A Day of Homeschooling

I've been neglecting my homeschooling blog, as anyone who visits will see: the latest post is entitled "Advent 1." Still, whether I'm writing about it or not, the show has to go on, though it does so typically in a kind of lollygagging fashion, like a dog being walked on one of those expandable leashes, stopping to smell around under all the bushes and . . . well, anyway. Like that.

Realizing that readers here might not necessarily follow our trail to another blog -- not that you couldn't, just that you might not think yourself all that interested -- I thought that since it's been a while anyway, I'd write a bit here about our homeschooling day.

Now, we are not masters of organization, or scope-and-sequence, or even creativity necessarily, on a daily basis. Mostly we live together, balancing some necessary formal "sitdown" work with a lot of whatever we'd just do in the course of a given day, but from which we can learn things if we're paying attention. And we talk. A lot. Some of us more than others. Some of us simultaneously. I consider that we do continual, free-form narration.

So, our day today:

1. Around 10 a.m. we sat down at the kitchen table -- Amicus, Helier, Crispina and I, Epiphany having gone off to campus for Latin class and a day of schoolwork in the library -- and we said Terce. In the form we use, there's some chant to sing, so we sang that.

2. I read Richard Halliburton's Royal Road to Romance aloud to everyone. Halliburton is a lively narrator, and his travels, in 1925, make for entertaining and frequently funny reading. This is really Amicus's book, to cover geography, but Helier and Crispina like it, too. While I read, Helier played with Star Wars figures, and Crispina colored in a coloring book. Amicus listened and did a math lesson, some Latin grammar, and a sentence-diagramming exercise. I took one sentence from our chapter as an impromptu math word problem for Helier and Crispina: Halliburton remarks that the bos'n of the ship on which he is working his passage to India (hm, you know, that would make a good title for something . . . ) has been at sea for forty-two years and is fifty-two years old. So I asked them how old the bos'n had been when he first went to sea, and we worked it out together.

3. Last night Helier had dragged out our UsborneIntroduction to the Second World War and wanted to read it. We read a couple of pages last night -- as with most Usborne books, a double-page spread pretty much counts as a complete "lesson" on a particular theme -- and this morning they wanted to read more, so we read about the state of various world democracies in the years between the wars, and about the rise of Nazi Germany.

4. Helier and Crispina being still much taken with Richard Halliburton, I made them up a handwriting exercise based on the chapter we had just read. On triple-lined elementary-school writing paper I wrote some words from the chapter we'd just read -- oil, gas, tattoo, and so forth; it really was a very lively seafaring kind of chapter -- and they first traced over my words, then copied them on the blank lines I'd left below each line I'd written on. While they wrote, I read the next chapter of our current Arthur Ransome book, Swallowdale, aloud.

5. We finished reading and writing at lunchtime, so we said the Angelus and ate soup and bread for lunch. After lunch everyone was free to read and play. I set to work unpacking more of the boxes of books which still fill our back porch, and Amicus dug out some old friends, including a bunch of old issues of National Review, and went off to read them. We all did a bit of housecleaning. Crispina colored. Amicus and Helier dressed up in old Cub Scout and Webelos uniforms, which they said were their military uniforms for their imaginary country, Berzerkistan. Crispina and I made more bread and talked about yeast. Helier and Crispina did a good bit of very loud fighting over some old Cub Scout patches which the unpacking of boxes brought to light, but after some contemplative time in their rooms got back together to string beads -- they are making gifts for a friend who's coming to visit tomorrow.

Right now Helier's reading a Superman comic, Amicus has just finished washing some dishes, Crispina's playing quietly here in the room with me, and dinner is cooking.

All our days don't go so straightforwardly, but today was typical of an ordinary pretty-good day. So for those of you who wonder what we do all day long, now you know.