Status

Yesterday went well, but not as well as I'd hoped.  We're still making progress, so I'll view yesterday as half-full, rather than half-empty.

I played with Numbers and am tweaking their gradebook template.  I think it'll work.  I'll play with it this summer and hope to have my gradebook settled by the time we start our real school year in August.

We had a great time in English.  We've parsed the first three sentences of Psalm 1.  We've diagrammed the first one and will diagram the next two today.  The three little ones are copying it for handwriting and our pastor will preach on it in two Sundays.  We learned about some cool rhetorical figures - antanaclasis (or a clashing of words) and hyperbaton (changing word order for effect and emphasis).  We're also looking at the difference between the seven basic parts of speech and the different jobs that are done in a sentence by words, phrases, and clauses.

We haven't tackled logic yet this week, and we have more economics to do.  We're about half-way through Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, reading it aloud and watching Jeffrey Tucker's interviews with various economists about the book.  When we're done with that, we'll begin watching the Teaching Company's Economics lectures and reading Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics.

We also started working on learning to sing in parts.  We're starting with 'Happy Working Song' from Enchanted and I'm thinking of adding in 'How Will She Know?' from the same movie.  And we've started doing some exercises that I remember from my high school theatre classes.  We may do a readers' theatre or else choose a scene or two from a play and block it as both a play and a film.

It's time to head to the salt mines!

New Session

Last week was a Sabbath week, and boy did we need it!

I spent some time messing around with PlanBook and had great hopes for it, but I don't think it's going to work.  I'm tired of writing our all the kids' lessons by hand in their planbooks, so when PB didn't pan out, I began messing around with Numbers and finally got it figured out - thanks to a friend who graciously answered all my stupid questions.  Now to see if I can get my money back for PlanBook - I'm not holding my breath.

I had hoped to audition for a summer play, but that didn't get off the ground.  I also had hoped to teach at least one film class, but I'm not sure if that's going to fly either (I'm still waiting to hear).

So, what to do with my summer?  I decided that I want to teach the kids to sing parts and I want to start doing some theatre exercises with them.  We'll also continue with English, math, logic, economics, and Latin review.

I hoped to get us up earlier so we could finish our academics and have time for extra stuff like sewing, more gardening, and baking.  Didn't work out yesterday - restless night on Sunday caused me to wake up late on Monday.  I didn't give up and we did some of what I had planned.

Today was better.  We started a bit earlier and I got more of my to-do list done.  We dove into Psalm 1 for English (our pastor is preaching on it in a couple of weeks), parsing and diagramming the first sentence.  Also discussed nouns: definition, categories (abstract vs. concrete, proper vs. common), and the many jobs of nouns in sentences.  Will tackle verbs tomorrow.

Began our singing with a lecture on posture, opening our mouths, and abdominal breathing, then warmed up and played around with singing different notes of a chord together.  Found that our 'Happy Working Song' sheet music has parts, so we started there.  Need to call Music Mart and order another song to work on.  Nathan is hoping for Handel's 'Messiah' (yeah, right), but the others are hoping for a song from a Broadway musical.  We'll see what Ross has to offer.

Also went through some stretches and posture and drama exercises - made the kids move across the room as if depressed.  I've got a few more in mind, but I found a book with theatre exercises for kids at B&N which I hope we can pick up tonight.

SDG!

Annual Reading List, 2008/2009: Nathan

Fiction and Literature:
Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen (read aloud by Mama)
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë (August)
Silas Marner, by George Eliot
Inferno, by Dante (July)
Purgatorio, by Dante (September 23)
Paradisio, by Dante
The Antiquary, by Sir Walter Scott
The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis (September)
Eldest, by Christopher Paolini (August)
The Man Who was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton (August)
Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis (August)

The Giver, by Lois Lowry

Animal Farm, by George Orwell

1984, by George Orwell

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

Pride & Prejudice, by Jane Austen

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Song of Albion, by Stephen Lawhead

The Edge of Eternity, by Randy Alcorn

Taliesin, by Stephen Lawhead

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Nonfiction:
More than Dates and Dead People, by Stephen Mansfield
Empire, Niall Ferguson

Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton

What's Wrong with the World, by G.K. Chesterton

Annual Reading List, 2008/2009: Eliza

Literature (read by herself):
Mouse Soup, by Arnold Lobel
Serving in the Shadow of Death, by Laura Blakey
Bright Night, by Nancy Wilson

The Chick and the Duckling, translated from the Russian of V. Suteyev by Mirra Ginsburg (10/8/08)

The Little Bear Treasury, by Else Holmelund Minarik (including Little Bear's Visit, Little Bear, and Little Bear's Friend

Literature (read to her):
Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen (read by Mama)
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis (read by Judith, finished 28 Sept.)
Grimms' Fairy Tales, by the Brothers Grimm (read by Joel)
Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis (read by Judith)

The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster (read by Jared)

History:
A Child's History of the World, by V.M. Hillyer (read by Mama)

Science:
Jack's Insects, by Edmund Selous (read by Mama)

Rhetoric, Logic, Grammar Update

It took us a week and a half to parse and diagram our way through Portia's courtroom monologue from The Merchant of Venice, but we made it.  

Then we shifted to looking at the flow of argument in the speech.  I pulled in the basic list of topics from Andrew Kern's Lost Tools of Writing.  We also found a couple more figures of speech: simile and metonymy.  

The younger kids have been working on copywork while the older are beginning a writing assignment.  They have to come up with a conflict (from a book or film) and step into the shoes of one of the characters and write a speech, letter, or persuasive essay based on the passage we've been studying.  Nathan chose a situation from a book he's writing.  Judith chose Cars, the conflict between Lightning McQueen's self-centered desire for fame and Sally's desire for him to help her save the community of Radiator Springs.  Benjamin got a bit stuck, so I chose The Patriot for him, the conflict between Lord Cornwallis's desire to defend civilization from the rebels against the king's authority and Tavington's desire for personal advancement by any means available.  

These may not seem like conflicts of opposites, but that's part of how Portia approached Shylock's request for 'justice' (which was really personal vengeance dressed up pretty).  She placed mercy over against justice and showed how mercy really is the greater virtue.  

The little ones still seem to be listening in and paying attention.  This morning, as they worked on copywork, they continually asked questions about what the older kids and I discussed as we looked at the topic questions in LT.  I'm amazed at the depth of the questions I'm getting from my 10, 9, and 7 year olds.

Annual Reading List, 2008/2009: Joel

Literature:
Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen (read by Mama)
Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy (finished in August)
Fairy Tales, by the Brothers Grimm

The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster

Pearls of Letra, by Brian Jacques

Redwall, by Brian Jacques

Martyrs of the Catacombs, by anonymous

Martin the Warrior, by Brian Jacques

Salamandastron, by Brian Jacques

History:
George Washington Carver, by Geoff Benge

Cameron Townsend, by Geoff Benge

Amy Carmichael, by Geoff Benge

Science:
Christian Liberty Nature Reader, Grade 3 (finished in August)
Christian Liberty Nature Reader, Grade 4

How the Weather Works, Reader's Digest Books

Rhetoric, Logic, Grammar

I know it's been forever since I've posted anything, but life's been settling down and I have a bit of time today.

We took last week off, and I've added in a few things this week.  It's only Tuesday, but we're off to a bang-up start.

We used to parse passages of literature together each day.  I stopped because it was taking so much time that we seemed to have time for little else (I was aiming for an entire passage each day - too much!).  However, a conversation with a friend got me thinking about reinstituting and expanding this idea.  Debra commented, when I told her that I thought I might need to abandon rhetoric for awhile while covering logic with the older kids, that the trivium used to be taught in an integrated manner, instead of separated out into different subjects.  This really got me thinking (the more lumping together I can do, the happier we all are).  She also mentioned that the trivium was taught in one-room schoolhouses and that the younger learned much from listening in on the olders' lessons.  We work for an hour each day and pick up the next day where we left off the day before - line upon line, precept upon precept.

So far this week, we've parsed and diagrammed the first four sentences of Portia's courtroom speech from The Merchant of Venice.  We've also learned about ellipsis (leaving out a repeated a word or phrase or clause in a sentence).  We've been dealing with subordinate clauses, predicate adjectives, direct objects, etc. - pretty advanced stuff.  I use the Shurley question and answer flow, but we then parse according to Ed Vavra's KISS Grammar, (Google it, it's available free online) and diagram with the help of Mary Daly's Big Book of Diagrams.  We've jumped into the deep end of the pool and none of us seem to be drowning, yet; although yesterday, I had to ask for a life preserver from ClassEd when I hit a sentence that I just didn't know what to do with.

Once we're done parsing and diagramming, we'll look at the flow of argument in the speech and we'll look for rhetorical figures, tropes, and schemes.  The kids have started notebooks with their parsed and diagrammed sentences, a page for each figure with the definition and examples, and vocabulary.  The little ones will add copywork, which I set up using Educational Fontware.

We're having a really good time and we'll all learning bunches.  We'll be alternating between Shakespeare and the KJV Bible (for the poetic language) for awhile, but I'd like to be able to look at some of Churchill's speeches, our founding documents, and modern political speeches, as well as literature from Antiquity (where we'll be in history next year).

SDG!