Smrt Lernins

Captain Science has been doing better at math than I expected. Due to swift passing of the last few bridges, we’ve arrived at the final bridge of Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents and I don’t have the next book(s) yet! Yikes! I’m not sure Patchfire and Eclectic Girl have finished w/ Beginning Algebra yet, either, so we don’t have any math to do once he passes this bridge.

On a positive note, I’m taking him up to my brother’s house from Saturday through Tuesday of next week for his tour of Icarus Studios, so I could more order books and have them arrive while I’m gone, in theory. The real issue here is that his completion of the book took me unawares, and the onus of that falls on me for not paying close enough attention. I thought he had one more regular bridge and a few more chapters before the final bridge. Oops.

I guess I could pick up some review stuff (like the Key To… series) to help fill the gap until EG has finished w/ Beginning Algebra, but that would require going to Scary JesusBook Store. Hmm….decisions, decisions.

We’ve been working our way through ancient history this year, as I think the idea of doing history in order on a four-year(-ish) cycle, as presented in The Well-Trained Mind, is a great one. As Captain Science has shown a great deal of interest in the mythology and dieties of these early cultures, I decided it would be fun to make a large project out of it, something to tie together the whole year. After all, the way a culture worships and the things they believe says a lot about that culture [moment for pointed silence whilst my readers consider what much of the beliefs and worship in our culture says about us -- hint: it ain't particularly flattering, from this secular homeschooler's perspective].

The idea for the Pantheon Project sprang from “oh crap, you mean we’ve finished Egypt and I haven’t quite gotten all my Greek materials yet? Uh…research the Egyptian gods this week!” Captain Science loved it! He read about the gods and wrote paragraphs about each of the ones he considered most important to the pantheon. He seemed so enthusiastic about the topic that I had him do the same for Greece and Rome. I started calling it the Pantheon Project and developing some longer-term goals with it.

As we move forward with ancient cultures of Asian, Africa, and the Americas, Captain Science will continue to compile information on the deities and religious practices. At the end of our school year, we’ll use all of this data to do a large comparative religions project, integrating art and writing into a giant Cage Match of the Gods card game.

No, really.

The thing Captain Science loves even more than weird ancient religions is inventing/designing card games with Officer Daddyman. What could possibly make a more awesome subject for a battle-style card game than various gods with strange powers and bizarre requirements for worship? Move over, Pokemon, because Poseidon, Osiris, and Kwan Yin are entering the arena! Instead of energy cards, I forsee cards like “burnt offering.” Instead of trainers, maybe priests and priestesses? The actual designing of the cards will likely take place over the summer. Captain Science and I will work on the information (review-style) and then I’ll turn it over to Officer Daddyman for game design. Should be fun times.

I wonder if any other homeschoolers would be interested in snagging a copy of this irreverent battle royale?

If I have any other Michael Clay Thompson curriculetes* out there reading my blog, your input on this would be most welcome.

Tomorrow, I’m planning to get Captain Science rolling on his new MCT language arts curriculum. We have the whole Town level at our disposal, so any topic staging I do won’t have to revolve around the ordering of and waiting for books to arrive.

The recommended order of events seems to be:

1. Start the four-part grammar text (Grammar Town).
2. Halfway through grammar text, start the Latin-based vocabulary (Caesar’s English I).
3. Upon completion of the grammar text, begin writing (Paragraph Town), poetry (Building Poems), and practice workbook (Practice Town).
4. Upon completion of writing/poetry texts, start next level of grammar text (Grammar Voyage).

Is my understanding of the recommended order of text introduction (per this elemetary curriculum guide) correct?

Because Captain Science has such a good foundation of grammar already, I am considering starting him with the Latin-based vocabulary at the same time as the grammar, then alternating writing and poetry once the grammar is completing. I don’t forsee completion of Grammar Town taking any great length of time. Any strong recommendations for or against these plans?

I suppose I could just scatter the books around on the floor and let Captain Science chicken-peck at them at his own pace, but I guess I’m just the conventional type.

*There is something practically athletic about developing rigorous curricula for our classically educated children, isn’t there? I suppose we could also be curriculists or curriculeers, but that’s not nearly so awe-inspiring.

This week started out rough, but ended up productive.

Since winter break, Cpt. Science has been completely unwilling to do any work. Along with that, he’s been Bad Attitude Boy, smart mouthing and back talking and arguing. Things finally came to a head on Tuesday, when he pitched a shrieking, stomping tantrum at the park. Well, I don’t tolerate a tantrum from a nine year old, so we implemented what I like to call prison-style homeschooling: confinement to the house, most basic of subjects only (math, language arts, history), and lots of running if work isn’t completed or if there’s any back talk or rudeness. Captain Science ran an awful lot on Tuesday. He also missed out on science lab and wasn’t allowed to play with friends, visit Nana, or leave the house for anything but running.

Miraculously, he woke up on Wednesday, had a morning run, and was downright chipper. Not only did he finish his work in a timely manner, he did it with a glad heart, and the work was top notch! At the least sign of the return of the bad attitude, he was sent out to run four laps up and down the street. Each time, he came in with an even better attitude and work ethic. By today, he was zooming through his subjects with enthusiasm and determination, turning in top-notch work and using his best manners. He was rewarded with a short trip over to Nana’s house to play with his friends there, something he hasn’t been able to do during our week of prison-style homeschooling.

During three days of near-perfect homeschooling, Captain Science read about the fall of Rome and wrote a lovely essay about that, then made a great joke about part of Rome being attacked by birds, and becoming Turkey. He passed the bridge to chapter 15 in Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents in two tries, missing only two on the first try (most likely due to misreading his own handwriting in the middle of a problem) and only one on the second try (due to misreading “0″ as “6″ in the middle of a problem — time to work on handwriting again!). He read several chapters in Science: The Definitive Visual Guide, which we discussed. He did the last chapter in Vocabulary from Classical Roots that he will be doing, then passed the test on the previous four chapters. He also finished several sections in Writing Strands 3.

Next week, we toss Writing Strands, Vocabulary from Classical Roots, and Editor in Chief A1 in favor of the Michael Clay Thompson Town-level language arts curriculum. I’m so excited, and so is Captain Science.

Mostly, though, I’m excited that we’re finally back on track again!

Today, Captain Science (who has been doing a splendid job of staying on track these last three days) encountered a bit of a road block while working on Writing Strands. The lesson asked him to write about the parts of his schooling that his parents might find interesting. That would be all well and good, but the activity went on to request information about some fairly out-of-home schooling educational experiences, like science projects with classmates, boring lectures from teachers, and the like.

Now, color me confused, but this is the writing curriculum praised by many homeschoolers, including the authors of The Well Trained Mind, so I didn’t expect that an entire lesson (prewriting, two writing assignments) would be relating to the public (or at least more formally structured, with other students) school experience. I told Captain Science to just write about his homeschool day as though he were relating it to Officer Daddyman, but he keeps coming upstairs to ask me things like, “Mama, we don’t have periods. What do I do?” (“Just write about your different subjects.”)

Of course, as much as Captain Science has enjoyed Writing Strands, and as much as I like how it is structured, we’ve had the issue of it just plain being below his abilities level. I’m having to combine multiple days worth of lessons into a single day, just to give him an appropriate level of work. I think now I should have started him with Writing Strands 4, but the recommended age range threw me. Ha! Should have known better.

If I’m going to have to rewrite and reorganize most or all of the lessons, I may as well just write the lessons. Luckily, our Michael Clay Thompson Town curriculum came in the mail yesterday, complete w/ the writing program, Paragraph Town, so hopefully we’ll be able to move forward with something a little more challenging (for him, as the challenge of Writing Strands was mainly for me).

I can’t wait to dive into our MCT stuff, but I’m making myself take the weekend to plan our course.

Laura asks, “How do you know how to pace homeschooling? I know homeschoolers who finished high school at 16 – how do you feel about that?”

It’s a little hard to think about long-term pacing right now, when all I want is for Captain Science to finish his daily assignments on time! I wish I were currently in the midst of worrying about pacing from the “whoa, don’t go too fast!” point of view, instead of our current “why is it taking you three hours to finish one math problem?” point of view. This boundary testing nonsene is a bitch that I’d like to send back to the pound.

Still, you’ve touched on a big issue for homeschoolers. Obviously, there are different schools of thought about how (or whether) to pace work in order to keep a homeschooled student on track for a roughly “normal” age of graduation. Some people let their children work at an entirely self-directed pace, even if that means graduating at 14. Others believe strongly (and I mean strongly) that certain subjects are taboo before certain ages or stages of development, and that you’re damaging your child horribly and permanently for allowing them to work too far ahead of what they feel is “age appropriate.” Think I’m exaggerating? Ask Patchfire how much flack a homeschooler takes for daring to algebra to a nine-year-old (even a gifted one). One mustn’t learn too fast!

Of course, you’re not asking what They (the collective “Them”) do, but what the [Smrt] Homeschooler does. Thus far, pacing (at least for the sake of making sure he doesn’t finish too early) has not been something I’ve worried about excessively. Captain Science is already officially one grade ahead, due to skipping a grade, so he’d be graduating early anyway. He’s working ahead of his grade level (the one to which he was skipped) in several areas, when he isn’t wrapped up in his hissy fit of “I don’t wanna!” that we’ve been experiencing the last few weeks. I couldn’t imagine deliberately holding him back or slowing his progress, just to keep him on “grade level” — whether out of fear of potential damage from introducing concepts or out of fear of him going off to college too young.

Some of our curricula is self-pacing. Life of Fred is a good example of this. He does a section a day, moving through it at a pretty fast clip, unless he’s having trouble with one of the concepts. If something is tripping him up, it will come out in the bridges between chapters. Since he has to correctly answer 9 out of the 10 questions to move on the next chapter, he could theoretically complete the bridge in one day. If he answers fewer than 9 correctly, however, he must complete the next try the following day. While only five tries are provided, there’s the option of repeating them until the concepts are cemented. Typically, he makes it through by the fourth try, though second or third is more common.

This does mean that he’s moving through the Life of Fred books pretty quickly, covering more than one full book per semester. It also means that, in another six to eight weeks (provided he gets back on track) we will be faced with the choice of starting either pre-algebra or beginning algebra, which puts us into the “oh no, you can’t start algebra too early!” zone. Personally, if the kid has the prerequisite skills, I don’t see why s/he couldn’t start algebra. Whether or not Captain Science will be ready, however, is going to depend entirely on his skill set at that point. I won’t hold him back if he’s ready. I won’t push him forward if he’s not.

The subjects where I control the pacing, such as history, I’m careful to not throw too much information into one day. This isn’t because he couldn’t make it through the work, but because I want him to have time to savor the minutia of the subject matter. Yes, he could read the entirety of Eyewitness: Ancient Rome in about 20 minutes, if it even took that long. He wouldn’t, however, take the time to think about the similarities and differences between Roman culture and ours, or what it would really mean to live in a stratified society (especially as someone on the lowest stratas), or about how different childhood might have been for him had he lived over 2000 years ago. Pacing, for history, means offering just enough information in a go to let him look at each fact and draw conclusions between those facts and his prior knowledge and experiences.

What I expect from him, work-wise, is increasing gradually over the year. He’s moving pretty rapidly from simple ideas to broad and important concepts — the speed at which he goes through the material hasn’t changed, but how he relates to it has.We’ve gone from listing dates and finding vocabulary to writing (hopefully) thoughtful essays based on essential question (both the “recurring questions in life” and the “key inquiries within a discipline” varieties). How do the differences in cultures affect childhood? What is the meaning of the forms of entertainment we choose, the foods we eat, the rulers we elect (or who conquer us)? If he’s ready to seek out the answers to questions like that and to think deeply and meaningfully (moving from the grammar stage and into the logic stage), why would I continue to insist he work on the lower level, simply because he’s in fourth grade and the logic stage “officially” begins in fifth grade?

As for what we’ll do about college when (since we’ve already gone past “if” by virtue of grade skipping) he graduates early, most of that will depend on Captain Science. If he doesn’t get any further ahead than he is now, and graduates at 17, I have no problem with him going to college wherever his heart may lead. At fifteen or sixteen, if he’s ready to handle the work (which he should, if he’s graduated high school), we’ll probably send him to a local college/university for a year or two, as we have wide variety from which to choose within a 30 miles radius.

Of course, if Harvard or MIT comes knocking at fifteen, I guess we’ll just have to change our plans a bit, right?

Do you have a question for the [Smrt] Homeschooler? Email them to
smrtmama@smrtlernins.com

Sometimes I feel like the kid in “The Rocking Horse Winner,” rocking away because there must be more money. Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy curricula, and through curricula comes happiness. So say we all.

I know there are a billion “homeschooling for free or next to free” websites out there, who will tell me I’m doing it wrong if I’m dishing out more than $5 for history, but between the gas and energy that would be required to go back and forth to the public library, which doesn’t have the vast majority of what Captain Science needs anyway, thus requiring heavy supplementing, I assure you, buying the exact curricula comes out cheaper in the wash.

I will confess to you that I’m about to make a major curriculum purchase, the Michael Clay Thompson Grammar Town set. We’re looking at the Level 2 Basic Homeschool package, because it has all the teacher manuals, which include the student books, for the level, which is for gifted 4th or on-level 5th graders. If only I had the money, I’d buy the complete package, which has separate student books, but I can’t dish out an extra $65 on top of the $105 I’ll be spending tonight. From what I’ve heard about the curriculum, it will be worth the money, especially for a language-mastering, Life of Fred-loving boy like Captain Science*.

Patchfire and I long to order the entire MCT series, so that we can see exactly where it goes. Unlike some curricula, which are available at the Scary Jesus Book Store (which I’m not sure I’ll be patronizing any longer, due to the owner’s attitude towards his customers), MCT can’t be bought locally, so we don’t have the luxury of flipping through it at our leisure. Between us, we’ll own Grammar Island and Grammar Town, but that doesn’t help us project forward to Grammar Voyage and the levels beyond. Will we continue to love it? Only time will tell, but I sure wish I already knew. I could develop a language arts plan from no until the end of time.

If I had an unfettered curricula budget, I would buy:

• Michael Clay Thompson language arts series
• Life of Fred College Prep Set
• The Medieval and Early Modern World seven volume set.
• The Definitive Visual Guides to Art, the Universe, and War
• Bevington’s Complete Works of Shakespeare, 6th ed. (mine is several editions out of date)
• Surely quite a few other things, but let’s focus on the brain candy above, shall we?

Unfortunately, I don’t have a limitless budget for curricula, so I have to buy only what I need, thus limiting my ability to plan ahead. As a secular homeschooler, my options for comprehensive, secular materials that challenge my gifted child, yet are engaging enough to make him want to learn are few are far between. Life of Fred is one of the few that meet nearly all of those goals (falling short only by not being entirely secular, though close enough for our purposes). MCT looks like it might fit into that narrow set of parameters. The DK books are glorious, though they require I develop all my own lesson plans for history (not a horrible torture, luckily). I also don’t have the money to keep replacing curricula that don’t work. It’s a hard knock life sometimes, being a secular classical educator.

What’s on your dream list of curricula?

*Captain Science declared tonight, “I don’t want to be called ‘Captain Science’ on the computer. I want to be known as ‘Shadow King.’” My answer: “Uh…yeah. You know, not so much.”

Surely not!

The last two days, we’ve charged Captain Science with the task of setting goals for himself and meeting them. If he can continue to do that through tomorrow’s work, then on Friday we will mail in the check for the Starbase program at Dobbins Air Reserve Base, a 5-week, one day a week course in aeronautics. If he can’t demonstrate the ability to set goals and complete his required work, he won’t be going. If he can, then he will.

Yesterday, he set rather long time periods for himself to complete the work (an hour to complete two math problems), but finished most of the work well before his own goal. Today, he’s set much more realistic goals and come within a few minutes of meeting all of them. For instance, he gave himself 45 minutes to complete math (6 problems), which would have put his finish time at 10:15. At 10:10, I check in with him, and he had only done a problem and a half. I reminded him of his goal, reminded him that he had to meet his goals at least reasonably well in order to attend Starbase, but didn’t express any emotion about the situation at all.

At 10:19, he came upstairs with completed math work. Funny how that works.

He completed his language arts, for which he’d allowed himself another 45 minutes, within just over 30 minutes, then took a snack break, and is rewarding himself now with his history. He’s been looking forward to the topic of the Roman army since we started Rome, and now he finally gets to read and write about he. He’s given himself an hour and fifteen minutes to read the chapter and write his essay, so as long as he completes it within an hour and a half or so, I’d say he’s stayed on task for all his major assignments today, and we’ll call this day a major win!

The goals he is setting are very close to the time blocks on the schedule, so we’ll try to get back to that next week. He’s been a little disappointed we aren’t sticking to it, and keeps saying, “But the schedule says it’s time for…” I’ve explained that, this week, he’s setting his schedule and motivating himself, because obviously I can’t motivate him. If he finishes the week strong, then we’ll slowly start reintegrating the extra subjects he loves.

Feeling pretty good about our progress. Hopefully this is onward and upward.

Let’s just put this out there. Compared to other homeschoolers, you are woefully inadequate.

I’m not speaking to any specific “you,” because it would take too long to address each of you to whom this applies individually (as it applies universally), but to the general “you,” which also includes me*. You are a woefully inadequate homeschooler, and if you didn’t realize that, you haven’t talked to enough other homeshoolers. You may feel pretty good about your current course load or you may, like Earnest Mom here, always feel like you’re doing slightly less than you ought to be, but one good conversation (or forum thread) with a pack of other homeschoolers will make it clear to you: compared to them, you are doing it wrong.

I’m sure we all have our categories of homeschoolers towards whom we feel slightly superior academically. I confess, when I see people writing about either “unschooling” (especially “radical unschooling”) or using certain “Bible-centered curricula” from certain publishers, I have a brief moment of feeling our academics are rigorous enough by comparison. That is the crux of it, though, isn’t it? It’s always “by comparison.” Whenever I feel good by comparison, you can be sure that someone else is going to come along and by comparison make me feel like I’m trying to educate my children with three crayons, a wet dictionary, and a broken sliderule.

Part of it’s financial. Most of us aren’t Pioneer Woman, with our very own one-room school house and nigh limitless money for curricula and craft supplies. At the McLernins home, we’re raising three children on a police officer’s salary, with a slightly-below-the-American-average-but-still-too-high-for-comfort level of debt and student loans to pay off for a Smrt Mama who doesn’t work outside of the home. I will always wish I could afford more curricula and supplies than I have. I want to buy the best books and the workbooks and teacher’s guides that go with them. I want full color, full content, all the volumes. I want to buy books at least a semester, and preferably a year, ahead of time to better prepare. I would like to have the full scope and sequence in my possession so I could be sure that I’m covering everything I need to cover, not discovering in 11th grade (or the 11th hour) that we missed something crucial all because I didn’t have all the curricula together in one place at one time. It could happen, ok?

I often feel inadequate about my space. I will always long for a dedicated school room, not a school room/office that used to be a dining room. I want more storage and a better filing system, both of which are limited, not by Officer Daddyman’s ability to containerize (which is, let me tell you, simply magnificent), but by space**. Space is also constrained by money, because we can’t afford a bigger house or to build an extension on this one just for the sake of having a large school room. Filthy lucre. Dirty luck.

Then there’s the time issue. Even with a color-coded schedule, I can’t find the time to fit in everything some of these homeschoolers are doing, because (back to the money issue) we’d have to travel for some things (which takes away more time) and we have to eat, sleep, and teetee sometimes! I guess if I were willing to wake my children at 6 and have them working by 6:30, we would have time for music and art every day, for more regular field trips (no, wait! that pesky money thing again!). We do unexpectedly find ourselves with an entirely empty Tuesday, as our secular homeschool co-op went to pieces this morning, so I’m hoping to shove some art in there, along with creative writing and Patchfire’s class on the human brain, for a little mini co-op of sorts.

At the end of the day, all I have to do to feel like I’m failing miserably is to log on to the Well Trained Mind forums, especially the accelerated learner board, where if you’re doing two advanced math programs with your 8-year-old, they’re doing three more advanced programs with theirs, and where if your child is reading five grade levels ahead, theirs is reading Dostoevsky in Russian by choice, and where their children are all enrolled in five extra curriculars, put in seven hours a day in academics at home, and still have time to write their novels, finish their cross-stitched pillow cases for charity, and make inlaid mosaic murals from glass tiles they made themselves using self-taught glass-blowing techniques (which the do in their specially-designed-for-homeschooling school room, with built in shelves full of the entire set of curricula they’ll use between now and their early enrollment in college at 14).

I have two options: wallow in my feelings of relative inadequacy or decide that they’re just making it all up to cover for their own crushing sense of inadequacy. Who’s with me on option #2?

*In fact, it mostly means me, but if I say “you collectively,” I feel better about myself, because I have company.
**Next week’s “Ask a [Smrt] Homeschooler” question comes from Officer Daddyman, and is, “Are you going to keep all of this?” with a frantic gesture at the pile of last semester’s papers.

Despite the Tank not being back in preschool yet (back on Wednesday), me having to take Babypie to the dermatologist (all’s well!), and this being Captain Science’s very first day after winter break and on the new schedule, I think things went swimmingly.

Captain Science and I got up at 8:00am. He grumbled a little at this, as I previously allowed him to wake naturally, which lead to a pretty wide variance in start times. Still, he got up, did his arm exercises, got dressed, and ate his breakfast quickly and with little fuss, and sat right down to get started on his math before I had to leave with Babypie.

Officer Daddyman called me at one point to verify the timing of snack and lunch, as our snack break is 10-10:30 and lunch is from 11:30-12, and there’s not another snack listed on the schedule (he’ll have one w/ his school reading or during any of the other free times). What he doesn’t realize is that if Captain Science doesn’t get frequent, small breaks for movement and a little food, he can’t concentrate worth a hooey. An hour to an hour and a half on, 15-30 minutes off seems to be the magical combination for maximum output.

Math was a bridge (between chapters 10 and 11), grammar was an Editor in Chief A1 exercise, and history was on Roman technology. He went over the time limit on all three, but was able to complete the work within the time allotted for catch-up work and corrections. I think that as he adjusts to the new schedule, and after we do a little desk rearranging to help speed things up, that he won’t have trouble finishing everything.

It felt great to be back to school today. I’m not looking forward to the Tank’s return to preschool, though, and am now leaning even more strongly towards not re-enrolling him next year, in favor of putting him in the Master’s Academy arts program. If he’s going to be in a religious setting, I think he’d benefit more from it being arts-based (which I can’t really give him) than “academics”-based (which I can).

Have everyone else started back to school?