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I was tagged byTim's Mom at Bona Vita Rusticanda Est.
Here's the game: Well, I don't have 23 posts yet so I'll do this using the last post.
Assuming paragraph headers don't count. The fifth sentence would be:
My husband will be on an 11 day vacation starting the middle of next week and I don't want to have to spend that time cleaning house.
Hmm, I guess what that says about me is I would rather spend time with my family than clean house.
Let's see, who can I tag? CM, Children and Lots of Grace, Raising Kids of Character with Grace and Peace, Harshbarger Homeschool, and Rhythm and Rhyme of Life.
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And we are all looking forward to this vacation when we can just slow down, sit down, and enjoy one another's company. This vacation was supposed to happen a month and a half ago but was postponed when my dh started a new position so it's been a long time in coming. (Actually he was supposed to have had 2 vacations since then and hasn't had any!)|
Behind in Everything! Life has been a bit crazy here for about the last month. We are behind in our schoolwork - okay, we aren't really behind because we start early in the year so we can take longer to get through everything but we aren't where I was hoping we would be at this time - the house is a complete disaster and the weather is cooling off and I haven't gotten winter clothes out of storage yet. All of this plus we are coming up to exam time and I haven't even started preparing for them!
Playing Catch-up So, this past week has been spent trying to get the house into some kind of decent order. My husband will be on an 11 day vacation starting the middle of next week and I don't want to have to spend that time cleaning house. I've also been working on getting the children caught up to where I want them to be in school. I still don't have the winter clothes unpacked - which we will need during vacation when we travel up north to visit family - and I haven't even started writing exams. I'm so thankful that Charlotte Mason exams consist of questions like "Tell me all you know about Benjamin Franklin."
Strategies to Prevent Falling Behind (Hopefully!) I have joined the FLYLady group to help me set up routines so next time things come up we won't end up totally behind in everything. As for schoolwork, I need to figure out a way to motivate my son. He wanders around constantly, dawdles, goofs off, and generally takes FOREVER to finish his schoolwork. My daughter is much better at working independently but there are a few things she will skip completely if I don't stay on top of her. I don't want to bribe them to do their work but I'm not comfortable with saying well, you didn't do it so now it's too late and you're out of luck. If anyone has any great ideas on how to deal with this, let me know! |
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Child Training I discovered that my children haven't been doing everything they are supposed to be doing. Even though I usually go through the entire list and ask "Did you do this, this, this and this?" One child spent the entire day Sunday catching up what wasn't completed during school time. The other has given up free time today to get caught up. I have been very lax in asking for narrations after their readings and I am going to have to be consistent with that or I know they will fall back into skipping things they don't want to do.
I know this is my fault - I'm the parent and I'm the one that's responsible but I still find it frustrating. I hate feeling like I have to stand over them in order to get them to do what they are supposed to do but I think, at least for a while, that I am going to have to be right there with them the whole day making sure everything is getting done. It all makes me feel very down and discouraged. And, truth be told, a little angry as well. I know, how SHOCKING, that a homeschool mother sometimes get a little angry.
On a Good Note My husband has started his new position and will no longer be working nights. YAY!
Language Arts A friend was asking me about Language Arts because she and her daughter are so bored and frustrated with what they have been doing. In talking with her I realized how easy LA are in a CM education. Not easy as in unchallenging, but easy as in not adding a lot more work for mom or student and no silly "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" essays to write when you didn't DO anything on summer vacation worth writing about! My kids get to write about really interesting stuff - the stuff they find exciting and want to talk about that they are reading in their books. It makes the assignments easier for them because they are interested in what they are writing about and more interesting for their teacher (me) to read since I already know everything they did on their summer vacation anyway.
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I'm still working on revamping my MOTH schedule so that we are getting up earlier and going to bed earlier. I'm hoping we will be able to accomplish more each day as well - not school-wise but more housework and more fun stuff. 
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The advisory board and members of AO have put together free, online resources for homeschoolers and others who have been devestated by Hurricane Katrina to use to create some normalcy in their lives and the lives of their children. If you or anyone you know might be helped by this information please pass on this link:
Ambleside Online Helping Hand Emergency Learning Plan
Ways You Can Help I received the following information through an email group and would like to pass the information on to those of you who are willing and able to help.
Open Your Home Help Provide Shelter for the Victims of Hurricane Katrina Help through Homeschooling Today Magazine Operation Katrina - Update |
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My husband has transferred to a different department and his work hours are going to become more "normal". He will be home by 7:00 each evening! This will be the first time in our 14 year marriage that he will be home every evening. God is so good to have blessed us with such and unexpected gift.
Scheduling Now that my husband's schedule will be more regular I am going to have to re-do our MOTH schedule. I am looking forward to being more organized and consistent with what we do. I have always had a horrible time getting chores done - mine and the children's - and I am hoping that once dh starts his new schedule next week we will be able to get more housework accomplished.
I'm planning to ease into getting up early in the morning with dh and spending some quiet time with him in the morning before we get the children up. I'm also looking forward to being able to have breakfast all together!
Lunch Menu Lunch time is always rather chaotic here and takes up more time than I would like. I was discussing (more like complaining) about this to dh the other day and he has suggested that I make a lunch menu for each day just like I do for dinners so that everyone knows what they are going to have and they don't waste a lot of time deciding what to have.
Since we will be having breakfasts together as well I am making a breafast menu and a tea-time menu. The purpose of the tea-time menu is to make sure that we are getting some healthy things into our bodies during this time rather than always having cookies or junk food.
I am using recipes and menus that I found in my Lunches and Snacks cookbook by Sue Gregg to make our lunch and tea time menus.
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Now that we have settled into a reasonable routine for schoolwork we are gearing up to start cleaning house in preparation for the holiday season. We normally do tons of cooking, baking, cleaning and shopping but this year we are scaling back a bit since we are facing a possible union strike in November. (Please pray that a strike doesn't happen.)
We follow the basic plan and use the forms located at Organized Christmas. I enjoy organizing and planning and I love forms. I also love the way my house looks when I'm done.
Atmosphere There has been a lot of discussion about atmosphere on the AO email group so I have been thinking about the atmosphere in our home lately. I have noticed that if I am smiling and in a good mood the children generally are in a good mood as well. I'm sure y'all have heard "If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." And I have found that is generally true in our house. I have also noticed that when I stay up too late, I sleep in late and wake up to a messy house and a bad mood which ruins our whole day!
I am also working on having a Meek and Quiet Spirit (ala Teri Maxwell's book of the same name.) I find that my faults are reflected in my children. If I get angry and speak in an angry tone to them, then they will speak to each other the same way.
Tea Time One thing that we do in our home to improve our atmosphere is a daily "tea time". We have tea at 2:00 so that it doesn't interfere with piano lessons and we really do have tea. We turn on some classical music, turned down low so we don't have to shout over it and we do our Bible lesson, read-alouds, and whatever special class we have that day (Plutarch, art, poetry, recitation, Shakespeare, etc.). |
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I have been researching narration for the past couple of days because this is an area where I have not been consistant in our homeschooling. I know it is extremely important and I want to do a better job of making sure narrations are being done. I came across the following article and wanted to share it with all of you.
I didn't write this post - it is copyrighted to Wendi Capehart.
Narration is an important part of a Charlotte Mason education, and a deceptively simple one. Do not be fooled by its simplicity. Narration is the bones for essays, critiques, and all other sorts of more formal writing later on. Narration seems so simple, but it really gets the brain working on all sorts of complex tasks, reviewing, reasoning, comparing, contrasting, organizing, selecting, and summarizing. Once the brain has done all this work then the child tells back, which is also an important skill in communication. With such a simple, yet complex task, some try to make it more complicated than it is, and others find that their children are surprisingly reluctant to begin. Perhaps these ideas will be helpful to those who wonder where to start. |
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Next question CM didn't really do unit or theme studies, exactly.
Her PNEU schools were organized into "forms" which roughly correspond to grade levels. If you chose to use a curriculum like AmblesideOnline it is divided up into Years but the years don't necessarily mean grade level. Clear as mud?
Our children started using the old schedules from AO when they were in second and fourth grades. We started with year 1 and used parts of the old schedules each year until last year when we went with a completely different curriculum. This year we decided to go completely with AO and to use the new booklists so we placed our 8th grader in year 6 since we didn't feel should was ready for the academic increase in Year 7 and our 6th grader in Year 4. We felt he was old enough and mature enough to start the Shakespeare and Plutarch studies and for a more academic curriculum. So far, this seems to be a good fit. Our 6th grader does need a bit of help understanding the Shakespeare and Plutarch lessons but then so do I.
Creating your own If you put together your own CM curriculum, you can do it any way you want. I would suggest if your doing it on your own that you combine your children as much as possible, especially if they are close in age or you have a large family. Even though our children are doing seperate years in AO we do combine them for certain things - Plutarch, Shakespeare, Art, Music, Bible, Nature, Read-alouds, etc.
If you have all of your children studying the same time period in history, there are more opportunities for discussion and for doing fun things together. |
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Well, since there isn't a CM curriculum in a box you would have to add everything. Doesn't that sound completely overwhelming?
AmblesideOnline (I talk about them a lot because we rely on them a lot for our curriculum) has suggestions for each subject divided up into years. They have a list of about 4 different math programs that you can choose from or you can choose something completely different.
Math CM used manipulatives a lot in teaching math so one of the suggestions is to use Math-U-See since they lean very heavily on the use of manipulatives. But, CM suggested using things like buttons and beans as manipulatives which you could do with any curriculum you chose. You just get out the bag of beans and use them to help you explain the concept to the child.
At our house we use Saxon math. We use Saxon simply because that was what was recommended as "the best" when we started homeschooling and since math is a struggle for one of our child we felt it best not to switch methods. I must say that particular child has advanced by leaps and bound using Saxon (which, btw, does have some paper manipulatives such as fraction circles) and we are very pleased with how both children are doing.
Science CM did science through nature study and studying a certain branch of science (or more than one) each year, such as botany. Science is something I happen to hate! For the first few years we homeschooled my husband, who thinks science is fascinating and fun, taught science to both children when he was home. He wasn't concerned with being CM about it - he just had fun with the children.
When our daughter started 7th grade we started using the Apologia science books and she LOVES those. I like that they are written in such a way that she can do it without me. I have been told that the new elementary science courses that Apologia is now offering are very CM-friendly.
Answer? I'm not sure that I have answered your question, Ann. But, I did get to talk about one of my favorite subjects (math) and my children's favorite subject (science). |
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This was the second question that Ann posted in response to my survey.
The short answer - yes.
Charlotte Mason's philosophy gets the best results and works best as a whole but most people don't start out doing everything. Most people start with the basics - living books, narrations, copywork/dictation and short lessons. Some people stay right there and others go on to add more and more of CM philosophy as they grow more comfortable and gain confidence.
Living Books Living books are books that are generally written by a single auther as opposed to textbooks which are written by a bunch of authors. Living books are also generally written in literary (story) form. Children connect with stories and remember them.
You can use living books as your complete curriculum or take a textbook you are using and add a few living books that go along with what you are studying in the text.
Narration Narration is a big word for a simple concept. It simply means "telling back".
How it works: When you are first starting narration (when the child is about 6 years) you will read a short passage (possibly just one sentence) out loud to your child(ren). Then ask one child to tell you what the passage was about. Remember to keep the lesson short - don't try to read an entire chapter one sentence at a time and require narration after each sentence - or you will weary both yourself and your child. Slowly build up the amout that read until you can read an entire chapter or episode in the story.
When your child starts reading their own books rather than you reading to them then ask for narration after the child reads on their own.
You can also ask your child to start writing down some of their narrations when they are about age 10. But, oral narration continue all through school and is never completely replaced by written narration. Also, keep in mind that writing is more difficult for your child than talking so expect written narrations to be shorter and less detailed than oral ones.
Copywork/Dictation Copywork (handwriting practice) starts out with letters, or even just strokes, and is very slowly (over YEARS) increased to words, sentences, and paragraphs. The child could start with a letter of the alphabet that they are learning. You want them to do their best so a single, perfect "A" is better than an entire page of sloppy, rushed letters. For copywork the child copies from a model onto their paper. They may copy from something you have handwritten, something you typed in a particular font on the computer, or straight out of one of their books.
Dictation differs from copywork in the fact that the child writes what is read to them rather than from a model. You would have the child look over a passage in one of the books they are reading and note the punctuation, capitalization, and spelling of each word. In our house we do this together and I write on the white board any word the child or I thinks might cause trouble. Then, I ask the child to study the word until they are comfortable with it, then close their eyes and try to picture the word in their head. If they can do that I erase the word and have them write it on the board. If they can't then we try again. Once the child is comfortable with the passage, he sits down and I read a clause at a time and they write exactly what I say. We correct mistakes immediately because I don't want them to get an incorrect picture of the word in their heads.
Short Lessons Short lessons enable your child to concentrate and pay close attention to the lesson. You've probably heard "You can do anything for 15 minutes." It works for your child as well! You can slowly, over the years, increase the time your child spends on any given subject so that by the time they are in high school they are spending 30-45 minutes on some subjects. For example, when we started we spent 3 minutes doing copywork. Now, that we are starting our fifth year of copywork the time has increased to 10 minutes and the children have gone from making single letters to copying sentences. |
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Today was our first official day of our new school year. And, all things considered, I am very pleased with how it went.
Scheduling I have a book called Managers of Their Homes (MOTH) written by Teri Maxwell. My husband and I spent some time earlier this summer putting together two schedules - one for the summer and one for the regular school year. We had all the time slots filled and it looked really impressive.
When we tried to implement the summer schedule we discovered a problem. Our family doesn't function on set times for anything because of the way my husband's job is scheduled. He has different days off each week and there are about 6 different times that he can be scheduled to work. One of those starts at 4 AM and one ends at 11 PM. So our wake and bed times are very inconsistent out of necessity.
New Plan Due to the "problem" we discovered during the summer we have decided not to assign times to the things we have on our plan. We also have different subjects depending on what day of the week it is - for instance our daughter does logic using Fallacy Detective one day a week. In order to deal with all these things I have created a chart that has the days across the top (day 1, day 2, etc. since I never know if the first day will be Monday or Tuesday) and then each subject listed in the boxes below the day they will do it. There are no times listed anywhere. The children simply start at the top (Personal Devotions) and continue down the chart until they are finished.
Shakespeare The curriculum that the Lord has lead our family to use (AmblesideOnline) selects a Shakespeare play to cover during each 12-week term. They suggested Antony and Cleopatra for the first term of this year and matched it with Plutarch's Antony. Since this is my son's first experience with Shakespeare's actual plays and with Plutarch we chose to go with a different Life for Plutarch (Poplicola) and will do Antony and Cleopatra when we do Antony next term. This term we are doing The Winter's Tale. I have found it on CD and we are listening to it while following along in our own books. I didn't want to ask my son to start reading it himself yet. We did audio books with our daughter as well and Shakespeare is one of her favorite subjects. She picks up some of the videos from the library to watch in her free time!
CM Questions Answered Ann has kindly helped me out by asking a few questions for my CM survey. So, I thought I would go ahead and answer them in this blog.
Ann asked: 1. How structured is the CM curriculum? Who would like it more, a "scheduled" type of homeschool family or a more laid back type?
I think that is one of the nice things about CM is you can make it fit your lifestyle rather than having to fit your lifestyle to the curriculum. A lot of people make up their own CM curriculum - there isn't a CM-in-a-box curriculum that I'm aware of. Some add living books to their history textbooks. Some use all living books. The amount of structure and schedule depends on how you want to do it.
Our family uses AmblesideOnline (linked above) and we try to do everything they suggest. It does take our family a little longer to finish our school day than some other homeschoolers might need. But, for us, the benefits of being able to include art appreciation, Shakespeare, nature study, music appreciation, etc. is worth the extra time that we spend. Other families pick and choose what parts they want to include.
I hope that answers that question.
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Can y'all help me out? I am supposed to give a talk on Charlotte Mason and Classical Education for our homeschool group later this year. I have never done this before and I'm a bit nervous. I also am very unsure of where to begin introducing CM (and classical education) to others who may have never heard of either. So, I'm hoping y'all can help me out.
What questions do y'all have about CM and/or classical education? What things about CM/classical sound overwhelming to you? Which things sound like fun? If you are/were brand new to homeschooling what things would you want to know about CM/Classical? What are your favorite CM/Classical resources - books, websites, etc.? If you are using CM or classical, what drew you to this type of homeschooling?
You can just leave a comment here on the blog - I'll be checking for responses and I look forward to hearing from all of you!
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Q: What is your favorite night-time snack?
cheese and crackers
something to read, my family, and an indoor bathroom. :-)
reading material because we are a CM family and are constantly reading - I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I didn't have anything to read. The other two should be obvious.
My mom showing me a Winnie the Pooh cake that was for my birthday (second or third). Where ever my family is.
I'm tagging people randomly:
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I haven't been online for a few days and just discovered it so, I apologize for being late.
Q:What is your absolute favorite book?
A: Besides my Bible? Um, Non-fiction would be Teaching the Trivium, Fiction would be Chronicles of Narnia (I know it's more than one book but they all go together!)
A: I have a hard time comprehending what is read to me but my son does read his Pathway reader to me each day and I like listening to him read.
A: Yes
A: It was about a knight, a dragon, and a damsel in distress - my son wanted his dad and I to each write a book for him. It's not something I would have tried if it wasn't one of my children who asked. A: I would write a book about the journey the Lord has taken us on to get us to this place just for my children to have someday.
Now I guess I have to tag 5 people.
Have fun everyone! |
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Homeschool News We are slowly working into our full school routine. This is our third week of adding classes. We started with Math and Science, then added Dictation and Grammar. This week we are adding some fun classes - Godliness Training and Logic.
Godliness Training is done with a parent - our son is going to be studying the book Boyhood and Beyond with his dad, and I'm going to be doing Raising Maidens of Virtue with our daughter. My daughter and I are going to be making a "Virtuous Maiden Scrapbook" to record what we are learning through the study. Scrapbooking is something we both enjoy doing together.
In logic my son and I will be working through Building Thinking Skills Book 3 Figural together. We only spend about 15 minutes on this book each day and we won't do all of the problems. We just do enough to show me that he understands the concept. Our daughter is going to be going through the Fallacy Detective book by Nathaniel and Hans Bluedorn. The Bluedorns write a logic column for Homeschooling Today magazine that I thoroughly enjoy! She, her dad and I will all be going through the book together and I am really looking forward to it. I love their writing style. They make a very intimidating-sounding subject a lot of fun.
Happy Birthday! Today is my daughter's birthday so if anyone happens to visit her blog, you can wish her a happy birthday. |
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Birthdays Yesterday was my husband's birthday. I just love celebrations! We had his family over for dinner, cake and ice cream. I made the cake and my daughter helped make the lasagna. We bought the ice cream .
Birth Days We got a call from my aunt at 5:00 yesterday morning to let us know that my cousin had delivered her first baby - a girl. Both mom and baby are doing well. We got pictures in an email and she is beautiful. Of course, I'm not the least bit biased. I can't wait to go hold her and smell that baby powder smell again. It's been too long.
Random Blog Days I found:
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In just a few more days my daughter will celebrate a birthday. The time goes much too fast now that I'm an adult. It seemed like the year took forever back when I was in school. Now, it flies by. Maybe I'm just getting old (still feel like I'm 20 though.)
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Today I am thankful that my children are capable of working idependently when necessary! I am currently working on a project for a ministry our family is involved in and just didn't have the time to sit down and work on lessons. But, schoolwork still got done. They were able to come to me and ask questions if they didn't understand something but did most of the work on their own. I'm thankful that homeschooling enables children to learn on their own - they aren't dependent on me lecturing or demonstrating or teaching. They know how to learn things on their own. That was one of our goals in homeschooling so it's nice to know we are accomplishing at least a little of what we set out to do with the Lord's help.
The Lord's Heritage I mentioned the ministry that our family is involved in so I thought I would share a little about the ministry. It's called The Lord's Heritage. From the homepage:
"We are an internet hosted, bible based, Christian sterilization reversal ministry. We exist to support each other in our walk to trust the Lord completely with our fertility and family size. We do this through contributing financially to the current families tubal reversal or vasectomy reversal funds."
If you are interested in learning more, check out The Lord's Heritage.
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 Abraham Lincoln You have a Bible and a library card what more could you possibly need? You prefer the Charlotte Mason Method of reading living books for everything: historical fiction, biographies, real histories, nature guides, etc. No soon-to-be-outdated textbooks for you. Visit my blog: http://www.GuiltFreeHomeschooling.blogspot.com What Type of Homeschooler Are You? brought to you by Quizilla |
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Fabulous 4th We have an annual cookout with some friends each 4th of July. We eat, the children play in the kiddie pool in the yard, the men let off fireworks and smoke bombs, the women visit in the air-conditioned house and we all watch the fireworks display from their driveway. We all had a really good time. My children are older than the other children who are there each year so they get to practice putting others before themselves. Always a good thing.
A Day Off We had four of the seven children we were visiting on the 4th come to stay at our house for the day on the 5th. The two youngest ones aren't big enough to stay without their mommy and the oldest boy was going to a doctor's appointment. We had a lot of fun. It's been a long time since there have been little ones in our house. We have been praying for quite a long time and asking the Lord to bless us with more children but so far the answer has been 'no'. So, I am very thankful for the opportunities to help out a friend and enjoy having lots of children in the house all at the same time.
Easing Into It We have decided that we needed to get back into working on regular schoolwork earlier than we had originally planned. I get really burnt out and ready quit in the spring so I don't want schoolwork to drag on into July. Actually, I get tired of doing the old things that we have been working on all year. I want to get started on the new things that we have planned for the next year. Since we take about 39 weeks for actual schoolwork plus 6 weeks of vacation from schoolwork during the year we needed to get back into doing some of it now.
Math So, today we started our math programs and science programs. For math, we have always used and liked Saxon. My daughter is doing Saxon 87 and my son is doing 76 this year. She is a bit above average as a student but math isn't one of the things she really enjoys. My son is more above average than she is and is very good at math. It's a difficult balance trying to find a level that will challenge but not frustrate either one of them but will still allow her to be "ahead" of him. As well as something that doesn't have an obvious grade level to it. My son was in public school for a while and gets a mental block when something says it's for a grade level above where he should be.
Science My daughter absolutely, truly, completely LOVES Apologia's science texts. She used the Exploring Creation with General Science last year and started the Physical Science book today. I love these books, too! I didn't like science at all in school and would be very happy to never do another science experiment ever. These books are written directly to the student, the experiments are ones that she can usually do on her own, and she is really enjoying science.
My son is using creation science books that are part of a series (can't think of the name) and they're all titled The __________ Book. Astronomy, Geology, Weather and Ocean fill in the blank. He is also reading It Couldn't Just Happen and using TOPS books for astronomy experiments. Last year was the first year we tried the TOPS books and really liked them so well last year that he asked for more to do this year.
Today I Am Thankful for: A God who made each of us individuals. My children are loving science, I hated it. My son is a whiz at math, my daughter would be happy to skip it altogether. My daughter loves to write stories and plays, my son hates to write anything. It sure makes life (and homeschooling) more interesting! Praise the Lord! |