Ireland

This list is compiled with the help of the Real Learning community; I'm putting an * next to the resources we already have. The others I have not read or seen or listened to, yet. OH! And if you read this and see something missing, please comment!

Books
Cottage at Bantry Bay * and sequels*
Red Hugh: Prince of Donegal *
Beorn the Proud*
Secret of Ron Mor Skerry by Rosalie Fry
Under the Hawthorn Tree (about the Potato Famine, part of a trilogy)
Nory Ryan's Song and Maggie's Door by Patricia Reilly Giff (about the Potato Famine, HT JoVE)
Twist of Gold by Michael Morpungo, also about the Potato Famine (haven't read it, but saw it at Amazon when looking for the previous two -- and we have another book by the author which we like)
Darby O'Gill and the Little People
Darby O'Gill and the Crocks Of Gold
Some Experiences of an Irish RM (there is also a BBC series)
Magic Summer by Noel Streatfield
The Heritage by Frances Parkinson Keyes

Tales, Saints Stories, Legends


Fin McCoul by Tomie de Paola
The Sailor Who Captured the Sea (ties in to Book of Kells)
Jamie O'Rourke and the Pooka
Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato

saints stories:
Brigid's Cloak
The Man Who Loved Books by Jean Fritz about St Columba
Brendan the Navigator by Jean Fritz*
St Brendan and the Voyage Before Columbus
Celtic Heritage Saints*





Celtic Fairy Tales
Irish Legends for Children
Favorite Celtic Fairy Tales
King of Ireland's Son * by Padraic Colum








Movies

Darby O'Gill and the Little People
The Quiet Man*
Secret of Roan Inish*
Into the West*






Movies that are possibly more suitable for older kids or adults (I personally haven't seen any of these)

My Left Foot
Local Hero
In the Name of the Father
Michael Collins
Waking Ned Divine


History/Non-Fiction


How the Irish Saved Civilization (teen and up)
Real Lace
Angela's Ashes and 'Tis by Frank McCourt. I read the first one. Too raw for kids even teens but certainly memorable.

The following book is for children:
History of Ireland *





Music

Faith of our Fathers
(here is a DVD version)
So Early in the Morning Clancy Children
Clannad

• Theme from Harry's Game
• Perfect Time
• Whisper to the Wild Water

Chieftains*
Clancy Brothers*
Kilkelly* by Mick Malone and Robbie O'Connell (who is a nephew of the Clancys)
Anthony DeLallo, * a very talented young Catholic homeschooler, has a CD of Irish songs called A Wee Bit of Ireland (HT to my friend Chari -- he is her priest's nephew!)

Internet Visits (& Geography)


Skellig Islands
Giant's Causeway

Brendan Voyage*







Art


Color your Own Book of Kells
Book of Kells: Selected Plates in Full Color
Celtic Design: Knotwork




Rabbit Trails

Tree Heritage: A Guide to the Famous Trees of Britain and Ireland
(for my amateur dendrologist)
Favourite Medieval Tales(by Mary Pope Osborne -- includes a story about Finn MacCoul)
Dublin: Eyewitness
KC Irish Fest!
CS Lewis's Irish heritage
Irish Literature at the NewAdvent Catholic Encyclopedia
Wee Irish Folk (listmania)


Irish Poems, Poets and Ballads


Fields of Athenry*
Grace*
WB Yeats: Easter 1916 and The Second Coming
The Stolen Child --my daughter wrote a story based on the poem.
Irish Fairy and Folk Tales ed by WB Yeats*
Anthology of Irish Verse ed by Padraic Colum
Seamus Heaney is Irish -- we have the CD version of his Beowulf*

A Love of Nature from Earliest Days

Intimacy with Nature makes for Personal Well-being.––But to enable them to swim with the stream is the least of the benefits this early training should confer on the children; a love of Nature, implanted so early that it will seem to them hereafter to have been born in them, will enrich their lives with pure interests, absorbing pursuits, health, and good humour. "I have seen," says the same writer, "the young man of fierce passions and uncontrollable daring expend healthily that energy which threatened daily to plunge him into recklessness, if not into sin, upon hunting out and collecting, through rock and bog, snow and tempest, every bird and egg of the neighbouring forest . . . I have seen the young London beauty, amid all the excitement and temptation of luxury and flattery, with her heart pure, and her mind occupied in a boudoir full of shells andfossils, flowers and seaweeds, keeping herself unspotted from the world, by considering the lilies of the fields of the field, how they grow."

Charlotte Mason is quoting from Charles Kingsley's Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore which seems to be about the advantages of taking Natural History seriously in one's lives. He lists many more benefits to the mind and to physical health, and ends in this manner:

And so I end this little book, hoping, even praying, that it may encourage a few more labourers to go forth into a vineyard, whichthose who have toiled in it know to be full of ever-fresh health, and wonder and simple joy, and the presence and the glory of Him whose name is LOVE.

I don't agree with everything Kingsley says but the bit CM quoted rang with me ten years ago when I first read it and it seems to have been borne out in our lives since.
Today's Lesson has a post on Expend Healthily that Energy.

Aidan stacking firewood in front of our house.

HOW I plan -- overview

Here is the basic template I use when I'm planning a literature-based unit. (I do units, I guess, but they're not activity-driven and they're usually either a divergence from or a more indepth exploration of whatever track we're on that year). Here is a post I wrote 3 years ago about planning literature themes.

Here's where I wrote a bit about a very general Scope and Sequence and some of the Logistics. Though this was written for 2006 it still applies. More on the fundamental curriculum here... starting with preschool and building on it.

As far as practical details go, I like Dawn's idea of starting planning for the next week on the Wednesday before. I may try something like that.

I realize that I plan a bit differently every year. Last year a lot of my planning was oriented around resource-finding for the childrens' interests and for finding spaces in my day for the leisurely conversations that reveal so much about their hearts and minds. The rest of my planning energy went towards looking for things to strew. I also used a lot of planning energy to develop some(better, not great) household routines and prayer habits. These things are still helping me a lot and I don't want to let go of them.

When we were more actively doing our Story Meeting (oh yeah, I forgot that took some planning energy too) I realized that my stories work best if I have a general vision and a few specifics of the way in, but too many details written out ahead of time kill the interest and creativity for me. That wouldn't be so bad except that when the creativity isn't there, I can't "see" and if I can't see I feel like I am putting on a puppet show rather than writing a real story. It occured to me then that this might explain why I seem to have to reinvent the homeschool wheel to some extent every year -- new process of lesson planning, new morning schedule. There is a fair amount of consistency in the big picture as I've already mentioned but the details get a lot of shaking around.

Now how does this impact my kids? If I felt one of them really was asking for more consistency and structure in the daily things, that would be incorporated into my plans. When my oldest reached his high school years he definitely did communicate that he wanted more structure and consistency, so I rearranged things to provide that for him. Then I over-generalized the lesson and started requiring more structure and consistency of my second son and that was not successful. He didn't really benefit from what had worked for his brother though it wasn't a complete disaster.

This year for planning I've been using the Tanglewood Corebook along with the CHC Lesson Planner.Together they cover most of the areas I want to be reminded of and they are both pretty. I use my spiral artist's sketchbook to brainstorm and mind-map ideas.

The general process goes like this:

• Look at overview, booklist, etc.
• Brainstorm ideas and write out.
• Collect resources.
  
• Put into daily form.
• Write into plan book.
• Expect that it won't go exactly as planned.

I think one mistake I made in the past was trying to make my lesson plans too laid out and structured. Then they would just bore me dreadfully to look at them. I'm trying to figure out a way to put more creativity into the planning and writing. Look at Alice's!

My biggest challenge is probably making TIME work for me. Being visual-spatial, I don't move very consistently through time. I can get a lot done in a short time but the corollary is that often the day goes by and I haven't gotten to most of the things I wanted to. This lack of sequence is difficult for my kids so I've had to work hard to make myself stay on some sort of track. Once I have a general routine in place, I can usually get a lot more done.

A Spacious Plan

I really like these Albert Bierstadt paintings. Yes, they are a bit romanticized. But we live in terrain that looks like this and sometimes the light is a bit like it too, only not quite so much so, perhaps. Bierstadt painted around the Sierra Nevadas and that is where we live. We are only a few miles from Yosemite.

Several years ago Elizabeth introduced me to Sonlight. I loved the Sonlight idea that the literature/history reading is the Core of the curriculum and THEN you add the basic 3Rs; not that these latter aren't important, but the 3Rs are more like tools or instruments and the literary books are closer to the heart and soul of an education. It was something I'd felt, partly because of reading Charlotte Mason and more because of what I most valued of my own education, but the way Sonlight expressed it helped clarify it in my mind.

Even before that, I went through many, many spiral notebooks trying to figure out the big picture for what I wanted to "cover" (for lack of a better word) in my homeschool. A lot of homeschoolers use unit studies and I like the idea of them in theory, but I can't really go from unit to unit in actual practice. I am not that kind of thinker. It feels to me like riding on a road with lots of blind curves.

A lot of unschoolers make their lives and the childrens' interests into their unit study. This doesn't work for me either, I find. Once again I think it's neat in theory, but I can't live that way without frustration.

So very early, when my oldest was in fourth grade, I devised a sort of big picture plan for religion/literature/history. It is basically similar to Kolbe Academy's. We have followed some version of it ever since. It is surprising looking back how consistent we have been through some very chaotic times.

Yes, this means that we don't all study the same history at the same time. However, you'd be surprised.

• Our children are mostly three years apart so we can rarely combine literature resources very much anyway.
• And usually the themes have some points in common so that we can overlap more than you would think at first glance.
• Finally, I really go for the "one room schoolroom" effect where the older kids get to hear again the stories they heard when they were babies and the younger kids get to hear bits and pieces of the Iliad or whatever more advanced readaloud is going on at that time.

So here is the general overview
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K-2 No formal history curriculum. We go slowly through a book of Bible History. We read lots of stories like Children's Book of Virtues and Aesop's Fables. They are getting a context and delight in stories of times past. Stories about parents and family history fits in here too.
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3rd grade -- Kolbe has Egypt this year. It does not work for us spending a whole year on Egypt -- just too abstract and weird and not enough books for this age group -- so here's where we do an Egyptian unit -- I have enough materials to pull one together easily and Egyptian units are fun -- and then we either have a Sonlight-type world history survey or US History Survey
4th-5th grade, roughly -- we start with Ancient Greek and Rome, very similar to Mater Amabilis. It works for us better if we do US History/world history as a separate study rather than concurrently, as MA does. I used to try to do them both because Core Knowledge had it set up that way and because there are so many resources for American history for that age level. But generally we end up saving US History for spring and summer and doing it in a more freewheeling way.
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6th grade is a sort of multicultural exploration based on Sonlight Year 5 and the Real Learning booklist (you have to look on the sidebar of the main site). We actually do monthly units here and try to consolidate general geographical knowledge.
7th grade is ancient history. Egypt can be covered more easily at this age level in my opinion.... more books and more understanding of the scope of history.
8th grade is a survey of post-Pentecost history up to early modern times.
There is a different focus in this middle year survey -- more consciously targeted towards knowing one's faith and how it relates to time and location and other faiths, etc. It is a good time to start some type of "giving reason for the hope that you have".

But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect 1 Peter 3:15

Mother of Divine Grace covers this same time period -- here is the scope and sequence and here is the booklists.

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In 9th grade we have done different things for different kids. A child who hasn't done as much US History during the earlier years can do a year of that -- there are resources for that at Mother of Divine Grace, at Sonlight, some at Mater Amabilis, and some at Ambleside. One of the children ended up spending 2 years on ancient history as Kolbe recommends.

Anyway, 10th through 12th is another chronological cycle. 10th is the ancient world, 11 is the middle ages and 12th is modern times. Here is the high school core curriculum.
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• Sonlight Arranged by Well Trained Mind Cycles is a great online free resource. Her whole site is wonderful.
• Another one I have not mentioned yet is Baldwin Project. I go there often. We have a doublesided laserjet printer and a comb binder thanks to dear husband.
  

You must not imagine this layout is lockstep or the same for every child. It is not that way at all. My swings from unschooly commentary to layouts like this might seem odd, but it fits with the way I operate. I like to know where I'm going but I like to take the scenic route. Neil Young says: "It's a bumpier ride but you meet more interesting people there."

We use different books as new ones come to our attention, different focuses depending on interest. I find it helpful to remember what Charlotte Mason said: "One child finds his meat in Plato, another in Peter Pan." If you set a generous outlay of provisions in front of a child, he or she will show decided preferences and needs. So we adjust accordingly.

When I Plan

There is a thread going on about Lesson Planning at Real Learning. I love seeing how others do things. The planning is as unique as the individual family.

I realize I tend to do a lot of my planning in mid-winter. Let me start that over. I start planning for the next year in mid-Spring, just around the time the nice weather arrives and the kids are restless anyway. The planning helps me revive my interest in a fading school year and get the last few things done that are really important in light of the big picture.

But January is when I am most often sitting there with my list of bigger goals, trying to decide if we're on the right track and where to course correct. Somehow this helps me get through the notorious February blues. February becomes a time to try out the new things.

August is when I am usually writing out specific lesson plans for the more consecutive subjects, in preparation to start in late August. We always try to have a burst of basic 3Rs in the early fall. It so fits into my patterning from all my 18 years of schooling.... new pencils and notebooks, all that. If we make good progress I feel OK about letting up a bit around Thanksgiving when the holiday season starts.

Even during more unschooly cycles in our lives, I realize I follow this cycle. It works for me IF I am conscious of it and plan for it. When I was just starting homeschooling, I felt like my homeschool fell apart about every 3 months. I would do the equivalent of an inexperienced driver on an icy road, trying to twist the car BACK instead of turning the wheel with the slide.

Yes, it is snowing outside right now -- and we are driving south tomorrow. Hmm, I could probably think up all sorts of snow and icy road metaphors right now!

The next part of this is about WHAT I plan.... the Big Picture, the view of the Spacious Place.

Year 5, Kieron, 2007

Plans for Kieron are mostly Mater Amabilis with a bit of Ambleside.


Religion

• One saint’s biography to be assigned as independent reading each term.
• Bible History

Liturgical Year (twice weekly)

• Lent My Path to Heaven by Geoffrey Bliss
• Easter Our Lady’s Book by Lauren Ford
• Probably some of the Catholic Mosaic books we already have.
  

Ancient History -- 3 times weekly

• The Story of the Romans by Helene Guerber.
• Usborne Encyclopedia of the Ancient World
• Usborne Time Traveller: Rome and Romans

Further reading according to interest

• Augustus Caesar's World by Genevieve Foster
• Lives of Famous Romans by Olivia Coolidge
• Caesar's Gallic Wars by Olivia Coolidge
• City by David Macaulay
• Science in Ancient Rome by Jacqueline L.Harris
• The Orchard Book of Roman Myths
• Detectives in Togas by Henry Winterfeld
• Mystery of the Roman Ransom by Henry Winterfeld
• The Pirates of Pompeii by Caroline Lawrence - mystery set in 79AD (also other books in the same series including The Secrets of Vesuvius, The Assassins of Rome and The Thieves of Ostia,
• A Triumph for Flavius by Caroline Dale Snedeker
• The Time Travelling Cat and the Roman Eagle by Julia Jarman

Nature Study (Weekly)

• Take at least one nature walk each week.
• Keep a nature notebook

(He does this with his sister)

Books

• Discovering Nature Indoors
  
• Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton
• Ways of the Wood Folk

Geography (twice weekly)

• Kon Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl
• Seabird by Holling C.Holling
• The Cay by Theodore Taylor (Caribbean) - fiction \

Some book of Ireland yet to be decided

Science

• Galen and the Gateway to Medicine by Jeanne Bendick
• some book about health and human body

Literature

• The Aeneid for Boys and Girls by Alfred J.Church
• Shakespeare (Weekly) -- with family -- probably MacBeth and Midsummer Night's Dream
• Plutarch: Themistocles
  

Classic Children’s Literature (Ad.Lib.) -- probably won't finish all this list -- I just chose the ones from MA and Ambleside that I thought would be most likely to fit into our theme and to be interesting to him, that he hadn't already read. I'd like him to read one of the "girl" books but won't be too surprised if he gets to only one since he IS eleven after all : ).

• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
• Swallows and Amazons and other books by Arthur Ransome
• The Hobbit by J.R.R.Tolkien
• Heidi by Johanna Spyri
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
• The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• The Railway Children by Edith NesbitA Book of Golden Deeds by Charlotte Yonge
• Bambi by Felix Salten
• Little Britches series by Ralph Moody
• The Borrowers by Mary Norton
• Lassie Come Home by Eric Knight
• Gentle Ben by Walt Morey
• The Complete Peterkin Papers by Lucretia Hale
• Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
• Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
• The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain
• Lad: A Dog (or another book in the Lad series; many are online) by Albert Payson Terhune
• The Treasure Seekers by Edith Nesbit
• The Wouldbegoods by Edith Nesbit
• Hans Brinker by Mary Mapes Dodge
• The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

Year 8 -- Literature List

First part here
So, the tentative booklist now is :

First Section:

Bible and Faith
Gospel of Luke (possibly using Navarre Bible commentary).
Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis.

Biography/Historical Fiction
In Freedom's Cause by GA Henty
William the Conqueror by Hilaire Belloc

Geography
Brendan Voyage by Tim Severin
(also, some other book about Ireland, since we're doing a study of Ireland this year -- the Ireland day is going to be about once a week, and I will post that list separately since it will be multi-level)

Literature
Ivanhoe
A Taste of Chaucer
Shakespeare

Nature
Life of the Spider by Henri Fabre -- we love his books
I have a book by Edwin Way Teale which I've forgotten the name of


Health
Joyful Mysteries of Life

Civics
Catholic Book of Character and Success (instead of Ourselves, which I'll hold off on)
Plutarch ( & perhaps some other ancient history resource, especially if he shows a longing to continue with his extended project on that.)

Economics
Whatever Happened to Penny Candy

Poetry
Irish poetry
Here is Padraic Colum's Anthology of Irish Verse
Celtic Folklore -- interesting things here and probably some weird things too.

I like all the Year 7 Free Reading especially the historical ones. Some of them he has already read. Some of the icelandic sagas listed, we will replace with the ones my Dad gave me that I have been reading with Brendan.

I hope to focus particularly on Howard Pyle and Sir Walter Scott, since he is at the right age and has that temperament to enjoy them.

For Art I would like to do a study of the Book of Kells

I think Sean would benefit from "How to Read a Book" more in his high school years, though Liam read it in 8th, so perhaps Sean could read Landscape with Dragons instead- since we don't agree with everything the author says in his book, it makes for excellent discussions, very good for this dialectic phase of middle school.

This is just the reading. He does Key to Algebra for Math and Latina Christiana for Latin. I may try him with Traditional Logic I or wait till next year. There are lots of details about things like current events, narrations, and grammar and rhetoric on the Ambleside site. I used Daily Grammar with my older kids at that age as a survey/consolidation before high school, and it worked pretty well.

Lastly! I have his reading for after that drafted out but we will see how this goes before I get it planned out in detail. I think he is ready for a BIT of more challenging reading and narrating and 8th grade is usually a high school prep and grade school consolidation year, in our homeschool. But it's often difficult to tell how the children will respond to a shift in direction and I definitely want him to thrive.

Year 8

Background

Sean, who is just turned 14 and in the 8th grade, has always loved ancient history, starting in fourth grade when I gave him Famous Men of Greece. He devoured it in a couple of days and then started back at the beginning and read the whole thing again. Last year I gave him a lot of the Bethlehem ancient history books to read. He's also read many, many retellings of Greek and Roman history and legend. I will pull together a list sometime. The type of book he reads and rereads are the Redwall Series and the Prydain Chronicles, and he has also read and reread the Narnia Chronicles and things like John White's Archives of Anthropos. He will devour a Bethlehem historical novel in a couple of days but usually doesn't go back to it to reread. He also recently read "Seven Sleepers" by Gilbert Morris -- Christian science fiction.

Then this year he has been reading "Story of the Church" along with books chosen from "Reading Your Way through History" . So far: "Fabiola" (out of order chronologically but I wanted him to read it for Advent); then "Ides of April" "Beyond the Desert Gate" and "Between the Forest and the Hills".

So my future plans for Sean are springboarded mostly from Ambleside Year 7. I would like to use Mater Amabilis but his level has a study of 20th century history and we usually do 20th century in senior year of high school because of the maturity level of some of the material. Our 8th grade in the past has been a survey of post-Pentecost history up to the 20th century. When Liam did 8th grade we brought it right up to the future with some science fiction books, but if we do this with Sean it will have to go into next year.

I like Sonlight Curriculum's method of doing literature, where they have some more challenging selections along with easier ones. I read a book by Ruth Beechick a long time ago where she noted that children, as they progress into literacy, will tackle some challenging books and then seem to "regress" into easier books and simplistic series. She says lots of parents think the kids are backsliding and try to get them to read "up to their level" all the time, but in fact, the easier reading often serves a valuable purpose in consolidating skills and building confidence and getting a good sense of fiction patterns and devices. This has definitely been my experience both with my own childhood and in watching five readers so far grow into literacy. So I'm going to have Sean read some books just for fun and for context, along with a few of the steeper Ambleside books. The balance will depend on how he responds.

Wendi Capeheart write in an informal chat about Ambleside Year 7 :

I would say that some themes in year 8 would be a continuance of the government/authority discussion, and also freedom, responsibility, personal strength and courage, integrity and commitment.

This reminded me that in many of our best literature years we had a theme to focus on -- I am an English Lit major after all!; for example, the 20th century senior theme was about the value of fiction in depicting reality, and once we did a 6th grade theme on the role that the individual plays in history. I certainly don't hammer it home but it's fun to play with it as a connecting device between the literary works, and it keeps me motivated.

Next post: The booklist

Mapping Out the Universe

When I speak of Knowledge, I mean something intellectual, something which grasps what it perceives through the senses; something which takes a view of things; which sees more than the senses convey; which reasons upon what it sees, and while it sees; which invests it with an idea. It expresses itself, not in a mere enunciation, but by an enthymeme: it is of the nature of science from the first, and in this consists its dignity.

The principle of real dignity in Knowledge, its worth, its desirableness, considered irrespectively of its results, is this germ within it of a scientific or a philosophical process. This is how it comes to be an end in itself; this is why it admits of being called Liberal. Not to know the relative disposition of things is the state of slaves or children; to have mapped out the Universe is the boast, or at least the ambition, of Philosophy.

Moreover, such knowledge is not a mere extrinsic or accidental advantage, which is ours today and another's tomorrow, which may be got up from a book, and easily forgotten again, which we can command or communicate at our pleasure, which we can borrow for the occasion, carry about in our hand, and take into the market; it is an acquired illumination, it is a habit, a personal possession, and an inward endowment.

And this is the reason, why it is more correct, as well as more usual, to speak of a University as a place of education, than of instruction, though, when knowledge is concerned, instruction would at first sight have seemed the more appropriate word. We are instructed, for instance, in manual exercises, in the fine and useful arts, in trades, and in ways of business; for these are methods, which have little or no effect upon the mind itself, are contained in rules committed to memory, to tradition, or to use, {114} and bear upon an end external to themselves.

But education is a higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent, and is commonly spoken of in connexion with religion and virtue. When, then, we speak of the communication of Knowledge as being Education, we thereby really imply that that Knowledge is a state or condition of mind; and since cultivation of mind is surely worth seeking for its own sake, we are thus brought once more to the conclusion, which the word "Liberal" and the word "Philosophy" have already suggested, that there is a Knowledge, which is desirable, though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure, and a sufficient remuneration of years of labour.

Value of Play, and other thoughts on education

There is an interesting thread going on at Real Learning called "do you consider yourself radical" meaning a radical unschooler. I started this blog in order to debate with myself (Smeagol and Gollum: )) about whether unschooling "worked" and whether I was cut out to be an unschooler. I sort of wish I could be more of an unschooler than I end up actually being, but sometimes I find myself making perfection into the enemy of the good, and try to fit myself and my homeschool into something that doesn't really work for me. In practice, I find that homeschooling is an art; the sum of it is a kind of "synergy" as Leonie said in the discussion. Cindy at Applestars calls it Collaborative Learning.

Two interesting articles from very different points of view:
What Does it Mean to be Well Educated? by Alfie Kohn
You Can Always Look it Up-- Or Can You? by ED Hirsch

I don't entirely agree or disagree with either of them. Hirsch makes a case for broad general knowledge providing a way to acquire more knowledge. Yes, this seems to be true in my experience. However, I think this broad knowledge is often best acquired in family informal moments. You see that children from homes whose parents talk to them and read to them go into formal academics with a lot of hooks to hang things on already in place, including a major hook -- that their fundamental needs have been met (according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs). This has nothing to do with finances or economic status, either, except indirectly as parents who are on the financial margin are often more preoccupied and working long hours so they don't have the time and energy to devote to family times. The kids who DON'T have this kind of language and context background usually have more difficulties acquiring new knowledge though formal education, though literacy is a key that can unlock a whole new world to the child. I was just reading about Helen Keller in Charlotte Mason's book and how she lived in a shadowland until she discovered how to read Braille and the connection between language and knowledge. This is an extreme example; but I think that for some people, books and other resources can fill a need that their family life has not provided them. In fact, I've met several people who found freedom and hope from books and learning.

But my main point is that often the schools aren't the best place to acquire broad knowledge if the process hasn't already been begun outside of the school walls. School may have its virtues but it is usually less efficient in preparing the basic groundwork than the informal, open-ended, responsive environment that children benefit from outside the school grounds.

Alfie Kohn makes some justified critiques of our society's too heavy reliance on standardized tests, educational certificates and other "objective" markers that are in many ways inadequate to really measure competency and human qualities. I agree with him there, and I think he raises the right questions: Don't we have to know what education is FOR before we know whether it has succeeded? However, the idea of some committee or person measuring my child's competency as a human being (not just in certain intellectual qualities measurable by objective tests) is truly frightening. I think we have to be careful about replacing objectivity with something with even more possibility for problems: pseudo-objectivity and the de facto tyranny of the "expert". And I think he doesn't deal enough with the truth that children, PEOPLE, usually want to learn if they have the opportunity and aren't stifled with inappropriate educational methods.

I do think though that more localization and diversity of resources and markers for achievement would be a good solution, as he implies, and as a homeschooler I think that homeschooling is one of those examples of localization and diversity.

Anyway, while we were talking on the thread, I realized that a lot of what I look for in measuring whether my particular homeschool is successful is in the quality of play. Here is the foreword of Anne Lahrson Fisher's book Fundamentals of HOmeschooling. A summary of the book's position on Play:

Parents who homeschool with the greatest success love to play with their children. They learn to protect children’s playtime. They appreciate how much learning results from many kinds of play. Play allows the spark of creative insight to flame – a most powerful learning tool.

To me this seems similar to what Mihaly Csíkszentmihály says about Flow -- he talks about a state of mind engendered by doing something that is both challenging and rewarding at the same time. When I notice that the quality of my childrens' play is high, it usually reminds me of his description of FLow.

How does it feel to be in "the flow"?

1. Completely involved, focused, concentrating - with this either due to innate curiosity or as the result of training
2. Sense of ecstasy - of being outside everyday reality
3. Great inner clarity - knowing what needs to be done and how well it is going
4. Knowing the activity is doable - that the skills are adequate, and neither anxious or bored
5. Sense of serenity - no worries about self, feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of ego - afterwards feeling of transcending ego in ways not thought possible
6. Timeliness - thoroughly focused on present, don't notice time passing
7. Intrinsic motivation - whatever produces "flow" becomes its own reward

I'm using the word Play loosely to mean all the things that people do for the thing's own sake. I suppose another word would be leisure in the traditional sense of the word, not the same sense of today's concept of expensive and basically passive forms of recreation (though those have their place too).

It seems to me that this capacity to play richly is a great marker of human success in adult life, and it also has the virtue of being rewarding and powerful right in the present moment. It would be difficult to measure in schooly terms, however, and I think that's not entirely a bad thing. I think that this is what bothers me about both Kohn's and Hirsch's ideas -- they both seem to assume that the school system's role is to oversee the student's WHOLE life. I think this is part of our problem; that the public education institutions are usurping a role that should be more in the hands of the individual student/child, and his parents, and his church and community.

Kohn seems to fall more into the trap than Hirsch, probably with the best intentions. He wants education to be about MORE than just academics, and education IS about more than academics. But that begs the question of whether SCHOOL as a public (and secular) institution ought to be about more than academics. I think this is a relatively new concept -- that the state should oversee all aspects of a child's development and education, not just the intellectual branch. Richard Mitchell's Graves of Academe is an extended treatment of the dangers of stifling, bureaucratic tyranny which are potential in that scenario, and I like CS Lewis's The Silver Chair (the beginning chapters) as a literary example of a progressive school taken a horribly wrong turn.

I think that society's place is to empower the family and the individual child (the Catholic Church calls this subsidiarity -- the larger and less organic institution should not do for the smaller more organic one what it can do for itself -- but Society does have a responsibility to support and help the smaller units). Empowering does not mean taking over, even if the State thinks it can do a more efficient job. For one thing, it can't. For another thing, even if it could, that is not its role.

Laundry

I blew the Internet Regula right after I made it public…. sigh. That always seems to happen. Anyway, I spend a long time writing a post about unschooling on my other blog. IT did help clarify my thoughts but that’s also a good rationalization for spending EVERY day typing for an hour in mid-afternoon and actually brushing my kids away from me. OK! I am resolved to pick myself up and try again.

I didn’t keep a careful log today. We all did the minimal basics and got outside. It was an at-home day. So pretty much a repeat of some of the other days.

A quick note about laundry. I never mention it because it’s one of the only housekeeping things in my life that has never caused a problem beyond temporary glitches when we have been on vacation or have a colicky newborn (when my husband usually ends up taking over the laundry until things are running better). Usually I do the laundry, though the kids pitch in now and then. Right now we don’t even have a dryer which means if I don’t do laundry every day I am in trouble. So I usually put a load in to wash last thing at night and then take it out and hang it in the morning. It’s dry by evening so if we have to do 2 or even 3 loads in a given day I can usually manage it if I strategize. I hang the laundry on our loft rail and it air dries from the warmth rising from the wood stove below (how quaint and mountainy, I know!)

Why is laundry not much of a challenge around here when so many housekeeping things like cooking are hard for me? These are my explanations:

• I don’t have elite athletes in the house, or babies in cloth diapers.
• We don’t change our clothes every day because we don’t go somewhere every day.
• WE don’t go somewhere every day so I’m usually around to transfer clothing from one station to the next.
• We have a large capacity washer/dryer.
• I don’t bother with the extras — softeners, etc — we have lots of skin allergies in this family so simple and natural works best.
• Husband works at home in T shirts and jeans or shorts or sometimes pajamas, so no ironing.
• I put all the boys’ socks and underwear in two separate bins in our laundry room after I wash and roll them, and they get their own out.
• I rather like laundry and wish everything to do with housekeeping was so do-able. My car is always a disaster and cooking is really difficult for me — fussy kids and I just don’t enjoy it, so we don’t have the variety we probably ought to.

Weekly Housekeeping Rotation

Don Knotts

• Tidy Upstairs and Downstairs
• Dust upstairs and downstairs
• Wipe tables and furniture upstairs and downstairs
• Wipe downstairs windows, upstairs TV and monitor screens and sides

Bob Hope

• Sweep main floor, including Frodo's room and pantry
• Mop floor downstairs
• Mop downstairs bathroom floor, laundry room, pantry and lastly Frodo's room

Dennis Day

• Wipe bathroom counters
• Clean upstairs and downstairs bathrooms
• Wipe sides and fronts of oven and refrigerator, and inside bottom of refrigerator

Jerry Lewis

• Keep fire going
• Help with dinner or make dinner once a week
• Do a monthly job

Ambleside Mornings

Cindy at Dominion Family has these posts on Morning Time which are interesting if you are trying to start doing things in a Charlotte Mason way in your homeschool. And here's an older one called A Charlotte Mason Day.

Also, some Timetables from the early Parents' Union Schools and some examples of homeschool schedules.

And a Charlotte Mason Day from Dishpan Dribble.

Unschooling Thoughts

I brought these over from this thread on Real Learning where we were talking about Radical Unschooling -- if there could be a Catholic form:
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Bottom line is, I guess, that I agree with and respect a lot of the RU principles, especially in parenting.

They call it "mindful parenting" which to me is an evocative phrase and sums up a lot of what I am trying to do myself. I think it is very Catholic.

John Bosco says something a bit similar in his ideas on Preventive Discipline.

I actually get stuck more on the education part of it, and as I ponder that, I think it's because education is more artificial than parenting.

Chesterton says children aren't born with an innate desire or natural trigger to learn Greek verb forms or put their collars straight. At most, they are born with the capacity to develop these skills. In some cultures it may not be necessary to learn these things at all. They are only indirectly related to character or moral formation.

A huge percentage of parenting is about modelling (environment) and forming habits in the heart of the domestic church. It takes thought and care but it can happen in a very real and ordinary life. You can teach principles of hygiene, order and regularity, and the Ten Commandments, just by living and reflecting on living.

But "education" meaning enculturation-- it seems that it goes beyond just daily life to what you want to BRING to daily life. Especially in a culture like ours, where we as Christians are called to stand outside it a bit.

That makes no sense: probably I have to drag in Thomas Aquinas. He says that the most effective and "real" way to learn is by discovery, "inventio".

However, it would be difficult and a bit inefficient to learn EVERYTHING simply by discovery. So that's where teaching "disciplina" comes in.

However, teaching should as closely as possible imitate how people learn naturally. Which is what it sounds like you are doing gracefully and "naturally" in your own home, Molly.

Obviously we could easily live life and never learn Latin, and possibly function OK in today's world without it. However, Latin is good and noble to learn, but a mom can do a lot by environment and delightful habits and inspiring ideas to make the children ready to learn Latin and content to do so, and able to learn from it and not be harmed by the methods.

I see that once again, I'd have to write out a long LONG post to really make any sense -- but maybe you can read between the lines?

To say it another way -- in some ways I am trying to teach my children more than I learned myself when I was growing up. So I have to consciously bring things into my home that AREN'T part of my natural normal "default" life. Some of the best things in our home have come about by looking for MORE, that is beyond my own natural scope and beyond our modern-day culture's scope.

I have to think in terms specifically of Education, what I want education to be for my children, to actually reach beyond the ordinary day to day life.

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Pulling the thread off direction just a bit, but do any of you have trouble doing that "blending structure and freedom"? I think the reason I do sometimes is that so often, structure and freedom are seen as opposites. I liked Anne Lahrson Fisher's phrase "protecting play time" because it seemed to say HOW one could balance structure and freedom in order to make life richer for the children, and how the play was the key thing. She said that you can see the effectiveness of the balance in the richness of the childrens' "leisure time". This seemed to fit in with what Nancy Wallace describes and also a bit with how Charlotte Mason talks, as well.


I like the way you describe your homeschool, Leonie. This unschooler of a large family has a concept called "Collaborative Learning" that rings with me. It sounds a bit like the synergy you describe.

Maybe the (secular) radical focus is on the individual, where a Catholic focus is more on the FAMILY as the basic unit of society. Maybe you can have a Catholic radical unschooling if you concentrate on parenting and how that translates into a lifestyle of learning. Anyway, I explored radical unschooling during this spring and summer; what it ended up being was a deschooling time, and that was wonderful. I think we all needed it after the stressful weeks and months and years we had had recently. We did a LOT of talking and the conversation ended up being a great consolidation and reminder of all the children learn informally by strewing and just living.

However, the synergy started to not work as well, the boys were bored and I think my daughter felt a little unsupported in her educational ideals, and we moved away from a completely open-ended way of learning. We still don't do a LOT of sit-down work; I still think that informal learning sticks better than formal. I don't think that what we are doing now is what RUers would describe as truly radical, but it is working.

I truly think that my homeschool works best when I think of seasons and relationships and don't get stuck too much on one "mode" whether it is unschooling or CM or classical or whatever else. We seem to do various blends in different ratios of all of those things at different times; there is a consistency in that I'm never tempted by strict "school at home" or anything overly textbooky or clock-oriented. That kind of thing does not work for my family in any way.

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Molly, quick thoughts on the article which I read with interest -- I always find Alfie Kohn interesting---

First, it sounded like he was critiquing the limitations of standardized tests or a "cultural literacy" focus in measuring true education. ED Hirsch is the proponent of a core of knowledge ( here's a sample article by him which Kohn refers to a bit scornfully as a "bunch o' facts".

I agree with Kohn about the limitations of standardized testing and cultural literacy as a measurement of true education but I don't scorn them quite as much as he does. They may be insufficient but their limitations are in their insufficiency more than their essential wrongness. Whereas some other measurements he proposes strike me as truly wrong and rather scary -- they would be too subjective and rely too much on the judgement of "experts" whom I have no reason to trust at all.


I would strongly resist any measurement such as this one

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For example, Nel Noddings, professor emerita at Stanford University, urges us to reject "the deadly notion that the schools' first priority should be intellectual development" and contends that "the main aim of education should be to produce competent, caring, loving, and lovable people."

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YIKES. Makes me awfully glad I homeschool and don't have to worry about my kids EVER being measured by someone else's view of what competent, caring and lovable people are. (BY the way, to be fair I don't think Mr Kohn was holding this up as an example of a better way: he goes on to say:

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In short, perhaps the question "How do we know if education has been successful?" shouldn't be posed until we have asked what it's supposed to be successful at.

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So he is saying that we can't determine whether education is successful until we determine what it is to succeed AT, which is a good point.

What is the radical unschoolers' goal in educating their children? I think they want their children to love learning and to learn that learning is inseparable from real life. I also think a strong element of "autonomy" creeps in there.... ie all persons, including children, should have a right to determine their own fate. This is true in one sense, but untrue in another since our Catholic faith teaches us that we are not essentially the pilots of our own destiny. God is. I think children are deserving of the same dignity and respect that is given to adults. However, like the rest of us children are under God's authority. I think you COULD radically unschool with a respect for that truth -- I've seen people on the Catholic unschooling list who are doing this or something very close.

But that emphasis on individual autonomy that creeps into secular radical unschooling throws off my moral compass -- it does not acknowledge the reality of society as I know it, as a community, as a Body with different components each separate but also functioning together, as we heard at Mass last week.

I think you're SO right about the strewing!

Do you think I'm missing something about the point of the article?

I am not an educational reformer, thank heavens, so I don't have to propose general educational measures as Hirsch and Kohn do in their different ways. I would like my kids to have a broad, generous background of knowledge about the world, not just the society we live in today but the past and the future. I would like them to have enough "knowledge" about the world to be able to develop a philosophical habit of mind, ie a habit of being able to look at the big picture and not get stuck in some narrow-focused ghetto of ideas and facts.

Sorry, this is getting rambling and I don't have time to shorten it.

Oh, I wanted to add that I think an unschooling approach -- a free, collaborative, relationship-oriented approach -- can meet a LOT of these goals in a very organic way. I guess I don't completely agree with either Kohn or Hirsch -- I think the truth is somewhere else altogether and is something to do with family relationships and developing a sense of vocation.

Internet Regula/Resolution

In response to this thread on internet communities I started an informal Internet Regula for myself which went like this:

• Read and write mostly when everyone is asleep.
• Don't do this every night.
• Do research and quick specific emails during the day.
• Have a notebook to log what I want to accomplish online so I don't drift.
• Also, log what I did in order to keep track.
• Pray: AMDG -- devote internet time to God.

It made me realize that in the theme of Celebrating Abundance, I might be more grateful for the gifts the internet gives me if I back off just a bit. So that was an informal New Years' Resolution that I didn't post because I wanted to make sure I could keep it!

It was hard, which is a good sign -- muscle burn! Though it has been getting easier over time and now I have some habits to replace the old ones. Our chair by the fireplace is a great help! I also notice that I'm more keyed into what's going on around the house, and staying off the computer myself helps me keep the children away from the screen a bit more.

I think I was wrapping too much of my identity up online, which made it less "real". I wonder if this is universally true -- getting overinvolved makes things "less real", whereas a bit of detachment and "agency" puts things in a more real light. A half-formed thought there, and half-formed it will have to stay.

I notice that it's difficult to get back into the swing of things when I am not on here as much. I could easily drop off almost completely, though I've been trying to keep up with my online journal.

Karen E posted these guidelines for regulating things in our lives, according to St Ignatius:

• Things/people God wants us to enjoy

• Things/people God wants us to endure (or suffer)

• Things/people God wants us to remove (because they lead us to sin)

• Things/people God wants us to sacrifice (willingly give up, even though they don't lead us to sin)

She also has posted a prayer to St Isidore that you can say before going online:

Almighty and eternal God, who created us in Thy image and bade us to seek after all that is good, true and beautiful, especially in the divine person of Thy only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, grant we beseech Thee that, through the intercession of Saint Isidore, bishop and doctor, during our journeys through the internet we will direct our hands and eyes only to that which is pleasing to Thee and treat with charity and patience all those souls whom we encounter. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Angels Fly,,,,

My husband read aloud this bit to us from the American Chesterton Society. He read it in Gilbert which is one of our favorite magazines.

Pope Benedict is quoted as saying:

I'm not a man who constantly thinks up jokes. But I think it's very important to be able to see the funny side of life and its joyful dimension and not to take everything too tragically. I'd also say it's necessary for my ministry. A writer once said that angels can fly because they don't take themselves too seriously. Maybe we could also fly a bit if we didn't think we were so important.

My husband has liked this particular Chesterton quote for a long time. He even put it on his website which also contains some scans of some Chesterton first editions and other memorabilia that he owns. I thought it was funny that the Pope remembered the same line that has become part of our family anthology of proverbs. The original is:

Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.

Dr Thursday points out that in context, Chesterton was comparing angels to the devil:

For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.

A Few Links about Parenting

• Intimations of Immortality
• Thy Children as Olive Plants
• Legionary Parenthood
• Legion Meditations
• Become as LIttle Children
• My review of CM
• Imagination of CHildren
• Parenting Like Jesus
• CHildren and Scripture

Charlotte Mason Resolutions

(Clare Francis and Patrick Gabriel -- when I first discovered CM, through reading For the Children's Sake, Clare was not much older than Patrick is now)'

I mentioned that one of my New Years Resolutions was to read Charlotte Mason's Home Education. I have been following Amyable's CM Blog and also marking up my own copy at home. The Simply Charlotte Mason blog has a series going on Habits which is good reading, and we may have a Real Learning discussion of one of her books. I thought I would like to write down some notes on here as I read through Home Education, partly trying to understand her words in their context and as she intended them (I by no means claim to be an expert) and partly to ponder about how her ideas have influenced my homeschooling and mothering and what I intend to do or think about as a result of the rereading.