We're actually in our second week back, though our first week of adding in all extracurriculars again: Scouts, Irish dance, and YMCA Gym and Swim for the youngers, Scouts with tying up of Eagle requirements for the 9th grader. He's also taking Organismal Diversity for his second semester of college biology, plus intro-level German (though he's been doing German on his own for the last three semesters), and is gone to campus four days a week now.
Today is Gym and Swim day, so this morning we've concentrated on seatwork -- math, handwriting, spelling, grammar -- and independent reading, with our basket reading deferred to this evening after dinner. Our general MO, continued from the fall semester, is to begin the day with independent work, then to spend roughly an hour on basket reading after lunch.
The 3rd grader's current program:
Math:
We've just started a chapter on time and measurement, which she should breeze through pretty quickly. I had contemplated skipping it and moving on to multiplication, for which we'll want the bulk of the semester, but she wanted to do it, so I'm guessing we'll spend about a week on it before we do move on.
Spelling:
Review of the last eight weeks. Her exercise today had her pick out misspelled words in a story, which was challenging but useful -- I always think "editing" exercises are particularly helpful.
Grammar:
Parts of speech. This week seems to be devoted to nouns; today we focused on proper nouns. Composition and dictation assignments will come up later in the week.
Handwriting:
Review of cursive K today. Copywork coming later in the week.
Reading:
Detectives in Togas (Monday, Wednesday)
Buster Bear's Twins (Monday, Thursday, Friday)
The Burgess Seashore Book for Children (Tuesday)
Joan of Arc (Tuesday, Thursday)
A Lion to Guard Us (Tuesday, Thursday)
Paddle-to-the-Sea (Wednesday)
The 4th grader:
Spent time in the hospital just before Christmas, so his schedule is still off-kilter a bit.
Math:
Working on multiplication: memorizing facts via computer math games, plus exercises dealing with multiples and properties of multiplication. He works accurately, but still pretty slowly. I am hoping the continual facts practice will help with his speed.
Spelling:
Just took a test dealing with sh, ch, and st sounds. Fourteen words out of fifteen correct; I had him write the missed word correctly. Moving on to a new list tomorrow.
Grammar:
Parts of speech: identifying verbs. He's just finished writing, copywork, and dictation assignments.
Handwriting:
Cursive copywork.
Reading:
The Bronze Bow (Monday, Wednesday)
The Enchanted Castle (Monday, Thursday, Friday)
Peace at Bowling Green (Tuesday, Thursday)
The Way Things Work (Tuesday)
Minn of the Mississippi (Wednesday)
just finished Edmund Campion and need a new saint bio for Tuesday/Thursday reading.
Our basket reading:
various poetry books
The Bible
Augustus Caesar's World
Life of Fred: Edgewood
The Firebird and Other Russian Fairy Tales
George Washington's World
The Living Forest
Book of Heroes
City
Introducing the Periodic Kingdom to Its Heirs
Usborne Introduction to Art
Galen and the Gateway of Medicine
Gotta go find an AWOL bathing suit for Gym and Swim . . .
13 comments:
Just a suggestion for the new saint for the 4th grader: Elizabeth Ann Seton. One of my favorite Anglican to Catholic stories.
Oh, I love her, too. This particular child, however, hates saint stories and will only just barely consent to read them if they're really manly. No lady saints.
It's not that he doesn't like saints. He just doesn't like saint stories, as written for children, very much. Of course, he doesn't like knowing at the outset that the person he's being asked to become attached to is going to die a horrible death . . . so from that standpoint, Mother Seton would be a nice choice. Except that she's a lady, and therefore uninteresting.
I'm thinking maybe St. John Bosco. Manly, dynamic, and not a martyr.
But in general, yes, of course we love Anglican-to-Catholic stories. We're all Cardinal Newman around here, as you probably would surmise.
The younger kids don't really remember ever being Anglican -- they are living an entirely different life from the rest of us.
I love Edmund Campion! In Waugh's biography he really emphasizes that the theological studies of the expat English Catholics were a conscious preparation for martyrdom.
Have you done Francis Xavier? Manly saint, glamourous Far East setting, and no martyrdom.
Sally, I don't know if you are reading Leila Lawler's current series on teaching writing and grammar (or rather, on not teaching them directly). I'd be interested in your thoughts, since you are clearly not following that path.
No, I haven't been following Leila's series, but I know a lot of people who do grammar via copywork, in the context of kids' writing, and so on, in the vein of not teaching grammar as a discrete subject. And I didn't do it as a discrete subject with the older kids. In fact, I hardly did it consciously at all. Fortunately they're both pretty intuitively good writers, but I can see that it might have helped us to establish a grammatical literacy together earlier on.
I've gone the workbook route with the youngers -- we do the CHC Language of God series -- for several reasons:
1) They like it. It gets a little too "let's learn Catholic grammar" for me, but that seems not to bother them.
2) The lessons are short, usually 5 minutes, and -- this is the important thing -- *I do not have to plan them or think about them,* which I do when I'm using copywork or a child's own writing to teach a concept.
3) The Mater Amabilis Charlotte-Mason-inspired curriculum which I started out following when we were first becoming Catholic includes a formal grammar component in the form of the Emma Serl Primary and Intermediate Language Lessons series. My older kids hated those books, and there was a lot in them that I found myself not using: I didn't like their offerings for picture study, for example. But I liked that the general idea of English language study was part of the program, and I've kept returning to liking that, even though I don't really do MA, and I don't use their grammar-book selections.
Meanwhile, I did sort of wish that they'd cover things like parts of speech, because that's actually useful. People say that they teach grammar through study of a foreign language (chiefly Latin), but what my oldest daughter's first Latin teacher confided to me was that it was a pain in the neck to try to teach Latin to ninth graders without a solid grounding in basic English grammar, because he found he had to teach that *first,* before Latin grammar made any sense.
In terms of learning to use English, I don't think you have to know what a noun or a verb is in order to write a good sentence, but knowing what nouns and verbs are, and that you need both to have a sentence, gives you that much more control over what you're doing.
Anyway, the CHC workbooks seem to accomplish much of what the Serl books do, including composition and copywork and dictation. The things they don't do -- memory work with poems and picture study -- I do with other resources anyway.
4) I *could* do all this indirectly, in what I guess might be termed a more "living" way, through copywork and writing, but that seems like reinventing the wheel in order to accomplish basically the same thing, which is an understanding of how English works. At the end of the day, I guess I feel the same way about straightforward grammar study as I do about math-facts drill: it's a literacy you just really have to have, one way or another. These are tools that make other things easier and clearer.
And it seems to me that it's just as easy and effective to do it gently every year, so that things have a chance to sink in, as to spend a lot of time at some point trying to remediate, or else spot-teaching as problems arise. Not that I wouldn't, or don't, do the latter, especially with my high-schooler, but I think it really helps to have established a common grammatical language.
5) But really, again, it is just helpful to me to have something laid out for us, so that the kids can pick it up and do it more or less on their own, in five minutes a day, with me to advise as needed. I am just too lazy to be more creative or "living" about this particular thing, and the kids don't seem to mind that one bit. So there you go.
The thing I'd really dispense with, incidentally, is spelling. This is the first year since we took the older kids out of school that we've ever done formal spelling, and I'm not convinced that it's worth the time, enough to do it every year. Right now, though, it is providing a useful review of sound families and again, the kids don't dislike it, so I'm willing to give it the rest of this year. We probably won't do it again next year, but this year I thought we could use a little "bump" in that direction, so that the kids would have more writing tools at their disposal.
Flooding my own combox here, as I have another free moment . . .
As far as writing, per se, is concerned, I am far more hands-off. I never ever, in the lower grades, give writing assignments -- we do copywork, and when "journal" assignments come up in grammar, I always make them either free-choice, or just a matter of writing a few sentences, maybe with a suggested word to trigger things. Or I turn them into copywork assignments, if the writer is really blocked. The last thing I want is formulaic "creative writing" -- bleah. Forget "creative." I really loathe that, as an assigned thing. At this stage, we concentrate on the idea of a sentence as a thing made of words. What somebody does, on his or her own, with that idea, is where the "creative" comes in, and it has very little to do with anything I do, other than handing people the raw materials.
Real writing tends to happen off-stage -- one child keeps a journal sporadically, and another has a pen pal in Belgium (the daughter of Paul who sometimes comments here -- we are loving getting to know her!), so that letter-writing fulfills whatever writing expectations I might have. At this stage, I don't do a lot of teacherly intervention in their writing, other than to be sure that a letter is correctly written enough to be clear to the recipient. (and it does help to have a shared language of the basic conventions of English grammar , so that we're not fighting over what to capitalize -- "But *I* write it this way!").
In the high-school years I am far more "college-preppy" about it, as you know. And I do start to expect more in terms of formal, assigned writing in 7th and 8th grades, though again I'm prepared to be creative and receptive with regard to what that means. I see these earlier years, on the other hand, really as a "grammar stage," when we are paying a small amount of formal attention daily to building blocks, as we do in math, so that they have tools and some understanding of how the language works at their disposal for the things they want to do. Meanwhile, we read and think and talk, and the emphasis is really there, rather than on producing writing.
I have all kinds of ambivalent feelings about English grammar that get in the way of teaching it well. For starters, having gone to school in French, I never studied English grammar myself, and so I tend to think of it as quite unnecessary. On the other hand, in school we studied French grammar very thoroughly and explicitly, and those skills have served me well in other languages. (I too have seen what your daughter's Latin teacher described.) In practice we do very little formal "language arts."
You describe grammar as tools for "understanding how the language works." That's what I'm after, I guess, and when put that way it seems eminently reasonable to teach it explicitly even in younger grades. I think I'll stick with Grammarland and start the diagramming workbook.
I agree with Leila Lawler's attitude that having something to say, and developing the ability to think clearly and specifically, is a prerequisite to writing well, and that reading lots of good prose will go a long way toward making a student able to express himself competently. As I type this, I realize that my kids can form perfectly respectable sentences; what frustrates me is that they often don't seem to have much to say. We have to address the thing=king, not the writing.
Yes, I think what you say about writing and having something to say is exactly right, and that's why we don't do "composition" per se until at least middle school age. I don't subscribe in practice to much of the classical methodology, but I do find their general divisions -- grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric -- to be really accurate assessments of what a child's brain is ready to do at a given stage. At least, it's useful language for thinking about various stages of readiness, and I find that it's what plays out in the way I do things.
I do wonder we should be so profoundly uninterested in the way our own language works, when we're so profoundly interested in the workings of other languages, like Latin, or why we -- by whom I mean "so many homeschoolers whose blogs I have read" -- would brush off English grammar as somehow "dead," or antithetical to creative, authentic self-expression. I mean, that's all very Romantical, but these are after all the building blocks of which Shakespeare is made, for example. I find it hard to believe that I'm killing anyone's "authentic" voice, whatever that even means for a fourth grader, by asking him to think about nouns. This, by the way, is not an argument with you, Anne-Marie -- it's an argument with a lot of things I've read in just the last several days, which I've just been spoiling for.
More and more I come to mistrust this "living" learning idea, because what's the opposite? By doing math drills I'm doing "dead" math? By spending five minutes on a grammar lesson I'm doing "dead" English? (By the same token, my skeptic's antennae really go up when unschoolier people than I talk about "delight-led" learning, or how they wanted to make learning "joyful." Boy, not me. We're all about misery here . . . )
I wouldn't do grammar exercises in a vacuum, of course, and I wouldn't make them the center of our day . . . I wouldn't do an "English-Grammar-Centered Curriculum" along the lines of the "Latin-Centered Curriculum," though I guess you could, and could make a cogent argument for doing so. I'd still call us literature-centered, for sure, and I think that's right. We focus a lot more on what goes in than on what comes out, at least till late-ish middle school, when I think I can reasonably begin to expect something *to* come out.
Oh, and we really liked Grammar-land.
I learned about homeschooling through John Holt and Growing Without Schooling magazine, and in the beginning I always felt guilty insofar as we weren't unschoolers. Then one day it hit me: we train our kids in all kinds of things that we deem important, from toothbrushing to manners to prayer. Why should math, language, science, etc., be any different?
My husband recently read a book that dumps on "find your passion" in favor of "work hard to develop your skill." Excellence in performance is what counts, says the author, and passion won't keep you going when excellence requires a spell of drudgery.
Are you a Nancy Mitford fan? I often think of the passage in The Pursuit of Love where Fanny describes the aimlessness of Linda's teenage years (in contrast to the disciplined hard work imposed by Fanny's school) and its detrimental effects on Linda's character in later life.
Oh, that's a great insight, re Linda and Fanny (and yes, I like Nancy Mitford!).
Also a great insight regarding the things we train our kids to do -- they don't just intuit how to make a bed or say "thank you." Certainly we model these things, hoping they follow our example, but usually we have to be more direct and require practice for those lessons to sink in.
It's also occurred to me many times that we don't find the discipline required to learn a musical instrument repressive: we understand that playing scales limbers the fingers to do bigger things. And we don't say, "Oh, I'm not going to ask him to learn the notes; I want him to find his own piano voice." There's a name for that voice: noise.
We were unschoolers in the very beginning, which I don't exactly regret -- it was what worked when we needed to transition a very strong-minded and resistant nine-year-old from school to home, and in many ways, she did pick up things on her own for a long time, particularly in the area of writing. What I did observe with that child as a high-schooler was that while she did very well, and she's now a very successful and hardworking college student, many things would have been easier for her had she had more basic tools at her disposal. Mostly this was true in math, but it occurred to me more than once that Latin, for example, of which she did four years in high school, would have been much easier in many ways if she'd had a stronger foundation in English grammar.
So I am far more conscious of trying to lay a foundation in that kind of thing for my younger kids. As I said before, we do it pretty minimally, but we do do it.
And I still have a whole stack of vintage Growing Without School issues in my house. I gave a lot of them away several years ago, but kept some. They were hugely influential to me in the beginning, but now I find I take them far more with a grain of salt. I guess I'm just too establishment these days . . .
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