Book of Centuries

History is the story of the way in which man has learned, and is still learning, how to live: of how through long centuries he has sought to satisfy the practical needs of his body, the questioning of his mind, and the searching of his spirit. It is the story of the greatest adventure in the world, this story of how man, from very small beginnings, has progressed in body, mind, and spirit. ~ Dorothy Mills

When I was in school, history was not "the greatest adventure in the world." It was downright boring. History was my least favorite subject in school, and, over time, much of what I memorized for the test flew out of my head. Textbooks had all the adventure squeezed out of them to make room for dates, facts, and other "important" things. I learned only what was required to get an A. What I had to regurgitate was just factoids that went in one ear and out the other once I turned in the textbook for good. History was history after graduation.

I fell in love with history as an adult, reading and discussing living books, usually written for the young, with my children. I enjoy reading nonfiction history, historical fiction, biographies, etc. especially those written by people with a passion for their subject. Thanks to reading wide and varied living books, I remember more history now than I ever did before. And, I don't even study! I want to know more because history really is a great adventure, when well told.

I learn interesting tidbits all the time. Do you know that Wisconsin is nicknamed the Badger State, but not because of the animal? Or, that President James Garfield came up with an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem? I get to follow people in their personal quests and journeys: facing dangers in the Lewis and Clark expedition, winding through twists and turns to invent the telephone, helping family and friends survive an epidemic to which the protagonist have immunity, and finding a new home after seeing your old village burned down to the ground. I sometimes find myself taking a peeking ahead after a particularly exciting chapter. Sometimes, I even stay up until the wee hours of the morning to read straight through to the end.

The most challenging aspect of teaching this way is finding books that are living without being moralizing. Not much has changed in the century and a half since Mason wrote, "There is nothing which calls for more delicate tact and understanding sympathy with the children than this apparently simple matter of choosing their lesson-books, and especially, perhaps, their lesson-books in history."

Charlotte Mason imagined the mind as a beautiful home which we fill with ideas found in storehouses (living books). She found it better to get to know a time and place through the life of one person or event instead of a timeline or chart of the entire history of that period listing all the important facts that somebody things children ought to know. Forming a relationship with someone in the context of their time, whether they are famous or otherwise, will teach children far more about that time than a list of dates that are just as confusing as times tables to the young. A history book that reads like an encyclopedia article has sucked the life of history. She favored books with a story that "moves on a few broad, simple lines" (Page 281).

They purl along pleasantly as a forest brook, tell you 'all about it,' stir your heart with the story of a great event, amuse you with pageants and shows, make you intimate with the great people, and friendly with the lowly. They are just the right thing for the children whose eager souls want to get at the living people behind the words of the history book, caring nothing at all about progress, or statutes, or about anything but the persons, for whose action history is, to the child's mind, no more than a convenient stage (Page 282).

"The writer has chosen such stories as he thought would amuse and please his readers, and give them at the same time some knowledge of the lives and thoughts of their forefathers. To this end he has not written solely of great folk––kings and queens and generals––but also of plain people and children, ay, and birds and beasts too." Mr. York Powell  (Page 288)

Other characteristics of living history are:

• A single voice chronicling history in a way that was "succinct, yet often warm with life; business-like, and yet childlike in its tone; at once practical and spiritual, simply just, and the work of a true scholar, breathing love to God and man" (Page 283).
• Firsthand accounts, those based upon eye witness testimony whenever possible, and contemporaries.
• The heroic age, or "the echoes of some dim, rich past" (Page 284) before recorded history began because "these were giants in the land in those days, and the child wants to know about them"  (Page 284).
• "Graphic details concerning events and persons upon which imagination goes to work" (Page 288).
• "Replete with interest, sparkling with episode, and full of dramatic incident" (Page 291).

But the bottomline is what happens to the child when given a living history book:

• "The child's imagination is aglow, his mind is teeming with ideas" (Page 284).
• "A child's individuality plays about what he enjoys, and the story comes from his lips, not precisely as the author tells it, but with a certain spirit and colouring which express the narrator"  (Page 289).
• "A narration should be original as it comes from the child––that is, his own mind should have acted upon the matter it has received" (Page 289).
• "They love, too, to make illustrations" (Page 292).
• "They play at history lessons, dress up, make tableaux, act scenes; or they have a stage, and their dolls act, while they paint the scenery and speak the speeches" (Page 294).
• "The child will live out in detail a thousand scenes of which he only gets the merest hint" (Page 295).

This sounds vague until you see it in real life. When my son was little, he ran back to his room to get the "perfect prop" before we started a reading. He built triremes out of legos and pitted the Greeks against the Persians on Pamela's blue blanket. He built the seven wonders of the ancient world in legos too. A friend recently shared that her youngest has traded Leif the Lucky for Batman. Pamela peeks ahead after every Plutarch and Shakespeare lesson to figure out how long it will be until the Ides of March. When she reads aloud, her voice betrays her emotions: she is a bit worried that two different characters are about to lose their beloved horses, another faced a dramatic grizzly bear attack, a cable broke and sidelined an important project, and Aleck Bell never seems to have enough money or time to invent the telephone.

Younger children keep the order of heroes straight by century through a very large timeline, setup by centuries, in which children wrote the names of people in their proper chronology. The table of centuries provided a graphic panorama to things in their time order and exact dates becomes information overload. An article in Charlotte Mason's periodical provides greater detail if you are really interested. AmblesideOnline has another example here.

Older children (those ready for writing their narrations, or about upper elementary) keep a book of centuries. It started out as a place to record illustrations for a book written about the British Museum.

Pamela has tried keeping one off and on, but it has never quite gelled for her. So many things are coming together for her this year, so I thought I'd try again. What is a book of centuries? Well, my good friend Laurie Bestvater has scored the Charlotte Mason's archives for information to supplement what we find in her six volumes and describes her research here. Laurie sums it up her thoughts in a FAQ and is now offering a beautiful, high-quality volume that will last a child many years.

Stone Age Pages




43rd Century B.C. Page


Map Pages

Mono Monarch Mania

So, there we were minding our own business, doing nature study. As planned, we were drawing the young Southern magnolia in our backyard in watercolor pencil. Suddenly, pandemonium erupted!

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a bright orange flash. It wasn't the red, wobbly flight of a cardinal. Nor was it an orange leaf drifting to the ground. It glided more gracefully. My heart pounded when I realized a monarch butterfly had gently landed in the butterfly bushes in front of my beloved camellia.

I scampered frantically into the house and grabbed my cheap camera, which was set to four-shot sequences. The butterfly must have realized I was stalking it because I scared it, and it too frantically fluttered around trying to avoid that crazy woman. I pointed the camera at random spots and came up with a couple of cool shots (out of a bunch of duds) that I couldn't have planned better.





The monarch finally settled down, as did my heart and I took a couple of pictures of it drinking nectar.






Then, I drew Pamela into the scene and we watched the butterfly until it left. Tomorrow, we will draw pictures in our nature notebooks! When we returned to the house, I went to the regional checklist for my county at Butterflies and Moths of North America. Alas! The monarch, a migrant for our area, is not listed, so I submitted a sighting as a monarch butterfly. It lacks the black line on the hind wings, which its copycat the viceroy butterfly sports. And, ladies and gentleman, we have a confirmed monarch, and BAMONA now includes in the listing of butterflies for our county!

Beautiful in Its Time

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil—this is the gift of God. Ecclesiastes 3:11-13

Today (er, Monday, but I'll pretend I posted two nights ago) should have been a disaster. Steve came home for an extremely short visit over the weekend, leaving us bummed at how little we see him. Pamela and I began the weekend about a half a day behind schedule. In the name of masterly inactivity, we took Friday afternoon off, hoping to catch up here and there over the weekend. We did knock out some books, but we started Monday a tad behind.

I meant to wake up early to start promptly at eight o'clock. I didn't roll out of bed until eight after dreaming about accidentally putting my nature notebook in the washing machine. On top of that, I had a headache and we had to go on an errand that required an hour of driving plus an hour of running around.

We started late, already "behind." Since I don't obsess over schedules, I figured we would do what we could do with delight and no more. Pamela did her best to supply the delight. She picks the order of what we do: some days she is methodical. She usually walks her favorite route and selects books in chronological order (from ancient to modern and vice versa). Sometimes, she picks her favorite route backwards or takes a completely new one. Lately, she has preferred reading books in random order.

Today, random didn't add enough joy, so Pamela invented her own game. For every book, she covered her eyes and told me, "Pick a random one." She giggled while I picked a book out of the crate and laughed when she saw what I picked. I improvised on her game and gave her clues while she had her eyes covered. I would hum the tune of a train song when I picked a book on that topic or "Hail to the Chief" when I picked one on the presidents. Then, she really laughed uproariously. Selecting the next book was a hilarious game that melted my headache.

Mother Nature had a lovely surprise when we headed out to study the magnolia tree. The creamy peach fruit, a fascinating study in its own right, popped out cheery red seeds, something we had never noticed before. We collected three different colors of leaves and recorded all of our finds in our nature notebooks. Then, we headed to the computer to classify the tree with the help of the Clemson Extension biological key. Pamela wrote down the name in English (Southern magnolia) and Latin (Magnolia grandiflora). Pamela has enough Spanish under her belt to translate the Latin word grandiflora. Without any help, she figured out right away that it meant "big flower".



Pamela found joy in mathematics too. She was looking at the relationship between the circumference of a circle and the diameter, calculating the ratio of the former to the latter. When the book asked her "How many times does the diameter fit around the circumference?" Even though she wrote an equation based upon the ratio (C = 3.1 x D), Pamela did not think to solve for D (D = .34 x C). I think the decimal was throwing her off. Since she enjoys playing with numbers, I showed her how to plug numbers into her calculator to figure it out.

I encouraged Pamela to guess a starting number, any number. She guessed three and plugged it into an equation based on an actual data point (a cookie cutter tin): 14.3 x _____ = 4.5. Her guess (3) yielded a number much too high, so she tried and discarded 2 and 1 (too high) and 0 (too low).
14.3 x 3 = 42.9
14.3 x 2 = 28.6
14.3 x 1 = 14.3
14.3 x 0 = 0

With a upper boundary (1, which was too high) and a bottom boundary (0, which was too low), I guided her through the search: the point half-way between 1 and 0. She plugged in .5 found it too high.
14.3 x .5 = 7.15

Then, she tried and rejected .4 (too high) and .3 and .2 (too low):
14.3 x .4 = 5.72
14.3 x .3 = 4.29
14.3 x .2 = 2.86

Every time we tried a new number, Pamela grew more and more delighted as the product got closer and closer to 4.5. She squealed with joy! Then, I asked her to try "Point three what?": .3__.

She tried .35 and squealed at getting even closer: 5.005! More joy with .34 (4.862), .33 (4.719),  and finally .32 (4.576)!

As always, we spent our time in the car wisely, doing our audio work (Spanish, recitation, a few audio books, music), and waiting for assistance in various offices, doing written work. I smiled at Pamela's misspellings in her studied dictation: how can you not see the logic of writing introducted? I smiled at her choice quote for her commonplace book, "Care for him as for the apple of your eye." She started her narration about gorillas in her science notebook and added two drawings of ancient sculptures to the drawings of those we have found in town.



Another delightful study is on the telegraph. I created five audio files (one per day) of a message in Morse Code. I picked quotations and lines Pamela might recognize from her reading to practice decoding using a tree. The file was not too difficult to create: I used Audacity to create series of 1,000 Hertz tones lasting 1/4 of a second for a dot and 1 second for a dash. Today's message was the title of a hymn we learned last year: Open Our Eyes, Lord. Watching Pamela's face light up anytime she makes a discovery is another source of joy.



Last June, I bought a calendar of firsts from Red Mountain Community School, but it has taken some time to wrap my head around it. How do you know a first is a first? God clued me in on Saturday when the camellia that always blooms in October revealed its blossoms right on schedule. The second issue for a math geek like me is that the book has 86 pages, each of which has four columns, which equates to 344 days of entry. A leap year, which has 366 days, would skip 22 days. That meant we needed to have two days per column, twice, in ten of the months and two days per column, once, in ten of the months. I made a command decision to set up January 1 through 27 on single columns, put 28/29 together, and 30/31 together. We will apply the same logic to the last four days of every month until we hit November and December, which will only be the last two days of the month. You can see why I have put off making any decisions because I can't even follow my reckoning here. Since we had plenty of spare time, Pamela started setting up her calendar and made it half of the way through February. Because Pamela loves calendars, she enjoyed this immensely.

They find that, in Bacon's phrase, "Studies serve for delight"; this delight being not in the lessons or the personality of the teacher, but purely in their 'lovely books,' 'glorious books.' ~ Charlotte Mason

Living in Spite of Yourself

This week, my wonderful church started a new women's Bible study: Living Beyond Yourself by Beth Moore. I took this Bible study five years ago, but life has gotten so busy that I need a refresher. How do you know if you need it? Well, if it is Wednesday morning and you know you cannot possibly get everything done that you need to get done by Friday without losing your mind, this is the study for you. Why? You learn to tap into a power, and a person, higher than yourself to get through the day without losing your cool or telling someone what you really think.

By relying upon the Holy Spirit, you end up enjoying Fruit whether or not everything on your to-do list gets a checkmark: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. What? Get rid of all your bad habits while doing everything on your list. Nope! Fruit like that doesn't come naturally: it comes supernaturally through the Holy Spirit working in your heart. If you really don't think you need it, check out how many times you whine or vent on a Facebook status.

Besides supernatural power, other things have helped us keep up with our studies (we just wrapped up Day 18 and are half way through Week 4). Today, I will share how I set up my audio disc. Some of our day is primarily audio: Spanish lessons, folk song, hymn, Spanish song, Spanish fairy tales, recitation, composer study, listening to Librivox recordings, etc. Having it all on the computer means it is not portable. Today, in between delivering meals to the elderly through meals on wheels, Pamela did all of her audio work: forty minutes freed up to do something else at home! I have a hard time keeping track of one CD, much less five or six. Plus, that means getting up and switching disks every time we transition to another activity. By putting everything I need for the week on one CD, the day runs more smoothly: we can take it to the car with us or we can flip through tracks with the remote control.

Here are some tips that have helped me:

1. I put everything in order of frequency. The things we do every day go at the beginning of the CD, so we avoid wasting time flipping through tracks. The stuff we do only once a week goes at the end of the CD.

2. I love Audacity, which lets you edit your sound recordings. Before making a CD, I edit individual files for various reasons.

• I edit the tempo (change the speed without changing the pitch). When someone speaks too quickly (Spanish or an audio book), I slow down the recording without making the changing the speaker's vocal quality.
• I remove any annoying background noise. 
• To introduce vocabulary words for Spanish, I copy and paste the person in the story saying the word. We listen to new words and point to pictures before the story begins to build our vocabulary.
• I include only the part of the story we are reading. Because the Spanish fairy tales are short, we listen from beginning to the current stopping point. I cut the ending out so we know exactly where to stop. For Spanish only, we listen to the same segment two or three times a week. Our goal is building our ear for we already know the story.
• I break up the English readings that are stories into day-by-day chunks. So, if we have five passages from the same book that week, I will have five different tracks with only the passage we need for each day. I have tabs and marks on the pages in the book so Pamela can find the right spot on the page on her own if I am driving.

3. I put all audio work in blue ink (not black) on our weekly schedule for quick reference.

The Power of Ideas

Every educational philosophy seems to have some sort of emphasis around which curriculum is built. For example, unit studies intentionally build all subjects around a theme: a specific topic, a character trait, a country, etc. Traditional textbooks focus narrowly on a subject with information organized and presented very tightly, factually, rigorously. Classical education gives children what fits in each stage (in the grammar stage, i.e., elementary age, the focus is memorization of facts, rules, data, details, etc.). Unschoolers pay attention to the interests of the child and provides what is needed to pursue those interests. So, what is the emphasis for a Charlotte Mason approach?

CM homeschoolers tend to think in broad principles rather than fixed rules. When unsure of what to do, I often fall back on her principles. For example, when Pamela was struggling with picture study taught in the manner Mason described, I realized Pamela, as a person with aphasia and autism (personhood being Mason's first principle), required more scaffolding by giving her visual cues to show what I understood, having a grand conversation, and turning it into a theory of mind game with five levels of scaffolding. Now, Pamela can do picture study in the way Mason described.

Some may point to history as the pivot of a Mason curriculum, which actually takes a backseat to the knowledge of God. "The knowledge of God ranks first in importance, is indispensable, and most happy-making" (Page 158) and "Next in order to religious knowledge, history is the pivot upon which our curriculum turns" (Page 273). While that may help us structure the books and things we choose, I think there is something more fundamental. While some subjects dovetail well into a chronological way of thinking (history, literature, picture study, composer study, architecture), others do not (second language, mathematics, science, handicrafts). Mason also added books completely out of the chronology she laid out for that school year! Why? I think the reason why has something to do with what we emphasize.

And, what do we emphasize you ask? Ideas. Mason touches on ideas in several of her many principles:

In saying that "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.

We hold that the child's mind is no mere sac to hold ideas; but is rather, if the figure may be allowed, a spiritual organism, with an appetite for all knowledge. This is its proper diet, with which it is prepared to deal; and which it can digest and assimilate as the body does foodstuffs.

Such a doctrine as e.g. the Herbartian, that the mind is a receptacle, lays the stress of education (the preparation of knowledge in enticing morsels duly ordered) upon the teacher. Children taught on this principle are in danger of receiving much teaching with little knowledge; and the teacher's axiom is, "what a child learns matters less than how he learns it."

But we, believing that the normal child has powers of mind which fit him to deal with all knowledge proper to him, give him a full and generous curriculum; taking care only that all knowledge offered him is vital, that is, that facts are not presented without their informing ideas. Out of this conception comes our principle that,––

Therefore, children should be taught, as they become mature enough to understand such teaching, that the chief responsibility which rests on them as persons is the acceptance or rejection of ideas. To help them in this choice we give them principles of conduct, and a wide range of the knowledge fitted to them. These principles should save children from some of the loose thinking and heedless action which cause most of us to live at a lower level than we need.

The concept of ideas seemed very nebulous to me for a very long time, but the longer I work with Pamela, the more vivid it becomes. For example, last year, we read a book that absolutely captivated Pamela: The Tarantula in My Purse. Pamela fell in love with the idea of Jean Craighead George taking wild animals into her home, caring for them, and later releasing them. Then, we had an appointment from God the week we read the last chapter in the book: we helped a friend rescue two hawks! Since then, Pamela has talked off and on about rescuing animals. Last month, a praying mantis ended up in our house: I noticed it crawling on the ceiling while I was talking to a friend on the phone. A few days later, I snapped a picture of it hanging out on some furniture. All on her own initiative, Pamela dug out a mason jar and lid from the cabinet, carefully captured the misguided insect, and put it outside. I had my camera handy and caught her comments on video.





The most recent episode was concerning a walnut sphinx moth, whose identity Butterflies and Moths of North America kindly confirmed for us. (Oh, and as a result of our citizen science efforts, BMNA has added the walnut sphinx moth to the rolls for our county!) I have to admit: it wasn't a true rescue. I spied it on the back porch while setting the house alarm for the night. I found Pamela's butterfly garden netting and sneaked out to capture the poor thing, which we kept in captivity long enough to work through a few lessons from the Comstock book (Handbook of Nature Study) and make nature notebook entries. Tuesday night, we released the moth and Pamela easily saw why the moth is sometimes mistaken for hummingbirds. Its wings flutter quite rapidly.







But, this is not the end to the ideas. More are sprouting. We cannot do nature study on every animal such as those not native to our area or close enough to visit. So, our books inform us when real living things cannot. We are now reading a book about people moving to a location where a species of endangered animals lives and monitoring their health and well-being. These people became veterinarians and animal epidemiologists and moved to a jungle or forest in a far away just to work in this field. She is picking up all sorts of interesting ideas related to the original one that captured her attention: we can give diseases to animals, and they can give diseases to us. Sometimes, our diseases kill animals and vice versa. Rather than take them to a hospital like we did the hawks, these animal doctors work outdoors and shoot medicine and sleeping potions into dangerous animals that need treatment. I cannot wait to see where these newly sprouted ideas lead Pamela.

I will leave you with her final nature notebook entries of what she learned from our guest.

Flapping, Feathers, Sphinxes, and Other Fun Stuff

Yesterday, we wrapped up our second week of homeschooling, which flew by!

Language Arts - Pamela picked some interesting quotes for her common place book, one of which is a foreshadowing of Mark Anthony's speech and Caesar's funeral in the play by Shakespeare. One of the most memorable moments of the week ended up in the common place book. We have been reading a book about a girl from Boston living in Charleston at the beginning of the Civil War. Another girl insults her by calling her a Yankee, and her father smooths it over by explaining that the British call Americans that name. Then, we were reading an entirely different book in which one of our ships was visiting London and giving tours to people. The Brits remarked, "The Yankees were most civil" and, as Pamela read the line aloud, she added, "War. Just like 'Yankee girl'" and chuckled at her play on words. She laughs aloud during readings quite often when something strikes her fancy. Pamela did more copywork of Benjamin Franklin's wit and made only one spelling error in her studied dictation. I opted not to turn it into a lesson since the word was unfamiliar to her (erect).






Literature - Two weeks ago, I wasn't sure how Pamela would do with one particularly fanciful book that I'm enjoying because I can see threads that surely must have inspired Tolkien and Lewis. Pamela's narrations are wonderful, calming my concerns. I also worried about a mythology book I substituted for the one on the curriculum list which jumped from story to story too quickly. She had no problem shifting from one setting, Eustace Bright telling stories to his younger siblings and friends, to the myth. Her narration of the Gorgon's head tells me she remembers the action from day to day, which was not happening with the original book! Because the book retells six myths in great detail, she will glean the background knowledge needed to leap from one story to the next down the road. Sometimes, two steps forward requires one step backward!

Math - While I love our math curriculum, Pamela has a few issues with it. The program assumes Pamela has background knowledge that she lacks. I have continued to make sheets that blend word roots and concrete illustrations and practice activities that prepare her for the next exercise. She is doing really well and worked on things like classifying triangles (equilateral/isosceles/scalene and acute/right/obtuse), constructing her own triangles, finding the relationship between different sides and their opposite angles, etc. Last year, I took a break from the curriculum to nail down fractions, area, perimeter, etc. I gave her some review problems and she remembered what to do! She absolutely adored the "magical" moment when you are finding the median of a triangle, and all the lines cross at the same point. Not only that, all on her own, Pamela connected the word median to mediano (the Spanish word she learned for medium in last year's Ricitos de oro y los tres osos). If your math lessons lack magical "aha" moments, then you are missing out on one of the great joys of life.

Science - We have struck a great balance between reading, doing, drawing, and writing for science. The lessons are short and varied, keeping Pamela's attention. We finally shredded enough paper and cardboard for our worm composting bin, so this week we made holes in the rubber maid bin. Because the drill wasn't working, I ended up hammering nails into the bin. It proved to be great work for Pamela's fine motor skills because, once the nail was stable and no longer needed to be held, Pamela finished the job and then retrieved the nail with the claw end. This finagled approach worked well for the holes in the top and bottom, but the springiness of the sides of the bin rendered it ineffective. Eventually, I stumbled on Plan C: screw a hole into the bin, pound the nail until stable, and let Pamela finish the job. Borrowing a drill from my father would have saved us a lot of trouble but would not have given Pamela's hands a solid workout. Redworm composting is full of information for beginners: we chose the "deluxe rubbermaid bin" because I'm not willing to shell out the big bucks yet. Besides, the process of building the thing will make us both better and handiwork.


We made fewer nature study entries because we spent two days on the garden spider and two days on the sphinx moth, which I have submitted to Butterflies and Moths of North America for identification. I believe it is a walnut sphinx moth, but none are listed for our county. By the way, you know you are a homeschooler when you sneak out on the back porch in your jammies to capture a moth! I had an old swallowtail lying around the house, so we carefully observed the differences between moths and butterflies with our own eyes as Pamela wrote down details about the moth. We are collecting feathers and drawing them. Once we have enough, we will be sorting them by kind (the position on the bird). A feather is not simply a feather as you can see in the photograph.



Pamela easily distinguishes puffy versus blanket versus no clouds. She is still working on the scientific names: cumulus and stratus. We have had absolutely no rain for our rain gauges and no opportunity to paint nimbus or cirrus clouds this week. I find it hard to call these watercolor paintings science because they are so beautiful. Do you notice the little symbol Pamela invented to reflect "no clouds"?


Since we are studying clouds, we are doing experiments with evaporation. The water from last week's experiment finally evaporated below the rim lines of the jar. Pamela clearly saw that the lidless jar evaporated more quickly. We started another experiment to see which container shape will evaporate more quickly. The most fun experiment involved massive amounts of flapping, and Pamela loved it as you can see in the pictures of our flap-a-thon. We were trying to see the effect of wind on evaporation rates. You may notice that the science journal are entirely Pamela's effort: drawing and simple sentences (I guide her in the phrasing). I can spend less time on planning by letting her notebook reflect her thinking rather than represent the thinking of someone who created elaborate lapbooks. Kids really can think for themselves if given the chance.



Watercolor Class - Pamela painted the top and side views of an apple in watercolor class this week. As always, her colors make the subject seem alive.


Fine Arts - We were supposed to do a picture study this week. When it came time to open the ziplock bag of print cards, half were gone! I have no idea where they are. People think I'm organized, but I'm not. My ideas and plans are organized, but the concrete things in my life, i.e., stuff, have room for improvement. I'm still thinking through the back-up plan. Pamela has added to her collection of arches and columns in her drawing notebook.


Handwork - Pamela should finish this knitting needle case next week and get back to her finger knitting.


Foreign Language, Music, Geography, History - I have nothing much to add, except for a few morsels. Pamela and I learned some new things in Spanish: la manzana, está comiendo, and el lápiz. We are on track to finish the ten lessons (which are broken up into five-mini lessons each) by the end of the year! Pamela loves the songs we are learning. The other day, while we were walking, she was singing all the songs she knew and even making a couple of jumps for joy. While we were pounding holes in the composting bins, we sang just for fun. Pamela is still covering the same geographical places and just made the first entries into her book of centuries. It deserves a post until itself.

Physical Exercise and Community Service - I will close with pictures from the Prayer Walk for all of the schools (public and private) in our county. Hey, wait a minute! I just realized there were no signs for the homeschools. Hmmmm. Anyway, we walked three miles and prayed for schools along the way (or signs representing the schools). The organization had a great turnout: I felt so thrilled to be surrounded by so many people who care about education and are willing to pray for them. Pamela balked about a mile into it but managed to get a grip. After that, she was a champ. I took the walks off our schedule for Friday and Monday to provide rest. Oh, yes, I just had to take pictures of the yucca plant and swallowtail butterfly.