Some school plans for this week (Dollygirl's Grade Seven)

Daily work:  opening time (hymn), memory work, Easy Grammar Plus, Saxon Algebra 1/2, Fix It...Write, reading poems, French lessons (most days), play some Schubert when possible.  Continue reading Watership Down.

Monday

Old Testament:  Continue the Book of Numbers

English History:  "The Quarrel" (between Henry II and Thomas a Becket)

Ourselves Book II: "Dangers of the uninstructed conscience"

Literature:  Ivanoe  (Gurth's fight in the forest)

Natural History:  The Spring of the Year: read chapter 4 ("Things to See in the Spring"), go outside if possible

Tuesday  (probably going to a lunchtime concert)

New Testament:  Gospel of Mark, read independently and keep personal notebook

Geography:  Into the Unknown

Grammar of Poetry:  Spacial Poetry (last lesson we will be doing, other than review)

Plutarch's Lives: Cicero, Lesson 2

Literature:  The Return of the King

Wednesday

Old Testament:  Continue the Book of Numbers

English History:  'The Murder"

Online map drills

Science:  work on muscles and skin; maybe use the microscope

Shakespeare's King John, begin Act II

Music:  finish chapter on Schubert (short reading)

Thursday

New Testament:  Gospel of Mark, read independently and keep personal notebook

Architecture:  Cathedral, second third of the book

Science:  continue

The Bear Says North: second story in the book

Ivanhoe

Composition time

Friday

Basic Bible Studies:  continue verses about our adoption as God's children

How to Read a Book

French History:  read about the Third Crusade, 1190 AD

Picture Talk:  Introduction to Vermeer

Money Matters workbook, chapter 2

Return of the King

Charlotte Mason and the Not-Just-Reading Challenge, Part Two

(Part One is here.)

Even when looking at the few samples we have of actual Parents' Union School timetables, the "what you do when and how" question looms....

People talking about Charlotte Mason's philosophy of education sometimes use the word organic.

Yes, organic does mean natural, real, of living things, not artificial.

But another definition is "consisting of different parts that all fit together well." Different organs, working together to make a functioning whole. Yet another is "happening or developing in a natural and continuous process."  

And the word that seems to fit in right after that is "holistic."   The idea that the total effectiveness of a group of things each interacting with one another is different or greater than their effectiveness when acting in isolation from one another.  The whole philosophical and educational package, made up of many small lessons over many days, multiple terms, a number of years, turns out to have a greater meaning and value than we could have forseen.

'Open, Sesame.'––I think we should have a great educational revolution once we ceased to regard ourselves as assortments of so-called faculties, and realised ourselves as persons whose great business it is to get in touch with other persons of all sorts and condition; of all countries and climes, of all times, past and present. History would become entrancing, literature a magic mirror for the discovery of other minds, the study of sociology a duty and a delight. We should tend to become responsive and wise, humble and reverent, recognising the duties and the joys of the full human life. We cannot of course overtake such a programme of work, but we can keep it in view; and I suppose every life is moulded upon its ideal. ~~ Charlotte Mason, School Education

Many living books.  Many ideas.  Many glimpses of the divine, of Eternity, of something beyond ourselves. ("God Sightings.")

And, unfortunately or fortunately (I think fortunately), it's impossible to program all that ahead of time, because we're not programmable beings.

We can plan books, do a little research ahead of time, think of good "narration prompts."  But we can't always predict where it's going to take us.

Use-what-you-choose homeschooling (Part Five--Last one!)

From Part Four:

"A vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books (also here), for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of "those first-born affinities that fit our new existence to existing things." ~~ Charlotte Mason

I started out here reminiscing about how homeschoolers used to depend on in-print curriculum reviews, but that there weren't so many of them that you couldn't make a reasonable choice; especially on a tight budget. And now the sky seems to be the limit.

I also pointed out that if you got stuck choosing, you might find at least temporary help by plugging in to pre-written booklists and schedules.  Which aren't at all bad things, and they're certainly better than (like the Duchess) throwing everything in the bowl and hoping for the best.

But if you feel like you're stuck blindly following recipes; if you want to get more adventurous, if for whatever reason you find yourself in a place where you need to do things differently...maybe you have a child with an unusual learning style, or a spouse with an unpredictable work schedule, or thirteen daughters named

Madeleine, Gwendolyn, Jane and Clothilde,
Caroline, Genevieve, Maude and Mathilde,
Willibald, Guinevere, Joan and Brunhilde,

And the youngest of all was the baby, Gunhilde...what was I saying...oh yes, as Peg Bracken said, then you are "for it."

Choosing and using is not really such a mystery.  You just need to follow sound educational principles and, so to speak, write your own recipe but don't let it send you up on a sky-high mountain of cake batter.  And I warn you that, as soon as you beckon them, hordes of Principles, Systems, and Methods, right, wrong, beautiful, silly, contradictory, and time-wasting ones, will immediately swarm your castle and beg admittance.

But as Charlotte Mason said, it's up to you which ideas you choose to let through the gates.  Invite the good ones in, and drop the portcullis on the rest.

Books, we've talked about, and we can keep on talking about them forever, because they're so central and they're getting so quickly shut out of this culture. Remember what Ray Bradbury said in Fahrenheit 451, that it wasn't really necessary to make books illegal, because most people had already stopped reading, didn't care anyway?  You don't have to bite people's cell phones in half to make your point; reading for knowledge, and going beyond the elementary reading stage (see How to Read a Book), is a little less hard on the orthodontics.  Search for treasures, and don't limit the search to "children's areas."

"Things, e.g.––
          i. Natural obstacles for physical contention, climbing, swimming, walking, etc.
          ii. Material to work in––wood, leather, clay, etc.
          iii. Natural objects in situ––birds, plants, streams, stones, etc,
          iv. Objects of art.
          v. Scientific apparatus, etc."  ~~ Charlotte Mason

In other words, explore the kingdom.  I know, I know, what was a simple list for her seems full of contentious obstacles for some of us:  clay's messy, wood takes tools, streams are wet, and what's with that et cetera at the end?  But, to put it in a better way, we gain something, even maybe something Charlotte didn't have, by having to make a conscious choice to make the natural, messy, and risky available to our children.

And you know how Charlotte Mason finishes off the "Educational Manifesto" from which I drew that last bit about Books and Things?

There is reason to believe that these principles are workable in all schools, Elementary and Secondary; that they tend in the working to simplification, economy, and discipline.

Simplification!  Economy!  Not to mention discipline!  This is not about overwhelming anybody.  It's about making and sticking to some basic, good choices.  The good stuff is all around us. Remember at the beginning of the first post I complained that technology has made things too complicated?  Well, yes, that's true, but if we know where to look and where to say "stop," we can make the most of it.

Illustrations from The Duchess Bakes a Cake, by Virginia Kahl.

Use-what-you-choose homeschooling (Part Four, one more to come)

From Part Three:

We have principles, tools, and a whole world to explore.
It means that we can stop worrying what the lady at church thinks.
It also means that we have a greater understanding and purpose when we do choose learning materials. 

So what does one need for teaching?  (Also here)

One or more persons, also known as children (also here)
The principle of authority, used wisely
The principle of obedience, taught well
The respect due to the personality of children
Three educational instruments--the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit (also here), and the presentation of living ideas (also here)
All the knowledge that is proper to children, communicated in well-chosen language
A vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books (also here), for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of "those first-born affinities that fit our new existence to existing things."
The way of the will (also here)
The way of reason (also here)
The Divine Spirit who has constant access to their spirits; their Continual Helper in all the interests, duties and joys of life.

~~ Charlotte Mason, "20 Principles," found in Towards a Philosophy of Education and elsewhere

One more post to come.

Use-what-you-choose homeschooling (Part Three of Five)

From Part Two:

"However, the trouble with following a premade plan, even a good plan, is that you can get caught up in the plan itself, and miss the bigger picture. 'I just want to get dinner on the stove' is a practical approach, but we miss out on something important if we never wonder what we're eating, where it came from."

Are we eating well?

Are we eating enough, not too much?

To reverse the education/food analogy, is our (literal) eating part of a "great conversation" of human history, agricultural practices, heritage, ecology?  Does it celebrate the earth God made and the things that grow on it?  Does it inspire stewardship, community, joy, and gratitude?  Does it make us want to come back for another meal?

Are we teaching well?  Are the students getting the right mind-food? Enough, not too much?  Are we teaching celebration, community, ecology, the great conversation?  Or is it just "math on the table?"  And what does that have to do with use-what-you-choose, whether we buy packaged curriculum, follow someone's plan in a book, scrounge through online freebies, or create something completely original? (Which might then become a book for someone else to follow...)

I could repeat what others have said about the meaning of education, but I want to offer a couple of links instead.  Brandy at Afterthoughts is running a 31-day series of Charlotte Mason posts, and today's post on the Three Educational Tools fits in well with the questions I just asked.  There's a recent post at the Archipelago blog called Studying the Principles Behind the Method.  To homeschool our children with sound educational principles in place means that, though the materials might seem random or ragtag, the philosophy and methods are not.

It means that we homeschool with more than a twenty-year-old B.A., a pile of thrift-shopped books, and a limited amount of time on You-tube.  We have principles, tools, and a whole world to explore.

It means that we can stop worrying what the lady at church thinks.

It also means that we have a greater understanding and purpose when we do choose learning materials.

Part Four is here.

Use-what-you-choose homeschooling (Part Two)

From Part One:

"The key to frugal homeschooling used to be use-what-you-have.  Now it's use-what-you-choose.  Like shopping at one of those monster supermarkets with fifty kinds of beef jerky, you can suffer classic middle-of-the-aisle paralysis.  You might end up with too much, too little, the wrong thing,  You, or your students, might have no idea what to do with it.  The lady you talked to at church might even be right when she wonders how homeschoolers can know what they're supposed to teach without someone standing guard over them.  Oh, for the good old low-tech days..."

So what do the food shopping experts tell you to do before you get to the monster supermarket?  Make a plan, of course.  Examine the wad of flyers weighing down the newspaper; look through your shelf of cookbooks for recipes using "pork shoulder," and if that fails, start a search of the mega-recipes websites. Don't forget to list all your coupons and price-matches, just to hold things up longer at the checkout.  Do we see a pattern here?  There are still too many options, and you're still going to end up serving frozen fries and chicken fingers, or whatever your default meal is.  

Homeschooling applications?  "The more catalogues (or websites) the better" isn't necessarily true, if you're not sure what you want in the first place.  And this is the big one, if you're broke or just frugal: not even if the resources are very cheap or free.  Because planning and teaching time isn't free.  Neither is bookshelf space, or printer paper and toner, or (for some of us) downloading costs.  As Uncle Eric repeats often, TANSTAAFL.

Okay then.  What's the next obvious thing to do, if you can't narrow down your own dinner plan? Follow somebody else's, right? and the more specific, the better.  Buy one of those 30-day menu cookbooks that includes grocery lists and prep timetables.  Follow the online menu plans of a kindred spirit, or rip them out of Woman's Day or Vegetarian Times. You know what? It can't hurt. You probably wouldn't want to follow somebody else's choices forever, but it can get you jumpstarted.  

Homeschooling applications?  As I've already said, it's a big, big world of curriculum, and if you have the money, you can order up anything from a virtual school or correspondence course (the most extreme forms of using somebody else's plan); to a box full of every last thing you need*, including pencils (Calvert School is the classic example, but in Canada we also have a family-run business called Tree of Life School); to one book with suggestions for each grade, each subject (The Well-Trained Mind).  Of course there are also the free options, like reading other homeschoolers' blogs, or borrowing a book like Rebecca Rupp's year-by-year guide from the library, or even (if you're desperate) looking at government expectations for public schools.  If you're stuck in indecision, go ahead and do what they do.  You might have to improvise here and there (can't do this, don't have that book), but you can at least get an idea of how homeschooling seems to work for somebody out there.  Who knows?--you might find you like whatever plan it is so much that you stay forever.

That's one way to do it.

However, the trouble with following a premade plan, even a good plan, is that you can get caught up in the plan itself, and miss the bigger picture.  "I just want to get dinner on the stove" is a practical approach, but we miss out on something important if we never wonder what we're eating, where it came from.

More in Part Three.


*Just as a point of interest, did you know that the creators of Ambleside Online referred to it early on as "Charlotte Mason in a box?"

Use-what-you-choose homeschooling: not as easy as it sounds. (Part One)

Looking for the rest of this series?  Part Two is here. Part Three is here. Part Four is here. Part Five is here.

When our Apprentice (now in university) was small, homeschoolers depended on product descriptions in hard-copy catalogues.  They grabbed up printed magazines, and books of reviews, by people who made a specialty out of knowing all there was to know about just about every known homeschooling product.  (Mary Pride and Cathy Duffy, to name two.)  Fifteen or twenty years ago, undertaking a project like that was actually feasible.

Around the same time, Diane Moos wrote a one-page article about frugal homeschooling, in response to a friend's request for an extremely low-budget sixth-grade curriculum.  Aside from a few helpful suggestions of low-cost resources (such as Spectrum Math), Diane's basic approach was "Bible and a library card."  You might update that now to "Bible and an app," but it's still good advice.

The difference, though, is that, back then, the new homeschooler could have made the most of what she had, but she wouldn't have been overwhelmed by choice, at least not on fifty dollars.  For fifty dollars, you could put together something quite decent, especially using thrift shops and used curriculum.  But once you had it, you had it, if that makes sense.  The math book, if you didn't like it, wasn't going to transform into something else.  Whatever maps and illustrations were in the science or history book, that's what you used, unless you uncovered a stack of National Geographics, or lived near a great library full of books to supplement.  Still, that would probably be enough to keep most kids busy.  If all else failed, as Diana Waring said,  you could take them to the zoo.

However, in the past decade, technology has transformed not only the how of homeschool, but the what. The friend with the fifty-dollar budget would undoubtedly now have at least a computer, and the Internet, if not an e-reader or a phone that does tricks.  And on the Internet she would find, at prices ranging from free to moderate to ridiculous, just about everything anyone could need for teaching.  I don't mean only online classes, tutors, and math drills for kids, but entire libraries from textbooks to classics; full-length movies; virtual tours; music and paintings to download; forums, groups, reviews, booklists, lesson plans, scope and sequences, rubrics, printables, manipulatives. Stuff that's already online, stuff you can order online, stuff you can put online. The whole magic box.  Just add crayons...but of course you can order those too, from cheapo to beeswax.   If you have decent Internet service (and hopefully a printer), the educational world is yours, no matter how tiny the budget.

So what's the problem?

The key to frugal homeschooling used to be use-what-you-have.  Now it's use-what-you-choose.  Like shopping at one of those monster supermarkets with fifty kinds of beef jerky, you can suffer classic middle-of-the-aisle paralysis.  You might end up with too much, too little, the wrong thing,  You, or your students, might have no idea what to do with it.  The lady you talked to at church might even be right when she wonders how homeschoolers can know what they're supposed to teach without someone standing guard over them.  Oh, for the good old low-tech days...

Linked from the Carnival of Homeschooling at The Common Room.

Two boxes: more than enough

Meredith at Like Merchant Ships recently referred to an old post of hers about how and why she keeps their holiday decorations limited to two boxes.

Consider her reasons why...and then could we consider applying the same logic to homeschool materials?

Now there are many different ways to think about that, and part of it is defining what we call "homeschool materials." The Mennonite Central Committee has an ongoing project where churches and individuals fill drawstring bags with school supplies: notebooks, pencils, a ruler and so on. It's hard to learn without having access to those most basic items. Then there are the "book basics" that most homeschoolers have, like reference books; and homeschool gadgets and gizmos, like timelines and maps, letter tiles, math rods. And beyond those, there are Books--often hundreds, sometimes even thousands of them. Some people don't even think of Books as school supplies, but for us they're basic too.

No way you're getting all that in one box.

And even if you limited the "box" to one year's worth of school for one child, you'd still probably want to store the rest for future years. Children aren't like Christmases, after all; you can use the same angel year after year, but you can't do the same math book over and over.

But the concept is still worth thinking about; and it's something I'm pondering even more during this year of being given access to extra freebies and gadgets (some of them very good and useful). It's something I have to deal with when I consider our array of well-used electric kitchen appliances--you all know how fond I am of my toaster oven, and the Crockpot is a pretty close second. What's good? What's useful? What's too much?

Many of us are blessed with a whole Treehouse to live in...but could you move your homeschooling, cooking, decorating to a tiny apartment or a trailer? What would stay, what would go? Would the kids' desire to hold on to every old toy suddenly be resolved by necessity?

What if someone came and asked you to put everything out on the front lawn for a photo? That thought's enough to make me finish this post and go clean up the living room.

Two boxes? It may not be practical in all respects...but it's worth thinking over.