Just look at that MCT hotness!
Captain Science’s assignment from Michael Clay Thompson’s Building Poems today was to write a poem based on a photograph. He chose Steve McCurry’s famous photograph of the Afghan refugee girl, published in National Geographic.
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The Afghan Girl
Her eyes are like a rainbow, yet |
Ten days, y’all. Ten more freaking days! I’m so excited, I could practically piddle on the rug.
This week, Captain Science went back and redid a few lessons from Paragraph Town using his other reading as the subject matter. He finished (finally, Mr. Dawdler!) reading Wind in the Door and Nordic Gods and Heroes. He completed several sentences in Practice Town.
Officer Daddyman and Captain Science worked together on some algebra word problems of Daddyman’s devising. Captain Science is greatly looking forward to starting Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra, now that he has a little taste of that kind of math. Algebra was always my favorite mathematical subject, so I’m excited about it, too!
Captain Science has advanced to the next set of piano books and continues to show a natural talent for it. He’s working with 8th notes and runs, and is also doing a little jazz, which is fun to hear! Two hours a week is a lot of piano lesson, but I think the time investment is going to pay off in the long run.
Our co-op is about done. Brain class is over (and none too soon, as tempers have been flaring and the last class involved Eclectic Girl calling Captain Science a hoarder, and Captain Science calling Eclectic Girl a stealer, neither of which is true), game class will continue with no foreseeable end, and the short story class will only have one more meeting together. Along with writing, the students have learned about editing, submitting drafts to magazines and journals, and writing contests. I wish Captain Science had been willing to invest more time in working on his story, as I’m having a hard time getting a good full-length draft from him, but he’s not the only one in the class balking at it a bit. I think we’ll take a step back and let him work on it more over the summer.
Physics lab was pretty much the same-ol’, same-ol’. At least Captain Science and Eclectic Girl didn’t squabble, right?
Captain Science did a ton of poetry work this week, since we didn’t get much done in Building Poems last week. He covered limericks, creating his own stanzas, metaphor, simile, apostrophe, and personification this week, writing poems for each topic. The following are his personification and apostrophe poems, which he decided to combine together in this format:
Sun and Moon
I.
The sunlight shines upon the sea
his goal is to light everything.
While lighting up the other side
the moon illuminates the tides.
For many years they battled far,
but now they always share the earth.
II.
O, brightest sun, you hottest light
begins the day and stops the night.
Yet O great moon, your noble rays
shall make much beauty and end the day.
For many aeons you two have fought
but at this time you battle not.
I’m sure you can imagine how proud I am of him!
As we reach the end of our school year (10 days left after tomorrow), I no longer feel like I’m homeschooling so much as racing. Will we manage to finish the last of the curricula by the end of the school year, or will it dribble over into summer, throwing off the whole rhythm of everything? Each day is a race to finish another book, another subject, so that summer can be a clean start.
With each book Captain Science completed, I experience a deep sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. It’s not just about another check-marked box on a list (though it’s a little bit about that, as well), but about knowing that we’ve done a subject from beginning to end, that we’ve truly completed the first year of homeschooling (rather than just futzing around until we hit day 180). Making it to the end of the year with something still unfinished, unless it was specifically scheduled to be unfinished, would feel–perhaps unreasonably–like a small failure. I set goals and I want them completed.
Every day is a race. Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents, we manage to put to bed a couple of months ago, pulling it out for review and working on math concepts independently of curricula in the interim. Captain Science finally finished Paragraph Town last week, though he has gone back and redone a couple of lessons in that. Our brain class with Patchfire is completely. The only thing left in the writing class is making corrections to the drafts and mailing them off for submission. Game class has become more of a game club, without a need for an end-date.
Now, we’re chugging along with Building Poems, trying to wrap that up. Ideally, the only book that we will carry with us through the summer is Caesar’s English I, which I never intended us to finish by the end of the year. Far too many lessons for that, no matter how fast Captain Science seems to be zooming through it. This will keep the vocabulary fresh in his head for starting Latin (and Caesar’s English II) in the fall.
Ten days, five of which will not be managed by me, as I leave the boys in the capable hands of Officer Daddyman and the Nana, whilst I jet off to Chicago to doula for my best friend’s first birth. Five more academic days in which to wrap it all up and put it to bed for the school year. I don’t feel ready for this! This year has been such an adventure and a challenge.
Surely I’m not the only one with a deep seated need to have everything neatly wrapped up by the end of the year. How does it work for y’all? Do you leave curricula hanging to next school year? Not finish the school year until everything is finished? Do tell, do tell!
Patchfire writes about homeschoolers needing to hear a little bragging, too. I think that the best way to get that for Captain Science is by sharing his poety, which strikes me as quite mature for his age. I’m no poetry-naive yokel, either; My master’s thesis was a collection of poetry. I hope you’ll humor me in taking these opportunities to share the Captain’s works.
Here is Captain Science’s latest poem from Michael Clay Thompson’s Building Poems, a poem in the Rime Royal form (7 lines of iambic pentameter in an ababbcc rhyme scheme):
The Great Greek Heroes
The great Greek beasts and heroes long ago
Had much adventures many, many times
Like Jason and the Argonauts had rowed
The monsters fell to them; They were sublime,
And later on in one great different time,
Achilles was the greatest hero yet.
He fought great Hector and he won, you bet!
We’re going to work on not overusing “many” and “great,” but the kid managed to stick “Argonauts” and and “adventures” into iambic pentameter. Not only that, he correctly used some of his Caesar’s English vocabulary. Yes, he pretty much rocks.
Captain Science’s essay for today:
World War II
World War II stabbed terror into the hearts of thousands. Many lost a friend or loved one in this sword of death, and terrible, ruthless Germans crushed many souls in their hands. Planes swarmed the sky and brought whole cities to their knees, while tanks struck down any pathcrossers who bravely stood against them. Thousands of lives were devastated by the evil hands of Germany, but America won in the finish.
Four poetic meters, that is: iambic pentameter, trochaic tetrameter, dactylic tetrameter, and anapestic pentameter.
Captain Science’s assignment for Michael Clay Thompson’s Building Poems today was to choose a topic, choose four words, and write four four-line poems using the above four meters, each containing those four words and addressing the topic. Because it’s a rather challenging task, I agreed to do it as well. We had about an hour to work on our poems.
Captain Science’s topic: Roman wars
Captain Science’s words: The (I told him that’s a cheater word and next time it won’t count), Roman, loud, and war
Iambic Pentameter
The Roman drums of war sounded out loud
You could hear many men crying out loud
And then there was something that made them scream
A laser was attacking with a beam
Trochaic Tetrameter
Roman solders war my men and
Arrows shriek loud through the air, then
catapults chuck boulders ’round — whoa
One arrow ’bout grazed my hair!
Dactylic Trimeter (he forgot he was doing tetrameter)
Bash! Oh no — bloom! There goes my tower
’cause of the catapult’s boulder, it
flew so loud, yet it did,
I had some horrible curses, so
I cursed the Romans then the war
stopped strangely, ’cause of the dead army.
(This was supposed to be anapestic tetrameter, but he totally lost the meter on this one — I like it, though)
I’m a sorceror, so I cursed
all the Romans. The two armies
had warred day and night for
10 YEARS! Finally we have
won, and against Rome’s
army, now we are going
home so we can celebrate so loud.
My topic: Seasons
My words: apple, flowers, faces, feel
Iambic Pentameter
The sun beats down, the flowers brown and wilt
Our faces, also brown, are turning pink
My mother’s apple pie served a la mode
I feel a warmth that isn’t from the heat
Trochaic Tetrameter
Apple picking in the orchard
Falling leaves brush by our faces
Flowers of the summer fading
Autumn colors in their places
Dactylic Tetrameter
Oh, can you feel it? The winter is fading and
flowers are peeking their faces up out of the
snow and the apple trees soon will be blooming, so
fare the well, winter, for springtime is entering
Anapestic Pentameter
Faces cold, feel the snow soft and fine on the pines, evening time.
Frozen cheeks, apple red, snowflakes light on your head. Softly said
Whispered word, barely heard in the night’s dimming light.
Close your eyes, safe and warm. Winter storm singing nigh, lullaby.
Captain Science wrote this little ditty today as an exercise in iambs and spondees.
I go into the kitchen
To get some pretzel sticks
And how much pretzels do I get
Well, nine’s how much I pick.
He didn’t quite integrate his understanding of the spondee into his poetic meter, but he’s getting there. He can explain it just fine, but since he’s only nine and still occasionally emphasizes words oddly in conversation, I don’t expect his usage to be perfect yet. We discussed that “many,” not “much,” would be grammatically correct here. He rewrote it to conserve the iambic rhythm and to try to use the spondee correctly. “Many” in the last line is intended to be the spondee, and when he reads the poem aloud, he stresses both syllables of “many.”
I go into the kitchen
To get some pretzel sticks
How many pretzels do I get?
Well, nine’s how many I pick.
…you make an ass of Nancy, maybe? Captain Science was a little concerned that “assonance” starts with a “bad word” (queue shocked 9-year-old face), but grasped the concepts of assonance, consonance, and alliteration quickly an easily. He wrote a little poem using all three.
The Ghost Judge
The midnight moon is spooky,
And scary ghouls roam everywhere.
There’s even a ghost judge,
and it looks like he’s sued someone,
for he closed around a zombie
and he never came again.
Yes, he closed around a zombie
and he never came again.
Captain Science has started working on Michael Clay Thompson’s Building Poems. Today, he read and then wrote poems with end rhymes, internal rhymes, and eye rhymes. I asked that he write a minimum of four lines for each poem.
The Roman Slave (end rhyme)
In the darkening sky,
In ancient Rome,
Chased by his master,
The slave ran home.
The Old Man’s Night (internal rhyme)
One long rainy night, in an old man’s sight,
He saw something at his open door.
He said “Go away, or I’ll get you, I may!”
And the thing flew out into the moor.
“Well, it’s in the plains…oh my! My leg pains!”
The old man said in disgust,
And because of the rain his short metal cane
Was also stating to rust.
The Rain (eye rhyme)
One day a little boy
Was soaked by a sudden rain.
The next day when he went out to play
It started to rain again.
