Smrt Lernins

I’m taking a slightly different tactic with the study of Ancient Rome than I did with Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece. While I’ve been happy with the summaries Captain Science has produced, I’d like to guide him towards exploring slightly more difficult concepts within his chapters, encouraging him to really delve into logic-stage learning. Towards that end, instead of a list of vocabulary words and a summary of Captain Science’s choosing, I will now give him a list of essential questions (probably between 1-3, depending on the length of the chapter) for each chapter. As he reads through the chapter, he should look for information pertaining to those questions, and write a paragraph to answer them. Questions may be along the lines of “Who was [such and such] and what important changes did he make in [place]?” or “If you were a slave in [ancient empire], describe what your day might be like.”

Here is my tentative lesson plan for Ancient Rome.

Ancient Rome Spreadsheet

Tonight, I was going to write about how the hardest part of homeschooling has been never being away from my kids. I sat down to write, with a cup of coffee on the desk and Babypie in my lap. I thought it was out of her reach, and it wasn’t. Hot coffee splashed all over the desk and all down her body. Thankfully, I always put two ice cubes in my coffee, because I’m too impatient for it to cool off enough to drink it quickly, so she wasn’t badly burned. We put a cool cloth on it and then I used the trick my mother learned for burns, which works so well, putting soy sauce on it.

I’ve suspected Babypie might have an allergy or intolerance to wheat, because she’ll sometimes get a little rash on her face when she eats a nibble of bread. Well, when I put the soy sauce on her burn, the burn turned into hives. Yes, the first ingredient in Kikkoman soy sauce, after water, isn’t soy. It’s wheat. I spent the next 20 minutes alternating cool water, refrigerated aloe vera, and hydrocortisone cream on her burn/rash, feeling like the world’s worst mother. We gave her some Benadryl. She was happy as a clam after we got her calmed down, and carried on like normal until she sacked out a few minutes ago. I’m wallowing in guilt and worry at the moment, because my baby isn’t well and I’m tired of her not being well, and I’m wondering what all I could or should have done to prevent it. Plus, I let her spill coffee all over herself. Freaking awesome mom, right?

Now I’m thinking about what I was going to write. It’s true, I don’t have much time away from my children. I have almost no alone time or “me” time. Honestly, though, it doesn’t bother me as much as it could. I’m a fearful person, much more so since Babypie was born and I developed post-partum anxiety for the second time. Homeschooling gives me an excuse to stay close to home and gives me a stronger sense of protecting them. My kids are where I can watch over them. When I send The Tank to school, I get anxious any time the phone rings, worrying it’s a call that something has happened to him, or he’s sick and I’m not there. I worry about them any time they stay anywhere else other than my mom’s house. Not sending them off for eight hours a day is, on the whole, a relief, not a burden.

I do get a little stir crazy and wish the noise and pawing at me and neediness would just back off for a few minutes so I could think (or tinkle) in peace. Sometimes I claim I want a vacation from my kid. On the whole, though, I am much happier having them here than anywhere else. I don’t want to be rid of them or “free” of them. I didn’t have them to pawn them off on someone else. I didn’t have them because I wanted to have lots of “me” time. I could have stopped at one or two and been at a point where they would be out of the house for the better part of the day, but that isn’t what would make me happy.

Fifteen weeks in really makes our school year sound well-established, doesn’t it?

We had another good homeschooling week, despite the cold/chest congestion thing blazing through the family and making us all grumpy and snotty. It’s sort of read-write-cough around here at the moment. From Wednesday onward, we stayed a little curriculum-lite, in order to let the kids start feeling better, but we have finished or are nearly finished with so many things that I’m starting to feel a bit giddy.

I have great and exciting news about Life of Fred: Fractions. Captain Science finished his very last chapter today! I really want him to work through all the tries of the Final Bridge next week, for that last extra practice, and then after Thanksgiving, we’ll move on to Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents (with Key To… books to augment it). It feels so good to be finishing things!

In other “wrapping it up” news, we’re also nearly done with Growing With Grammar Grade 4. We covered chapters 7.4-7.6 this week, which included diagramming prepositional phrases. We have one more section after prepositions, “Words and Punctuation,” and then *cue celestial choir* done, done, done! We’ve started Editor in Chief A1, for a little variety. Captain Science is unimpressed, as I made him rewrite his paragraph twice (for three total versions) due to lazy spelling, usage errors, and sloppy handwriting. I think he’ll enjoy the change from GWG once we get further into it, though.

Onward and upward, once more. This week, we bid farewell to Ancient Greece. On Monday, Captain Science reviewed all his essays from the unit and on Wednesday, he took a quiz in the form of a word scramble. That was a little less than successful due to illness, but I’m satisfied that Captain Science has actually retained enough about Ancient Greece for us to move on to Ancient Rome. I need to go book shopping at Patchfire’s house to get ready for that!

We did science on Thursday as usual w/ Patchfire and Eclectic Girl, continuing the seemingly endless light and color unit. Apparently, they made a spectroscope, but only Eclectic Girl looked through it before disassembling it. Why Captain Science didn’t speak up, I have no idea, but he’s been told that he needs to make sure he’s both pulling his weight and ensuring he takes his turn with all the experiments. We’re talking about moving on, right? I’m ready to move on from this particular unit.

Tuesday was our very last co-op day for the semester. I was sad to say goodbye to my students, but eager to start preparing for next semester, when I’ll be teaching Intro to Creative Writing and an advanced writing course on short stories. I’m so excited about that one, because it’s only open to students who have either taken a course with me before or who submit writing samples, and I get to sign off on anyone taking the class.

Captain Science had his film festival on his last day in co-op. His film was…creative. It was called Nuclear Train and while I couldn’t actually hear the dialogue, it did end with a drawing of a nuclear explosion, so I glean that the train blew up. I am looking forward to getting a copy of the movie on DVD, so I can crank up the volume and hear what they were saying.

The Tank had his last day of class before Thanksgiving holidays. In lovely example of political incorrectness, the children dressed up as “Indians” (for the letter “I” of course) with multi-colored feathered handbands and partook in a Thanksgiving feast that included chicken nuggets, tater tots, macaroni and cheese (perhaps left over from the macaroni art?), and grapes. He came home with a bag filled with pictures of cornucopias and pilgrims, crushed leaves, and a laminated place mat.

Babypie is recovering from her illness very slowly. She seems to feel fine, but she’s still covered in a rash that comes and goes. It seems to flare back up every time she eats wheat, so we’re only offering fruits and vegetables at the moment, along with nursing. I guess she’ll have a trip back to the doctor on Monday, because this is just going on and on. Why can’t we wrap this up as easily as the academic stuff?

In final happy news, Officer Daddyman was accepted at the local university and returns to school in the spring. He’s unsure about his major, as he transferred in 80+ hours of credits from another school, 50 of them in computer science, from his pre-law enforcement days. Another student in the family? This will be a fun addition to our family scheduling issues!

I’m not a very crafty parent, which is somewhat incongruous, as I am a crafty person. I sew, knit, crochet, make Waldorf-style dolls, dabble at quilting, but I don’t really do kid crafts. It should come more naturally than it does, because I’m also a 12-year veteran of Girl Scouting, including several years as a camp counselor to 2nd and 3rd graders. I know how to finger weave, make paper bag hand puppets, make my own candles and all of those great crafts, but it just never occurs to me to do them.

I never sit down and think, “Gee! I sure would like to have the kids make their own crayons today!” I don’t make tomato sauce and make that mental leap to, “Wouldn’t it be fun to use this as finger paint on butcher paper?” I seldom, if ever, come up with holiday, seasonal, or weather related craft ideas on the fly. Even things like painting and working with clay don’t pop into my head as an idea for filling time. The Tank came home from preschool yesterday wearing a beautiful necklace made from dyed, dry pasta of different shapes and sizes, and I never, ever would have thought to make something like that.

Why are some parents like that and others aren’t? I have friends who routinely set up seasonal sensory tables for their children, who make their own playdough on a whim, who always have an idea for something like paper pumpkins or turkeys to provide holiday-relevant activities, who festoon their mantels with garlands made from paper leaves colored and cut out by their children. I’m an intelligent person. I daresay that I’m at least a moderately creative one. I like to think I’m even a fairly fun mom at times. Why don’t I even think about making designs from glue and shaking cinnamon and glitter on to them? Why don’t I make felt “paper” dolls with my kids? Why don’t we make and bind our own books?

Am I missing a creativity gene? A parenting gene? Am I somehow wrong-thinking and a right-thinking parent would do these things? I feel guilty when I see all the crafts my friends do with their children, because I worry that my kids are missing out on some special part of childhood that a better or more progressive/involved parent would offer them. I don’t remember my mother providing us with endless craft activities as we grew up, at least, not outside of Girl Scouts. I always thought that was what Scouting was for. My boys don’t do Scouting (Captain Science tried, but we quit half a year in, because it was every bit as bad as I’d thought it would be, and then some). I know I’ll want to lead a Girl Scout troop for Babypie at some point, and I’m sure we’ll do make all the milk carton ice candles, clothespin reindeer, and paper plate masks there that a little girl could desire, but what about my boys? Are they going to suffer and be uncreative individuals for a lack of crafting in childhood?

How do I find the motivation for this? Do I even need the motivation for this? Will macaroni jewelry be the dividing line between the wise and the foolish, the enlightened and the worldly, the creative and the dull? Does so much depend upon a tissue paper mosaic of a red wheelbarrow, glazed with homemade finger paint, beside the pipe cleaner chickens?

I hate defining myself by what I’m not, but in the case of secular homeschool curricula, especially science curricula, it often really does come down to finding something that is not-religious. The options for homeschool science are pretty much all either religious or the supposedly neutral curricula that are really anything but. The issue is that there is no such thing as neutrality about science — you should be as impartial (in your methodology and interpretation of data) as possible, you can be avoidant (get around that pesky evolution issue by just not mentioning it) of those issues that are the source of dissent — but you can’t really be neutral when it comes to the issue of scientific theory versus religious doctrine.

If you discuss biology (though many Christian curricula call it “life science” or “zoology”) without mentioning evolution, you’ve made a decidedly un-neutral choice. If you present both the theory of evolution and the doctrine of creationism, you’re still making a choice that isn’t neutral — you’re presenting both as equally valid options, two “beliefs” of equal weight between which to choose, and which involves having made the choice to place religious dogma on the same level as evidence-based science.

Once you’ve made your choice, stick with it. Creationism and evolution are incompatible. Literal 6-day creationism and evolution, even less so. Either God made the Earth and its inhabitants in a divine wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am or not. Either the Earth and its inhabitants evolved over time, or they didn’t. Your science text needs to take a stance one way or the other. Anything less is hypocritical and a little bit condescending. A secular science text shouldn’t even address the topic of creationism (or it’s half-assed, fence-sitting cousin, “intelligent design”). There’s no need to bring it up in order to dispute it, because if your text is evidence-based and scientific, religious doctrine has no bearing on it.

Let your argument for your belief stand on its own merits, instead of basing it on how mine is wrong. There’s a time and place for the refutation of fallacies, but I don’t need to see the points of creationism discredited one by one in my child’s science text. The same should go for the creationists, who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to discredit evolution. The wrongness of someone else’s belief isn’t argument enough for the rightness of yours. What I want is evidence, not faux neutrality. I want rigorous, secular science that addresses real scientific theories, rather than ignoring them to appease both sides. I’d like to have my scientific chocolate peanut butter free of any theological chocolate. That’s decidedly hard to come by in the world of homeschool materials.

Yes, somewhere in there, we are related to dirt, the Sphinx, and a moray. Bizarre.

Today is just one of those days. You know those days, right? The days where you find yourself leaning into the refrigerator, eating caramel ice cream topping out of a jar with a spoon, praying that your oldest child stops coughing and your middle child stops wailing so they don’t wake up the youngest, who has only just fallen precariously asleep for the first time all day, despite spending most of the night flailing and coughing? Now that we’re all on the same page about what kind of day it is, let’s pretend I never mentioned the caramel thing.

We have some kind of crud at the McLernins house. It’s an congested chest crud that is making everyone cough and be irritable. They’re coughing their brains right out, as can be evidenced by Captain Science’s inability to complete his Ancient Greece quiz/activity. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the answers — he remembered things like perioikoi and hoplite just fine. Ancient Greece has been his favorite topic thus far and we discuss it all the time. He couldn’t figure out what to do with the scrambled letters once he’d answered all the questions. The act of unscrambling was just beyond his ken. Understand, that child has been doing word jumbles and the like since he was three or four, so this isn’t a new concept. He didn’t “get it” today, nor could he (after figuring out the middle word was probably “and”) think of a game he played that had “and” in the title. Finally, he managed to come up with “chutes and ladders,” which didn’t work, and with much coaching, wandered ’round to “hide and seek.” Even knowing something similar to “hide and seek” was what I was looking for, he still couldn’t unscramble “H-A-D-Y-R” into a Greek-related word. In a combination of frustration and pity, I finally just blurted out “hydra and seek,” and he laughed, because it is cheesily funny.

At that point, I decided it was time to fold ‘em and walk away, which was definitely the right call. I called a hiatus on any further learning and instead, am enforcing a nap time for all children, regardless of age. Of course, only the baby is complying (and only after a great deal of coaxing), and the other two are coughing, thrashing about, calling things out to each other, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. As long as they’re pretending to rest, however, and aren’t waking up they’re sister, I’ll play along and pretend I don’t hear them shuffling about up there.

I’ve finally gotten a shower and had a cup of coffee, so I call that a win. We can finish the rest of today’s work on Saturday when we have a better hand.

This is one of our activities to review Ancient Greece.

Greek Unscramble Quiz

Hapersmion asks, “Any plans to teach Latin, since you’re going the classical route? Greek? Hebrew? Ancient Etruscan, perhaps?”

I’ve looked for Teaching Ancient Etruscan for Idiots book, but haven’t had any luck with that one. I suppose I’ll have to call that a lost cause.

As for Greek and Latin, well, those would normally be a part of classical education, but we’ve decided not to pursue them as our language(s) at this point. I understand the arguments in favor of Latin, especially, but because it’s an area where neither of us have any interest or passion, I just can’t motivate myself to WANT to include Latin. Captain Science wants to do eastern languages, so we’re starting Japanese in the spring. I think a modern language of that caliber is going to benefit him more in the long run than Latin.

We are, however, doing a vocabulary program called Vocabulary from Classical Roots, which (obviously) introduces Latin and Greek roots to words. If learning classical languages is supposedly to help build a better base of understanding for modern languages, I think a classically-based vocabulary book at least accomplishes that to some degree. Captain Science loves it, because he loves language, and has really taken off with it. If, by the end of this first book, he responds more positively to the idea of learning Latin, I’ll consider adding it.

Sure, maybe this gives me Classical Education Fail, but I only have so much time in a day or week. We have a lot of subjects to cover and I have to prioritize. Learning Latin for the sake of learning Latin just isn’t high on my list of priorities. I also admit that my appreciation of Latin isn’t as high as others’ might be, because I never took it in school. My education was public and traditional, not private and classical, so have a tendency to prioritize things based on that experience.

Now, the various incarnations of English? That we will learn. Old English, Middle English, early Modern English? That’s where my passion lies and where I’m apt to get all het up to teach. Perhaps I can manage to drum up that level of excitement for Latin. I’m trying. I really am. I

My professional background is in writing. I have a master’s degree in professional writing and editing and have been a freelance writer for the last six years. I’m currently teaching a creative writing class at a local homeschool co-op. Despite all of this, however, I still use someone else’s writing curriculum for Captain Science (we use Writing Strands). Why? Because sitting down and mapping out the ideal curriculum for me just seems way too intimidating.

Someone on the WTM forums asked what I’d look for in a writing program, so I sat down and made a list of the things I’d like to include:

1. A Grammar Component: Correct grammar and usage is so important and you can’t be an effective writer without it (e.e. cummings not withstanding). I really like the idea of a grammar program like Editor in Chief, which puts grammar in context through identifying mistakes and correcting them by rewriting the paragraph. Sentence diagramming may seem tedious to some children, but dissecting language helps you learn how to use it better, so definitely include sentence diagramming in your grammar curriculum. My ideal writing program would include the grammar component, rather than treating it like it’s a separate subject.
2. Writing Styles (Formal and Informal): Writing in a variety of contexts helps you grow as a writer. As part of our personal curricula, we do history writing (twice weekly), writing for language arts (once or twice weekly), and creative writing (more sporadically at this point). We plan to add in science writing, as well. My ideal writing curriculum would include a variety of writing types and would teach an overview of writing styles, as well as basics of writing summaries and creative writing.
3. Write Regularly: The best practice is to do a little writing every day. Adult writers should try to meet the “1000 words a day” goal, while youth writers should shoot for around 100 words. My ideal writing curriculum would encourage short, daily writing, as well as once-weekly longer assignments.
4. Creative Writing (and Pre-Writing): Don’t push creative writing too early, but don’t eschew it entirely. Some people discourage expecting creative writing for children under 8-10, but I think making the connection between story telling and writing a story is important. Even very early writers can dictate a story, read back what was written, and expand on that story. Older children should be encouraged to write from prompts, to rewrite stories and include their own original details, and to do things like character development.
5. The Long and Short of It: Some writing programs put the emphasis on florid language, some put in on saying things succinctly. My ideal writing program would include both — sections where the student is to write a long description (perhaps even rewrite a short, succinct sentence) of something and sections where the goal is to summarize an event or long sentence into one simply, precise sentence.
6. No Five-Paragraph Essays: The only purpose of the five-paragraph essay is to develop the idea of thesis sentences, supportive details, and concluding paragraphs. You can accomplish this same goal with a tree/flowchart (thesis sentence as the top, main details coming off, minor supporting details coming off of those, and all of it coming back together at the bottom with the conclusion.
7. Outlines and Key Word Outlines: One thing we did like from IEW was the idea of the key word outline. It’s a good introduction to the concept of detailed note taking. My son reads his section once, get an idea of what his paper will be about, goes back through and does a key word outline, then sets aside the book and does his paper. He’ll be moving on to more formal outlines in the future.
8. Let Writing Be Its Own Reward: The great thing about writing is that it produces something tangible that can be shared for the brag factor. Compile your student’s best works from the year and have them bound (or use a self-publishing company like Lulu). Let your child give the writing as gifts or just keep a copy of his “book” for posterity.

I can’t see myself sitting down and developing a formal program that does all of this, though the bits and pieces are all things we do. Maybe someday, when I’m not actually currently homeschooling, I’ll give it a whirl.

What would YOU like to see in a writing program?