Language Arts Lessons

 We try to adhere to the simplicity of Charlotte Mason's idea about language arts which leans heavily on narration and on copywork. By using CM's method language arts can spill over into many subjects as reading and writing are the primary tools in education, however, we also have specific skill building lesson to keep these tools sharp and ready for use. Handwriting, reading practice, and phonics we do in the morning just after breakfast in our Three R's Rotation.

Handwriting: We are transitioning from print to cursive. After doing some cursive only last year and seeing the boys missing some fundamental things I thought this book would help them see the little bits more clearly as well as to review each letter individually. I also like the Proverbs so Print to Cursive Proverbs was a great fit for us. The boys copy the proverb in print one day and then copy the cursive letters one by one in context of the verse. They also practice other words using that letter. As one letter is introduce every other day they get a good chance to copy and read the letter in in all the positions, first, middle and at the end of a word.

Phonics: We are still using a phonics book, Phonics Pathways. Seems we use a different one each year. I have been puzzling over why the boys simply don't seem to assimilate and use the phonics they have learned. They still struggle to know when to when to use the silent e rule etc. But I am learning to be content with slow progress and they are getting better and better at reading each year. I take them through a 5 minute lesson every day and then as they are reading or doing other things highlight that lesson in their real life language usage. Hope this gets it more home. I often wonder if it just isn't something they care about or their minds don't need this information just now, so it keeps getting set aside. One day as we continue to add this knowledge to their icebergs of knowledge it may come to the surface.

Reading: I don't know why we did this but we are reading through five different books one each day of the week. The books are very similar in difficulty and content so it doesn't seem to break continuity of we read three pages from one book, set it aside until the next week and pick up the next book to read three pages from it. The boys are reading the passages out loud to me as I work in the kitchen. I do very little monitoring except to be close at hand to correct a lazy reading or to help them when they get stuck on a new or difficult word. Mostly I am letting them be alone with their book and learn to develop strategies for working out how to read new words using the rules or knowledge they already have, ON THEIR OWN. They are enjoying this. I let many mistakes go by but in the end they have been stopping themselves to make it right as they want to know what the books is saying. What will happen next? This is why I love to read, and it has motivated me to read harder and harder books so I can get the knowledge out of them or to know about the people in them or how the story will end. 

After each reading I get to hear from them what they story was about. This is narration. We also do narration from book I read aloud to them in other subjects like history or literature, but they do very good narrations from reading to themselves too. In the future they will be doing more and more of this as their reading ability increases.

These are the books the boys chose to read from, you can find them all at Yesterday's Classics or Amazon.com. ( From left to right: The Sandman His House Stories, Rollo At Work, Rollo at Play, The Sandman more farm Stories, The Sandman His Farm Stories.)

Grammar study/Poetry and spelling are three more language arts lesson we do during the week. CM does not suggest a grammar or spelling lesson per say but both of our books are CM friendly so they work well with a CM education. Three days a week we work through lesson in Primary Language Lessons by Emma Serl which includes poetry memorization, picture studies with narration and dictation practice etc. I let the poetry lessons in this book take the place of a separate lesson on poetry just now as it meets our needs beautifully and simply.

Two days a week we also do a lesson from our Spelling Wisdom book. Spelling wisdom simply puts spelling words into a sentence which can be prepared by the student ahead of time for a dictation. By following the course Sonya has developed you will learn the basic spelling words but with an idea attached. Brilliant! and so much easier to remember than the old fashioned spelling list. We just began Spelling Wisdom this year so we are on book one. Also since the spelling wisdom gives the boys adequate dictation practice I skip the dictation exercises in Primary language lessons when they occur in the book.

Lastly under Language Arts is Literature, my favorite. Literature for us happens at the end of the day and I read aloud to the boys before bedtime. We don't narrate this lesson just enjoy the stories, so when I chose books for this lesson I keep that in mind. Here is our Literature list for this year:

Tales From Shakespeare by Charles Lamb

Ou Island Saints by Amy Steedman

The Lantern Bearer by Rosemary Sutcliff

Adam of The Road by Elizabeth Janet Gray

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

Traditional Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens

Rolf and the Viking Bow by Allen French

The Viking Adventure

Princess Adeline by Julie Sutter

Stories of Beowulf

Monk's Hood by Ellis Peters

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters

One Corpse Too Many by Ellis Peters

Knight of the White Cross by GA Henty

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle

Selections from: Anderson's Fairy Tales

Selections from: Grimm's Fairy Tales

The Lion of St. Mark by GA Henty

Selections from: One Hundred and One Read-Aloud Celtic Myths by Joan C. Verniero 

Men of Iron By Howard Pyle

Crispin: The Cross of Lead by AVI

The Wise Woman and other stories by George McDonald

The Grey Wolf and Other stories by George McDonald

and, if we have time this year we will read the following, otherwise they will have to wait until next year...

The Fellowship of the Ring

The Two Towers

Return of the King

Language arts is not the boys best subject but I am holding fast to Charlotte's advice regarding the reading lessons and resting in my own sort of contentment knowing giving them a secure foundation is more important than arriving at the finish line in a certain time frame.

"The teacher must be content to proceed slowly, securing the ground under her feet as she goes." from Volume one, page 204.

Week Thirteen Wrap-Up

HI, something we have been enjoying lately....

Bible: Genesis

Stories of Faith: Grandpa's Box

Math: Same old same old this week in the Matrix Caveman Rotation, except that the boys are upping their accuracy and their end time on the matrix. TJ has the current best score of 6 min 66/67 correct. The other tow are getting 100% however they are taking more time to do it. It is working really well to have them try to beat their own score, for it has eliminated some of the competitiveness that was destructive between them. Conversely they are enjoying doing the math and finding it more interesting.

We learned about another female mathematician named Sonya Kovalesky in Mathematicians are People too Vol. 2.

Ancient Greek History: We have begun two new books this week relating to history. Firstly, I added a lesson right after lunch because we were regularly ending school at 3 pm an hour earlier than I have scheduled for. This is happening because the boys are really getting better at following directions and just getting their work done without a lot of moaning or complaining. Amazing how much time is lost here. I intend it to be a geography lesson for I realized that we already have several books that would lend to this kind of lesson and I saw that Amblesideonline.com schedules for one so why not try it. It would be more food for the mind. So we have begun to read My Little Macedonian Cousin by  as it relates so well to the other book we started which is Alexander the Great by John Gunther. It was a tremendous fit and the boys adore it so we are still on schedule and getting more mind food served. Cool! Charlotte says,

"Our aim in education is to give children vital interests in as many directions as possible-to set their feet in a large room..." Vol. 3 pay. 231

Aesop's Copy Work:

Max's Aesop copy work.

Science the observation of Birds: We continue on this week with Blacky the Crow by Thornton Burgess. I also mention a fun game we picked up at the local Goodwill store this summer. It is a memory game of 100 photos of birds. I introduced the boys to the game one night  a few months ago and they have been playing it themselves oft and on, more recently as they have been listening to the bid stories we read in our lessons. They have decided that the Red Tail Hawk and the Big Horned Owl are the best and most desirable to win their other favorite is the wren. This year they are able to read the names of the birds on the cards and so without me they are learning. I love it!

Nature notebooks:

Language Arts: This week the boys wrote a composition about a rabbit family and what they did in their free time, completed some sentences that asked the question when? and they did dictation with sentences that distinguished there from their.

TJ's composition "What I do in my free time..."

Bed Time Read-Aloud: We all felt sad that Jack died in our new read aloud On the Shores of Silver Lake the next book in the Little house series. We all cried when Pa tried to wake him so they could travel west together. I am aiming at reading two books of the series each year so On the Shores of Silver Lake will be our last one until next year. Last year we read Little House on the Prairie and Farmer boy.

Latin: Our lessons last week pertained to a dialogue about Julius and Flavia in writing class with Corinthus. As the dialogue was about writing we have been doing some exercised involving roman or old latin writing. We wrote a message in latin script, we completed a worksheet about roman numerals, we translated some latin verbs into english and we made our own seal stones and a letter written on a thin board like they did way back then.

Art/Music: In drawing lessons this week we drew circles, snowmen and completed a drawing practice sheet.

And we continue in our rotation of reading about Chopin in his early years and listening to his piano music.

Have a great day!

Week Five Wrap-Up

The weather is cooler this week now that fall is finally decided to show up. We still have some green leaves on the trees making for some lovely shade in our garden which I adore. Before it gets too cold I still plan more outdoor dinners and time to take naps on the trampoline...makes for a great hammock!

We are just about finished reading The Blessed Child by Ted Dekkar and Bill Bright. It will be sad to end yet another heartwarming story to move on to the next one. We all have enjoyed this glimpse into God's miraculous nature that The Blessed child has revealed.

We are also completing our memorization of skip count song X6 about the monkey's in the jungle and will be learning X7 next week. I have been implementing more living math methods in our approach towards multiplication. So now that we have arrived at the X6 tables I am slowing down on how much new stuff I am presenting them to be sure they are really understanding the why of the table.

“The child may learn the multiplication-table and do a subtraction sum without any insight into the rationale of either. He may even become a good arithmetician, applying rules aptly, without seeing the reason of them; but arithmetic becomes an elementary mathematical training only in so far as the reason why of every process is clear to the child. 2+2=4, is a self-evident fact, admitting of little demonstration; but 4x7=28 may be proved." (Vol. 1 pp. 255, 256) 

So next week I'll explain how we did this. In the handbook Mathematics: An Instrument for Living Teaching gives some guide lines:

“To help the children to see the rationale of the multiplication table, they at first construct each one for themselves with the teacher’s assistance, e.g., suppose it were 4 times, the teacher begins ‘I write down one 4 on the board with a small 1 above it, to show how many fours I have. Then I write down another four, how many have I?’ ‘Two.’ ‘How much have I now, two fours that is?’ ‘Eight.’ Put eight down underneath the second 4. Now write down another four, we have three fours or 12, similarly four fours or 16, five fours or 20, and so on to the end of the table, 12 fours or 48, until the whole table stands: 

(Stephens, 1911, p. 10). 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4

equals
4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48

They will see ( I trust) how the skip counting helps with the table and how multiplication is a simple way to do addition.

Much of my time this week has been spent preparing a lapbook centered around The Iliad by Homer. We have been reading Rosemary Sutcliff's version (Black ships Before Troy) of this epic poem which is actually written in a narrative form. On our next pass through this fascinating portion of history we will read the poem written by Homer.

To prepare the lapbook I print off the pages, cut them out and assemble parts that would be time consuming and irrelevant to the point of the book. Some things by doing them the boys will learn more about the story, other things are just busy work, I save them that. So once the mini books are ready I put them into a plastic pouch and save them for the boys. This time I fashioned the lap book to fit into our spiral bound scrapbook.

Just a glimpse of the mini books all out of the pocket.

The boys spent time coloring the pieces that made up the two front covers before we pasted them onto the cover and then into the spiral bound book. We limited the colors used to just browns and yellows to see how the colors will tie the whole lapbook together visually. This was an unpopular suggestion on my part and though the boys did it, they asked that they could decide on the colors next time. So though it looks great this way it is theirs and next time you will see the colors they choose.

Here is Zak's completed covers pasted in the notebook. We now have a lapbook in a note book. I am not sure if we are lapbooking or notebooking but probably the former rather than the latter. Either way it is working rather well. :)

We did put the mini books together and into place, but we have not yet written in them, colored them or done any sort of real study using them. In the end we will have understood better who killed who, who fought with the Trojans and who fought with the Greeks. We will know the family tree of the Greek gods and which gods played a part in this story. And last put the story on the map.

More entries made this week in the Aesop copywork book. Zak really caught onto this assignment and though I require only one fable a day he has been doing two or three hoping to get more and more treats for good handwriting. Very cute!

The boys are all sad that the Burgess Bird Book is drawing to a close. They are counting the pages that are left and savoring them. I suggested we read the book again, for there are so many things you can do to compliment this book and dig a little deeper into the information he so wonderfully presents about birds. I am strongly considering this but have not yet decided. What would you do? The boys were intrigued. I mean really, who said you can only read a book once? And then there are the issues brought up in my mind regarding illustrations and CM's methods. I like this quote from this article and am pondering just what part adding more to the reading of the story will play in their minds.

Our senses, it seems to me, are some of the tools we have for taking in information, but they are not the primary tools for learning.  This is a major problem in much of the world of education today.  There is much talk about learning styles, and I suppose it is helpful to know one’s learning style, but the fact is, taking information in is not the same as processing that information, or, as Mason said, “labouring with the mind.”   This is the step that many children never get to take in their learning process.  This is the purpose of narration, which Mason called “the act of knowing” (p. 17).  In fact, we may have preferences as to which sense we prefer to take in information (visually, kinesthetically, aurally, tactically, or odoriferously), but this is not the same as owning new information.  Mason says, “We trust much to pictures, lantern slides, cinematograph displays; but without labour there is no profit.” 

I'll tell you what I came up with next week. 

Another thing we completed this week: Memorized the Poem "A Secret." We did it the same we memorized the first poem, with drawing pictures, copywork and lots of reading and repetition. Now we are off to do some dictation the boy's favorite exercises. No really, it is!

We are getting to the end of Toad Triumphant too. This week seemed to be a week of many endings.  Thus I am soooo excited for next week which will be full of beginnings. :)

We veered away from the dialogues this week to look into the grammar of Latin. It was just a peek. I printed off cards with nouns (animals), cards with adjectives. The first day we simply played concentration with the animals to learn their names in latin.

On the second day we together matched the adjectives with the animals according to their gender. SImply collectively making up funny sentences with just the nouns and adjectives.

Then on the third day I hand printed two cards for each with the verbs we know thus far, erit (will be) and est (is). They first took the pile of adjectives and separated the masculine ones from the feminine ones, then I gave them each an animal and they created sentences matching the gender of the noun with the gender of the adjective. Then they read out their sentence in Latin and translated it to us using the words to help sheet below.

The cards for the animals and the adjectives were from the Minimus Teacher's guide, but the Words to Help sheet I made myself in Publisher.

To enhance the Klee inspired 3-D cities we painted last week we added some black lines, wow, they look so much better. These are Max's paintings.

Mostly this week we have been working on drawing and coloring 'inchies.' of Paul Klee's art works. Each square is 2 inches by 2 inches. We plan to make twelve in all and so far the boys have made 6 each, so we are halfway there.

Last week we finished reading A Day with Tchaikovsky so this week we listened to Tchiakovsky Comes to America a production by Classical Kids. Now onto a long look at the NutCracker Ballet. The boys will love this!

Lastly this week we went indoors to add an entry into our nature notebooks. Is wasn't because the weather was bad, but that it seemed a good time to add in a little skill training to our nature observation. We used basic contour drawings to develop the eye and train the coordination between what you see and what you draw. 

We did go out to get something to draw and then we drew the contour or outside edges of the specimen we selected. Then on another sheet of paper we tried a blind contour drawing looking only at the specimen and not at our papers. I did it first to show them how silly it will look and so they would not be afraid to just give it a go. This technique develops the best hand eye coordination needed for drawing. It was hilarious, fun and relaxed us all. Then they drew their specimen having had a good look at it now adding in as many details as we could see.

Hope your week was a good one too!

Week One Wrap-up

Yeah!!! Amongst all the messes and undone plans we had a terrific start to the year this week. Letting God take the lead in the schedule and the daily moment by moment decisions has led me to make two significant changes to our home education. They are to apply more of CM's education principles to our school and live by a new schedule.

What I have always loved about a CM education is all the good books. I like how she filled up young students with a rich banquet of ideas DAILY. I realized that I have been skimpy on the banquet of ideas putting in its place more hands on activities. And though my boys enjoy hands on activities some times, this year I have limited them and added many more living books rich with ideas for their minds to be filled with. I can see they are thriving already eating daily from a rich feast of ideas.

I have heard that boys need time to fidget or be active before they can settle down and do seat work. SO when we were discussing how to go about our schedule I was so happy when Max came up with the idea of doing school from 11am to 4pm with a lunch break at around 1pm right in the middle of the lessons. It has worked out beautifully!!! When the boys come to lesson time after having had time to themselves to fidget and work off excess energy they do much better in school. We do more learning and less discipline. I too am benefitting from the extra time in the morning to do my own things and get ready for the day before lesson begin. My only big adjustment is to be sure to prepare lunch before lessons at 11.

Our new schedule of lessons for this year looks like this...

We begin the lessons reading a story about someone's life who walked with God. We do this to get a glimpse of who God is, how He leads those who follow Him and to see what adventures people have do follow Him. This year we have begun with Bruchko.

After reading Bruchko we do a lesson from Minimus. In this lesson we listen to a dialogue between Minimus the mouse and each member of the family. Mininmus is asking who they are. The boys just about have the dialogue down pat and can read it all by themselves for the most part. Here is Max's work sheet on the members of the household we have met so far...

We will spend most of the year on this Latin book so I am taking my time to go through it slowly. In addition to add some background to Minimus I have been reading Douglas Bond's book Hostage Lands to the boys at bedtime. It is about a young Latin student in modern day Britain who accidentally finds a set of old Roman tablets on his father farm near Hadrian's wall. The story of Hostage Lands is the story he discovers as he translates the tablets with his eccentric Latin professor. Cool thing is that both the book and Minimus take place in Britain near Hadrian's Wall.

This summer I introduced multiplication and division to the boys via Emma Serl's wonderful turn-of-the-century math primer called Everyday Number Stories. Since they did not yet know their times tables they figured out the multiplication problems and division problems using addition. WOW they sure found that cumbersome, but they are NOW ready this fall to learn the times tables, so we are doing that. I began this week with the Original Skip Count Kid Audio songs for X2 and practicing the X2 on a multiplication table. Tomorrow for our catch-up-game-activity day we will play Loot the Pirate Ship and read about a Mathematician form Mathematicians are People Too Vol. 2. I love how fun math can be.

Loot the Pirate ship!!!

History this year will involve learning about Greece and Rome. I have collected a HUGE pile of books on this over the last few years at the Goodwill etc and will have PLENTY of material to choose from as we read the fascinating stories of these ancient peoples. We begin the year with The Story of the Greeks written primarily by H. A. Gruber, and enhanced by Christine Miller from Nothing New Press. It gives a wonderful overall feel for the story of the Greek people. This week I read aloud the stories as the boys fiddled with legos or colored their pictures of the family we met in our latin study. Once this lesson is complete we eat lunch.

LUNCH

BREAK

Our nature study focuses on birds and insects, so I asked the boys which one they wanted to study first...they chose the birds. SO we read from The Burgess Bird book by Thornton Burgess each day. When we want to see the birds he is describing or hear the songs they sing, I pull out these books to learn more about the birds introduced in our story.

Bird:The Definitive Visual Guide, 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names, and Backyard Bird Songs. Tomorrow we will be outside for a nature hike and we will have our eyes open to see if we see fly catchers, sparrows, wrens and phoebes the birds we read about. I hope to find a nest or two.

Ahhh... Language Arts! Spilt into three parts we rotate them around to fit our schedule. The three parts include: Reading out loud from the Elson Reader book Three including narration of the story(s), Handwriting or copy work, and lessons from Primary Language Lessons. This week was wonderful! I heard classic tales read aloud to me with easily given narrations of them. The lessons in the PLL have copywork in them but if the lesson does not I assign a sentence or two from their reader. PLL has a new lesson for us DICTATION. Surprisingly the boys loved the challenge of it. we only did two lessons but I am at THEIR pace so it is enjoyable for us all.

Modern artists are on the docket for art history this year. So we began with Paul Klee. This week we played Go Fish for Modern Artists to see him amongst other modern artists and then a few days later the boys colored one of Mr. Klee's famous paintings "Head of Man"

 Last but certainly not least is composer study. We begin this year with Tchaikovsky! Since Opal Wheeler's books were such a great highlight to our composer study last year I chose to read her again. So we began with The Story of Peter Tchaikovsky. What a lovely little boy he was!

Each day we complete all the above lessons except for art and music which rotate out every other day. We are planning on doing a 6 day week with the 6th day being a catch-up-game-actvity day.

I am excited for another year of discovery with more rich ideas to think on and a new schedule to live by.

Lit2go

We are not even half way through book two of the Elson Reader Series and I am planning what to do after we are done. I am weird, I know. I never used to be a planner but I am hooked on planning for education. It is so much fun to look at resources that are available out there, especially those that are FREE. In my search for what-to-do-next for our reading lessons I came across a really fun and useful site.

Have fun looking at lit2go. This site has a wonderful selection of classic literature for FREE! Best thing about this site is that it is so user friendly. Let me show you around a bit and gush about how great I think this site is.

The home page is laid out in such a way that it is easy to peruse their "shelves" and see what is available. It is not a huge selection but what they have selected is good quality literature. If you have a book in mind you want to look up simply click on the letter of the alphabet and see what titles there are under it. To see a book simply click on the picture of it.

On the book page you will note several useful bits of info.

• A short description of the story.

• Chapter titles links that link to a download page and a short description of that chapter is about.

• The Flesch-Kincaid readability level (in the right hand margin)

Once you click on the chapter title you will be offered the choice of downloading a PDF or an MP3. (not all of the books on this site have both but I noticed most do) The MP3’s are well read and they correspond with the text on the download page. If you chose to download the PDF you will not be disappointed. Here is a sample page from Little Bear at Work and Play.

NOW what I really like about this site is the Flesch-Kincaid grade levels. What is the Flesch-Kincaid grade levels? you ask: click on the words and find out or here is a short answer to way-lay your curiosity:

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level index is one way to measure and report the readability of English text. The Flesch-Kincaid formula considers the average number of words per sentence (average sentence length, or ASL) and the average number of syllables per word (ASW) within a given passage in order to estimate the complexity of the text. The formula then converts that complexity level into a score that roughly equates with a grade level (K-12) in the United States. The formula is:


Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level = (.39 × ASL) + (11.8 × ASW) - 15.59

I am excited about these levels because I am an intuitive sort of person and step-by step things are still a bit of a mystery to me. By using these levels I can be more sure that I am getting materials that will be within the range of what my boys can do and they won’t freak out when I assign something way too hard by mistake. (They like it when I follow the book)

At the top of the page click on the tab entitled “readability.” This will bring you to page with K-12 links on it. Each link/number takes you to books and passages of books that are readable at that level. We will be looking at level 3 once we finish our Elson Readers and here are some titles on our list to choose from:

Books:
Rescuing the Lost Balloonist by Captain Quincy Allen
Squinty the Comical Pig by Richard Barnum
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Herriot Beecher Stowe (Told to Children)

Passages:
Hercules and the Waggoner by Aesop
One to make ready from counting and Math rhymes
The little Hero of Haarlem from Fairy Tales and other traditional stories
The Story of Miss Moppet by Beatrix Potter
Laughing Song a poem by William Blake
Seventh Night: Mr. Scarecrow from Seven O’Clock Stories
pages and pages more

 I could use these resources in a myriad of different ways here are some I am toying with:

• Select several passages/a book and print them out. Bind them into a reader using my pro-click binder (3-ring biders work well too!)  for each of the boys. It would be fun to let the boys select the passages they wanted to read so they have more of a part in the creation of the reader itself.


• Use parts of the passages for copywork. Since they are graded by level you be sure you were selecting simple passages at first and slowly build up to more difficult ones.


• Make a CD of some of the poems or stories to listen to on long car trips or before bed time.


• Read aloud once passage and have the boys narrate what was read.

 How would you use them? I would love to hear your ideas.

Winnie-the-Pooh



In a month or two we will be studying bees and how they use the nector in flowers to make honey as part of our investiagtion in botany. To add to this mini study on bees I made this little copywork notebook based upon the charming stories of Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne. There are 13 pages of copy work with classic images from the story Winnie the Pooh and the Bees. There are three coloring pages of Pooh in the back. Please drop in a download a free copy. The classic Pooh images I found at justpooh.com. The pictures are free to use for educational purposes and personal use. See what you can make with them!

 

I found small version of the classic stories for 69 cents each at our local Goodwill store. They are the original story with classic pictures but the small size which children love. Really a charming little set of books.