trying to catch the little sparkles in the stream

Things to love, do and think about this week:

• Spring — the outdoors — all that is going on out there –“Let children] once get touch (sic) with nature, and a habit is formed which will be a source of delight through his life.” –Home Education, pg. 61
• Aidan’s “learning to read through writing” project
• Paddy’s counting (he is fascinated by numbers and there are some flashcards up to 20 here at Jan Brett’s page).
• Aidan’s large motor therapy and stretching exercises.
• Sean and Kieron — continue their checklists through May — Latin, grammar and outlining in first priority for me to help them with.
• “Being there” — being mindful. (this site I linked to derives the attitude from Eastern spirituality but my Catholic faith has a somewhat similar concept of the habit or disposition of “recollection”). Charlotte Mason calls it attentiveness.
• Getting back to my Internet Regula.
• Holos

It is Impossible to Say Just What I Mean

Goodbye, Poetry Month!

To usher out the month --
-- Love Song of Alfred Prufrock is one of my favorite poems of all time. I was just rereading it in the car today. My husband needed a root canal so I coming with him so I could drive him back (it is a 50 mile trip).

The poem is too long to paste on here in its entirety. My father loved this part and used to declaim it often:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

He also liked this one:

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

So when I read Prufrock in college I felt I already knew the poem a bit from this childhood association. I have read the poem many times since then; each time getting something different out of it. Even the ellipses and pauses speak, elegiacally.

Today I particularly noticed this part -- I didn't remember when I quoted Eliot in my post about Hamlet that he actually mentions Hamlet in this poem:

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."
. . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

The Wine-Dark Sea has a quote from an article about TS Eliot (the whole thing is here) :

Think of the world as divided between things easily labelled and things just barely describable. Civilians work with the easily labelled things, but when something just barely describable confronts us, we call in the language marines: poets. But then, out beyond that, there’s Eliot and the type of poetry he represents. It’s another step beyond. It agrees that special tactics need to be applied to the nearly-unspeakable. Eliot argued that, given the way the twentieth century was turning out, “it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it appears at present, must be difficult.” Why?

Because in a complex world, “the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”

Paddy's Reading

Paddy’s reading:
Paddy has been interested in this Harper Collins Treasure of Picture Books. I got it on a bookstore remainder rack and it’s a nice book, though the quality of the selections vary. His favorites right now seem to be Harold and the Purple Crayon, and Caps for Sale. In the past he preferred Goodnight Moon. Personally, Harold has always made me feel a bit dizzy, like I was going into an existential tailspin. What’s this about nothing real around him except what he draws with his crayon? I still feel an echo of the vertigo I felt as a child when I realized he would not actually get back to any kind of real home — he would have to draw his own home. I guess that was when I first confronted Descartes and Kant and became a material Aristotlean…. LOL. But Caps for Sale is one of my all time favorite stories. Everything about it is perfect… it has clarity, completeness and balance. * All my kids have loved it too, particularly the pattern oriented ones.

He has been asking for stories twice a day so I am probably reading to him for close to an hour and a half per day. He has been having lots of meltdowns recently so I wonder if he is on the verge of one of those developmental leaps. Those often seem to accompany or precede or sometimes follow growth. Another explanation could be the spring weather or the increased responsibility he has nowadays with his T ball and having to pick up after himself. Or maybe it is the fact that we have had more sweets around the house since Easter. So difficult to tell sometimes.

The boys have accomplished their checklists. In the outlining book, Sean is at the point now where he reads a paragraph and then decides which of the topic statements best represent what the paragraph is about. This has been difficult for him in the past but obviously he’s moved ahead in his reading comprehension ability because now he picked it out without difficulty.

Kieron and I are on adjectives, in Simply Grammar. SG classifies articles as adjectives… Hmm. And copulas as verbs. Hmm. I wonder if that will be confusing later on. I think this is one reason why I always dropped the book previously, with the other kids. But I think I will keep going this time and then go from there later on with something more analytical, like Harvey’s. Just pondering. Kieron enjoys making up his own sentences in the book’s exercises though of course, like most 11 year old boys, he wants to make up silly sentences. I wonder if Charlotte Mason knew this about boys that age.

Aidan has been using the V Tech Phonics board to spell words.

*(NB — found this Waldorf article about painting when I was looking for the Aquinas requirements for beauty– which is, in case you are interested:

“For beauty there are three requirements: First, a certain wholeness or perfection, for whatever is incomplete is, so far, ugly;
second, a due proportion or harmony;
and third, clarity, so that brightly colored things are called beautiful.”

Of Operas and Sparkling Streams

The other day my daughter went to see opera Manon Lescaut with some friends. The dress she wore was one she made herself. She buys second hand "retro" patterns online and sews them up with my sewing machine, which is almost the same age as she is.

I was thinking that this is another one of those life things that would be trivialized if you tried to put them in scope and sequence, academic terms. Sure, you could write sewing down for home economics and the opera down as a music elective. There is nothing wrong with doing that in my mind if it helps the child to reach future life goals like, say, for college or vocation.

But if you thought that was really what the sewing and music were about, you would be missing the point. There is so much more here -- a memory, a way of living life, a connection with the community, aspirations and dreams. More still. To put it into formal educational terms would thin it out. There have been times in the past, to be truthful, when I have spoiled the richness of one of the childrens' endeavours by too quickly casting it in "educational" terms.

It is one of the minor sadnesses to me in homeschooling that I have to pay attention to these things, and it is ironic that the more I am trying to unschool, the more pressure I feel to assign educational value to rich, organic experiences and projects.

JoVE wrote:

I also wonder whether as homeschoolers, we feel some pressure to identify all the learning that happens and claim it for part of the homeschooling process. I suspect those who follow a more structured curriculum don't feel the pressure to do this but those of us who are more unstructured .....may feel that we need to identify the learning in an activity to demonstrate that the unstructured approach does lead to this culturally desirable outcome.

I think that it was perceptive of JoVE to say that sometimes unschoolers have the temptation to put "life" into little ticky tacky "learning" boxes. In our honest desire to show that learning takes place naturally and richly in life, we may sometimes find ourselves reducing "Life" into little categories that don't do justice to what the actual experience is about.



I love the idea of "learning all the time" and think that desire for knowledge is one of the core desires of the human being.

Aristotle writes:

All men by nature desire to know.

John Holt writes:

“Among the many things I have learned about children, learned by many, many years of hanging out with them, watching carefully what they do, and thinking about it, is that children are natural learners.

“The one thing we can be sure of, or surest of, is that children have a passionate desire to understand as much of the world as they can, even what they cannot see and touch, and as far as possible to acquire some kind of skill, competence, and control in it and over it. Now this desire, this need to understand the world and be able to do things in it, the things the big people do, is so strong that we could properly call it biological. It is every bit as strong as the need for food, for warmth, for shelter, for comfort, for sleep, for love. In fact, I think a strong case could be made that is might be stronger than any of these.

“A hungry child, even a tiny baby who experiences hunger as real pain, will stop eating or nursing or drinking if something interesting happens, because that little child wants to see what it is. This curiosity, this desire to make some kind of sense out of things, goes right to the heart of the kind of creatures that we are.”

I think that there is truth in Frank Smith's idea that learning is something that most often comes in the course of something else -- trying to become like what is around us and chiefly, what we identify with and feel we belong to. This seems similar what the Greeks thought about "paideia" -- the process by which children grow into their heritage, their birthright. It may be like Chesterton says -- that it's when we aren't functioning well that we tend to think about our functioning. Kids don't usually think: "What am I learning?" They just learn.

However, as I wrote in JoVE's comment box, I think it is very possible that in our society, where there is a temptation to think of the human being in terms of "worker" and production value, not the broader human value -- there might also be a corresponding temptation to think of the child's learning as his "work" and over-obsess on his learning, while reducing it to things we can measure and identify. You notice, and JoVe mentioned, all the "educational" toys out there. Not that they are objectively bad, but there is something to be wary about in restricting a child's explorations to phonics and shapes and colors when he has the mental equipment and energy and absorptive power to tackle the richness of the entire universe.

I think some homeschooling mom angst may spring from the fact that we are often, not always, staying home and giving up a paycheck to do this homeschooling, and feel an unconscious pull to justify our existence and our workload by showing lots of achievement-oriented results. And there is also a temptation to watch our children carefully and anxiously and fret about whether they are really learning or perhaps just "wasting their time".

JoVE's post brought up the question to me: "Is there anything that could be called "NOT-learning?"" Of course, this is the quintessential unschooling question. But what she wrote made me see it again from the other side. The rushing current and the silent rocks underneath the top, sparkling part of the stream; the hidden seeds under the ground long before they sprout and perhaps, become mighty sequoias or flourishing lilacs. Not that all of life is about learning, but that all learning springs from life.

Resolve: to get back to "mindfulness". Try to see the sparkles in the stream and maybe, what is underneath them. Which means I need to slow down on this pondering and step back from the computer for a while!

My daughter writes about her sewing and patterns here.

Related posts from the archives:

Vertical Relevance
Marshmallows and Thoroughbreds
Value of Play
Mindful Learning

Streaming the Year

I am going to stream consciousness about this past year and how it’s gone in terms of homeschooling.

I started this blog almost a year ago while I was experimenting with “total unschooling”. I wanted a way to record and reflect upon what was happening in our days. I continued this during the summer.

I see that by September, though the days were still pretty unschool-y, I had started Kieron on Saxon 65, and I was doing some casual phonics with Aidan and Paddy.

By December I was immersed in processing information about Visual Spatial Learners. One of the main results of this was that I felt better about moving to a kind of eclectic type of homeschooling where we had some type of collaborative structure along with plenty of open time. It is hard to explain, but my concept of unschooling had locked out my sense of agency. The concept of collaborative learning and the understanding of the right-brained learner helped me get to the other side of the tangle I was in. I still can’t quite put it into words, as you might notice, but the difficulty resolved and now I just have to give it time to come closer to the surface to where I can verbalize it a bit better.

By January I had moved to a learning notes format as we worked through an Ambleside-type literature-based weekly schedule. We continued this through about March. Now in April, I recognize that the nice weather and other things going on meant that we were going to be distracted from the books and the winter daily rhythm would change a bit, so I strategized to put formal academics back to a minimum while I did some planning and pondering. (mostly the latter so far).

What is the point of this incredibly self-referential post? Well, I liked Owl’s Year in Review and thought that something like that would be a good way to get a perspective on what’s been happening in our homeschool. While I was thinking about it, I realized that this blog has provided me with the best record I’ve ever made of a homeschool year. Naturally, it by no means covered EVERYTHING, but there is a little cross-section of our year here.

Where do I see us going from this point? Well, during the summer I want to go back to recording the natural learning that takes place during a day. I missed that when I started logging specific curriculum-oriented details. I found the curriculum details useful in keeping us going and keeping me focused on the academic stuff, but I had less motivation to talk about those other things that happened in the day that were important but that didn’t fit into a “subject box”. Summer will give me some space to get back to that. There were some interesting posts in this series on “Learning Days” that made me think that it’s time for me to key in on connecting with my kids again. (I seem to do that cycle over and over!)

Next year, Clare will be a senior, Sean will be a freshman, and I think it will very likely be Aidan’s year to really get going on reading. So I see us continuing a Charlotte Mason/Classical type format with lots of literature, and steady progress in a few skills that I think are important. Last spring, I remember writing about how uneasy and “left out” I felt because I wasn’t looking over books and making plans. This year, I don’t see why this was such a big issue — why I didn’t think I could plan and prepare for what I thought the next year would bring, unschooling or not. If we go on a vacation, I plan and prepare even though I expect we will be doing most things spontaneously and willingly. Ideally, the preparation makes it possible to enjoy oneself more. Why should that not be the case with unschooly planning?

Unschooling acknowledges that there is more to learning than academics, more to life than learning. This is a bigger box, not a smaller one. I am not sure why for a few months I struggled with unschooling as claustrophobic. I think perhaps I defined it in such a way that it became a locked room rather than a spacious place. I think there are probably times when unschooling requires letting go of something that one has relied upon in the past, and that can give you an uncertain and floundering feeling for a while, but if it feels like oxygen-starvation it probably isn’t really what unschooling is about. Perhaps, to put it another way, there is a temporary oxygen-deprived feeling when you are exerting yourself, doing something new, climbing a slope to find a new view. But a longterm choking sensation like you are walking deep into a coal mine probably is something different.

Anyway, those are my thoughts right now — trying to see reflections in a stream! Seeing lot of little sparkling lights, but not getting much depth of perception!

What IS Learning, Anyway?

To add to Karen's Loads of Good Learning collection:

JoVE wrote a post about a good(learning) day and and Melanie wrote about some of my comments and related the habits of a (homeschooling) mother to the way we approach prayer.

JoVE writes:

I do recognize good days. But not all of those days are good learning days. Some good days are good because Tigger learns a lot. Some good days are good for other reasons. My response to the original question might challenge the terms of the question and address the "elephant in the room" which is a certain amount of understandable anxiety that homeschooling ignites. I might say, not every day will be a good learning day. But that's okay. Observe your children. Approach the task of parenting, schooling, and just being in relationship with them in a thoughtful and loving way. Trust yourself to do the best you can. And forgive yourself when you make mistakes.

I think that the original What Makes a Learning Day? came about because Theresa was answering the question of a friend about how much is enough and how you can tell. The friend was, from what Theresa wrote, a homeschooler who was attracted to a more flexible project-based learning style but unsure of how to make it "measure up" in the way we are accustomed in our society to measure learning. Now that JoVE points it out, I realize that all of us in our own ways have been trying to answer the question within that frame of reference, because it is commonly asked by people who see our more organic mode of homeschooling and wonder how it can be "enough". If I relate her elephant analogy to the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant, sometimes we are trying to explain our understanding of the elephant to someone else who is sensing a different part, perhaps only a single part, and we are hoping (unlike the blind men, who were stuck in their own mode of sensing) to get perspective on the whole thing in the process and lend understanding to others.

And yes, I am sure most of us deal with that anxiety about the elephant at some points too. I know there are some days where I can't see what we DO have because I'm fretting about something that is not happening.

Melanie compares homeschooling to prayer and writes:

When I was a teacher at the state college, one of my biggest frustrations was the wall of separation between my faith and my work. I love teaching, but I often felt like I was spinning my wheels and getting nowhere. I know homeschooling will have plenty of those frustrating days, but at the same time it will be rooted in Love in a way that my teaching career never could be, much as I tried to breach that wall. When I contemplate my decision to homeschool Bella, I feel as if I've finally connected the dots. I've found my vocation at last, to be both a teacher and a mother.

I think she is pointing to the truth that homeschooling is almost by definition an aspect of our mothering, our parenting. We homeschool because it seems to be the best way to be a parent. When my sixth child Aidan was in the hospital for months and my oldest, Liam, was just entering "the high school years" at the same time, my husband and I confronted this directly. Before that, we largely took for granted that our homeschooling was part of our parenting. They flowed together fairly seamlessly.

But we found that parenting during that crisis situation meant putting other things in front of the academic "learning" side of homeschooling. Suddenly survival and nurturing were way on the front burner. Other things had to step back. We had always known that our homeschooling was about something way more than just "schooling" but that was a turning point in confronting that we were parents first of all and that homeschooling integrally derived from that. In other words, that homeschooling was still homeschooling even when the learning process was practically the last thing on our minds.

There were days when after I came home from hours of holding my critically ill infant and holding back tears, all I could manage to do with my other kids was cuddle them while they watched a cartoon. And that was OK, because that was meeting a need that was much more foundational than the academic one. The kids could catch up on the academics (and did). But if I pushed aside our need to connect and be there for each other because "now it's time to do school" then I would be choosing the lesser part. It would be building a house on sand because according to Aquinas, Maslow and many others, what society considers "learning" is built on a foundation of other things -- trust, attachment, interaction, safety. Without what we sum up as Love, the effort to "teach" kids often teaches them the wrong lessons, or simply has no influence at all. We see that going on in the public schools where the efforts to systemize learning end up breaking it loose from the very things that make learning possible.

Frank Smith writes about this in LEarning and Forgetting, the book I was blogging about recently. He writes that "you learn by the company you keep". I want to write more about this book some other time, but for right now I want to focus on the part that relates to this point. He says that in the context of a relationship, of identification with what he calls a "club", you learn almost effortlessly, as a byproduct of your association with that "club". In other words, as JoVe was saying, "Learning" is not the main thing about life. That would seem to make "learning" a goal, whereas it's actually a process. Smith would seem to say that when a person finds a group with whom he identifies himself -- for most people, their first "group" is their family -- he effortlessly acquires a complex array of skills, attitudes and contextual information. These things lead to further things, but they can't really be isolated from each other, and "learning" can't be isolated from all the things that make learning possible, and the things that make learning into something that is valuable.

I think of my youngest child, Paddy. Last evening I read to him for almost an hour. We read, first, Winnie the Pooh, then Beatrix Potter's Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, then a Bible story about Noah's Ark, then "Follow the Drinking Gourd" about the underground railroad and slavery. When I consider the richness of this experience, "learning" seems like a thin word. Sure, he was learning, but that wasn't the first thing on our minds, any more than you think of your breathing when you are feeling wonderfully healthy. Sitting together on the bed, our eyes on the same page, my voice putting into spoken form the written words that are yet inaccessible to him, while he studied the pictures and asked questions like "Mr McGregor didn't know the bunnies had gotten out of the bag?" He chose the books himself, but of course they were books that were available for him to choose. I noticed that much of the language was fairly difficult -- words like "soporific" and concepts like "slavery" which he certainly couldn't have defined or passed a test on. Yet he was comprehending the stories and they were obviously resonating with him, because his attention was rapt.

I wasn't reading to him in order to "teach him something". We were sharing something we both loved, and sharing time with each other. In the process, we were both learning, but as a byproduct. Smith says that while we experiencing life in our "club", we are not only learning, but we are learning how to learn and what learning is for. This is a complex yet natural operation, like the operations of our circulatory or sensory system. Charlotte Mason talks about the "Science of Relations" ; perhaps this is another way of saying "you learn by the company you keep."

Ponderings and Plannings

My old friend Cindy at It’s About the Journey has written a series of posts on planning from an unschool-y perspective:

• Planning with a Light Touch
• A Little More on Planning
• Put on Your Oxygen Mask Before You Secure Your Child’s
  

I am going to use these as thinking material as I go through this process too. Also, I have been thinking about learning over on my other blog.

What Children Know Already

It seems to happen every spring that I start into heavy-duty pondering and planning mode. My husband is a computer game designer, and the process I go through is similar to the process he goes through as he is starting to work on a new game. He walks around with a notebook. He reads a few books or plays a few games. He talks — What if? How about ..? Look at…? To an outsider it might look as if he’s not doing much, it might even look scattered, but from seeing him go through this process every year or so for 25 years now, I know what will happen next. He’ll take his notebook into his office and get very quiet. Then he’ll start talking about nuts and bolts — “how can I ? what can I? Here’s what I’ll…” He starts implementing and problem-solving. At the very end, when he’s finalling, there’s a period when he spends almost the whole day in his office. When he comes out, he’s distracted. He complains about the game, he’s heartily sick of it. He’s putting the last little touches on it, taking it from 80% to 98% (he knows better than to spend these last days on that last 2% because complete perfectionism defeats the purpose of getting the thing done well and out the door. So many game designers have a game that they’ve never gotten out the door so they never actually become real game designers. So that last 2% of perfectionist energy goes to carrying over what he learned to the next game and the next).

Of course, homeschooling is different because it is about my kids’ learning, not primarily what I do to help them learn. But still, I notice that sometimes I feel I’m stalling; my mind’s in wide net mode, catching useless fish as well as the good ones. I’m wandering. I’m reading and getting lots of good ideas, but I don’t know how to fit them in…yet. That’s where I am now. It’s similar to his conceptual stage of planning.

At some point I know it’s time to move on. The instinct usually kicks in several days before I actually follow it. Right now I’m feeling the intuition but I can’t seem…to…get… there. I feel like I’m spinning my wheels. At that point I usually ask some of my homeschool friends, “What are you doing next year?” or sometimes answer their similar questions. I just need a way to get where I can dig in.
I think I may have to start rambling on in this blog hoping to pin down some of my planning details. It won’t be pretty. I have to work out senior year for one child, freshman year for another, sixth grade for another, and kindergarten/first grade for my special needs child. Of course, these will be the Big Picture plans and then there will still be the implementation, the course corrections, the little picture logistical details which come up as we go along.
Meanwhile my kids have been reading — going outside — playing DOG with the basketball set-up — playing duplos, designing computer games and storyboards — and heading out to various activities like T ball, music practice and homeschool meeting this afternoon. I am spending time with them still but I feel unfocused, and a bit out of touch with what’s going on in their heads. We have had scrambled meals all week — you know, those ones where you dig through the freezer at 5pm to see what you can scramble together in the least possible amount of time. Never mind optimum nutrition; convenience and calories are the key words.
No point here, just describing what’s happening. Since it’s happened so many times before I think it must be just how things tend to operate. I want it to work FOR me instead of either getting frustrated and guilty about it or using it as an excuse to completely lapse on everything. I’m trying to think in terms of rhythms and not just day to day regimentation. In the long run I see that these pondering, stalling times pay off. There are so many times when I’ve been able to informally guide or mentor my kids because I have adjusted my oxygen mask (in Cindy’s great analogy) before adjusting theirs.

I think Sean has kept up with his checklist but I’m not sure how Kieron is doing. Aidan is so cool — he does his handwriting practice and picking up marble with toes exercise EVERY day. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and the HWT book is on my back. That is a motivated kid.

What Children Know Already

Melissa at The Lilting House wrote a post continuing the dialogue about What Makes a Good Learning Day? One of the things she said was:

Charlotte Mason talked about narration as a technique for discovering what a student actually knows about a subject, as opposed to various testing strategies that in effect show what the student doesn't know. She wasn't writing from a self-esteem-boosting, "focus on the positive" standpoint; she talks about the subject in a very pragmatic manner, suggesting that the positive information (what the student knows) is far more useful for both student and teacher than a paper full of wrong answers, because in looking at what the student remembers about a subject well enough to narrate it, we see how the student connects with the knowledge, forms a relationship with it.

This puts into words something I was pondering in the back of my mind yesterday when I was writing about Aidan's IEP on my learning notes blog. I wrote:

IEPs serve a useful purpose in that they let you see progress and get some ideas for things to work on. I know this is not the experience for every parent of an SN child but I think they work for us because we aren’t really expecting much out of the school system and they don’t think they have ownership over him. So it’s usually just a conversation about progress and future direction.

And that makes it something I look forward to and find to be an important part of my homeschool plans for Aidan. An important part of my homeschooling life is noticing what my children DO know. Unschooling, Montessori, and Charlotte Mason all make generous provisions for this. Unschooling requires observing and living alongside the child attentively. Montessori requires attentiveness too. Charlotte Mason makes use of narration and other methods that bring out and expand on what the student already knows and gives him room to freely expand his knowledge through exposure to the "best things". To an extent, though the emphasis is different, the methods overlap.

IEPs are a schooly sort of way to do this. When Aidan first came home from the hospital with an assortment of medical and therapeutic needs, and I had my first highschooler at the same time, I bought a book called Evaluating for Excellence. The book is full of helpful checklists. If you have a teacher background or the kind of temperament that likes checklists and a way to organize flexible homeschool learning, it is well worth looking at. (there are some nice checklists at Highland Heritage, too, for organization and evaluation) I don't have that kind of temperament, but I did benefit from some of the principles. Among the ideas was that informal, homeschool IEPs can be useful too. In simple terms, it pays off to spend some time at the beginning and end of the year observing your children, seeing what they can do and then drafting out a few goals for their coming year. I've made a habit of doing this informally two or three times a year. It's usually a good thing to do when we're just coming away from a vacation. Rather than start right in "full steam", we start with a few basics and I observe, and think, and plan.

Another aspect of taking time to look at progress is the chance to celebrate. When Aidan did his IEP it was encouraging to realize that some of the issues that had concerned me at the beginning of the year were now non-issues or not nearly so formidable. Some of his goals weren't fully met and were "carried over". But many others were exceeded.

I think perhaps Charlotte Mason intended the end of term "exams" to be somewhat the same type of thing without the artificial element of formal IEPs. The children and teachers got a chance to see what had come out of their year of learning. This also has the benefit of giving a sort of closure to one learning period and reinforcing what was learned.

When I am streamlining my curriculum for spring, for example, part of this is so that I can spend more time informally hanging out with my children and planning for next year, and noticing where we have come from last year. I also seem to spend a lot more time blogging during these days, and I think that's because it helps me revisit my homeschool vision and ponder course corrections!

Kitchen Aids

My two kitchen "Aids":
Aidan and the KitchenAid.
Couldn't manage without them!


It's still cold enough in the Sierra Mountains to bake spice cookies, so that is what we did last night.

This is my teenager's favorite cookie recipe:

5 cups flour
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp ginger
1 tsp soda
1/2 tsp salt

1. 5 cups butter, softened
2.5 cups brown sugar
0.5 cup molasses
2 eggs

a small amount of white sugar to roll the dough in.
-----------

Blend in ingredients, form into balls of about 1 tbsp (we make them a bit bigger than that), roll them in white sugar and flatten them onto lightly greased baking sheet. Cook at 375 degrees for about 12 minutes (more time if you like them to be crispier)

Spring Forward to Fitness

Some of my Real Learning friends have started a fitness blog:

Lean but not Mean

The Bookworm recently wrote a post: Mean, but not Lean~!
(Ah, another chiasmus!)

She writes:

I'm trying out exercise videos and DVDs that I can fit into my normal day. My main criteria for choosing is cost. Given that I have no idea what sort of exercise routine I would like, having not done this before, I'm trying to pick up a selection of cheap used or discounted tapes and DVDs to try out. Hence the "mean, but not lean" title of this post (the "not lean" part speaks for itself!).

I think this is a good idea.

My daughter wrote about exercising

"A man ought to take exercise not because he is too fat, but because he loves foils or horses or high mountains, and loves them for their own sake."

Wise advice from G.K. Chesterton! Why must people always go on special exercise plans? Why all the stress and concern about not having worked out enough that day? Why the sighs because one is bored with what they're doing, or because one simply doesn't want to work out one day?

Why not simply do something you love, and let the results come as a side effect?

SO -- so far

1. Fit exercise into your normal day.
2. Do something active that you love to do, and let fitness come as a side effect.

Any more tips? I think that while "in the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love" -- for over-40 moms like me, spring brings thoughts of trying to get a bit more fitness into one's life. ... or to get oneself to fit into one's clothes from last spring. Hmm, can't seem to manage a chiasmus of my own yet. Maybe I need to stretch a bit more.

Oh, one more thing!

some studies have shown that several short (10 minute) workouts per day provide many of the benefits of one longer (30 minute) workout. So for those who don't "have time" or like me get bored or lose focus during long workouts, some of these ideas may be helpful.

More Thinking...

Thank you all for the Thinking Blogger meme tags! I count four of them! I am very grateful.

All the people who tagged me have posts that I have wanted to link to for a while, anyway, so this is a good opportunity.

from:

Mother Auma ( here, streaming her consciousness on Books, and this is just one of her posts that have made me think and resolve to try a little harder)
Faith at Dumb Ox Academy (her plans! and her journalling about her days)
Bookworm (I am saving her post on Art and Music resources to use for my planning next year )
Ladybug Mommy (check out her post on a Recipe for Classical Learning)

Very blessed to know all you perceptive writers and thinkers, and I know there are many more. Here is my original post trying to continue the meme, but it was SOOO hard. There were so many more than five out there.

It was fun gathering all these keeper posts; I'm thinking of making it a regular habit.....

Spring Schedule

As winter turns to spring, we traditionally seem to rely on workbooks and simple texts more than we do the rest of the year. There are a few reasons for this.

• One is that we used to prep for standardized tests during the spring season, and some of the habits still remain even though there has been no need to do the testing in recent years.
• Another is that this is a distractible time of year both for me and for the kids. I want to spring clean and prepare for next year and they want to be outside. Simple workbooks and texts can be done in Charlotte Mason style "short lessons", often orally with a chance for discussion and thinking.
• Another reason is that spring tends to be the time when I am looking over the past year and seeing what we didn't do that I meant to get to. There are usually a few basic subjects that need to be wrapped up or sometimes reviewed and consolidated, and several discovery-oriented areas -- art and nature come to mind -- that got pushed into last place. So telescoping the formal curricula into a few quick n easy lessons and then leaving big blocks of time that can be used for nature rambles or messy crafts or digging through supplementary books and resources seems to work well for that reason too.

So here is what we have been using for my 11 year old and 14 year old to finish off the last month of the spring term:- this is all very nuts and bolts but I think I have been too theoretical recently on here so maybe this is an antidote!

Kieron's Year 5 Checklist (pdf)
Sean's Year 8 Checklist (pdf)
--I print these out for them and they check things off as they do them.

Kieron Year 5


Kieron is using Latina Christiana. We are reviewing now. On alternate days we go through Simply Grammar together. The grammar concepts can be reinforced and consolidated from one language to the other.


For Greek, he is using Hey Andrew -- level one. It is a very slow-paced introduction to koine Greek..... at this level mostly writing practice. One of the reasons I've started him off in this book is because he still needs some work on fine motor control. This gives him some intellectual challenge while he is doing it. He can work on this one on his own.

For Religion he is reading the last few chapters of Credo I Believe. It is a simple but solid catechism book with nice art masterpieces. He reads and we discuss the text and the artwork.

On alternate days he reads chapters from the Old Testament section of Schuster's Bible History. This is written in old-fashioned language and at the end of each chapter there are questions which he uses as narration starters.

For math right now he is using various computer drills.

For science, he has started getting kits from the Young Scientist's Club. This is fun for him and provides a sort of base for various extra readings and activities. I forget who recommended it on the Real Learning board but I am grateful. It is just the thing for him!


Sean, Year 8

Sean has finished his Key to Algebra and so for the rest of the year he is doing computer drill and reviews for math. Around August he will move into Jacob's Algebra.

For Latin he has just started Henle Latin 1. He already knows most of the vocabulary in the book so this will give him a chance to focus on grammar.

He is doing a book called Thirty Lessons in Outlining. Unfortunately it seems to be out of print since the only place I can find it is at Amazon for 70$$! It is not worth that, but it is a useful resource.

He is using Hey Andrew book 3 for Greek. It's possible to start the course from this point and move a bit quicker. He used Basic Greek in 30 Minutes a Day in the past and we may go back to that when he is in 9th grade next year.

For religion and a bit of history, he is reading The Story of the Church. He will probably only get up to early modern times before the start of summer, and then for fall we plan to do a US History course.

For religion, he is finishing up the 8th grade Faith and Life: Our Life in the Church. This ties in with his history of Christendom course this year.


The boys continue to read for a large part of the day and spend time outdoors and doing various projects. I use my other blog to write out the details.

Sean is reading his way through history. And Kieron is reading from the Mater Amabilis booklist.

As we phase into summer we will be doing lots more nature study in our National Forest, travelling, and hopefully gardening! We haven't gotten rid of our snow yet here in the Sierras, though, so gardening won't happen for a little while. In the past, summer has always been a time to pursue a few interests and hobbies and also get a bit of advance work done for next year. I will be trying to work a bit more seriously with the little ones on reading and literature themes, this summer, too. But more on all that some other time.

Augustine on Learning and Teaching

I love connections like this -- just thought I'd share.

I am reading Religious Potential of the Child by Sophia Cavaletti, and I found a quote by Saint Augustine that I've been hunting for for years -- couldn't remember where I had originally found it and so I kept googling but of course, coming up with all sorts of things that didn't help me.

". . . Who is so foolishly curious that he would send his son to school in order to learn what the teacher thinks? But all those disciplines that teachers claim to teach, even those of virtue and wisdom, they explain with words. Then those who are called students consider within themselves whether what was said is true, each consulting that inner truth according tho his own ability. Thus they learn." (De Magistro)

Also--

"One who hears (a teacher) likewise sees those things with an inner and individual eye. He knows the matter of which I speak because of his own contemplation, and not by means of the words of the teacher. Hence I do not teach even such a person, although I speak what is true and he hears it. For he is taught not by words, but by the realities themselves made manifest to him directly by God revealing them to his inner self." (De Magistro, 40)

(Found the quotes, once I knew the name of the work, on Augnet)

Studeo's post Cardinal Newman on Learning Grammar seems to tie in a bit here too.

A lot of what Cavaletti is saying in the book so far reminds me of what Charlotte Mason teaches: Despise not, hinder not, offend not the little ones.

What Makes a Good Day of Learning?

Karen Edmisten was thinking about What Makes a Good Day of Learning? She was writing the post in response to Theresa's.

I liked what they both had to say because like me, they are eclectic types (Karen calls it "schizophrenic" : )) who adapt their homeschooling to their family situation, as I do. The original question was:

"How does one decide how much is “enough” without the aid of a professionally prepared lesson plan or step-by-step curriculum?"

I only wish I knew. To me it is a bit like asking: "How do you know you are doing "enough" in your spiritual journey?" If the answer is similar, it would be something like:

You ought to be doing more than the bare minimum but you should not be constantly stretched beyond your endurance; you should be regularly evaluating to see if a course change is required, and there ought to be an element of trust that new solutions will occur to you as they are needed. Keep your eyes open; be vigilant, but not anxious. (Helen has written about this evaluation and questioning process)

(I'm trying to avoid specifically talking about "grace" because I wanted to focus on what we ought to be doing ourselves).

I would also say, from my perspective of homeschooling for 14 years and graduating one student so far:

You want to look at the big picture. Not just one day or one week or one year. While an ongoing evaluation is useful, it shouldn't be big-picture panic or horror. I found that out the hard way in my first years. Whenever we had a bad day, I would rearrange my whole way of doing things. Wasn't helpful. Sort of like digging up the seeds every day to see if they were growing. Arnold Lobel has a very philosophical Frog and Toad story about Toad working 24 hours a day to give his seeds an optimum growing environment, completely exhausting himself in the process and not helping the seeds. You don't have to do that.

ANother question occurs to me, since I HAVE used professionally prepared curricula:

"How do you know you're doing enough WITH the aid of a curriculum?"

Honestly, the question remains the same. I've used lesson plans where my kids have skated through. Is it enough? I've used lesson plans where my kids and I struggled under a heavy burden and still couldn't "keep up." Is it too much? Lesson plans can help you in some circumstances, but they can't give you that guarantee that you are doing it "right." The best way to use lesson plans is to use them for what they are for: as aids. Not a guarantee. Not a rubber-stamp of approval from some outside "expert". Just an aid, if it helps.

Now: what makes a good day?
That is a slightly different question.

When I think about it, I know a good day when I see one, but I can't MAKE one happen. Flannery O'Connor said that the writer's part in writing is to sit down at that desk and be prepared, and make the moves of a writer. You aren't guaranteed to have a great writing day. You may struggle through thorns for 4 hours. But without that sitting down and preparation, it is almost guaranteed that you won't have a good day. You won't write at all.

I think homeschooling is a bit like that. You have to show up. I spend a lot of my homeschooling effort, I realize, setting things up so that a good day CAN happen. This is good. Most writers only write for a few hours a day, but they are writers full time -- preparing themselves, gathering thoughts, pondering, even when they are feeding their peacocks (as Flannery did in her spare time). I think it is similar with homeschooling. You may only officially teach for a few hours, perhaps much less -- or MORE, turning the picture the other way-- if you are an unschooler. But the crucial part of that preparation is simply showing up. There will be slow days, thorny days, miraculous days. But if you are there, they will be good days. They will balance themselves out in the long run. You will see what needs to be done, and do it.

Homeschooling is an art more than a science. Knowledge helps make the art better, but it is not the art itself. The art is in actually living like a homeschooler, in season and out, trying to do your best but keeping an openness to the not so good days. Learning from them but not letting them ruin what you ARE doing.

Just a few thoughts -- scattered as they are! Looking back over Karen's and Theresa's posts, I see we have said several of the same things in our different ways. If you write a post about this subject, will you put the link here or on Karen or Theresa's sites? I would love to hear what others think about this question.

Review of CHC's Middle School Planner

Lesson Plan Guide: Middle School Years
5th-8th Grades
Catholic Heritage Curricula
308 pages
copyright 2005 CHC

Catholic Heritage Curricula's purpose is to provide thoroughly Catholic resources that are flexible and easy to use in the homeschool. Their aim is to steer the middle ground between chaos and burnout, and this objective is well achieved in this lesson planning manual.

This lesson plan manual, in a sturdy spiral binding, is a Catholic Heritage Curricula exclusive. The books recommended are either CHC exclusives or distributed by the company so that if you use the guide as written, you can do all your shopping at one place. The manual is meant to be used with the blank lesson planner also provided by CHC. One nice feature of the book is that copying privileges are allowed within a single family. The student resources are intended to be photocopied for the student to use independently, for example. This offsets the price of the book, and makes it possible to use the resources again and again through the years.

The appearance of the pages is clean and attractive. Charts make excellent use of shading and fonts to aid the eye, and the resource lists have nice pictorial elements; the quotes are set aside in sidebars.

The book is divided into four sections: one on how to use the manual, another containing an overview and brief course layouts for each grade, a third section containing student syllabi, and a final section devoted to teacher resources. All the sections are interspersed with quotes from saints or Popes on learning, and advice and counsel from other homeschool moms, to provide opportunities for reflection.

The first section contains an introduction, an "At a Glance" chart, a list of FAQ, and suggestions on how to begin using the manual. The At a Glance is a scope and sequence chart of all the curriculum recommended for all subjects during the four years of middle school. The FAQ addresses questions such as: Is the course of study too light? what if my child won't listen to me? what if my child is ahead or behind in some subjects?

The second section goes through the four grades one by one. For each grade there is a list of the curriculum used for the courses; a sample filled-out week from the Lesson Plan Book; and brief details about the weekly flow of the different lessons. In religion for sixth grade, for example, Monday and Tuesday are suggested for reading the Faith and Life book and doing the activity page; Wedesday through Friday are devoted to Bible History, and it is recommended that the students answer questions in a notebook. Optional enrichment for this subject: A Year with God.

The third section is the longest in the book. It contains six student courses: one each for fifth and sixth grade, and two each for seventh and eighth. The courses are "hands on" history or geography, with the exception of a seventh grade study on the Virtues. The spine texts used are thoroughly Catholic. For example, fifth and sixth grades use "All Ye Lands" and "From Sea to Shining Sea". Eighth grade history is based on ??Catholic Catechism History and 2000 Years of Church History.

The hands-on courses are planned in a fashion somewhat between a textbook course and a unit study. The student is usually asked to read a section from a spine text like "All Ye Lands", then given a variety of activities to choose from: reading historical fiction, doing a craft, a creative writing, looking at a video or online field trip, discussing something or doing extra research. The courses progress appropriately in difficulty from fifth to eighth grade, with more complex writing projects required at the older ages. A "Five Question" paper format is taught and developed and practiced during the upper level courses. The courses are put together so that they can be photocopied and given to the student so that he can work independently.

The final section of the book is titled "Teacher Resources" and contains three resources: A composition handbook for the homeschool mom; a "science in a nutshell" scope and sequence list of the different areas of science compiled by Holly Pierlot; and a World History Timeline with all the dates included that might be of interest to the homeschooler in putting together a family timeline.

Though day to day suggested layouts are provided in most of the courses, and the student syllabi come complete and ready to use,a complete overall "ready to go" daily layout is not provided. The manual is meant to be used with the CHC lesson planner, and this is where the daily and weekly details are entered. For example, the recommended weekly plan for 6th grade religion is given. But the teacher or student would have to actually put the specific page numbers and details into the right place in the Lesson Planner. This is different from the CHC lesson plans in the earlier grades where each week is laid out ahead of time. The intention is probably to help the parent and child to take over the planning reins a bit more in preparation for the high school years. Including four grades in the manual instead of just one is an advantage because it gives a general "flow" to the middle school years and lets the homeschooler pick and choose courses according to the child's ability level.

Rambling towards Mooreeffoc

For some reason I have been so tempted to rename my blog Exceptio Probat Regulam. Don't ask me why -- it doesn't even seem to fit, really. I found it in Newman's Apologia Pro Sua Vita -- it is Latin for "the exception proves the rule". I just like the way it sounds! I am a bit like my 7 year old -- I pick up on some new word or phrase and then it runs through my head for days. At least, Exceptio Probat Regulam is better than "Many Cheerful Facts about the Square of the Hypotenuse" which is the other phrase that has been accompanying me everywhere these days.

I renamed my blog In a Spacious Place back in December and then recently found there is already a blog named A Spacious Place -- sigh. It refers to a different Psalm, since mine is based on Psalm 30 and hers is based on Psalm 18, and the title is a bit different -- but still. I feel a bit like a name thief.

Back to "exceptio probat regulam" --maybe it does fit a bit. We do seem to live a bit that way. We have a log home... and eight computers hooked to each other through a local area network. We are remote from civilization in miles but can access the World through the web at the click of a mouse. We have drying clothes strung on our loft railing because our dryer hasn't functioned for almost a year, yet we have books -- and computer games -- everywhere. We have a gas-guzzling Suburban but our family fills every seat and it's our one car. Both of the parents freelance at home. Our income varies wildly from year to year, and it does not seem to really matter to anything that counts. We do classical unschooling. WE live in a part of California where you can drive an hour and move from sequoias and cedars and snow down to dust and heat and farmland.

I think this is why we are all Chesterton fans around here. Chesterton spent his life looking for the strange place called "Mooreeffoc."..... in other words, the paradoxical, the mystery in the prosaic everyday, the thrill of discovery in the banal and everyday places of life. As Tolkien writes:

Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.

My daughter uses this Chesterton quote as the tagline for her blog:

"When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale."

So true, and this is another one
(and look -- I think it's a chiastic structure! how cool!):

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered;
an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered."

Ask Bilbo Baggins! That could sum up what The Hobbit is about in one line!

I strive for a "Regula" but I cherish the "Exceptions". Every natural object has a certain identifiable order but all have some unique feature which separates them from the others of their kind. All my friends and family -- I cherish the common ground I have with them but delight in their differences, that amuse and interest and enlighten me. Often it is not the order in my day that makes it memorable, but the deviations -- the extra inconveniences and adventures. I think all this is a reflection of our Lord, who made us all so diverse within a given order, and surely intended it that way.

Mooreeffoc would make a good blog name, too, I'm thinking. Probably has been done already. Yep, I knew it.

The Classic Model of Learning

The title of this post sounds like it's going to be about classical education, and in a way it is, but it gets there by the scenic route.

Steph at A Room of My Own had The Book of Learning and Forgetting on her sidebar. I requested it from the library because of the title and the picture. It is a very good read; reminds me a bit of some of John Taylor Gatto's books.

There are some details about the contents of the book at this page: The Classic View of Learning and Forgetting

The book's premise is that we have lost the "classic" view of what learning is about. Up till about a century and a half ago, everyone assumed that "we learn by the company we keep." He says that every culture has a proverb dealing with this truth. ( For example, it is expressed in antithesis in Proverbs 13:20: He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will suffer harm) . Learning was seen as a process of growth. The ten year old is not a different creature from his two year old self -- he is the same person, grown and developed. Similarly, learning is not an accumulation, like crystals forming or liquid collecting in a bucket, so much as a growing, like a seedling into a plant.

A century or so ago, a different view of learning came about as a combined result of the birth of the science of "psychology" and the creation of the efficiency industry inspired by the Prussian army. The admiration of the Prussian system led to a desire for increased efficiency and organization in the education system. The early pyschology endeavours -- many based on studies of animals or research done into mental illnesses -- seemed to promise that learning behavior of humans could be codified and measured objectively. This led to many changes in our school system that we still think of as standard today. For example:

• Age-segregated classrooms (thus eliminating the possibility of older students coaching and setting an example for younger ones, and older students getting the benefits of being leader and model for the younger ones).
• Testing and recording as ways to measure academic progress.
• Disability/at risk industry growing around the students who do not keep up (since obviously, it can't be the methods that are at fault, since they are objectively designed).

I am planning to take notes as I read through the chapters, but for right now I wanted to recommend it as a short, thought-provoking read. The main thing that stood out as different for me from books like Gatto's and Alfie Kohn's is that it traced the "paideia" or "learning as mentorship" back to ancient days rather than putting it in a purely modern frame of reference.

Smith makes the point that most "back to basics" advocates are proposing something like "back to 19th century regimentation". He recommends going further back, to a more classic tradition where learning took place in the context of spending time with those who knew what you wanted to know.

Like a Soldier, to the Stage

Finished Hamlet!

A few random notes.

The last act took me aback a little. The tone of the play moved from quick and hectic to a more serene rhythm... not so much the plot itself, which remained very full of incident, but the way Hamlet reacted to the events and the way the play moved from close focus on him to a wider, almost national focus in the last part. I am having a difficult time describing it, but the edginess of the first part seemed to culminate when Laertes and Hamlet scrabbled in Polonius' grave. After that, Hamlet seemed to take back stage as a persona and move into front stage as a more historical character. The final scene where practically every key player is poisoned by cup and rapier seemed to be a bit of a homeopathic anodyne.

To me, his hesitation during the earlier parts was not the ineffectual hesitation you see in something like The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock.

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

Hamlet's hesitation is informed by a kind of grace. When he finally can act effectually, he does.

Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally: and, for his passage,
The soldiers' music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies: such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

A couple of sites:

This one is a standard informational study-guide place with resources for teachers.
This one is interesting and a bit quirkier and more personal.

Here's a Shakespeare Theme Page.

Gilbert --- & Sullivan, and Chesterton!

This Gilbert and Sullivan ditty has been running through my head all day thanks to my kids:

I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical

I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse

With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotepotenuse

It goes on, and on!


The students at my oldest son's college just put on an in-college production of Pirates of Penzance last week. We didn't get to see it, but my ds said someone was filming... so we are hoping that we will get to see the DVD version at least. My daughter got to see a couple of the rehearsals when she was visiting there last month.

I thought maybe Chesterton would have had something to say about Gilbert and Sullivan, and indeed, I found this Introduction to a critical appreciation of the Savoy Opera pair. A quote:

And then the odd thing happened that was like a lucky coincidence in a farce or a magic gift in a fairy tale. As it stood, his satire was really much too intelligent to be intelligible. It is doubtful whether by itself it would ever have been completely popular. Something came to his aid which is much more popular than the love of satire: the profound and popular love of song. A genius in another school of art crossed his path and co-operated in his work; giving wings to his words, and sending them soaring into the sky. Perhaps no other musician except Sullivan would have done it in exactly the right way; would have been in exactly the right degree frivolous and exactly the right degree fastidious. A certain fine unreality had to hang over all the fantasies; there was nothing rowdy, there was nothing in the special sense even rousing about such song, as there is in a serious, patriotic, or revolutionary song, or even drinking song. Everything must be seen in a magic mirror, a little more delicately distorted than the mirror of Shalott; there must be no looking out directly upon passing events. The satiric figures were typical but not topical. All that precise degree of levity and distance from reality seemed to be expressed, as nothing else could express it, in the very notes of the music; almost, one might say, in the note of the laughter that followed it. And it may be that in the remote future that laughter will still be heard, when all the voices of that age are silent.

Learning Curve

See the Books I'm Reading sidebar? It took almost an hour to enter those five books yesterday -- the book covers that link straight to the information page, and the hyperlinks as well. But now I know how to do it.

I think it will take less time when I next do it, because that is the typical pattern. You spend big time on your learning curve uphill slope and then you get to rely on what you already know.

My 11 year old, Kieron, is learning to do gif animation. He wanted to learn how, so with a bit of supervision he looked it up himself, downloaded a tool and some information, and set to work. He spent over an hour getting two characters towards each other on a page. But the same thing will happen to him, too. He will get to the mastery point and then he can focus on what he is doing, not how he is doing it.

This is similar to how Charlotte Mason's notion of Habits work. You do things that make virtue easier, and you do them again and again until you don't even have to think about them. If you are in a habit of telling the truth it becomes very difficult to lie. This guards us from moral dilemma in daily life, so we can save our pondering and willpower for the "big things".

Thomas Aquinas refers to a virtue as "a good habit bearing on activity," or a good faculty-habit (habitus operativus bonus). (from article by Father Hardon)

In the early habit-forming stages, it is helpful to have strong motivation. I wanted to know how to get those books over there on that sidebar. I knew if I could get past the learning part, I would have a useful tool at my disposal (and I could find out if there was an easier way to do it!!)

It is also good to have a general sense of competence. Thankfully, Kieron has acquired a "can do" attitude as a fifth sibling, homeschooled. I somehow acquired one as a firstborn, public schooled. I just read recently in a waiting room magazine that kids learn confidence from testing themselves against appropriate level challenges and learning to cope with failure. Resilience is the key to self-esteem, according to this, not compliments and protection from all adversity. More on this at Eide Neurolearning. This too fits in with some of Charlotte Mason's ideas.

I talked on my other blog about how motivation and focusing on how I COULD do it helped me organize my hours in a day. (It is an ongoing process though, and that's the other aspect of habits I don't have time to write about today! certainly learning from failure has come into it!).

This started off as a simple asking-for-commiseration for my sidebar challenges, and turned into a reflection. LOL. Off to T-ball with my little ones.

Classics

I forget what I was looking for a few days ago when I happened across this Classical School Blog. I put it on my Google Reader because it looked interesting.

Today when I was organizing my feeds on there, I ran across it again. While catching up on the posts, I found to my delight that the blog's authors are Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide, the same pair who run one of my longtime favorite blogs: Eide Neurolearning. The two blogs have similar formats with short articles on interesting information, cross-referenced to other articles.

They have a book called The Mislabelled Child that I am now going to look out for.

Here's a post on the classical school blog about the Progymnasmata -- I have just been looking over Classical Writing: Diogenes which is about Chreia, the third of the progymnasmata.

More Evening Reading

Aidan seems to be in a pattern of doing his literacy-activities in the evening. This is from an old activity book that he happened to come across (I picked up a folder and accidentally scattered the pieces, and he grabbed them)

Matching up the picture, you discover a word. He loved just the matching part and it was enough of a motor challenge, but the game came with some word cards without pictures and he was trying to sound them out.

I am thinking of having him build some words to match by using his homemade moveable alphabet, but the ones I have printed out are too small. I’m going to try to make some bigger ones and maybe a velcro backing for them since they are presently too slippery and hard for him to keep in place.

Planning and Purpose

This is really cute -- sums up some of my days too! HT Cindy at It's About the Journey.

Also, a great post by Cindy: Trusting Myself (and God and the DC)

I like this piece of advice from the post:

"Plan on messing up 5 times a week. Then when you mess up 4 times, you will have had a great week!" :-)

My Temporal Organization

When I feel logistically disoriented, I make an organizing book. It really seems to help get me back on the ground. Around Christmas-time, I read a lot about Visual Spatial learners and learned a lot about the way I think. One thing that helped was realizing that I don’t move well through time sequence. I mean, I KNEW that, but seeing that it was a personal difficulty rather than assuming it was a common human trait that some people handle much better than me — well, THAT was helpful and with that, I could address the challenge. One thing that helps is converting temporal into visual/spatial — that is, some sort of nicely blocked out chart, not too cluttered, that helps me visually perceive the flow of time.

Anyway, here’s the books I made last week:

The dark blue one is from January, so I didn’t make that one last week — it is my monthly planner. I put all our appointments and other big things in there. I like the exterior pocket where I can keep pens and index cards or whatever. I have kept a monthly planner every since Aidan came home from the hospital because that was when it got difficult to intuitively keep track of all the appointments plus the activities of the other kids.

The one with the picture cover is older, too. I use old greeting cards and scratch paper to make little notebooks that I carry with me in my purse or around the house to jot down random notes — I always remember things at night or when I’m vacuuming, not when I’m TRYING to remember.

Here’s the interior of the monthly one:

The green one is a weekly planner. It lets me write out more specific things about the week’s plans, including lists of things to bring (like snacks to the T ball game and so on).

The little red notebook is a daytimer where I can jot down what actually happens in the day, so I can remember it to blog about it.

You would think that it’s excessive to have THREE time logs. Indeed, the red daily one is no big deal. It just gives me a chance to keep track of the day as it is happening.

But the monthly one is a LIFE saver — gives me the overview at a glance. Devoted to ONE purpose so it is not visually confusing for me. And it is helpful to me to copy the week’s appointment over into the Week Timer, because that is when I start thinking over the logistics of the actual appointment, and putting down things to remember to bring or plan.

Then the turquoise planner is for projects and book notes. I didn’t take a picture, but there are also some Cornell note forms in there. When I’m reading a book or looking over a resource, it helps me to jot down observations.

I make the little booklets with a comb binder, then I back the comb with colored duct tape so is is more neat looking and sturdier. You could do this with online books you print out for Ambleside, too.

All the forms came from DIY Planner. They don’t have homeschool forms there but they have lots of other things, all free. I was craving the Mead Day Runner that Aidan’s occupational therapist has, but when I priced them online — yikes! And it made me realize I would have more fun making my own, anyway.
This post is about as geeky as you can get. My daughter shakes her head: “You’re taking pictures of your notebooks to put them on your blog??” I have to share the thrill, though. What usually happens is that I keep the books faithfully for a few weeks and then drop them. I used to kick myself but now realize, hey, doing this serves its purpose. I get back in the temporal sequence that way, and then I drop most of it (except the monthly planner, essential!) until I find myself lost in space again.