 2.

Unedited by Tammy Glaser, who is thinking her decision to go without the association method for language arts might be justified.

Wordless Wednesday: Chipmunk Chronicles

Focus on Chipmunks

We are wrapping up the end of our first official week of school, and I have to say Pamela is awesome. I made up a schedule in Excel (by the way, if you do not already have it, homeschoolers and other educators and students can buy the home and student edition of Microsoft Office for a great price--I enjoy thinking in Excel and find it indispensible for planning! Like her daddy, Pamela loves accomplishing and swiping things of her to-do list. We have accomplished nearly everything on the plan, and what is not done is due to things I need to figure out! She even adjusted it for me when we got behind in the association method because I got too ambition one day this week and we got a day behind!

The highlight of the week for me was one of Pamela's ideas. Throughout the summer, Pamela has been dropping little hints about what she would like to do differently. She requested that we read her beloved Getting to Know Nature's Children series of books. I do not believe these books are truly living books, they are not dry like encyclopedia articles either. I thought she might enjoy making entries in her nature notebook and writing her narrations there. As you can see, we started off with chipmunks.

Even though the soil in our area is too swampy and full of clay for chipmunks, we know them very well from our time in Colorado. We fed and watched the ground squirrels and Western chipmunks in our backyard. The baby chipmunks were so adorable, and Pamela enjoyed watching them scamper about. David spent hours trying to tame those things and could not contain his joy when one touched his shoe. One day, he ran into the house bawling, "Loa [our dog] broke a rule! She ate a chipmunk!" Yes, that day our dear dog shattered David's innocence, but he forgave her anyway.

During the week, Pamela read through page 11 and recorded her thoughts on graphic organizers posted below.





When it came time to write her narrations today, I put away her graphic organizers and she wrote from memory. I enjoyed seeing what she took away from her reading and what she found important. I loved her illustrations, too!

First Book Report in Her Own Words and Syntax!

For all of you Charlotte Mason kindred spirits, ChildLightUSA just posted the Fall 2007 journal. Click here and click journal to retrieve it.

This week we finished reading The Winged Watchman by Hilda van Stockum, a book with a wonderful message about forgiveness and self-sacrificial love. Because Amazon does not have text statistics for this book, my second trick to determine grade level is to go to the official Frustrated Reader site. While Renaissance Learning does not offer official quizzes for this book, I searched online to see at what grade level most schools place the book--half-way through the sixth grade in terms of reading comprehension. I majored in statistics for my master's degree and I just cannot help but pore over statistics!

And, here is Pamela's first book report in her own words and syntax! I followed the process we always do for guided written narrations. First, I recorded her oral narration of the entire book. Then, I made the sentence strips and worked them. We broke up the book report into four writing blocks, which she did one after another: Title/Author/Character/Setting, Beginning, Middle, End. Except for the title and author, she wrote the rest of the report without assistance. A major praise report follows the pictures of her first book report, so read on!





I am very excited for Pamela for the following reasons:

Positive Trend - I posted the first four narrations Pamela did at her page. Using Word, I did a spell check, which reported these narrations to be at a grade level of 2.7. I typed up Pamela's book report, which was measured at a grade level 4.0. Obviously, I will have a better handle on trends by the end of the year, but she increased the grade level of her writing.

Independent Writing - I left Pamela alone while she was working. She wrote everything, with no access to other material, from her memory! This illustrates the importance of narration: We Narrate and Then We Know.

Cursive - I did not tell Pamela how to write the report; I just said that it was a very important report and she could type it if she wanted. She opted to write it on the porch. Based upon that information, she chose cursive.

Because - I have not officially taught Pamela how to use the word because. But, whenever I make sentence strips, I add because to a few sentences. She used that word appropriately in several instances.

Thinking - I originally snapped the following picture of the report's first page. Notice that, after writing the middle and the end, Pamela had thought about what she had already written and added more names to her character list.



She has plenty of room for improvement in her style, which comes across as stilted. Keep in mind we reached present tense verbs in June. We have not done past or future tense yet, much less helping verbs. She used several syntax units I have not formally taught.