The journey of one single Christian mom and her bright and sunny Asperger's-affected 9yo son as they learn and explore together in South Florida, Charlotte-Mason style http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/ en-us Homeschool Blogger Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:37:00 -0500 Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:37:00 -0500 I have purchased a domain name that I absolutely love and have started building a very comprehensive blog and web site at: http://www.singleparenthomeschool.com I am very happy to announce this. I am in the process of compiling a book about single parent homeschools and the different ways in which people make it work for them. If you are a single parent who homeschools or know of someone who does, please refer them my way at cminsofla at earthlink dot net, as I am in the process of putting together a brief questionnaire. I want to include many, many "sidebars" in the book about real-life single parent homeschoolers and their vastly diverse situations as encouragement to any single parents who are currently homeschooling, or thinking about doing so, or for any traditional families who want to provide encouragement to single parent homeschools. I intend to blog at least 3 to 4 times per week, as well as develop a comprehensive links list and resources pages for single-parent homeschoolers and other on-a-budget or time-constrained homeschoolers.  I will also eventually be publishing my curriculum that I'm working on - Shakespeare studies for elementary, junior high and high school homeschoolers - there.  Please do check it out and let me know what you think!! :) I will no longer be blogging at HSB, but I will add my entire blogroll here to my friends list!  Please do feel free to do the same and add my new web site to your blogroll!  God bless each and every person that has been so kind to me here on HSB. I have really enjoyed my time here, and intend to recommend it as a beginner blog service to any homeschooling family that is looking for a quality blog site.  See you all on the flip side! http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/365764/ Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:37:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/365764/ Hello! I have been absent for a while. God has blessed me with an inbound customer-service full-time job from home that pays well and that I enjoy, but I have had to radically adjust my schedule and do not nearly have as much "computer time" as I used to.  I am getting up earlier than I ever have since graduating high school, working a 2-hour morning shift before PJ wakes up, then spending most of the day with him, then working a 3 to 4 hour shift in the afternoons, then dinner, some family time/ TV/ reading together, then lights out!  I also work a 10-hour shift once per week. In this way, I am working a full-time job from home. PJ spends the 3 to 4 hours either hanging out with my grandmother next door, or drawing or reading quietly nearby, or playing video games on his computer.  I am trying to save up to buy some more educational games so this time isn't wasted so much :)   I have finally... mostly... decided what we're using for school this year.  My goal in our homeschool this year is to have a much more relaxed, enjoyable, engaging and hands-on homeschool than we have in the past.  No more "school-at-home" for us! I know he is at least on "grade level" with everything, so I am confident we're able to go on a different, more experimental track this year.  I want to introduce a wide variety of topics that will spark his interest and get him excited about what we're doing, not make him feel like school is somethig he has to tolerate until it's over and the REAL fun (video games, creative illustration and storytelling, computer programming, experimenting with musical instruments, etc) can start. He does well at whatever I throw at him, but I really want him to LOVE what we're learning about.   I have been reading the incredibly eye-opening and excellently written book Discover Your Child's Learning Style and based on the self-assessments PJ did with that book, I have really come to accept that my son is a Thinking-and-Creative/Performing personality with a great deal of spatial and picture-visual intelligence, whose main modalities of expression are humor and storytelling. I have discovered that he is a morning person and runs out of steam in the evenings.  These are TOTALLY NOT AT ALL any of my strengths, nor is it how I learn, and I am a night person so we'll see how we'll reconcile that... but this is the way the Lord saw fit to put him together that way, so it has to be respected :)    This year we are doing: many more projects, a great deal more of the lessons we have orally, more drawing, more storytelling, more performing and skits, more public speaking and recitation (my little extrovert of a son actually enjoys this!)  more manipulatives (generously donated by the folks on the HSEduFreeMarket Yahoo! list) , more work on creative writing, shorter lessons, and NO WORKBOOKS WHATSOEVER.  We will be using a couple of workbooks as a resource, but our focus will be living books.  Here is our curriculum as it stands right now:   Story of the World Volume 3 and Volume 4 - With the corresponding activity guides. We started SOTW3 in the middle of the school year last year and we didn't get through the whole thing, so we're starting in the middle of Vol 3 this year and continuing on with Vol 4 after we're done.  As I have plotted it, taking our time and really exploring into each topic, we'll be a little more than halfway done with SOTW4 by the end of the school year next year. That's fine. We'll just keep reading it over the summer as fun summer reading :)  The munchkin looooves geography (there goes that spatial intelligence thing again!) so I'm going to try to emphasize that, as well as let him make his own pages for his history notebook instead of coloring the pages. I really don't want to leave Vol 4 until next year because I want to do a totally different program for 5th grade, and PJ is big on "follow through" and will want to finish both volumes if possible, so we're going to try for that. Winter Promise: Animals and their World - This integrates art, science and geography. PJ is extremly excited about this one. He is especially excited about the Adventure Readers (read-alouds for the family) because he really enjoys stories about animals.  In fact, he likes learning about and playing with animals in general, so I think this program, with its combination of art instruction, geography and zoology, will be a brilliant fit for him. The spatial intelligence with the picture modality stuff comes in the fact that it comes with animal crossword puzzles and word searches, which he really enjoys, as well as having many colorful pictures in all the books. In keeping with Charlotte Mason's ideas, it includes many, many handicrafts related to animals, such as building animal habitats and other similar crafts. Additionally, their "Draw Write Now" series based on animals seems really excellent as well.  PJ has been poring over the catalogue for a while and asking excitedly when it'll get here. :)  He can't wait to start on this one.  His great-grandparents in Massachusetts are purchasing a set of seven animal habitat jigsaw puzzles for him to go along with this. It's going to be AWESOME! A Reason for Handwriting: Cursive C - The easy methodology, short lessons, simple copywork based on Bible verses and emphasis on ministry with the "finished products" are very Charlotte Mason in approach. PJ needs tons and tons of help in handwriting, and we didn't get far in our cursive studies last year. The mechanics of handwriting still elude PJ, who is severely dysgraphic, and I think this is a disservice to him since his head is so full of ideas for great stories and games, so I'm going to try the slow-and-steady gentle approach to writing, combined with a typing program, and that'll hopefully make it all click for him. Rod and Staff - Building With Diligence: English 4 - To be honest, this is the one I'm iffiest about.  I have the feeling I may ditch it early on.  My son is a very good speller and has very good grammar for a 9-year-old and doesn't need all the extra help in that, but he really enjoys grammar (he says that it and geography are his favorite subjects) and may actually have fun with sentence diagramming.  Also, they emphasis a very gentle introduction into independent creative writing, and have many hands-on activities suggested. The lessons are sometimes overwhelming if done as instructed, but they can be adapted to be done orally or shortened in every case.  But I have the feeling with Animals and their World and A Reason For Handwriting and everything else, he may already be getting plenty of writing, so if it seems like our schedule isn't accommodating this, we'll ditch it. It's not entirely necessary. MEP Math Year 3 - I love this curriculum.  It is available for free as PDF files (scroll down to where it says SCHOOL CURRICULUM MATERIALS); I had both the student workbook and the lesson plans printed out and spiral-bound at OfficeMax for less than $40 and it looks absolutely excellent. I have gotten tons of math manipulatives from friends on the HSEduFreeMarket Yahoo! group, ranging from Base 10 blocks to play money to fraction bars to cuisinaire rods. The generosity there has been amazing.  I think PJ will really enjoy this. He's very good at math, but he doesn't love it.  This is a much more fun way to learn math, and it is very low on repetition (something that keenly frustrated him about other math curriculae), emphasizes mental math (something PJ needs work on) and even has games and the allowance for giving most answers verbally, or showing flash cards with numbers on them instead of having to answer. My Aspie should get a kick out of that.  I can't wait to see how this turns out. Teach Them Spanish! Grade 4 and Grade 5 - again, the emphasis is on short lessons with many activities, manipulatives and games. PJ enjoys working with flash cards. We used this program a couple of years ago and we really liked it.  Since the entire tables of content are available online for both books, I have determined that I will be able to get through Grade 4 and half of Grade 5 this year, with the other half of Grade 5 and the entirety of Grade 6 for the following year. This series unfortunately only goes up to Grade 6, but after that, we will probably NOT be learning Spanish. It's our native language and I just want him to have a basic grasp of its grammatical and spelling rules. In his 6th grade, we'll probably do a third language, such as French or Japanese. He's very keen to learn Japanese, due to his japanime obsession.  I have promised him that if he diligently studies Japanese, we will spend at least 2 weeks in Japan over the summer the subsequent year.  Ooooh. :) AlphaOmega's Switched-On Schoolhouse Bible Studies 400. He LOVED it this last year; it'll be something for him to do while I work.  I took out all the tests and quizzes; as I described in an earlier post, I don't feel that Bible Studies should be just another compartmentalized academic subject, but an integrated part of one's school day, and we did the lessons of SOS Bible 300 like family devotionals. Guitar lessons at Elizabeth School of Music, for which I am bartering web design and graphic design services.  :) So check back in a month or so - the site'll be a lot cooler then! As for his yearly required reading list, I haven't put it together yet. He only got through a third of the books I put together last year, but that was mostly because I wasn't very consistent about insisting that he read every day. With my new schedule, I think it's going to be very useful for him to have something productive and quiet to do while I work.  I am thinking of going with either Winter Promise's 4th Grade American Story 2 reading list, or Sonlight's World History 1+2 reader list.  I haven't decided yet; I'm leaning toward the latter since we're doing World History, not American History, but the AmHis books look like more fun. :)  I was thinking of doing the Animals and their World adventure read-alouds as our main read-aloud spine, but that's scheduled right into the school day, so maybe I'll have him read the WinterPromise independently and do the Sonlight suggestions as the night time read-alouds. I am also using various resources for art/ music/ poetry appreciation as time permits. Music appreciation is the easiest, of course - we just constantly listen to and discuss classical music, then read a biography on the composer once every few weeks. I have also purchased the wonderful book, Story of the Orchestra.  For poetry/ drama, my wonderful homeschool park date group is considering letting me teach a simple all-ages homeschool class on Shakespeare which would culminate in a rudimentary performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I am still plotting the best way to do that. I have considered starting to write a book about "Shakespeare for Homeschoolers;" I just haven't had the time. So that's what I've been up to.  All in all, things are going well here. Once the expenses of the start of the school year have subsided, I am going to aim to buy a digital camera to start scrapbooking and recording our adventures this year, so expect many many more pictures to come! I hope everyone reading this is having a blessed and happy summer. :) http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/357630/ Mon, 16 Jul 2007 09:16:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/357630/ Several people have asked me to elaborate, so I'll post my little review here.   I have a 9yo son who, like most boys his age, loves doing anything the computer.  I was definitely tired of struggling through "school at home" the last few years and I wanted to do something new.  Switched On Schoolhouse sounded ideal.  We got the 3rd grade SOS off of eBay for about $150, brand new.   Initially I wasn't sure what level PJ should go into. Switched-On Schoolhouse (SOS) does have a placement test, and he tested around the 7th grade level in language arts and 4th for math. I knew that this wasn't right. His reading level is indeed far above a 3rd grade level, but I also knew he wasn't on a 7th grade level of grammar, reading comprehension or writing, so I was immediately a little suspect.  The problem is that the placement test is multiple choice, and my son has very good deductive reasoning skills, and was able to get many of the questions right just by process of elimination.   I had heard (incorrectly, in hindsight) that SOS was "very rigorous" and I was concerned if he had "learned enough" to go into 4th grade. PJ was technically entering-3rd-grade-age, but when I took him out of kindergarten, he was testing at "late first grade level" and I had just had him skip kindergarten, so he was, for several years, "a year ahead."  However, I had a severe respiratory infection for about 1/3 of PJ's third grade and I was afraid that he had "missed" too much, so I decided to get 3rd grade SOS because it was better for him to have a very firm grasp of the fundamentals than it would be to have him struggling through things he was barely ready for.  This was only the first of many regrets I was to have with this program.   PROBLEMS WITH THE GENERAL CURRICULUM:   It didn't take long for me to realize that the 3rd grade level material, generally speaking, is that which you commonly see covered in 2nd and 3rd grade materials - not 3rd and 4th grade. He could have handled the 4th grade level just fine, but despite their placement tests, there is really just no way to tell this before you buy.  So this is my first gripe against SOS - since it is designed to be used in the homeschool as well as the traditional Christian private school, it is geared to the lowest common denominator.    It is also very obviously not an exclusively homeschool program. In the 3rd grade section, there are many numerous examples, word problems, and reading comprehension passages that reference traditional school, recess, and school days. If your child has never been to school or barely remembers it the way mine does, this is very frustrating. The program normatizes the institutional school experience - surprising, given its popularity among homeschoolers; frustrating for a homeschool parent, especially one whose child longs to experience "real school." (Mine doesn't, but I know others who do.)  Basically, if you do Switched-on Schoolhouse, you are expected to "do school at home." This could be a boon to parents who expect to transition their child into a regular classroom at some point, but since I intend to homeschool as long as God gives me breath, this is a non-issue for us.   The total lack of parental involvement except as an aid to the occasional question was very alienating for me. The reality is that Switched-On Schoolhouse does not need you.  You, as a parent, are more or less extraneous the educational process. You can take the time to add in your own lessons - away from the computer - and you can customize the process however you like, taking out units, rearranging their order, etc., but it is a losing battle. At the end of the day, when your child sits down to do Switched-On Schoolhouse, you really don't need to be there unless your child has a question about part of the text.    Thus as the year progressed, I felt more and more like a bystander in my own child's education - not unlike how I felt when he was in school.  It was very boring for me, because like many 8-year-old boys, my son was not completely ready to work independently, still needing a great deal of redirection and "Okay, on to the next question now," which, trust me, after a week or two of doing this for hours daily, gets very old and boring very fast. But  I didn't choose the subject matter, I didn't choose the presentation, I had little or no part of teaching my child this year in the subjects in which he did SOS.  More and more, his education was becoming an "off to the computer with you!" process and I hated that.  This, more than any other reason, is why we will not be using SOS for anything other than Math and Bible Studies again. Now I'm going to go through why I found the specific subjects problematic.   Language Arts The first and most immediately obvious problem with SOS Language Arts for 3rd grade is that the spelling is far below grade level. In many of the early lists for 3rd grade, there were 3-letter words.  I was assured that they would get progressively harder, and they did - now, at the end of the year, they are starting to get closer to 3rd grade level.  My son never scored below a 100 on any spelling test and he has never studied for them. I do not think this is a good thing.   Secondly, the writing component is very thin.  My son has only been asked to do 3 or 4 book reports all year.  I can only recall two or three brief, paper-thin creative writing assignments - something for which most children discover a love at this age.   Of course, you do have to supplement penmanship - they are upfront about that. They recommend Horizons Penmanship, but we did A Reason For Handwriting Cursive (C) at first, and now we just do copywork of hymns, poetry and Scripture.  There is very little coaching on constructing a well-thought-out book report or essay - the process by which they present it is almost fill-in-the-blank ("First, state the title. Then state the author. Then state what the title says about the story. Then state where it is set." etc.) There is a single assignment on correspondence the entire year, at the end, and no other instruction on any other kinds of writing. My son has had to write a single poem - a haiku - all year long.   As a great lover of poetry, this is the cause of great consternation for me. There is next to no poetry study.  My son has only had one assignment all year on poetry, the haiku essay - for which we had to check out a book from the library. I don't mind this at all, but certainly replacing the meaningless "reading comprehension" passages with meaningful poetry or based them on required reading or easily found children's literature wouldn't have hurt anyone.  An anthology of children's poetry is among the recommended reading list for third grade, but it never ties in to the curriculum and I'm sure most parents aren't sure what, exactly, they're supposed to DO with that anthology.   The book list makes an attempt to diversify, in the sense that it recommends biographies as well as speculative fiction and non-fiction, but again, it is bare bones and I don't think it's enough reading for any child, especially if he is reading the recommended minimum 20 to 45 minutes a day.  I also am of the mind that PJ should read literature from many cultures and points of view, and needless to say, SOS does not provide that. It doesn't even pretend to be multicultural in any way, shape or form, except for a few "reading comprehension" passages about an English-speaking child enlightening a Spanish-speaking child about Jesus. This despite the fact that the Spanish-speaking child's family was Christian in the passages.    I believe children should read traditional "classic books" like the handful of books on the SOS list, but like Charlotte Mason, I believe that as new books are published or resources are newly discovered, there is nothing revisionist about including it in your quest to have your child intellectually feed off of "living books."  Living books can be old or new, and can come from any culture.  Of course this takes a great deal of discernment on behalf of the parent, and SOS is counting on a parent who doesn't want to exercise a great deal of discernment when it comes to their child's education.    Next year, I plan to use Sonlight's reading recommendations, both for read-aloud and independent reading, along with some of K12.com's 4th and 5th grade recommendations, which tend to be heavy on the high-quality and multicultural.  For grammar, spelling and writing, I plan to use Rod and Staff Grade 4 and 5, with an eye toward Charlotte Mason's emphasis on copywork and dictation, plus Shakespeare and poet studies.  Much, much more rigorous than SOS, and probably a lot more interesting to PJ too.   History and Geography This is the subject that we threw out earliest on.  It is a total misnomer to call this a history and geography course. There is very little history and the brief, disconnected forays into geography were almost extraneous to the lessons.  What it is, is a course about different types of communities - farming (1/3 of the course is about different types of farms), mining, fishing and manufacturing.  After the eighth week of learning about the endless minutiae of processes on soybean farms, cotton farms, lettuce farms, etc. etc. etc., my inner-city kid was ready to stage a revolt. I have no problem to "my communities" or "my community helpers" approaches to very early childhood social studies, but I feel that a 3rd grader has long been ready to learn  about real, actual history.    So the subject matter was way below a 3rd grade level, but written so dryly and with so much attention to pointless technicalities (do all 3rd graders really need to know the 2397523 types of machinery used on cotton farms?) that its presentation was almost too sophisticated. It was, in short, totally inaccessible and irrelevant for my child. We ditched it after the first quarter for Story of the World, Vol 3, both the text and activity book, and we've been having a ball learning about world history and geography ever since.  SOS History and Geography is not a history and geography course - it is a generalized social studies course.  Grade 4 is more of the same. A child strictly on the SOS curriculum doesn't get to actual world history until the SEVENTH GRADE!  On the SOS Yahoo! group, "my child hated Gr4/Gr3/Gr5 history" is a common complaint.  I would not recommend this SOS subject to ANYONE. It is not a good history or geography curriculum, period.   Math My son has difficulty writing, so he actually enjoys doing math on the computer. Unfortunately, the SOS approach was, once again, way below 3rd grade level. We spent the first three months doing nothing but addition and subtraction of multi-digit numbers - a 1st and 2nd grade skill.  We are just now getting to multiplication and division.    There is a TON of review.  This is a pro and a con. Some children need that much review but I question if the SOS approach is helpful for all but a small number of students. They are often just a batch of the same kinds of problems over and over and over.  Some of the review lessons have more than 40 of the same kinds of problems!!! I feel this is excessive. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - if your child has done 400+ addition problems and is still not getting multi-digit addition, the answer is not to do 400  more, but to try a different approach.    There is no guidance about how the child should study for tests or quizzes whatsoever, except, presumably, more review. The lesson itself is presumed to be the studying and the quizzes are just a more high-pressure version of the lessons; the only real difference between the quizzes and the lessons is that there's no explanatory text and you're only allowed to answer once. They are otherwise indistinguishable.  My son doesn't like a lot of review and finds it tedious, so I have had to sharply edit every single math lesson, starting from the 3rd unit on out, and just omit a lot of the review units.  I wish I had done this earlier; we'd be done with 3rd grade math by now.   That said, my son does enjoy doing math on the computer and he HAS learned basic math facts quite thoroughly. But because so much of it was so basic, he is now behind. We have basically done 3rd grade math twice, which was unnecessary.  I plan to do a "4th grade summer math skills" briefly over the summer and then start a heavily modified 5th grade Math SOS in the fall. (In another earmark of poor continuity planning that SOS generally suffers from, 4th grade SOS math doesn't cover any subjects that 3rd and 5th grade don't cover - so 4th grade is basically a year of repetition.)   Science   SOS's approach to science is a lot like the traditional classroom - it introduces the child to many disciplines and subjects all in one year, all unrelated to each other, over and over, year after year, in the hopes that each year its presentation is more "in depth."  I don't think this is an intuitive or logical way to learn science and we have had to do a LOT of supplementing: reading from children's science encyclopedias, going to the museum, using Klutz books, etc. There is no mention of the scientific process anywhere.  Next year, I plan to do a lot of hands-on science, nature studies and things like that. I plan to do one semester of chemistry using The Well Trained Mind's recommendation, Adventures in Atoms and Molecules (we did a little this year - good times!) and one semester of physics using Physics Experiments for Children, as well as nature studies, nature walks, gardening and nature journaling. Needless to say, SOS never brings up the suggestion that the child should actually leave the computer and experience science in a hands-on way. Many of the "experiments" can be done right at the computer. Embarrassing.   Many people choose SOS because it is a Christian curriculum, but it is only a Christian curriculm for science in the most cursory ways imaginable.  It's almost like mention of God is shoehorned into the content. (Example, studying the human ear may say something like "God gave us ears to hear his word!" Gee, ya think? LOL)  There is no mention of creation or dinosaurs or any other subject that typically grab the average 3rd grader's imagination.  It is just honestly a very sad attempt at teaching Science.   Bible Studies For me, this was the most problematic SOS subject - and for PJ, it was the most enjoyable.  I think the program does a good job of presenting the content in a child-friendly, engaging way, and PJ has learned a lot not just about the Bible, but about theology and how to do theological research, as well as how to reference the Bible in various ways.  However, there was relentless quizzing and testing and it treated Bible Studies like just another academic subject. This made me very uncomfortable. Eventually I took a recommendation of someone on the SOS Yahoo! list and took out all the quizzes and tests, and we simply did the lessons as a family devotional together.  The drawback is that you will go through about 2 grade levels per year if you do it daily and will need to buy the second grade level individually, and eventually you will not be able to purchase the entire package for one grade.  One other disadvantage - the third grade level has no system of scripture memorization whatsoever. You will have to do this on your own. It is not required by the program.   Conclusion I feel like we wasted a lot of valuable time this year with SOS.  It isn't at all what  I would like for our home or homeschool; that it is a Christian curriculum that so thoroughly removes the parent from the educational process and instills such an institutional school mentality in homeschooled students is troubling; that it is a Christian curriculum that treats Bible studies and devotionals as just another generic academic subject is even more so.    There are some families that would find its approach advantageous.  The parent who requires a child to work independently for whatever reason - illness in the family, a new baby, a sibling who requires a great deal more attention with learning struggles,  the need to work from home simultaneously as the child, etc. - would find SOS very helpful.  Likewise, I have known families who used it for high school, because it does keep very good records.  Similarly, a parent who requires excellent and exact records of their school day for legal reasons would find this helpful. The software even times your child and prints out how long he or she worked on any given lesson, and you can print out daily, weekly, monthly and yearly reports of activity.  Instant portfolio.  For high school and junior high school,  I understand there are a great many electives.     I don't think Switched-On Schoolhouse is a bad program and I do believe it has some advantages.  My own son has benefitted from working on the computer for various subjects. It just was not at all in line with my goals for my home or homeschool, and not in line with the standards I have set through Charlotte Mason's ideals.  I would caution Christian parents to purchase and use it with a great deal of discernment and supplementation. As a backbone to an education it isn't bad (except for the History/Geography, which I think really is bad), but it isn't self-contained as it purports to be, and parents should know that going in. Next year, we will ONLY be using Bible Studies and Math from Switched on Schoolhouse. Both require a lot of customization, but they were the only subjects I did not find to be vastly subpar to other approaches.  We're sticking with Story of the World, and investigating WinterPromise as a possible curriculum as well.  Literature based and less structured - as a reaction against SOS.   I hope this account of our experience with this curriculum can be of use to someone. I welcome feedback and responses! http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/323854/ Fri, 4 May 2007 11:03:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/323854/ Today at the library (one of our favorite places) we saw the 1933 and the 2005 versions of King Kong next to each other on the DVD shelves and we decided to rent them and watch them to compare the differences.  Tonight we watched the 1933 version, which was surprisingly violent and gory (not to mention quite racist in several parts), and though the special effects did get some laughs from me and PJ (who said the blood coming out of the T-Rex's mouth looked like jelly - which became a running joke)  the story of the giant monster whose heart is won by a delicate human woman still resonates on some levels today.  Tomorrow we watch the 2005 version with Jack Black and Naomi Watts.  Or maybe only the first half - it's a three hour film!  We're then going to compare and contrast the two movies afterwards. Should be interesting.   Some wild stuff has been going on in South Florida homeschooling circles. Two major homeschooling support groups have collapsed for various reasons. One was a group for which I was a founding member just two years ago - the victim of a whole lot of apathy and some nasty personalities.  The other is a very large and very old group that was trying to be both non-sectarian and religious; it worked for a while, but ultimately didn't.  It's been a period of transition for the Broward and Dade homeschooling communities, I think.  You can bet a lot of prayer has gone on, on my end.   We are so blessed to have our park group in Coral Gables. We love EVERYONE who goes there. I have sincerely not had an issue for two years with a single parent or child who attends; on the contrary, we have made so many friends. I don't think it's secular, per se, as there are several Christians who attend but it is very nonsectarian. We are all of different ethnicities, creeds, etc., but we all get along and we all just happen to share the same principles of valuing non-sectarian support among homeschooling. We mostly just meet weekly for the park dates - which we all enjoy - but we also sometimes organize activities either at the park or outside of the park.  Once a month we celebrate the birthdays of the children whose birthdays are in that month; we have maybe half a dozen seasonal celebrations too, and we have been moving toward organizing some fun educational events too.   For example, next week we are having Mock Greek Olympiads.  Basically a toga party :)  We are organizing some Greek Olympic style games like "javelin" throws and relay races, having authentic Greek food, and some Greek-themed arts and crafts.  In March we did a thing called Historically Speaking, which was something my old group came up with. Basically, the children each dress up as a historical figure and speak for about 5 minutes in the first person about who they were and what they did in their lives. PJ chose Christopher Columbus and his costume was very authentic :) It's a good exercise in drama, public speaking (we had a brief public speaking "workshop" the day before for the kids), creative writing, history and research. We are now discussing the possibility of having a Shakespeare day next year. I did a ton of Shakespearean acting in college and after college, and would love to do something like that with the kids.  We were thinking we could tie it in to the Renaissance Faire they have every year in February, which is largely Elizabethan themed.   That is actually one of my pet projects percolating in my head at the moment.  I am thinking of putting together a "Shakespeare for Homeschoolers" kind of web site or blog.  Part book review, part lesson plan repository, something like that. Many people think Shakespeare is too far above young children, but I don't think so at all. I mean, obviously one wants to start with something child-friendly like A Midsummer Night's Dream or A Comedy of Errors or Twelfth Night.  I have a great prose version of about a dozen Shakespearean plays that I got off the bargain bin at my local Borders.  It includes snippets of the real dialogue in between the straightforward prose and the beautiful illustrations.  We read through that first, and then we make paper cut outs of the characters and act out the real play, act by act.  I wasn't sure PJ would be into it, but he really has fun with it and actually does more or less understand what's going on. We're working on A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is very kid-friendly and very funny, so that helps.  The paper dolls we ordered arrived a few days ago and we've been having a ball with them. PJ wants to build a stage and everything. We read Aliki's William Shakespeare and the Globe as well, which helped to give the play a larger context.   Part of this has played into my interest-led emphasis that I've started taking in our homeschool. We would read through the stories no matter what. There is a baseline of content in our homeschool. But PJ's interest has been thoroughly sparked by the story of A Midsummer Night's Dream and he's chosen to find out a lot more about it and get really into it.  Had he found it boring, well, at least he would be familiar with the general gist of the stories of Shakespeare; at least when he gets a bit older, he won't find them quite so alien.   When I first decided to introduce Shakespeare this year, I thought there would be a scarcity of materials geared for K-5 grade, but there's actually a TON.  I had a hard time narrowing it down!  And yet people still act like I am doing this lofty, collossally ambitious thing, teaching Shakespeare to my 9yo. It's so not! But I think many PARENTS are afraid of reading Shakespeare, much less teaching it to their elementary school aged children, just because in school it was presented as something totally inaccessible, requiring translations and extremely tedious and relentless analysis and things like that.  Also, the only direct experience anyone has with live theater productions of Shakespeare are bad college and high school productions of the plays, which is like the blind leading the blind - as Baz Luhrrman's horrible film, Romeo + Juliet proved, actors who have no idea what they're saying don't exactly elevate the material, much less make it universally accessible. ;)   Per his own admission, Shakespeare's plays were intended to be viewed by the peasants and the noblmen alike. Iliterate peasants used to understand Shakespeare!  They deal in timeless themes and recognizable archetypes.  Once you get used to the unique rhythm of the language, it's really very accessible. Good audio recordings and BBC/film adaptations help, too... See? That's the kind of thing I'd want to talk about on the blog. I would love it if study of Shakespeare were more widespread in general, especially among homeschoolers.   I am also of the mind that we should start attending more concerts, more plays, more art festivals, etc.  South Florida is a bit acultural in that sense - there isn't a large theater or classical music community here, and what's here largely is very elitist, but there are still things to do if you look for them.  I am not too pleased with the art scene here; it's almost entirely post-modern and modern art and photography. When we lived in Boston, we had the MFA there which had amazing exhibits from the Egyptians through modern art; at the Miami Museum of art, it is literally 3 stories of black and white photography and one nook of "abstract" art.  I am on the lookout for better first-hand experiences with art. I do want to travel to Paris one day soon and visit the Louevre in person though. :)   Now that we are forming our own group with our own field trips, I think I'm going to go back to putting together a monthly list of Free Things To Do In Miami, which I used to do for my old group but gave up when no one came.  I am also in the process of starting up a nature journaling club for all of South Florida; we may tie it in to letterboxing, which is something a lot of our friends do and we'd like to get into, too. There are just not enough hours in the day! :) http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/323549/ Thu, 3 May 2007 22:47:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/323549/ I have been thinking a lot about the differences between the ideals of classical education, Charlotte Mason and unschooling.   The Classical Approach I've already read most of the classical education books out there - The Well-Trained Mind, Teaching the Trivium, etc. I think it sounded most palatable to me as a newer homeschooler because it sounds more like traditional school than anything else.   However, it is very, very stressful, rigorous, and especially in the early years, extremely tedious for the student at times.  All that copywork and drills and required recitation and everything else. We used First Language Lessons by Susan Wise Bauer for a few months in the first grade and tried everything else they recommended.  It was too rigid and, frankly, too repetitive and boring for us.   We still love The Story of the World, but since PJ has such severe attention and auditory deficits, I had to wait until he was skilled enough to read at least some of the material on his own in order to use it. I thought that Ur and Mesopotamia were very inaccessible subjects for the average 6-year-old, the age range recommended for Vol 1 of the series. Instead, we did a lot of studying of the general topics covered in Vol 1 and 2. Now we love Vol 3 as we use it formally, and use it more as a unit study on history and geography.   For example, the chapter about France's Louis XIV yielded a desire to study about Paris, the Louevre (which PJ, ever keenly interested in art and art history, is literally desperate to visit), the French Revolution, the musical Les Miserables, the French language, French cuisine, and extensive reading about France in the child's atlas we have. There were also numerous discussions about social castes and social justice and how today's French socialism has reactionary roots in the excesses of Louis XIV. That's how it goes for every chapter in that book. We are now on Germany/ Bach/ nationalism/ you get the idea.   As a result, here we are in May and we are not even halfway done with Vol. 3. We will probably keep going through it in the summer and just pick up Vol 4 whenever we're done. We just have a lot of fun with the book. Otherwise, classical education was way too counterintuitive and frankly condescending of the child. There is a sense in classical education that the child is an empty vessel who must be filled with ideas by us, the superior adults. The reality is that children are better at learning than we are! There is a certain contemptuousness, I find, a removal between parent and child, in the classical approach. It wasn't for us.   Unschooling The other end of the spectrum is unschooling. I have been reading The Unschooling Handbook by Mary Griffiths. I am nearly done, and feel more sure than ever that this approach is not for me, even as I agree very much in the basic principle that one learns best what one enjoys learning. However, I think that this particular book, and perhaps unschooling in general, takes that idea and makes some fairly unsupported conclusions. Despite touting itself as the most universally applicable approach to education, I find it is very narrow in scope.   For starters, there is a presupposition of the parent as a competent, well-rounded resource.  If an unschooling parent has no idea how to do an Internet search, or doesn't really know how to suggest all the educational ramifications of, say, baking a cake or buidling a treehouse or mailing something at the post office, or hasn't set foot in a library in 20 years, that parent is going to be an inadequate "facilitator" of quality educational experiences in any guise. I know a few "radical unschoolers" whose parents are neither well-educated nor good at making those kinds of intellectual connections between knowledge pools, and their kids are very ignorant in general.  There is one 13yo in particular who is functionally illiterate. "He'll pick it up when he needs to!" says his mother. I hurt for that kid, I really do.  He probably has some learning disabilities that no one has discovered because no one has ever sat him down with a workbook and pushed him in a direction that would reveal his very real limitations.  There is a young woman who is now struggling and struggling as a first-year medical assistant student because her mother never made her do any math, ever. It's just so unnecessary.   The book is scarily vague about how you can tell if your child is being adequately educated. "You just KNOW!" it says, over and over. Many of the testimonials given by kids flout parental authority - there is an account of a 12-year-old, for example, "deciding" to go to school, much to the pain and consternation of his parents, who are apparently physically incapable of saying no.  This is treated with sympathy by the author, but she nevertheless doesn't suggest, oh, being a parent and putting your foot down.   I am a Christian and I believe, as the Bible says, that it's my responsibility to "train up my child in the way that he should go."  But this is bordering on cruelty according to Mary Griffith. The book also politely skirts the questions such as "How will a child know how to put together a well-constructed essay?" and "How would anyone know they're good at physics if no one has ever had them learn advanced mathematics or study physics as a subject?" and "What if the kid never practices the instrument you paid hundreds for, and never makes any progress, but still insists on taking lessons?" and "What about kids who are naturally inert and really WOULD spend all day, every day, playing mindless video games if left to their own devices?" and "Okay, fine, 'you just know,' and you have to 'trust the process,' but how can you really tell if they are going to be academically competent enough to enter a university if your homeschooling logs consist entirely of things like watching PBS specials, sewing a bookmark, and emailing? Seriously now."   It is so much circular reasoning with little or no pedagological or empirical support. I feel like it is a huge social experiment and the kids are the guinea pigs.  And I'm sorry, no matter how voracious a reader is the child that learns to read fluently at 14 instead of 7, they're missing out on so much. I find so much in every chapter that is inaccurate, illogical and just unsupported generalizations.  And the fact that, at a time when it is estimated that the percentage of special-needs learners among the homeschool population may be double that of the public schools', the book devotes a single passage to unschooling the special needs learner is absolutely shameful.   Charlotte Mason: The Best of Both Worlds I love the principle of interest-directed learning, but I do not like the principle of child-led learning.  Charlotte Mason's principles of "spreading a sumptuous feast [of knowledge]" for the child is what works best for us. I choose the topics and in what order they are presented. There is a baseline of depth of coverage; past that, if PJ wants to spend hours reading about the history of the orchestra (a current pet subject) I am going to encourage this as much as possible. But I guarantee I wouldn't have a 9-year-old who knows what an overture or a cantata or a counterpoint are if he was left to his own devices, or if he had a mother who had no idea those things even existed.  He would also probably still be dyslexic, still be unable to write, etc. had I not formally taught him about these things. And he loves to read and write now, so obviously I didn't smush his love of learning there.   That said, we do TOO much formal learning now, I think.  I want to do less "To the computer with you!" style homeschooling and do more "real life" learning.  We talked a little today about how I want learning to be all around us.  He asked if window-shopping at the mall (a favorite past time) was educational. I said yes, because we are learning to be good consumers, learning how to conduct ourselves in public, and of course, deal-comparing and things like that.  Today was our fine arts day and we did the following that I consider educational:   PJ spent most of the morning making his own magazine about his own invented video game, an amalgam of Pac-man and Star Wars. The magazine featured advertisements, a joke section, and many illustrations. After a failed attempt to bind its many pages with scotch tape, we binded it with staples instead. I was given the magazine as a gift. :) We went for a nature walk around the neighborhood for about 20 minutes.  We identified several species of flowers, including the hybiscus, to which my best friend is allergic. We listened to several Bach cantatas, as well as a 1980s pop music marathon on the radio. PJ went with me on a visit to a client software training, and got to witness that. He also got a minor verbal lesson on business etiquette vs. informal social etiquette, which he thought was very interesting. We read a brief children's illustrated prose version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. PJ thought it was very, very funny. This version included snippets of the actual Shakespearean dialogue, which PJ appeared to understand. I ordered these paper dolls, which should arrive any day now, and suggested that when they arrived, we could put on the play ourselves using them. I suggested that we could make our own scenery as well. He reacted with great enthusiasm; however, the language really is very difficult, and I am pondering whether I should get one of those versions with the "modern translation" on one side of the page and the regular text on the other from the library. We had our first drawing lesson from Drawing With Children.  PJ still has a great deal of trouble following spoken directions and he is a bit resentful of "learning to draw" because he says he already knows how to draw. (His drawing is much like his writing due to his dysgraphia - several years below grade level, and yet I don't want to quash either his enthusiasm or his confidence. I am trying to frame it as something we do together "to do even more with drawing." It was a little frustrating.  We read the first chapter of Luke in the Bible, and discussed John the Baptist briefly. We sang the first three verses and the last verse of  "O Come All Ye Faithful" as the begining of this week's hymn study. We also sang "I Sing The Mighty Power of God" once through, which was our study from last week. There was some discussion and practical application of good breath control, posture and diction in singing, as well. We looked through our Spanish for Kids Larousse course, lesson 3, and did the corresponding activities. We read one chapter from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H. out loud.  He thought he'd hate the book when I first told him the premise; after two chapters he was begging me to read "just one more" and asking all kinds of questions about it. PJ read one chapter of The Sign of the Beaver and two chapters of Introducing Bach independently.  He generally enjoys historical fiction and biographies. Not bad for a day's work, even though we didn't really do any "formal schooling." I would have liked to have thrown in some art appreciation there - we have a few books about John James Audubon I'd like to get to soon - but, you know, not bad for a day's work. :) http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/321884/ Mon, 30 Apr 2007 23:53:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/321884/ What is the difference between auditory processing delays and just really bad, underdeveloped listening skills? I have been asking myself this for weeks now.   My son, whom I'll call PJ, age 9, is diagnosed with very mild high-functioning autism, as well as ADHD and sensory integration dysfunction.  He used to not be so mildat all; he didn't speak until he was 5,  his perseverative behaviors used to be much more pronounced and he used to barely be able to carry on a conversation. I think there are still many social subtleties he struggles with, but after four years of homeschooling and actively working on his social skills and expanding his understanding of things like sarcasm and idioms and chit chat and social etiquette, his pediatrician (the father of a profoundly autistic daughter himself, and pediatrician to dozens of children on the spectrum) says he believes that PJ no longer qualifies for the Asperger's/HFA label. I was surpised when he said this... but I don't disagree.   One of the things that he still has a lot of trouble with is retaining information that he has heard.  At his previous occupational / physical therapist, they told me that he did not exhibit any signs of having any kind of auditory processing delay, but I was dubious, as this is a child that watchest television with the closed captioning on so that "I don't miss any of the words"; he asks me to repeat things over and over; he will, when asked to do something in the next room, go to that room, and return, asking "I'm sorry - what did you want me to do?"  He will not be able to answer basic questions about a passage we just read. So SOMETHING is going on; I just wasn't sure what.   (I am taking him to an audiologist this month to rule out physiological issues, but he passes every hearing screening with flying colors, and in fact, has eavesdropped on whispered conversation from the other side of the house. I seriously doubt he has any kind of hearing loss. Still - the fact remains, he does not retain or even appear to catch much of what he hears.)   This year, for history and literature, we use the Story of the World curriculum by Susan Wise Bauer. We're doing Volume 3; I loosely covered the topics of Volumes 1 and 2 in the previous two years, but I was not able to use Volume 1 with him when he was of first grade age as per their recommendation.  I tried for a few weeks, but it would literally go in one ear and out the other for him. He could not sit still for one section of it, and he could not remember anything I had read, sometimes with me just reading the one sentence and asking him to parrot what I just said.  After the third or fourth try when we were both near tears with frustration, I gave up and used the first grade history curriculum from Christian Liberty Press. It wasn't bad, but I was so disappointed - SOTW is an excellent curriculum, and I would've loved to have been able to use it, but it seemed that my child was not at all an auditory learner, and I had to try something new.  This year, he reads well enough to read it on his own, so I tried it again to great success. We love Story of the World and recommend it far and wide!   About halfway through this year I discovered Charlotte Mason's gentle philosophies of child rearing and educating and fell in love. The trouble is, the act of narration - the child describing his thoughts, impressions and recollections from the narrative you just read the child - is an underpinning of her philosophy. I have tried unstructured narration with SOTW Vol 3 and it was a mess. Much prompting was necessary and since we did "buddy reading" of the passages - he would read a paragraph, I would read the next - he still didn't retain much of what I was reading, nor, in fact, was he retaining much of what HE was reading, either.   A few weeks ago I had a "lightbulb moment." It occurred to me that narration is the training of the child's attention, and nothing more. The child has to PAY ATTENTION to what you're saying in order to narrate effectively and, indeed, learn at all. I realized THIS is what is going on with PJ. He does not have auditory processing delays. He does not have hearing loss. What he does have is the attention span of a gnat. He misses what's said because he simply isn't paying attention.    If he were in a public school, he would certainly be heavily medicated by now. This was the recommendation during his few weeks of kindergarten.  I have never considered it because he tests well above grade level in every subject and is an otherwise happy and well-adjusted child, so I didn't see the point, but I am seeing now that his attention deficit has cost him dearly in many areas of life, and desperately  needs remediation.  So per Miss Mason's recommendations, I still require narration, I just "meet him where he is." Instead of reading the entire passage, I only read one or two paragraphs before asking him to "tell me everything you remember about what I just read." Sometimes this is too vague, so I say, "Tell me three things that you thought were interesting about what I just read."  I also - and this is crucial - tell him ahead of time that he will be expected to listen to the passage and narrate for me; I tell him that it will only be read once. In this way, he knows he has to pay attention. And guess what? He does.   In fact, it is amazing how well he does. Don't get me wrong; it is still a work in progress. Usually when I read the first paragraph, he can't remember anything because he hasn't been paying attention. It's still something he has to actively "turn on." I know that eventually it will be second nature; I realize that we are in the process of literally "rewiring" his brain, so he still often warms up with that first paragraph or passage. There is no punitive measure against this, of course. I simply remind him that we are to do our best with schoolwork and that we are now going to do the second paragraph and that he is to try much harder. If, let's say, it is a four-paragraph passage, INVARIABLY by the fourth paragraph, not only is he retaining everything I said, he is EAGER to narrate. He can hardly wait for me to finish reading so he can proudly show off everything he remembers. He is not just parrotting, either - he is asking questions and editorializing and everything. I am amazed.   Baby steps. Eventually I will be reading longer passages.  Eventually I will include dictation. He is now able to sit still and listen to an entire chapter of a book being read. We are going through Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H., one of my own favorite books as a child, which he initially said would be "boring" but is now begging me to read "just one more chapter!" and for the first time in his life, actively asking questions about the story.  (Considering that this year the only books that have caught his attention were Charlotte's Web, Babe the Gallant Pig, The Adventures of Paddington Bear, A Cricket in Times Square and now this, it is safe to say that my child loves stories that anthropomorphize animals.) For the first time, I have verifiable proof that he really is listening - and comprehending. For the first time, we are actually discussing and appreciating literature together!   We have a very long way to go, but I will say that when I first started diving into the CM method of doing things, I never dreamed it would be therapeutic for PJ as well as educational.  Homeschooling helped my child overcome dyslexia (thanks to Handwriting Without Tears), a diagnosis which he no longer has; it has helped him overcome a great deal of his autistic struggles; it looks as though it is now going to help him overcome his significant attention deficit and get SO much more out of the world around him.   I thank God every day that I am able to homeschool, and that I discovered Charlotte Mason. It has transformed not just our homeschool - but our home, as well. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/316622/ Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:55:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/316622/ I'm still in the process of "moving" over here, but if you're wondering who this wacky new person is that added you to her friendslist, it's the *cough* artist formerly known as quailhavenacademy. You'll find my reasons for changing blogs over there, and I'll slowly but surely be adding all my stuff and then some over here. Feel free to add me back, even if the friendslist still is offline. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/315202/ Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:55:01 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/cminsofla/315202/