This afternoon, when asked why a certain section of his science work wasn’t finished, Captain Science replied that Eclectic Girl kept taking all the batteries. “We had more than enough,” he said, “but she just kept saying she needed more of them.”
Now we know from whence cometh Eclectic Girl’s powers. She’s battery operated!
Our first week of homeschool turned out to be much busier than I ever expected.
Captain Science started off his first week of 4th-ish grade with an 8am run with Officer Daddyman and the leaped right into his history. He made it through the first four sections of Kingfisher History Encyclopedia, his main text, covering “What is History?” and “The World in Review” on Monday and “First Humans” and “First Farmers” on Wednesday. He has subject-relevant history vocabulary words for each day, some of which are clearly defined in the book, and others where he has to glean a definition from the text. I realized we’re actually overdoing history vocab a bit, because it’s taking far too long to get through it, so I’m splitting the words into two categories: look up and define on paper, and look up and discuss/use in summary/narrative. He writes a one-paragraph summary or narrative each day and does one oral summary or narrative each day. So far, he’s summarized “What is History?” and written a short narrative on the domestication of dogs. After vocab and writing, he puts any relevant dates onto his timeline, then he identifies any important cities, landmasses, etc. on the fill-in-the-blank map. He also does an hour of history reading each week. He started Eyewitness: Mesopotamia and will start Gilgamesh the Hero next week.
After history on Mondays and Wednesdays, Captain Science does his grammar lesson. We’re using the Growing With Grammar: Grade 4 student manual, but not the workbook. Instead, I write demo sentences for him to identify the correct parts of speech and to diagram. Thus far, he’s really taking to sentence diagramming, which pleases me to no end, as that’s something I also love. He’s really motoring through the book and has already covered parts 1.1-1.10. Once he’s demonstrated mastery of the concept in three example sentences, we move on. When passes the review, we’ll go on to chapter 2.
On Wednesdays, the Captain does his writing lessons from the Institute for Excellence in Writing’s Ancient History-Based Writing Lessons. I’m not incredibly impressed by this program so far, because it seems a little on the tedious side and is very heavy on the -ly adjectives and “never use a simple word when a 50-cent word will suffice,” a philosophy to which I do not ascribe. I think that the writing curriculum will be just fine with a little trimming here, a little expanding there, and the removal of the “banned words” list from the back of the workbook. As a professional writer and editor, the idea of using someone else’s How To Write curriculum is a bit galling, but Captain Science doesn’t enjoy writing and needed something simple, mechanical, and relevant to other studies to get him through it. This particular writing program only requires about a paragraph a week, which is sufficient writing when combined w/ the daily history paragraphs.
The liberal arts portion of homeschooling is rounded out by at least 30 minutes a day of reading (he just finished Redwall) and several nightly chapters of someone reading books aloud to him (currently The Chronicles of Prydain).
For mathematics (Thursday and Fridays), we started out with long division review. He gets a little lost with the traditional division methods, so Officer Daddyman tried introducing him to the double-division method [ETA: Officer Daddyman has informed me that they are not doing double division, but another method, found here, that doesn't seem to have a name, but which Cpt. Science thinks should be called the Steps Method], which he figured out pretty quickly. Cpt. Science will continue to do a problem or two before his math lesson every day, just to be sure he’s still getting it. He’ll start Life of Fred: Fractions next Thursday.
Patchfire is oh-so-kindly handling the science portion of our curriculum. Captain Science will head to her house on Thursday afternoons for TOPS science lab. This week they did the electricity module. It’s a nice break for me and fun for Cpt. Science to do some lernins with his good buddy, Eclectic Girl.
On Tuesdays, we will head over to the Secular Education Experience for Homeschoolers (SEE), where Officer Daddyman will teach martial arts, I’ll teach creative writing, and Captain Science will take martial arts, chess club, math club, and filmmaking.
Where is The Tank through all this? On Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, he’ll be attending a 4-hour preschool program this year. Next year, he may join in the homeschooling fun, but right now, 15 minutes of “table lernin” is about all he can handle, and after that, he becomes disruptive. A class full of little boys his age will give him a fun way to spend the mornings.
I think we had a very productive first week and I look forward to the rest of our curriculum!
Yesterday, we went over to my friend Patchfire’s house house so that Captain Science could have his first physics lab lesson with Patchfire’s daughter, Eclectic Girl. The goal of the day was the figure out how Eclectic Girl and Cpt. Science work together — does one give the other the answers? is one taking the lead in all the experiments? do they squabble when the pressures of labwork are applied? — and to give EG and Cpt. S a feel for what physical labs will be like. And yes, our 4th graders are doing physics.
They wrapped aluminum foil around batteries and lit up lightbulbs. Had this activity happened in a public school classroom, they might have been lucky to have one battery and lightbulb to share between them, and they certainly would have had a stringent set of rules about what was and was not acceptable for the experiment. Patchfire gave them the directions and the supplies (including a large stack of batteries) and set them free with minimal interference — guidance, but no hand-holding. The result was that our somewhat gawky little scientists figured it out in short order, in their own way, in their own time. So refreshing!
Captain Science is currently doing the “homework” Patchfire assigned him, which was to finish the lesson sheets. He’s currently trying to describe in detail how one would go about making a lightbulb light with nothing but aluminum foil, Scotch tape, and a battery.
SCIENCE! ENGERGY! SCIENCE! ENGERY! Snaaaaaaake Eeeeeeeyes…
