My 14-Year-Old on Facebook

All "grassroots" movements seem to end up as useful weapons in the arsenal of some bigger political machine. For the Republicans, it has been the "Tea Party", for the Democrats it has been the "Occupy-wherevertheheckthere'sastreetinthenortheast" people. I have no faith in either of these movements or in their ability to remain autonomous. All they seem to end up being is one big publicity stunt and a way to stir pre-packaged media "controversy". If you think that we're moving into any sort of "post-partisan" future, you're fooling yourself.

Yeah. Pretty much. Why don't I let him write the blog, and I'll go have some more tea? (the drinkable kind, I mean. Not the movement kind)

Monday School & Life

Mass this morning at 8. 

Sitting this minute at the kitchen table watching Helier do math, a protracted process. So much thinking, so little of it to do with anything arithmetical, and all of it set to an endless loop of "The Farmer in the Dell."

Crispina is in the sunroom, also doing math, romp-de-romp-de-romp, having already finished drawing and writing about polar bears and done some cursive practice. Now she's reading The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse and declaring that she does NOT want to tell me what happens in this chapter. So really it's the Top-Secret Classified CIA Underworld Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse.

Amicus got up at cow-milking time (for people who have cows, that is) to read an algebra lesson and watch a demonstration on DVD. No idea what he's doing right now;  maybe algebra.

On Saturday I cooked up three pounds of ground turkey with Italian sausage spices, and today I'm making sausage-and-pepper-and-egg "muffins" for lunch. On Saturday we also joined the Angelic Warfare Confraternity, which really has nothing to do with what I'm cooking today, though I do have to pray fifteen Hail Marys. Did ten in the car on the way home from Mass;  five to go. Of course, I could just go get my rosary out of my bag and pray that, but that would be so organized . . . 

The dog has gone for his compost elevenses, and now he's back in the kitchen, hoping I'll drop one of those sausage muffins.  Mmm-mmm, dog. Smell 'em and . . . I was going to say weep, but it's his mouth that weeps. Read 'em and drool.

Thoughts on the HHS Contraceptive Mandate

It occurs to me that what's really wrong with the contraception-coverage mandate is not only that it's a clear intrusion of the state into the territory of the free exercise of religion in this country. What strikes me also is that first, the state is underwriting the definition of an elective medical option as an absolute healthcare requisite. It's coming down hard, at least, on the side of an existing definition which has not, until now, been required to be universal in practice.

This is a little like declaring rhinoplasty a basic and universal human right, the denial of which, to anyone, at any time, however conditionally, amounts to an injustice. A nose job may in fact be essential to a given person's sense of well-being for perfectly valid reasons;  still, the government's not forcing everyone's employer to pay for it, nor is the fact of having to come up with the cash yourself considered particularly an affront to your rights under the law.

Second, and more important, however, the state is underwriting the definition of pregnancy and childbirth as disease.  It's buying and selling a default position that like smallpox, pregnancy and childbirth are conditions which ought to be prevented, via what amounts to a government-sponsored campaign.We don't quite yet want to stamp out children in the same way that we wanted, in the last century, to stamp out smallpox, but we sure as hell want to put our official state signature to the position that to get landed with a child you didn't specifically ask for ought to feel like a scar. We want any institution which objects to this position to understand that it is inflicting a wound, and that there's no other possible way to think.

I Know, I Know

It's boring around here. I promise you I haven't just been lying on the chaise longue eating Belgian truffles and waving my polished nails around in the air to dry them. (As if, my daughters might say). In fact, it's not that I haven't just been doing those things;  I haven't been doing them at all. I'm not even in the remotest danger of doing them, because for one thing, I don't own a chaise longue on which to lie, and the box of truffles I got for Christmas has long been consigned, a tomb of rustling paper cuplets, to the county dump (and please don't send me more). Plus, I hate nail polish.

So what I have I been doing, all these weeks I've been ignoring you? Well, I've been lesson planning, and also, of late,  I've been meal planning. Not long ago, fed up with trying to cook for Aelred's low-carb diet, and also fed up with my own physical proportions and general state of well-being, I decided that what I needed was a new cookbook. I bought Melissa Joulwan's Well Fed (not a sponsored link, by the way, just a link), and I have to say, it's made me want to cook again. For more info on the book itself, you can read the Amazon reviews;  in my view, all the raves she gets are right on the money. Anyway, I've set myself to cook my way through this cookbook this spring, adapting some recipes as I'm inspired to, but mostly putting on some more helpful cooking habits as I go. Chiefly I'm training myself to do a huge "cookup" every weekend, so that I have grilled chicken, browned ground beef, and chopped and steam-sauteed vegetables for go-to quick meals throughout the week, as well as one or two more special dishes. So, there's that going on in my life, and it's all good so far.

I've also been working on poems and on putting together a new poetry manuscript which I think -- though I'm not married to the idea right this minute -- I may self-publish sometime this year. My sense is that -- within the parameters of the already-microscopic poetry book market -- I'm simultaneously too formal and too free-verse, too religious and not religious enough, to fit any of the existing paradigms. I mean, many of the best poems I've written so far were written before I was Catholic and when I was actively struggling with faith, so there goes that devotional audience, for example. Even now, the poems I write are just -- poems. Some are a little prickly. They're not really supposed to make you love Jesus, though of course I hope you do. On the other hand, if you don't, they're not going to affirm you in that, which is something, I guess.

So I am thinking that I'll run up a limited number of small books, which I'll try to make lovely enough for Christmas presents, and see if friends won't have me to do poetry readings around town-ish, and that kind of thing. In the meantime, to amuse myself, I've been playing with a 5x8 format, arranging poems, trying on various classy-looking fonts, and trying to decide what overall narrative might tie together roughly twenty-five years' worth of poems, spanning a rather varied range of life experience.

Aside from schooling the shorter folk, reading Dickens with Amicus, and talking on the phone with Epiphany, who this week turned in the piece of paper transforming her into a red-hot Texas English major, that's what's been happening around here. Stay tuned . . .

Many Things Have Happened

A boy ordered some bacteria through the mail, and now they have arrived. You may ask yourself why a person would need to buy bacteria, when all he really has to do is open the refrigerator -- statistically speaking, that is. Apparently the average American refrigerator houses several million times more bacteria than the average American gas-station restroom, though on second thought, maybe that's less a statistic than a damned lie. Still, you hear things like that, and not all from the makers of Clorox. Now, when I use the words bacteria and refrigerator in the same sentence, it's not necessary to assume that I'm speaking in a specific sense of any particular refrigerator of my personal acquaintance:  merely statistics (or damned lies), you know. Of course, it's not necessary to assume otherwise, either. At any rate, as the boy suggested, he had to have something to go in his petri dishes, and here we are.

So now we have these bacteria, cunning little red ones and cunning little green ones, in their cunning little test tubes. Their presence has given rise to a whole new set of household rules, to the effect that thou shalt not cultivate e. coli on the kitchen counter. We have rules about gas burners, too, though it occurs to me that we might just have recycled the rules about the backpacking stove, since it's virtually indistinguishable from the little gas burner that came with the chemistry equipment -- for that matter, since we had the gas burner first, I wonder why the backpacking stove was even necessary except that, as the boy suggested, he had to get something for Christmas. Besides petri dishes, that is.


*

A girl came home from her first semester at college. I am frequently amazed all anew at the fluidity of a concept like normal:  one minute you're lying in a hospital bed, holding a little red burrito which a stranger has just handed you and saying to yourself, "Just exactly what have I done to my heretofore agreeable life?" The next minute the burrito is calling you long distance to say that the philosophy final is over, and that the young man to whom she has become appended wants to leave Dallas by 6 the next morning to drive thirteen hours to Atlanta to his parents' house, then four more the next day to bring her to your door, and you realize that there's an entire world beyond the walls of your own house, and it's not you rattling around in it footloose and full of a sense of infinite destiny, but the burrito. You, rather to your surprise, are the one in the house, waiting to open the door and let some of the infinite destiny back in, to grace you with its gilded presence for a few minutes, until the phone rings and something else claims its attention.

And you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here? 

And also, Was it ever really otherwise? 


*

A mother, two boys, a girl, and a dog went hiking together on the Feast of the Epiphany, in short sleeves and a blond wash of sunshine. Their hike began in a place called Confederate Laboratory:  it really is called that. I couldn't make that up. Confederate Laboratory proper is a cluster of little old houses which grew up around an 1820s cotton mill by the South Fork River, which used to run so thickly with eels, so they say, that men had to chop them out of the mill wheel with -- I'm not sure what, actually. Axes might have broken the mill wheel, so maybe shovels? At any rate, you never hear about eels in the South Fork River any more, and as far as I know, they don't feature in the traditional local cuisine as they do in East Anglia, which until the seventeenth century was one big eely fen, over which the Isle of Ely (literally, the Isle of the Island of Eels) rose like an unlikely hematoma, crusted with a cathedral. At some point after the trouble with the South Fork eels, another variety of trouble broke out, and the mill community became, for some reason, a site on which medicines were compounded, hence the current name.

The trail follows the bed of a defunct railroad leading -- as all roads lead in these parts -- to Gastonia. We have friends in a place called High Shoals, which is bigger than Confederate Laboratory but not much, through whose woods a rusted section of this railroad still runs. In the olden days, when the storefronts weren't so empty, people from High Shoals used to take the train the full five miles to Fiat to do their shopping. In those days, as now, Fiat was the big doings in this neck of the woods;  in those days, obviously, the doings were bigger than they are now. Now the tracks are mostly gone, and where the trains used to clatter you can stroll in relative silence, with the gray trees whispering around you and the river, below the mill dam, exhaling noisily over its shoals and scattering light.

There's a place by the water where someone has strung a rope on a tree limb, for no more nefarious purpose than to swing out on over a deep spot and let go. I suppose you could also use it to shimmy up to the place where all the fishing floats cluster like grapes on the barren tree. I sat on the bank looking at this strange fruit for several minutes yesterday before the realization of what they were broke upon me. It was the Feast of the Epiphany, after all. While I sat gazing at the fishing floats caught in the tree, the girl with me, who had worn wellie boots without socks and, in consequence, developed the predictable blisters, waded in the mud in her bare feet. She didn't have to go into the water to wade;  floods had deposited plenty of silt right there on the riverside rocks, and not all of it had cracked in the sun into a sort of crumble-edged tile floor. The girl amused herself for some time in not only mud-wading, but also digging up these mud tiles with her fingers -- they came right away in satisfying handfuls -- patting them into smooth black grapeshot, and lobbing them into the water. Meanwhile, one of the boys expended the respite from walking in rummaging through his well-stocked pack for a piece of moleskin with which to remedy the sororal blisters. Probably he had the backpacking stove with him as well, not to mention the gas burner;  it's not for nothing that the other Boy Scouts call him Wal-Mart. The second boy, the one whom I'd tried to persuade to wear a fleece pullover, because after all it's January, for pete's sake, and who had turned out to be right after all, feinted at underbrush with the walking stick his brother had lent him, to shut him up about the sword he had wanted to bring and been forbidden. The dog panted and walked around and around on the end of his leash, winding his legs up in it until he was effectively hobbled. The sun shone down beneficently on us as it would shine down on any oddly assorted fivesome in a lull in the action of a Dickens novel.

It's still Christmas, various people remarked at intervals, in tones of incredulity.

*

 It is still Christmas -- at least it was, and as the American Church celebrates Epiphany tomorrow, I'm loath to take the tree down even now, though I'm mortally tired of it. Yesterday, after we came home from hiking, I had the front door propped open to admit the dulcet air, and then I looked at the Christmas tree shining away in its corner with the tattered leavings of Christmas morning still clustered around its base, and one of these things was not like the other.

Of course, that's the thing about the Church year:  it does run counter to everything, including the weather and our own feelings. In Advent, when the rest of the world is riding high on the holly-jolly jingle-bell flood tide that started running around Halloween, we're supposed to override our convivial Christmasy impulses with a sense of eschatological longing. Hard as it is to accomplish at the time, it occurs to me that that's somehow far less difficult than singing O Come Let Us Adore Him on the third of January, when everyone else's tree has long since vanished into the county landfill and even we, who keep plugging the lights in day after day and forcing down whatever remnants of chocolate we happen across, feel that we've done this already. Can we fast now? Please?

It's not that we sweep it entirely away, of course. The Holy Family and their adoring retinue live on the mantelpiece until Candlemas, when Epiphanytide officially ends and the kings depart into their own country by another way, involving bubble wrap. Some winter dark will close in on us, even as the days stretch out languidly towards another round of Daylight Savings. We might have snow. Still, it's hard to swim against this sudden current of spring feeling which makes me want to throw things out, throw open windows, and let the fresh honest daylight in again.

But then, maybe we're not supposed to swim against it so much after all. Maybe we're supposed to drop our nets and follow. New year, new season, new life.

Greeting

Carolina Carol

Gentle weather, meek and mild,

Promise us a holy child.

While the wet wind bows the thorn,

In winter rain let spring be born.

Mockingbird, awake and sing

From every branch the sap's upswing

Inside the barren, dreaming oak

Which wears the warm sky like a cloak.

Let grape hyacinth rejoice.

Raise its spears in yellow grass.

Through these short-lived twilit hours,

Wrens fall silent;   still He flowers.

Cardinal like a scarlet flame

On the bare dogwood, proclaim

The shaken seed-head, swelling bud --

Our Spring has come in flesh and blood.

Learning Space

Dorian Speed asks:  "How does your schooling space fit into your home?"

For us it's a timely question. After eight years of homeschooling, first in an apartment, then in a couple of small houses, and finally in this much-larger house, which we bought because it seemed a potential goldmine of discretionary space, we finally -- as of two weeks ago -- have an actual, dedicated room for our books and our learning.

I had been sort of vaguely anti-the idea of having a schoolroom, because I'd been not-so-vaguely anti-the idea that homeschooling means the same old school model, translated to your house. To a great degree, I'm still anti-that idea. At the same time . . . well, we have all these books. Our learning, which is to say our life, is arranged around these books. And at last I've come to grips with the reality that, charming though it may be to fill the kitchen cabinets with books, they're not really all that accessible that way. If I can't see them, I won't use them. Ditto the books shelved two-deep in the butler's pantry. Ditto the books which disappear under people's beds.

Strewing, as I've come to realize, doesn't mean books and crap scattered all over your house, where you hope people will stumble on things. When I think of the parts of my own school experience which were good, what comes to mind immediately is the Lower-School library. In those days, the library was a modest thing:  it occupied a balcony in the upstairs hallway, overlooking the big lunchroom below. This was the pre-computer era, when a school library was still a library and not a media center, and smelled of books with plain library-bound covers, yellowed pages, and type you could feel if you ran your fingers over it. To say that I loved this library is an understatement. Mostly school gave me stomachaches, but to go to the library and choose a book was a glorious reprieve from the minefield of the rest of the day. In those years, in that library,  I read everything from Roller Skates to  Cherry Ames to Marguerite Henry horse stories to all the poignant Rumer Godden doll stories, with their requisite lonely and maladjusted little girls:  Fairy Doll, Miss Happiness and Miss Flower. School was an alien place, but the library seemed like home, and it, not the classroom, was where a significant portion of my early education occurred.

So when I realized that our books had outgrown the spaces to which I'd relegated them before, and I began to see that what we really needed was a space for everything together, I didn't think schoolroom so much as I thought library:  a place for books to live, a place to come and find and meet them, a place to read together;  a place where a person could come to graze and find good pasture.

Meanwhile, we had this little room at the back of the house, which we'd been calling the study. It had been home, mostly, to Aelred's books, and in the ordinary way of things, it did double duty as a guest room and a den. As such, it was mostly a pit. The room is really too small for the kind of large, comfortable couches and chairs which make a den a good crashing place, so we didn't sit there much. The kids mostly gravitated there with their toys and projects. We could close the door on on the resultant carnage rather than putting things away, so unless houseguests were coming, the room remained in a perpetual state of unusability.

Which was really too bad, because it's my favorite room in the house, the only room currently which I don't want to repaint. The apple-green walls are pleasant and soothing, summer and winter;  the ventless gas fire is a bit of a monstrosity, but it's cozy on cold mornings. Whenever we cleaned it, it was a nice place to sit and read . . . but it never stayed that way.

Part of my little series of recent epiphanies was the revelation that to be pleasant and usable, this room needed a definite, daily purpose. Meanwhile, there was the question of all these books. Aelred by this time had moved the bulk of his library to his office on campus, and the study shelves looked like a mouthful of missing teeth. Hm, I said to myself. And, Would you mind? I said to Aelred.

So, at the end of a week of exertion both physical and mental, his books had taken up residence on two bookshelves in the kitchen and in a cupboard in the dining room, where he tends to work when he's at home;  and our books were newly at home in the study. A maple drop-leaf table, a legacy from my brother's father-in-law which used to hold our printer, now occupies the middle of the floor, with stools and a chair drawn up to it -- in fact, I'm sitting at this table right now to write this blog post, my coffee at my elbow. When school starts, we'll sit at it to write and do our math together. The down-at-heels futon which our guests sleep on (sorry, guests, we're still not very four-star here) remains a good place to sit and read together. Some friends just passed on to us an old desktop computer, which the younger kids can use for learning DVDs and interactive CD-ROM things;  it and the printer sit on a coffee table and end table which used to float aimlessly about the room as, essentially, clutter instead of useful furniture. The gas fire's oversized mantel holds art supplies, binoculars and a telescope, DVDs and other sundries at one end, while I'm turning the other end into a little altar.

We've had the room set up thus for several weeks now. We read here in the afternoons and at bedtime;  the kids play on the computer or sit at the table to write. Aelred and I have escaped in here with glasses of wine or cups of coffee, because it's quieter, cooler, and more peaceful in here than anywhere else in the house. Best of all, it's stayed tidy because we're all using it to live in, the way we like to live.

But enough blah-blah. Here are some pictures:

A view of the room from the hall door.

I love this window, giving onto the dogwood tree where we can hang bird feeders.

My history shelf. All kneel.

The short-people computer station.

Futon with decorative computer-charger cable, Periodic Table,  and maps.

The Battle of Hastings

Shelves with each child's books for the year, plus resources and supplies.

Good Stuff

Dry-erase crayons. What everyone, everyone, everyone needs.

Owls in the Garden

Last night the teenagers, out to walk the dog in the dark, discovered -- well, all right, not owls on the backyard grass, but an owl, to be visited by which is to be brushed sufficiently by the wingbeats of mystery, don't you think? I didn't see it. They watched it, holding on all the while to a dog who had decided to feel protective and unfriendly, until at last it went away, with the aforementioned wingbeats of mystery. It was huge, the teenagers told me, the size of a toddler, and its wings shadowed the grass as it flew.

I should not share this information with my friend K., who has a small dog and lives in fear that some bird of prey will stoop down someday on her garden and bear Pegotty away into the eternal blue stratosphere. As my dog weighs sixty pounds -- more, probably, since he's taken to climbing into the compost bin to eat the eggshells and coffee grounds -- this is not a worry which keeps me awake at night, and so I am glad to know that an owl visits my yard in the after hours, when no one is abroad but my teenagers and (see dog, above). It's like being visited by . . . well, not an angel, and not a ghost, not something that would walk over your grave, but by the reminder that complex and intelligent lives go on on the periphery of my own, which of course lies on the periphery of theirs. Being visited by an owl, I feel the way Helier did when we read a book about microscopic life in a drop of water. Pages and pages of amoebae and protozoae and euglenae and so on:  he listened stoically enough, but later  he came to me and said, "Imagine. Whole other worlds, all around us."

If the natural world is like this, invested with mystery, all on the plain of the purely material,  then it's hard to see why belief in things like angels, for example, or heaven, is such a stretch. I have a harder time believing that the bus will come on time, or that the rest of the soccer team will show up for practice (today they didn't, but that was because I'd gotten the day wrong), than I do believing that unseen presences walk with us, or that our beloved dead are nearer than we think and knowable to us, as we are knowable to them. Things go on beyond our imagining;  why shouldn't we imagine them, and more?

Meanwhile, like everyone else I'm fed up with summer. After longing for it, after shuffling around my house in layers of clothing and huddling by the open over door in the mornings, for month upon endless month -- geesh, I can't write things like that without breaking a sweat, even with a box fan blowing full in my face. And yet it's not the heat so much as the longing for order that strikes me about this time every year. The fireflies have gone away, and now children running around the yard in the dark strike me not as icons of joy and freedom but as hooligans who need to be jailed for their own good and that of society:  jailed and read to, ten chapters of Swiss Family Robinson every night. Some of their friends went back to school today;  others will go next week;  we are making one last trip of the summer, to take Epiphany to college, then it will be all up for us, too.  There's the winged mystery of the great dark sultry night, and then there's the orderly daylight mystery of what we might do together this year, given enough books and some nice rain outside.

Oh, and this cicada who's been flying into the window behind me for the last two hours? Whenever I'm tempted to feel, for whatever reason, that I've been wasting my life on one small pursuit or another, I do well to contemplate the fact that some creatures wait seventeen years for the privilege of trying to fly through glass before they die.

Rain Steam Bugs

 

 And snow. Because of course that's what I'm thinking about, and not only because it's what's not happening now. The other day, cleaning a closet, Aelred happened upon a set of pictures I took the winter Helier was a baby, when East Anglia was paralyzed, much as the American South is always paralyzed, by a three-inch snowfall:  cars abandoned by the roadsides, buses not running, people exchanging war stories in the checkout line at Sainsbury's while they bought their extra cartons of UHT milk. The day of the actual snowstorm, I had taken Helier across town to see the doctor for some reason or other -- it must have seemed urgent, for me to have trudged out with a baby in a pram while the snow came bucketing down, in the very street pictured above, actually. The next day, after it had stopped, I walked out with the baby again, this time because the beauty of it all seemed kind of urgent, too.

I distinctly recall trying to cross the Seagull Bridge by Trinity Hall, pushing the baby in the stroller, and discovering too late that the bridge was a sheet of ice. We were stuck for a while at the top -- me transfixed by the vision of what would happen if I slipped, fell, and let go of the stroller on the steep downslope of the bridge, Helier either asleep or thinking his inchoate fleece-wrapped thoughts beneath the vinyl weather shield which turned the stroller into a little rolling greenhouse -- until some nice man came along in, I guess, spiked boots or something, and helped us down.

Anyway, here's what I saw on my walk that day. Maybe it'll cool you off. 

Saint Catharine's College

The lane outside our church. I don't think that's the Vicar's bike, but then again, it might have been.

Memento mori in the snow:  the wild garden behind the church.

Punts by the Silver Street Bridge.

Punts with snowman.

Some humble Bible chapel or other, with insignificant human figures.

A view of St. John's, I think.

Not the bridge we got stuck on.

Nor is this one, though possibly it's because I was taking these pictures that I got stuck.

At every turning, something dear to see.

Like this. I'm almost home;  it's right across the Piece, in the middle of that row of gray houses. The wind's behind me, pushing me there.

Not Exactly Your High-Stakes Blogger

Now, if there were high stakes for homeschool planning, beyond the obvious people's-lives-in-my-inept-hands thing, that would be another story.

I've posted booklists here already (and then gone back and thought, "No, that's not what I want to do. Yes, it is. No, it isn't," &c), and have finally set  up a couple of separate planning blogs for the youngers and for Mr. Eighth Grade Wonder. His is more of an interactive deal between us, while the youngers' blog is really just for me to try to keep all my ducks swimming in the right direction. Anyway, if you're interested in our homeschool planning, and who wouldn't be, I've moved most of that to those places to keep from cluttering things up here. Comments are deactivated on both those blogs;  if you want to comment on our plans, feel free to do it here.

Meanwhile, there's also the high-school humanities site.

Not to mention real life, in which children are coming and going and spending the night and packing for college. Re the last, people keep asking me sympathetically how I'm doing, and I think the answer is fine, though the thought of driving back from Texas without her does leave my happiness for her not unmingled with a sort of pit-of-the-stomach regret for the years which have slipped through my hands when I wasn't looking. Then again, though, how would I have held onto them? Could I really have burdened every second of those years with my full and conscious attention? Would I have wanted to? At what point would I have wanted to stop the clock, and how all right would I have been with not living past that point? Like I need more questions to ask myself at three in the morning.

All of that leaves this blog pretty quiet. Oh, well.

Homeschool Reading List #2: Third Grade

Gradually getting the learning thing together here, in the doldrums of midsummer. My aim is to have some plans nailed down before we take Epiphany to college in late August, so that come September, when we resume what passes as our regular routine, I can commence ignoring them. What else are plans for? I ask you.

Nevertheless, I make them, and occasionally I actually follow what I've written. The other day I shared our projected second-grade reading;  now for third grade.

Goals for third grade:

* For a fluent, fast reader, to increase "depth" and comprehension in reading

* To improve proficiency in handwriting, which right now remains a struggle, despite huge improvements last year

* To make strides in and feed enjoyment of mathematics

*To nurture a well-furnished historical, scientific, literary, cultural, etc. imagination

*To maintain good habits of prayer and expand understanding of our faith

*To cultivate a greater sense of personal responsibility via life skills and chores

Much of our reading will happen in a "combined-school" setting  with the second grader;  that booklist to follow shortly. Meanwhile, here's the third grader's individual reading list, which will be scheduled, like the second grader's, in small doses so that books are spread out over at least a semester, if not the entire year:

For the Children's Hour
School of the Woods
Story Book of Science
Robinson Crusoe Written Anew for Children
The Secret of Everyday Things
The Boy's Book of Sea Fights
The Book of Saints and Heroes
Poems Every Child Should Know (copywork)
Our Island Saints
This Way to Christmas
Great Inventors and Their Inventions
When the King Came
The Bears of Blue River
Boys and Girls of Colonial Days


Math:  MEP Year 3

Head of the Class: I'm using this, in all honesty, as a way to keep people gainfully occupied while I'm working one-on-one with someone else. If an MEP math lesson is going to take the full 45 minutes -- and my experience so far is that really, though in general I believe in short lessons a la Charlotte Mason, the full benefit of this program lies in doing it as it's written, and not skipping or breaking lessons in half -- then I need the person who is not doing math to be doing something quiet and learning-ish and independent for that amount of time, which is just becoming possible with these younger two.

So the third grader, once he's finished his independent reading for the day and finds himself at loose ends, will work his way through a complement of online applications in spelling, science, geography, and music, via a customized curriculum I've set up (nifty feature, that). The curriculum for each grade level also includes a "fun" component;  the third grade "fun" is a series of little multimedia presentations, a.k.a. narrated slide shows, on various career options. This is one of those Gee, I wouldn't have thought of that offerings, and it does look like fun, so he'll be doing that as well. Plus we'll be printing out Spanish vocabulary words and geography goodies like the flags of Europe to put in lapbook/folders in our notebook.

He'll also do liturgical-year lapbook projects with the second-grader, but I think I'm trespassing into "Combined School" territory now.

That booklist, plus Grade 8, up shortly.

Deals Deals Deals

Over at the  Homeschool Buyers' Co-op (free membership required to participate):  

The One Year Adventure Novel is currently available at a 20% discount. The more families opt in for this group buy, the greater the savings.

Amicus will be using this very cool-looking, rave-reviewed program for the writing component of his coursework this year:  it looks to me like the perfect way to learn about structure in writing, about pushing your writing beyond the limits of the terse informative paragraph, about how your written voice sounds to other people, about creating and sustaining a long-term project.  A kid who navigated this curriculum would, in my view, have prepared himself beyond adequately to adapt his writing to the structures and constraints and conventions of more formal writing later on.

Anyway (and no, this isn't a paid endorsement or formal review -- having requested and been impressed by the free demo, I just want to buy this product for the best price possible), I'm joining this buy-in and thought someone else out there might be interested as well.


Offer expires July 31, so don't dawdle!


Also . . .

Big savings on Rosetta Stone languages

A year's subscription to Defined STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math) at 60% off

Discounts at Bethlehem Books . . .

and more.

Check 'er out.