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Little Bears
14 August 2008
Returning to my Charlotte Mason Roots
My very first introduction to home education was stumbling upon a book quite by chance in a charity shop entitled "For the Children's Sake" by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay. I assumed it would be about parenting, and I liked the pretty cover, so I bought it. Little did I know how it would completely change my life! By the end of reading the book, I was convinced that the best choice in education was education at home.
When I started home educating my son who was barely 4, I started with Charlotte Mason principles in the background informing my thinking, but I didn't really manage to implement anything specific, so looking back, I think I foundered a bit and got tossed around by the prevailing winds of home-ed methods: although I chose Sonlight curriculum as my literature-base, I've swung from unschooling right through to quite formal workbook learning, and to be honest neither extreme quite fits us.
So I'm really wanting now to go back to my 'roots' and re-explore the Charlotte Mason method, her principles and philosophy and start really implementing them.
To be honest, I'm not quite sure where to start, but I'm thinking that taking small baby-steps will make it easier to make the changes permanent. Here are some of my thoughts:
1. I'm thinking of using some of the material from the back issues of the Home Educator Tutor (music, art prints, mostly, though there's lots more in there I could use).
2. I'll be re-instituting Nature Wednesdays - we used to go out regularly for nature-walks followed by nature-study at home, but it's something that became more and more rare, so it's time to try and make it weekly again, and this time with more of a plan - as I've said, using the Handbook of Nature Study, and also, "Looking at Nature" by Elsie Proctor - an delightful, out of print, old UK school textbook which would originally have been used in British primary schools.
3. I'll be starting narrations with the children again. I have to admit to really struggling with making this work, especially with my eldest boy, but I want to try again.
4. I'll be re-reading all the books I have relating to Charlotte Mason on my bookshelf, including the Charlotte Mason Companion.
5. I'll be re-reading the articles on Ambleside online, and seeing what I can use from there.
4. We'll try to do any bookwork in the mornings and get out much more in the afternoons.
I'll let you know how we get on!
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13 August 2008
Green Hour Challenge #1
In response to my request for Charlotte Mason-related blogs to feature on the Charlotte Mason network, a friend sent me a link to a wonderful Nature-Study blog, to which this Challenge is linked:
http://handbookofnaturestudy.blogspot.com/2008/02/green-hour-challenge-1-lets-get-started.html
I had a copy of the Nature Study Handbook a few years ago, but didn't gel with it and so sold it on, only to regret it afterwards (I've done that sort of thing so many times!) A few weeks ago, though, a friend passed her old copy on to me, and I thought I would try again, and I'm planning to try and make some use of it when we start 'school' again properly in the Autumn.
It's a very wet Wednesday here n the UK. Wednesdays always used to be our Science and Nature-Study day, so today is a good day to start.
I'm planning to go for a little walk locally, perhaps to the little fishing lake in the woods not far from us. I'll let you know how we get on!
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1 August 2008
Planning for the 2008-2009 School Year
We have used Sonlight for almost all of our years of homeschooling, adapting and tweaking to include Jewish history, but I am not planning to buy any more for the coming year since we tend towards 'unschooling with Sonlight' and we haven't finished the cores we were doing (6 and 1), so we won't be moving on to the next cores (7 and 2) just yet.
I am considering moving away from unschooling towards a more formal, scheduled way of homeschooling (and if anybody has advice about that, I'd welcome it!).
We use Singapore Maths for Mathematics, and I think we'll continue with this, but use more manipulatives and even try to incorporate more arts and crafts, which is something I did when my oldest child was younger, to good effect.
For history, I will probably continue with Sonlight (we're currently doing the first half of World History), but I'll be incorporating arts & crafts ideas from Dina Zike's Big Book of World History.
For geography, I have Dina Zike's Great Science Adventures title "Discovering Earth’s Landforms and Surface Features". And we may do some of our own projects using labpoking, for example, volcanoes , earthquakes, and rivers.
For science, I also have a Dina Zike GSA title: "Discovering Atoms, Molecules, and Matter" but I'm not convinced it will be suitable, so I may use the Charlotte Mason nature-study. I have some out-of-print British resources, as well as Anna Botsford Comstock's "Handbook of Nature-Study", so I'm still weighing up which to use.
For English, (creative writing) I've found an out-of-print UK curriculum "Reasons for Writing" (aren't the best things always out of print!) It includes a teacher's manual, student's manual and anthology of short stories to inspire writing. There is just one story about a witch which we won't use, but otherwise really nice material. It's such a shame it's so hard to find. Getty-Dubay's Italic Handwriting workbooks for handwriting, another very old-fashioned simple book for British spelling, " The Essential Spelling List"! I'm still not sure what to use for Grammar.
We do several languages. Primarily Hebrew, and we use a mixture of resources from Behrman House and online resources. We also have a local study group which is a great help. We use "Approach to Latin" for Latin, Skoldo for French, and we also do a little Swedish because we lived there for a while. We use Mamma Mu CD's, and books from the series Barnkammarboken range.
We don't start until September in the UK, so I still have a few weeks to work it all out!
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28 June 2008
Nature-study in the UK
28 June 2008
Firecrest, the Little King
 Hello!
I thought I would share what we've learnt this morning.
We were reading about the 'firecrest', which is apparently one of the UK's smallest (if not *the* smallest) bird, though I had never heard of it before now.
I checked it out on the RSPB's website, and was pleased to find that they have a sample of its song together with lots of information:
http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/f/firecrest/index.asp
We're just on the edge of being in the right area to find the firecrest, so I will have to make a note to look for it when we go out towards the south-east.
The book we were reading, by the way (if any of you are interested) is '366 and more Nature Stories', published by Brown Watson.
The author is Anne-Marie Dalmais with illustrations by Annie Bonhomme. It seems to have been written originally in Europe (printed in Milan) and is translated into English and edited by Colin Clark. It is a great book for nature study, with short and sweet little stories every day of the year, separated by seasons (so starts with Spring rather than January). It's beautifully illustrated (drawings rather than photos, which I prefer personally).
It is available through used booksellers.
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23 June 2008
Home Education UK
I'm a big fan of the Homeschool Lounge, and I do a lot of 'networking' on the internet, and I find it invaluable, especially lacking as we are in real life fellowship. I started a group on the Homeschool Lounge as a contact point for people in the UK and Europe, but it occurred to me that there was nothing similar for people in the UK, and so I decided to take it upon myself to create one.
The result is the Home Education UK network - a much smaller and humbler version of the Homeschool Lounge, and with a decidedly British 'flavour'. I'm hoping that it will develop into a really useful resource, a kind of 'one-stop-shop' for advice, support, encouragement and information on all things relating to home education in the UK.
There are groups for every kind of home education method (Charlotte Mason, Unschooling, Classical, etc.) and various different curricula (Sonlight, ACE, Ambleside Online etc.), and I'm planning on starting regional groups as an aid to making local contacts; there's a forum with various categories, including Teaching Methods & Learning Styles, Curriculum Subject discussion (History, Geography, Maths, English etc.), Special Needs and a Marketplace. If you join up, you also get your own profile page where you can blog, (and upload your homeschool blogger using the RSS feed), post photos and videos and more.
Come take a look today!
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3 June 2008
Unschooling with Sonlight
We have used Sonlight more or less throughout our whole Homeschool journey so far, that's 8 years. We've done Kindergarten twice now, core 1 (I'm doing it a second time now), most of core 2, a selection of books from 3 & 4 (we didn't want to spend even one whole year studying American history, so chose some of the best books and just did an 'America Project' over one semester (UK term), but those books look so good, I'd love to come back to 3 & 4 someday), most of 5 (actually probably only half of core 5 - when I bought it I thought it looked so wonderfully interesting, but ds, then 10 couldn't have been less engaged in the subject at the time, so we dropped it hopefully to pick it up again later) and now core 6.
We started off the year combining cores 1 and 6 in September (when the UK school year starts) on the 3-weeks-on, 1-week-holiday scheme (which, if you follow it the whole year works out the 36 weeks, the same as a traditional 'school' year) and it went well for the first semester. But now, in June, we're still only on week 14 (and the instructor's guide tells me that we've just completed 1/3 of the year!) How can that be?!
Well, apart from the fact that we have supplemented throughout with projects on British history (and the History of Israel / the Jewish people) and take breaks for the Feasts, we're actually homeschooling with Sonlight on a *very* relaxed basis. I'm slightly embarassed to admit it to my more formally schooly homeschool friends, but actually what we do resembles unschooling more than school. Our 3-weeks-on, 1-week-off schedule was abandoned in the new term and we've just been, well, kind of wingin it!
In a typical day, Dragon-tamer (12) will usually spend quite a lot of time with lego (designing space-ships is his forte), networking on the internet (the Lego network, by the way, is a totally safe environment, I recommend it), reading lots (he's currently studying plumbing, amongst other things). He chooses not to do anything which I would determine 'work' (if I insist he must do something which qualifies as 'work' - because I have terrible trouble de-schooling myself, and worry that he will have to some day learn to work - he would choose housework 100% of the time), but if I want to read the Sonlight read-alouds to him he will very happily sit and listen.
Pony-rider (8), as a typical girl', is much more amenable to traditional 'schoolwork', and will happily sit and do maths and writing etc. She will even ask to do maths, which is a wonderful thing to me (and I certainly don't want to jeopardise that by insisting she does it).
Motor-biker (6) will do maths and writing dutifully if I ask him, but chooses rather to draw (he is constantly drawing, and I'm amazed at how much pen control he has. Again, I don't want to make the mistake of insisting he writes and put him off the whole idea of it, which was a mistake I made with Dragon-tamer.
Baba Zonee (almost 5) has been asking for years for his own 'school-work', so I invested in a couple of workbooks (I bought some letterland workbooks first, but found these were really too advanced even though they're marketed for 3-4 year olds). He's currently working through "A First Writing Book" - a black and white printed workbook by Jenny Ackland, illustrated by Ivan Ripley and published by Oxford (so it must be good! actually I'm very pleased with it - it's much more appropriate in terms of size of letters, and there's no distracting colours), and "First Time Learning Counting" by Nina Filipek and illustrated by Andy Cooke, and produced by Autumn Publishing. Again, it's pitched at 3-4 year-olds but is much more appropriate for 5-7 year-olds in my opinion, but it's nice big print and clearly presented and it works for us.
Motor-biker and Pony-rider are using Singapore Maths (US edition, they're both currently on workbook 1A and Pony-rider will move up to 1B in a couple of days) and I'm quite pleased with that. Dragon-tamer got bored with Singapore Maths a few years ago and read through the entire collection of Kjartan Poskitt's Murderous Maths (which he loves and regularly re-reads) as well as going through GCSE texts for Maths, Physics and Chemistry. I'd like to get hold of Sonlight's "Mathtacular" DVDs, as we've really enjoyed their Science DVDs. We don't actually do a whole lot of science experiments (just occassionally) but again, Dragon-tamer has read widely - actually every science text he could lay his hands on - and I'm slowly going through the Sonlight science with the younger ones.
Other than that, we read a lot. I keep an eye on the schedules, but try not to let them condemn me! and I'm learning to ignore what doesn't suit us. We have an amazing amount of freedom here in the UK at the moment (and long may it last!) - provided we are giving the children an education suitable to their age and abilities and fulfilling our own self-designed goals, we are free to pursue our own interests at our own pace and we don't really have any hard and fast rules to follow.
I'd like to be a bit braver and add other non-schooly activities into our mix, but as I said, I still have trouble 'de-schooling' myself.
I'd be interested to hear of anyone else unschooling with Sonlight or doing something similar.
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13 May 2008
Rough Patch
Last year we seemed to be doing really well, following a 3 weeks on / 1 week off pattern and that worked from September to December. But somehow the winter darkness got to me and my energy tailed off and my schedule fell apart.
Ever since I have been struggling to get back into a routine, and the harder it's got the more depressed and unable to cope I have become.
We did a little bit of work today, but I had to send my 12yo out of the room for disrupting the others' work. And that's part of the problem. He has mild autistic tendencies and has always been a lot of work, but while the other children were younger I was able to give him a lot of attention and mold the curriculum to suit him. But now even my youngest is coming up for being officially homeschooled (which in the UK is age 5), I just can't devote so much time and effort to him, and he isn't learning (not from me anyway).
We had a talk today, and I laid it on the line for him - fighting and struggling like this is making me ill, so he has 3 choices:
- Try to do schoolwork with the rest of the children and we'll carry on with Sonlight,
- Go to School, or
- Tell me what he would like his schooling to look like and we'll find some other solutions
Well, needless to say, he chose option 3, and he told me that everything we study in school is totally boring to him, and he knows it all already, so what he wants to do is study to become either a Plumber or an Electrician, or both.
Now I'm really glad he's told me what he wants, but there again, what he wants is a big headache in a way, because there's almost no way he can get into college at 12 to study those things - being practical subjects, the UK red-tape health & safety would never allow it, I suspect at any rate. But I've spent some time online this evening looking for different options and I've sent off for some brochures of correspondence courses, and I'm even wondering about arranging a field trip to our local Construction College.
So, altough I don't know how tomorrow will go, I'm feeling a little more positive, and that fact alone will get my batteries re-charged enough to get up again and 'fight the fight'. And hopefully, it will be less of a fight from now on.
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