The Prodigal Returns

Life got crazy last year, especially through the summer, but things seem to be calming down now and we're getting off to our new school year, so I thought this would be a good time to begin to post some updates. (To see how I spend my summer, see my personal blog.)

One new thing we're doing this year for school is to learn the Psalms. I ordered a metrical Psalter from Crown and Covenant and downloaded three of the CD's they have that go along with the Psalter (the fourth, with all of Psalm 119 is due out soon). Many thanks to my friend, John Hodges, for the recommendation - I wanted something that wasn't too pop-musicuish and trendy, but that wasn't childish, either, and John came up with just the right thing.

We've been singing through about ten Psalms each day during Morning Time and we're all beginning to learn them. The harmonies are beautiful and I love that some have familiar tunes. We also enjoy the more ethnic tunes that some have been set to. It'll be awhile before we're able to obtain recordings of all the Psalms (they haven't been relased, yet), but we're well on our way.

I love that my kids are learning Scripture as they learn these songs, that the tunes are appropriate to the words, and that the kids are beginning to learn to sight-read when they sing. Our church uses an overhead with just the words during worship, so I've had to figure out a way to expose them to sight-reading as they sing. Learning the Psalms in this way definitely contributes to this.

We've also been reading the Psalms from the Sidney Psalter and the kids are beginning to be able to recognize them when they hear them (even though the words are slightly different and there's no tune to rely on).

We're studying Christendom this year, so this focus on the Psalms is appropriate, given the rise of monasticism that we're learning about (I've read that Benedictine monks sing through all the Psalms each week as they go through their daily offices). I'd love to incorporate more of the daily offices (the opus dei) and the monastic hours into our days, but it's tough alone at home and I don't know that I'm up to diving into it. A little at a time is probably a better approach.

SDG!

During our trivium time a few days ago, what one son affectionately calls 'Adventures in the Trivium', we parsed and diagramed the following sentence from The Wind in the Willows, which I'm reading aloud to the little girls:

Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way!

Today, we imitated that sentence together in preparation for the older four imitating it on their own. Here's what we came up with:

Spring! That was what they meant, that stirring zephyr, that scarlet crocus staining the snow, that robin heralding the break of winter's hold.

I'll post the kids' individual sentences when I get them.

We also began a little logic today, covering univocal terms. I only know a bit of logic, so we're taking it slowly, but I'm looking forward to adding this to our 'Adventures in the Trivium'!

SDG!

French - Littles

The littler three were having trouble keeping up with the grammar of Les Oeufs Verts and the French phonics were a bafflement, so I switched them over to oral French lessons until they're more solid with English phonics and spelling.

They're learning the same paradigms as their older siblings, but at a bit of a slower pace.

They've begun learning the parts of the body and left and right. We play Simon dites … or sing Alouette, pointing to various body parts. They've also begun learning the verbs lever (lift up), baisser (put down), toucher (touch), and montrer (show). Sometimes I'll ask them, 'Où est la main gauche?' and they answer, 'Voilà la main gauche!' while pointing to it or holding it up.

They're learning how to count to ten. I'll hold up fingers and they have to tell me as quickly as they can how many I'm holding up. I pulled out the old pre-school number flashcards and they use those for practice, too. I've heard them counting things in French - plates when setting the table, or cups of flour for a batch of pancakes.

Les Couleurs. I simply point to something or hold something up and ask , 'Quelle couleur est-il?' and they answer by saying, 'Il est …', naming as many colors as they can.

Yesterday, we also started working on the names of rooms in the house and parts of a room (floor, door, ceiling, window, etc.). They're most recent paradigm is aller, so we'll be able soon to talk about going into different rooms in the house or touching the wall or the floor.

I have a list of topical vocabulary I want to teach them, along with verbs and some aural constructions (il est … vs. ils sont …, la main droite vs. le pied droit, etc.). We'll simply move through them as we can. I'm also astounded at how much they're learning and how much they all seem to be enjoying it.

An added benefit is that I'm reviewing my French and am filling in some of those holes that have cropped up through my years of not using it.

SDG!

Negative Numbers

Benjamin has gotten up to adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers. Some of it makes sense, but subtracting a negative has been a bear to wrap our minds around. If zero is nothing, then how can you take away even less than nothing? I was really struggling to find a real life example. Drew came up with a great one and a friend tied it into English for me. I'll be going over this with Ben today - we'll see if he sees it as clearly as I'm beginning to.

Drew's thought - He compared it to heating and air conditioning. Heating is positive numbers and cooling is negative numbers. Turning either the furnace or the AC up (more power) is adding and turning them down (less power) is subtracting. So, turning up the heat is like adding a positive and it gets warmer. Turning down the heat is like subtracting a positive and it gets cooler. Turning up the air is like adding a negative and it gets cooler. Here's the tricky one: turning down the air is subtracting a negative and it gets warmer. I can see this organized on a chart with up & down on the sides and heat & AC on the top (like Mendel's sweet pea genetics), but I don't know how to reproduce it here.

My friend reminded me that, just as in English, two negatives make a positive.

A bunch of other friends sent me other examples that I haven't had time to look closely at yet, but we'll tackle them this afternoon.

SDG!

French - Olders

We're reading Les Oeufs Verts au Jambon (Green Eggs and Ham). This was a great book to start with because of the sheer amount of repetition. I went through the book and listed out the vocabulary and grammar my students would need to know to puzzle out and understand each section. I pulled paradigms from the verbs in the book and homework assignments were transformations of sentences in the book or the composing of original sentences and questions using the grammar, vocabulary, and paradigms we'd already covered. We're almost finished. So far, here's the grammar we've covered:

basic -er verb conjugation and subject pronouns

negation with ne … pas (Je n'aime pas ce Sam-c'est moi!)

masculine and feminine nouns and articles

singular and plural nouns nouns and articles

making questions with est-ce que …

making questions by inversion

negative questions and subject pronoun placement (N'aimes-tu pas les oeufs verts au jambon?)

elision and liaison

using an infinitive with another noun (J'aime manger les oeufs.)

introduced direct object pronouns (les, en, me) and their placement

future tense

faux future

introduced passé composé

All this will continue to be reviewed as we come across it in our next book: Histoire de Babar.

Our paradigms, so far, include

aimer

vouloir

avoir

aller

être

The transformations I mentioned above were my friend's idea - I'd take a sentence from the book and have the girls re-write it according to a pattern. For example:

Je n'aime pas les oeufs verts au jambon.

The assignment would include:

make positive

change the subject to second person, singular

use est-ce que to make a question

make question with inversion

make the subject plural

make the subject third person, singular or plural

change to false future

change to future

change to passé composé

Sometimes we'd do it as a chain, after one change, the new sentence would become the basis for the next change. Sometimes we'd change the original sentence over and over. This is how the above assignment might look upon completion:

Je n'aime pas les oeufs verts au jambon.

positive: J'aime les oeufs verts au jambon.

2nd person: Tu aimes les oeufs verts au jambon.

question: Est-ce que tu aimes les oeufs verts au jambon?

inversion: Aimes-tu les oeufs verts au jambon?

plural subject: Aimez-vous les oeufs verts au jambon?

3rd person, s: Aime-t-il les oeufs verts au jambon?

false future: Va-t-il aimer les oeufs verts au jambon?

future: Aimera-t-elle les oeufs verts au jambon?

passé composé: A-t-il aimé les oeufs verts au jambon?

I'm stunned at how much we've covered in only six weeks and am looking forward to Babar. Since it was originally written in French, I think we'll all learn a lot! And we're having fun, which means we're actually doing it!

SDG!

French

I've tried different French curricula through the years, both for high school and for younger kids, and have hated them all! The books feel like a strait-jacket, sapping creativity and the joy of teaching (which definitely diminishes the joy of learning on the other side of it).

So, with the hand-holding and encouragement of a friend, we're tackling French differently this year and it's going very, very well.

I thought I could start my olders and youngers together and split them after about six weeks, but that didn't work. I ended up splitting them after only about two weeks, but it's been good. I'll outline what I'm doing for each level in future posts.

SDG!

Okay, so I haven't been planning on the blog. I've been playing around with Numbers and finally figured out how to use it (thanks to a friend who is much smarter than I am!).

School has been moving along well for 12 weeks now (with two Sabbath weeks) and I thought I'd post an update.

Our routine looks like this:

Morning Time: prayer, Scripture (the same one all week, the text of next Sunday's sermon if I can figure out what it is); reading from either Piper's Don't Waste Your Life or Spurgeon's All of Grace; either a paragraph of three from Plutarch's Lives or a few poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, our poet of the session. On Fridays, after reading Scripture, I hand out a copy of a work of art (associated with our history study, if possible, but not always) for the kids to sketch while listening to a piece of music I want them to become familiar with: this six weeks it's Vivaldi's Four Seasons: Spring.

English: altogether we parse and diagram one sentence, right now we're working through the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V; when we get to the figures, we'll do one each day. We needed to spend less time on this each day so we'd have time for their other work.

Spelling with the littles: I'm combining Tricks of the Trade, Touch-Phonics, and The Natural Speller; we do three words each day, one rule per child, but they all learn the rules the others need; we'll have a spelling bee soon, which the kids are really looking forward to. The kids look in their reading or other work for words to go with their particular rule.

Math with the little girls: I've been working with the girls, letting them solve their equations on the dry-erase board and attitudes are quickly improving, as are skills and enthusiasm for math; I'm also finding that it's contributing toward better relationships. And now that we've been doing this for several weeks, they're beginning to work more independently and do more in their books.

After lunch, we tackle French (both upper and lower levels - more about that in another post), reading aloud, reading silently, correcting math with the older kids, listening to history narrations, Gileskirk lectures, science lectures, and anything else we need to finish up.

Whew! It sounds like a lot, but we're getting so much done and enjoying the time together!

I'll try to post more about planning and French, soon.