Rare Event Here: Homeschooling Meme

1.  One homeschooling book you have enjoyed -

I'm cheating: it's a six volume set which technically you could format into one humongous book:  The Original Homeschool Series by Charlotte Mason

2.  One resource you wouldn't be without -

One? Be serious!

Cyberfriends who either get autism, get homeschooling, or get what it means to have a relationship with Christ

3.  One resource you wish you had never bought -

Computerized homeschooling software I used over ten years ago, so long ago, I cannot remember the name of it

4.  One resource you enjoyed last year -
It's a tie between my Mac (I've joined the dark side of the force) and the authors of unpublished framework papers (the basis for a book to be published somewhere over the rainbow) who helped me better understand Charlotte Mason's ideas

5.  One resource you will be using next year -

A local Charlotte Mason study group - What a blessing that I've not had in all these years of homeschooling until now

6. One resource you would like to buy -

iPad version whatever

7.  One resource you wish existed -

I will quote my friend Nancy Kelly about a resource that I have wished a long time ago and will exist sometime in the near future:

Non-profit ChildLightUSA Developing New Mason Curriculum  

Dedicated to recovering and promoting Charlotte Mason's educational theories and practices, ChildLightUSA is developing a curriculum meticulously modeled after what Mason describes in her six volumes. A seven-member Design Team is changing the current paradigm of education, collaborating on a rich, modern and flexible K-12 Mason curriculum. This new curriculum will feature Mason distinctives such as 18 subjects per grade level for use in various educational venues including public, charter, private and web-based learning communities. The projected release date is fall of 2012.

8. One homeschool catalog you enjoy reading -

None but I do find books reasonably priced at Paperbackswap, Librivox, Baldwin, and Best Web Buys.

9.  One homeschool website you use regularly -

Even though we are piloting a different Mason curriculum right now, I still go back to the old standby
Ambleside Online for information and to help other homeschoolers.

10. Tag six other homeschoolers -
Queen Mum
Black Pearl Academy
Penny
Penny
Mrs. C
Stephanie

The Last Day of the Week... Monday!

We finished our first week of school yesterday. Yes, I know it was Monday. Since we started school on Tuesday due to Labor Day, our first week of school ended on the first day of the week. Years ago, I figured out the hard way that one cannot squash five days of school into four without losing one's mind! I learned so many neat things about Pamela thinks this week because we worked at a reasonable pace.

History - As always, she likes to tell me the day of the week if given the exact date (a savant ability). While most of our books are set in the industrial age, a Mason education doesn't mean unit studies, so we have books from different times in history. Keeping a timeline or book of centuries helps children sort out the chronology. We received a beautiful book of centuries, and Pamela will soon start making entries in it. All five days of school, she selected the order of reading based on chronology. The first three days of the week she went forward in history, from B.C. to A.D. The last two days, she reversed the order. She wasn't clear about the dating of a literature book, so she checked the copyright page. She asked "What year?" right before we read the book on Mississippi sharecroppers. Later, I looked up a couple of background details for her and informed her that it was set in the early 20th century. I read in a history paper on Mason's work that being able to place events in time sequence is a high school level skill!

Language Arts - Pamela started learning a new poem for recitation: Fog by Carl Sandburg. She did a lot of copywork, which she finds easy; the topic is a bit odd: Benjamin Franklin's advice on marriage. I had her try two studied dictations at a higher level of difficulty: study a whole paragraph, but only write the sentence that I choose and dictate. She adjusted well to the latest wrinkle. I was most intrigued by her selections for a commonplace book (the pages with pink lines) which she began for the first time this year. I scaffolded by paying attention to her reactions while reading and, at the end of the day, asking her for her favorite book. A commonplace book, a memento for the student, gives a glimpse into the literary development of their thinking. Clearly, Pamela favored Caesar in her quotes, choosing passages from a poem, a character study, and a play. She found humor in the wild party at the White House but turned around and quoted Jesus the next day. What tickles me the most is that Pamela quoted Shakespeare for one of her entries. Shakespeare!




Oral Narration - Readers unfamiliar with a Mason paradigm might fret over the lack of "creative" writing. Pamela is still learning English as a first language. She sees examples of beautiful writing in literary language in the books she reads every day. Through copywork and studied dictation, she learns mechanics like spelling and punctuation in context (and not dissected from the place where you would typically practice it--writing).  She sees examples of beautiful writing in literary language in the books she reads every day. Pamela orally narrates everything she reads, which teaches composition and organizing ideas. I have seen many improvements since last year: she is able to speak in fuller fragments or sentences, sequence her ideas (a few sentences at a time), and recall the reading from the previous day. Sometimes, she remembers a detail she didn't narrate the day before! As I reported last week, I see some critical thinking occurring in her narrations, too.

Not only that, I see her processing it during the day. Yesterday, she read about the Ice Age in her ancient history book. That night, Pamela found Antarctica in Google maps and was looking at the street view to see pictures. She asked me what season it was, and I told her that it was always like that. She said, "It never melts. Cold and miserable." I can tell one thing about the dating of the world confuses her. She has noticed that some books talk about millions of years (old earth ideas) and other books talk about thousands of years (young earth ideas). Today, when she was looking through the atlas, which has a graphic on prehistoric ages, she was trying to pronounce triceratops and told her the number of years. I explained to her that people have different ideas about when the earth came into being.

Literature - During the day, we read passages from seventeen different books of wide and varied genre:  historical, scientific, historical fiction, poetry, Shakespeare (yes, the real deal, unabridged and unadulterated), mythology, fantasy, biography, and the Bible. Avoiding textbooks gives us the freedom to read many lovely books during the day. The most beautiful thing is how integrated her learning becomes. While we are not reading a book on government right now, the two on inventions addressed the role of the President and Congress in building large pieces of infrastructure. Tongue-in-cheek realistic fiction illustrates politics. Not only that, ideas begin to emerge. This week, the overarching idea was how the North and South didn't agree on much during the Industrial Revolution.

Pamela shows much more emotion while reading than she did last year. Going through a passage about an inventor, Pamela gasped because the name of a street where he lived was West Newton Street. We used to live in a town called West Newton, and Pamela still drives through it on Google maps for old times sake. She also laughs out loud at things that strike her fancy and even shares little comments as we go.

Science (or Is It Art?) - We explored several things for science this week. Pamela painted cloud formations in water color to give her a chance to observe clouds and make their names more meaningful. We set up a simple experiment on evaporation that is ongoing. Like education, science cannot be rushed. Pamela filled the jars to the lid lines, and I  waited all weekend for the water level in the lidless one to drop below the confusing lines. Yesterday, they were not low enough. Hopefully, she can make her final entry later this week. We also shredded cardboard, newspaper, paper bags, and empty toilet paper and paper towel rolls for the worm composting bin. She made several nature notebook entries. The egg sac and feathers will be ongoing as we will make more observations down the road (on our walk, we found two other feathers that look completely different). We followed up on wisteria and camellia from last year. Pamela was surprised to learn that wisteria pods are green in the fall (not brown) and camellia fruit are fuzzy. We read several living books on inventions from the industrial era and a chapter about how related species share diseases.




Physical Exercise (or Is it Architecture? or Geography? or Math?) - Every day of school, we walk for thirty minutes. Along the way, I snap photographs of details we read about in art and architecture last year. To refresh her mind on them, Pamela is recording them in her drawing notebook after we get home. We also talk about which compass direction we are heading for geography. When Pamela asks how many minutes have elapsed, I tell her the time and when we started for mental math. If she wants to know the number of minutes left, I tell her to subtract it from 30 or give her the stop time and current time.

Many interesting things happen on our walks. Yesterday, we bumped into a family from our Charlotte Mason study group. The father owns a tree service business, and we noticed the load of tree debris in the back of the truck and watched the little bulldozer move up the ramp. Last week, Pamela aimed to walk to the old Walmart but an evil blister felled her along the way. She took off her shoes and walked the  neighborhood sidewalks barefoot, where she destroyed a small spider web with her toes, found a mockingbird feather, saw an expired mourning dove, and discovered a date on a water pipe cover patented on October 22, 1912--a Tuesday according to her. Google it. She's usually right.



Geography - Many of our books come from different places as well as times. One story is set in New Hampshire but takes readers back to ancient Greece. Through our reading, we have visited Charleston, SC, Mississippi, New York City, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City, Boston, the Missouri River, Michigan, California, Canada, England, Africa, South America, ancient Israel, ancient Rome, and an imaginary planet in a galaxy far, far away.

Math - Pamela loves the math curriculum, but the vocabulary is intense. I created some concrete illustrations with word roots and charts to help Pamela learn them. We combined review and new material this week. Her strength (pattern-recognition) balances out her weakness (language). Math is her strongest area, and she continues to work on pre-algebra.

Foreign Language - With Steve in Kansas, we transitioned to a canned Spanish curriculum that focuses exclusively on audio and pictures for the first ten lessons (which may take us all year). Pamela and I learned some new words: la carne, el medico, and el avion. All the other words were review for us! We are also listening to two familiar fairy tales in Spanish.

Music - We sang a folk song from South Carolina, a hymn, and a Latin American nursery song. We also listened to some of Bach's harpsichord music, which soothed us after a hot walk.

Handwork - Pamela ought to be fingerknitting this term to pave the way for knitting with real needles in the next term. Since her knitting needle case is nearly finished, she has focused on sewing instead.
 

Less, Not More

One struggle many homeschoolers face is the feeling of not doing enough. To prove we are doing a good job, we push our children harder and teach skills earlier. With special needs children, the stakes seem higher because some tell us we are not qualified to teach. That seed of doubt tempt us to forget that children are born persons. They have their own timetables. While we may know typical developmental patterns, we cannot force development to go any faster than it is. Pushing harder may very well train the habit of frustration, creating setbacks instead of progress.

It is okay to step back and table a goal when tasks cause tears. It is okay to slow down or to reevaluate what you are doing. Last year, I felt rushed to get everything done some days. This year, I cut the amount of reading by 13% (measured by word count). Rather than spend ten minutes on a book three times a week, we read for five minutes a day if ten minutes is too long because of the complexity of the language. The benefits of a more leisurely pace became evident last week.

One book was written in the 1960s. A passage describes a large room full of computing machines. That unusual turn of phrase caught Pamela's eye. She stopped our reading (we alternate reading aloud sentences) and asked, "What about computers?" I explained that back in those days they called it a computing machine, which filled a whole room. Computers didn't work very well, and they were huge. We continued the reading, and she stopped me again when the book described a long tape being fed into the computer. "Just like tape recorder. No CDs, yet," she added. I explained that, in those days, computers had reel-to-reel tapes and people used cards with holes punched into them. While Pamela said very little, the questions revealed much about the thinking going on in her mind.

Two thoughts come to my mind. First, living books have a way of shining light on other subjects. While the passage came from a literature book, the ideas led to a conversation about history and science. Second, the sign of understanding isn't the ability to answer questions. It is the ability to ask them. "The mind can know nothing save what it can produce in the form of an answer to a question put to the mind by itself" (Page 16). Each time Pamela stops and asks a question, she reveals what she knows and how she thinks. A good friend who is new to Mason's ideas points out how much teacher training she received on asking the "right" questions to elicit critical thinking skills. Now, my friend realizes we take the opportunity to apply these skills in the act of reading when we do all the thinking to ask the "right" questions.

Pamela stops and shares her thoughts through reactions or in words far more frequently than she did last year. In one book, she laughed out loud at one angry character telling another to sit on a tack, just as she did with the wild inauguration party at the White House during Andrew Jackson's presidency. She applied "together or alone" thinking and said "just like RDI" when characters assessed the possibility of one character pulling all the pranks described without help. Her face lit up in another book when she learned that one character is the cousin of a president she studied last year.  While taking turns reading lines from a poem about language, she suddenly felt inspired to read aloud in unison with me just as the topic switched to conversations and dialogues.

I scaffold Pamela whenever possible. I suspected she wouldn't understand the meaning of deductions in a story about sharecroppers, so I linked it to a word she already knows: debt and debtors. I told her the sharecroppers had too many deductions whenever they shopped at the store. They gave them too much debt, and they became debtors. I found a pattern in the books that didn't work for her last year. Nearly all of them have very short stories that only take a few days to breeze through. I believe she needs to live with a character or event for much longer. So, instead of reading books that leap from story to story, I substituted recommended books with Hawthorne's A Wonder Book for mythology and Tappan's In the Days of Alfred the Great for English history (part of our own history when you think about it). Perhaps, in the future, with an imagination warmed toward a few more key monarchs and stories, Pamela can start to take possession of a pageant of our historical roots.

It is a great thing to possess a pageant of history in the background of one's thoughts. We may not be able to recall this or that circumstance, but, 'the imagination is warmed'... (Page 178)

Expressiveness

Pamela gave a couple of priceless narrations that reflect her personality and her growing vocabulary. She kicked off the day, narrating what she had previously read in Genesis:

Abraham is sad and blue because Sarah is expired. Got to bury and buy a cave. It is almost time for the debut of Rebekkah.

From a person who has struggled with aphasia most of her life, that narration was fantastic! Debut entered Pamela's vocabulary when she started researching the history of television. Last spring, she loved juxtaposing debut and debt "From the Lord's Prayer" which stood out to her because our old church used the more familiar trespasses. I have no idea where expire came from but she's been sprinkling many narrations with it.

When she read the word anxiety in the passage on Caesar, she related it immediately to her own anxious feelings and narrated,

Caesar was mad. He was freaking out. He broke his camp. He marched! Humpf!

She borrowed some language from The Big Comfy Couch when she related a story about Andrew Jackson's inaugural party,

They put mud on the couch. Who made this big mess with Andrew Jackson? They got into big trouble.

Pamela also showed spunk when she narrated the first snow of the winter for a little brother she sometimes calls a brat,

Prediction - Pinch get into trouble ice skating. He disobey.

What Really Happened - He put stone in the snow. He make a stupid stone on snowball.

Today's Artistic Expression
Pamela also expressed herself in pictures today, drawing a mosaic we found at the art gallery, for her review of ancient art. She painted the sky again for science and added monkey grass to her nature notebook.


First Turtle
Pamela started watercolor classes in August. Every time the class meets, each painting, guided by the same instructor on the same subject, looks completely unique. People accept individuality in art, but somehow that idea doesn't translate as well to reading a passage from a book. We are tempted to look for certain facts that must be recalled and certain ways in which ideas must be expressed. That is not the point of narration. Just as art reflects the personality and reaction of the artist, a narration too reflects the personality and reaction of the reader.

We loved Pamela's turtle so much that we framed it and made a latte cup for Steve.



Pat Terry's Traveling Turtles
Pamela's first turtle was based upon a picture. Her second turtle was even better because she had live models! A friend found wild slider turtle eggs and built a nest for them. She took strong measures to protect the eggs from crows. A few weeks ago, they hatched and she has been taking them to classrooms and other settings where people can study them. The adorable baby turtles inspired the whole class. Today, Pamela added the finishing touch to her watercolor.



Watercolors from August

A Day in the Life of a Mason Homeschool

Every year I learn something new about Pamela and I learn how to arrange her education in ways to make it more living and more enjoyable. A couple of little organizational nuances helped: as always, I burn our weekly audio work (music, Spanish, audio books--to help Pamela develop an ear for other speakers, etc.) onto a CD but this time I put the selections in order of what we use most frequently to lessen the time forwarding to the right spot. In addition to putting page tabs in the books we are reading, I put them in the notebook of pages I keep in the reading notebook (passages for studied dictation, music pages, recitation poem, two books we don't have in hard copy, etc.). As always, I had the weekly schedule on hand and Pamela highlighted tasks as we completed him, which gives her a little thrill to see the column for Tuesday slowly turn from white to pink and yellow.

We spent 3 1/2 hours doing our thing in the morning and 1 1/2 hours in the afternoon, leaving time for me to shower and tidy up before our Charlotte Mason study group meeting. Today was especially meaningful to me because the first ever public school (charter) in North America opened its doors for class. Families, teachers, and those who love Mason's ideas of a relational education have worked so hard behind the scenes to make this school a reality.

I decided to give you a peek into a day. Some "exhibits"(the titles of specific books) are closed because they involve the design team developing a Mason curriculum for homeschools, private schools like Red Mountain Community School and Willow Tree Community School, and Gillingham Charter School. However, what I can show you is the process, which is what a relational education is all about.

Living Books
One thing struck me as we read very short passages, limited by Pamela's aphasia and frequent need for new horizons, from seventeen different books. Everything is so connected, but not by careful planning. The beauty of a living books approach is that the best books simply come together without special orchestration. This morning was rainy and misty, perfectly tuned into one literature book, which opens with children waiting for the fog to clear before they pick nuts, and the poem I chose for recitation is about fog. We read a poem by Kipling, which Pamela adored because it mentioned Caesar, whom we are reading about in Plutarch and slowly working through the play by Shakespeare. Our history spine touched on one president, while two books on inventions touched on two other presidents. Pamela gets a kick out of seeing all the unintentional connections between stories.

Language Arts
Pamela is doing copywork of sayings by Benjamin Franklin and studied dictation (which works on spelling, punctuation, and other mechanics of writing). This year, she advanced in her studied dictation: she studies a whole paragraph, but I only dictate one sentence to her. We added a new notebook on the menu: the commonplace book, which is a place to store copywork that has special significance to you. At first, I worried about how to spotlight this for Pamela. When we read today, the right moment emerged and I seized it. When we read the Kipling poem and Pamela's face lit up at the mention of Caesar, I shifted to her commonplace book after the reading. I told her how happy she looked when we read that verse of the poem, so that verse belongs in her commonplace book. I explained that it is like Maria and her favorite things. It is for those special passages that make her smile.

It is very helpful to read with a commonplace book or reading-diary, in which to put down any striking thought in your author, or your own impression of the work, or of any part of it; but not summaries of facts. Such a diary, carefully kept through life, should be exceedingly interesting as containing the intellectual history of the writer (Page 260).

Science
Instead of textbooks, we read living books for science about inventions and animals, rounding about by observing and doing. Today, we spent 10 minutes shredding material to make a worm bin. Pamela painted a watercolor of the clouds (which she will do for a few weeks) to observe them and learn their names. A gray blanket of stratus clouds cloaked us for most of the day. For nature study, we made entries of an egg sac made by a garden spider who inconveniently placed it near the doorbell at the front door of our house. I absolutely love what Pamela wrote and drew today.



History
Even though history is the pivot of a Mason curriculum, I will touch on that another day as I eagerly await the arrival of what I hope will be a keepsake in the years to come: a beautifully bound book of centuries. Rest assured, Pamela did bask in plenty of history: a snippet on Stone Age people (as we test drive an ancient history book), the death of Abraham's beloved wife Sarah, Caesar's fumble, two different British monarchs, an Indian girl near the Great Lakes, former slaves in Mississippi, and three different presidents from three different books. I cannot wait to learn what big ideas Pamela finds vital enough for her book of centuries.


Potpourri of Things
We listened to our classical music, listened to more Spanish stories (and will spent another year learning this language by ear before trying to read) and sang a song in Spanish, and Pamela sewed a decorative edge on her knitting needle case. We walked and talked about directions while we enjoyed fresh air and exercise. We will spend a few weeks reviewing what we learned about architecture, art, and sculpture by finding features in our town. Today, Pamela drew an arched window from a physical therapy practice near our home.







Last, but NOT Least Math
I love the math program we use but, as always, the vocabulary challenges Pamela. I have decided to spend the first two days of the work previewing new words with homemade activities and sheets and doing only three lessons per week (four if things go smoothly). Pamela enjoyed classifying angles and triangles and the introduction to new words, which I made as concrete and meaningful as possible for her (internal, external, adjacent, and nonadjacent). I allotted a full fifty minutes to this subject, and Pamela finished it in forty!