A Month with Charlotte Mason #7: Get a Life

Training your memory is not just a trick for winning baby-shower games, but a habit of mind, taught carefully from a young age. The power of observation is not a unique gift, but a trained power, developed and strengthened with constant use. Along with training in obedience and attention, it makes up a large part of CM’s early-years curriculum. How did Charlotte Mason’s older students get so much done in a school day that ended early and didn’t require homework? They had trained their brains to pay attention the first time, bringing their whole minds to bear on something, visualizing the historical scene or the spelling word, repeating it back, and also retaining it because the next lesson would follow from that one, linking back to the last. The brainwork here was the student’s; he was taught that he could do it, starting small and working up. Charlotte Mason said, “Give an instant’s undivided attention to anything whatsoever, and that thing will be remembered.”

This is what narration is—visualizing, remembering, and telling back either orally or in writing. It is not parroting, or "getting up a lesson" as Laura Ingalls used to do for her mother; it is retelling with understanding. Narration can be written, oral, or done as a combination with a child who is just starting to tell back in writing; and it can be done right after hearing or reading something, or slightly delayed like hearing a story on Friday and then being asked to write a narration on Monday (we have read that this was done in PNEU schools after a Shakespeare reading, later in the 20th century, and we can guess that it was also done that way in earlier years); or it can be done after a bit of time has gone by such as in term exams.

Back to the educational instruments, the three allowable and effective tools for teaching: the last one is the presentation of living ideas. "Give your child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information." Do I need to say more than that about it? That's all, but that's all.

And if all that habit training and visualizing sound too bewildering and overwhelming when all you’re looking for is what to do for reading and math and how to keep the littler ones out of mischief, Charlotte Mason has some encouragement:

Wise letting alone is the chief thing asked of them…every mother has in Nature an all-sufficient handmaid, who arranges for due work and due rest of mind, muscles, and senses.

These ideas are supposed to free us from some of the anxiety we naturally feel about having all this responsibility for our children’s upbringing and education. You have given them some skills, they have more of their own; let them use them. Parents are not to butt in on play but allow children, as much as possible, to get wet sometimes, dirty, tired, maybe even injured—taking a reasonable risk, but allowing them to grow. The leisurely part of CM is, partly, being able to back off.

“…..A little guiding, a little restraining, much reverent watching, Nature asks of us; but beyond that, it is the wisdom of parents to leave children as much as may be to Nature, and ‘to a higher Power than Nature itself.”

"Nature will look after [a child] and give him promptings of desire to know many things; and somebody must tell as he wants to know; and to do many things, and somebody should be handy just to put him in the way; and to be many things, naughty and good, and somebody should give direction…The busy mother says she has no leisure to be that somebody, and the child will run wild and get into bad habits; but we must not make a fetish of habit; education is a life as well as a discipline."

In other words: CM = Get a Life.

Here is a checklist for leisurely homeschooling—yes, that means You: the philosophy of leisure and the need for an un-anxious, positive atmosphere applies to the teacher too.

If you’re coercing or yelling or threatening, you’re probably doing it wrong.
If you’re spending too much time marking workbooks or cutting things out for the children to paste, you’re doing it wrong.
If you keep switching math curriculums, trying to find the perfect one, you’re probably doing it wrong.
If you’re explaining too much...
If you’re worrying that your kids haven’t mastered sentence diagramming by grade 2...
If you’re pushing your kids to narrate in front of Grandma...
If you never get out of the children’s room at the library...
If you’re worrying too much about this checklist…you’re probably doing it wrong.

In the next post, we'll talk about doing it right.

Review Crew Cruise Question: On Choices, burnout, and violets

This week's question: "Burnout--how do you handle it? Avoid it?" (Click on the ship to see more responses--they will be posted on Tuesday.)

And in the morning it's manna hotcakes.
We snack on manna all day.
And they sure had a winner last night for dinner,
flaming manna soufflé--Keith Green

On the weekend we went out for dinner with Grandpa Squirrel, to a diner-style restaurant we like. The food and the service are good. The wall decor is amusing (lots of diner-era movie pictures).The only problem with this place is its mind-bogglingly long menu. What are you going to have? Fish and chips, pasta, pizza, pasta-plus-pizza, burgers, sandwiches, all-day breakfast? Soup or salad with that? Fries or baked potato? Mama Squirrel went into can't-decide mode, so when The Apprentice asked for a chicken wrap, she just said, "I'll have the same." Fortunately, it turned out to be a good choice. But wrapping your brain around all those choices seems to be a too-common experience in our culture, and it can actually keep you from choosing at all. We have posted about this very thing before.

The Toronto Star posted a review yesterday (by Jennifer Hunter) of a new book by Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing. Iyengar talks about the same issues and describes experiments such as "the jam test"--a grocery store experiment where people overwhelmed by too many flavours turned out to be less likely to buy any of them at all. I've seen the same thing happen at the homeschool conference vendor hall, where the sheer number of books, DVDs, posters and toys makes people either freeze up, or go crazy buying things they don't need. Or the number of people telling you to try this math curriculum, that method, this subject, that program, becomes just another invitation for brain meltdown.

I'm experiencing a slight dose of this myself today, on a gorgeous warm Easter Monday that, besides an attack on Mount Laundry, requires some time spent organizing our spring term. If you can get burned out by boredom (manna waffles) or by overwhelming demands, you can also be attacked with similar symptoms when the choices seem too many. Especially when the weather's nice and the last thing you want to do is go through all those free downloads.

But maybe there's something there I missed...and the DHM is using that Numbers Long Ago book, so maybe I should look at that again...and I just got that 40-page Worksheets Directory, maybe there's something in there we could use. Oh nuts--I'd rather sit on the back deck and finish Terrible Lizard.

Okay...regroup. First of all, our general schedule has been working pretty well. Although I might like a slightly neater weekly table of subjects; and although Charlotte Mason might like it better if Crayons didn't do all her math, spelling and handwriting all in a bunch (or if she didn't do "spelling" at all, but that's another story); I have to admit that if it's working and the work is getting done, we're probably halfway there.

What do I want to see change this term? More outdoor nature; more picture study and music (we've been very lax on that this year), more geography, and more independent literature for Ponytails. More independent Bible reading, since we've finished the year's stories-to-read-together. More Roots and Fruits word roots, since we let that drop in the fall and the Squirrelings keep asking me when we're going to add more prefixes to our lonely little list on the kitchen wall. More habit training, which sounds like rather nasty medicine but which is nonethless beneficial.

Goals: to get Crayons to a particular point in third grade Math Mammoth, and to get Ponytails past decimals and through a bit of algebra. To read Kim and Great Expectations out loud, and more poetry. To get done Easy Grammar Plus through the Verbs chapter. To get done everybody's assigned history for the term. To finish a few other things that we started--no big choices involved there. To keep everything within the idea of leisurely. (You never thought it was so much work to be leisurely?)

Nice things I'd like to fit in:

*A short unit on inventions with Crayons, using some of the chapters from Story of Inventions which is part of her Year 3 work, and since we were asked to try out an inventors game for the Review Crew.
*Marmee Dear's Sugar 'n' Spice Unit Study, just because it looks useful and interesting
*Gardening books
*Spring Nature Study, from Type Lessons for Primary Teachers
*Nature study on the violets that are everywhere on our lawn
*Tables in Word 2003 by Leanne Beitel (how to create tables--very useful)
*Charlotte Mason's Ourselves

Some of those are obviously more important than others--but violets don't last long. We have to keep the priorities straight.

So am I done? Can I go read my book now?

Oh--I still have to get all that stuff in order for tomorrow, don't I? And put the things in the right workboxes. Okay, so I'm not quite there yet...

but I'm not burned out.

Photos: Mr. Fixit

A Month with Charlotte Mason #6

So that left only three valid, allowable educational instruments or tools—the Atmosphere of Environment, the Discipline of Habit, and the Presentation of Living Ideas.” This is sometimes cut down to “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” Let’s go through those.

I’ll touch on environment just briefly to say that Charlotte Mason thought that homes were great places to learn simply because they weren’t too perfect and packaged. Most of you know the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room. In recent months she and her family have become more and more involved in the lives of two little boys they know, to the point that the boys’ mother has taken the older one out of kindergarten so that the Headmistress can homeschool him when he stays at The Common Room house, which is out in the country with assorted livestock, creeks and woods to explore, and a variety of humans, related and unrelated, coming and going. In the process of all this, the Headmistress exchanged some emails with the kindergarten teacher, who thought that the little boy would really be missing out on something if he didn’t attend school, because the teachers at their school had "high quality literacy training," had “students reading at their perfect instructional level," and even offered "a leveled book room of books that the reading teachers use to match to the specific needs of the students." (Besides worrying about all the usual socialization stuff.) Since then the Headmistress has posted several times about the wide variety of things both boys are doing, too many to mention here, but including the books she reads to them out of the approximately 8,000 they own. Which place sounds like a better environment for learning? What kind of atmosphere do you want your own children to learn in? Can working only at a "perfect instructional level" actually be detrimental?

Second, on habits and discipline: When you think of habits, you might think first of moral things like not being greedy, or manners like saying please, or helpful things like cleaning up your own mess or turning the lights out. But it's not just about getting them to brush their teeth. Those things are all included in habit training, but there are also habits of the mind that are just as important, such as observation and attention. Charlotte Mason said that the formation of habits IS education, and that Education is the formation of habits.

When we teach strong habits of body and mind, we give our children the leisure—the freedom from anxiety—not to have to constantly worry about what to do next, whether they are going to come when they’re called or not, whether they are going to work attentively at their lessons or dawdle or get distracted, whether they are going to tell the truth or not. As adults, we have, we hope, developed stronger wills that enable us to simply tell ourselves to get back to work or do what we don’t want to do; children, according to Charlotte Mason, don’t always have that power, so it is important to begin with the discipline of habits, and work on developing the will gradually. She said, “The habits of the child produce the character of the man.”

If you read Home Education, you’ll find that Charlotte Mason spends a fair amount of time at the beginning talking about keeping children’s brains healthy and growing by giving them lots of fresh air and outdoor time; and her point is that since you’re out there anyway, you have the opportunity to train them in habits of observation of whatever is around them—plants, animals, landscapes, weather, stars, light, shadows, water, dirt, snow, and encouraging them in their abilities to describe, accurately and in detail, whatever they see. (Or whatever they observe, with any or all of their five senses. I still remember Coffeemamma's Schmoo showing the rest of her family that particular maples had their own smell--or was it taste?)

CM is thought of as a books-based, literary curriculum, and that is true; but I think it is just as much a SEEING curriculum, both in what is literally seen and what is visualized when listening to a geography lesson, when studying spelling words, or in picture study, when children look carefully at a painting for several minutes, and then try to describe it in as much detail as they can from memory. She believed that the act of visualizing something was the key to holding it in the long-term memory. You had to create a mental picture of something yourself, but too much given, too many visuals cluttering up the lesson, would actually limit that process, giving your brain less to work on by itself. I think that relates to our phrase “doesn’t leave much to the imagination.” That’s what Charlotte Mason did want to do—leave lots to the imagination.

A Month with Charlotte Mason #5: Only Three Tools

...and studying the subjects we do cover with books, Real Books—with Real Things as well, but largely with Real Books, inspiring real ideas and real questions, modeling real vocabulary, awakening real curiosity, offering real mind-food.

Real Things are important. A Charlotte Mason education can and should have lots of hands-on, feet-on, five-senses activity. It should have maps and globes, dominoes and math beans, coins, CDs, paint boxes, animals, games of tag, costumes and sets, physical exercises, field trips, singing, building, household skills, outdoor play, clay, magnifying glasses, caterpillars, shells, even tea parties.

But the one indispensable factor is books—lots of books, and the right kind of books, a rich, varied, generous serving that makes them want more. And using those books in a way that makes use of all the habits and skills, intelligence and imagination, powers of attention and observation, that are already in our children and that are being built up by the training we have been giving them.

We want whole books, and real books—not cut apart, rewritten, and sugar coated, but with their ideas intact. Even the more difficult books can be a vital part of the children’s education, without our worrying too much about whether they’re totally understood by 21st-century children.

Recently I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which is about a wartime book club and how each person in the group formed a relationship with one author or another in his or her own way, just by reading that person’s book, whether it was an ancient Roman or a 19th-century essayist. They were just plain people, some with more education than others, but they heard those voices speaking into their own minds, without anybody else telling them what they should think about the books; and they understood them, argued with them, loved or hated them. The books fed them, in the midst of a literal time of famine.

In the children’s classic Understood Betsy, the main character is surprised, during her first day in a country school, to be not only allowed but expected to read more than a line at a time out loud--just as she is surprised, in another scene, to be invited to drink all the milk she wants. The teacher tests her further by having her read “Barbara Frietchie,” and all the other children stop their work to listen (and are not scolded for listening). That evening as Betsy recounts her day to the supposedly ignorant old “Putney cousins” with whom she has come to stay, they suggest that she read to them from one of the books on their shelf: Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Their mutual enjoyment of “The Stag at Eve” creates the first real bond between Betsy and her new family.

Third--we're still talking about the three questions parents should ask themselves--how should the students learn? Charlotte Mason wrote about her early days of teaching, which she said were often frustrating because each year the children seemed able to do harder sums, and read harder books, but they did not really grow, in the sense of having minds more awake, or in gaining moral power to overcome problems like habitual lying or dawdling at lessons. She wanted to help them more, but wasn’t sure how. Over many years of experience teaching children, and then training teachers herself, several ideas seemed to come together for her.

She knew of many things that certainly might change behaviour, but most of them were not allowable if you started out by viewing each child as a person made in God’s image, who “must not be encroached upon whether by the direct use of fear or love, suggestion or influence, or by undue play upon any one natural desire,” like competition for marks. In other words, fear could certainly affect someone's behaviour; but that wasn't a route she wanted to take. The personal influence of a strong teacher could definitely change someone's behaviour, and probably for the better in some respects; but what would happen when that teacher was gone and the student did not know how to think for himself? None of these options were respectful of a young human being's moral rights. (Hm, so much for accusations of homeschool brainwashing.)

So that left only three valid, allowable instruments or tools that an educator could use to go beyond the "horse in a mill" school routine of endless recitations and sums. Those three were:

"the Atmosphere of Environment,
the Discipline of Habit,
and the Presentation of Living Ideas.”

This is sometimes cut down to “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” I'll go through those in the next post.

A Month With Charlotte Mason will be taking a break for the holidays this weekend.

Life outside of homeschool posts: thinking dinner as you cook

Dewey's Treehouse has always been somewhat eclectic--we go through seasons of posting mostly frugal stuff or food stuff, and other times when we're more about homeschooling or something else. If you're not into reviews or Charlotte Mason, thanks for your patience.

Yesterday we got home from an errand at shortly after four; I had an hour to get dinner on the table and I wasn't sure yet what I was going to do with the pound of ground chicken that I had left thawing in the fridge. I started it browning while I preheated the oven and mixed up a large pan of brownies, since we didn't have even one cookie or anything like that in the house (well, there was some Jell-O in the fridge, that I'd made up from the other package I bought for the disastrous Gummy Worms experiments). I also cut up some sweet potatoes and put them in a casserole, sprinkled them with pepper, drizzled them with olive oil, and added water to the bottom of the pan; they went in with the brownies. (I should have cut them even smaller because they were still a bit hard at the end; I had to finish them quickly in the microwave.)

When the chicken was pretty much cooked, I added part frozen green beans, one chopped-up cauliflower, and this combination of sauce ingredients: 1/4 cup white salad dressing (what we use instead of mayonnaise), 1/2 cup of cottage cheese (because the recipe I was thinking of calls for sour cream or yogurt and I didn't have either), a bit of garlic powder, and a teaspoonful of chicken bouillon powder. I put the sauce stuff on top of the vegetables, and it didn't look like much, but I was figuring there would be some liquid from the chicken and the frozen beans. In the end I did add a bit of milk: not enough to be soupy, just enough to keep it moist. I just let this cook for awhile on the stovetop until the cauliflower was cooked and it smelled done. I also added in the measly bit of cheddar cheese we had in the fridge. (We are not starving, we just need some groceries.)

And I cooked a potful of Basmati rice.

So: Cheesy Chicken Cauliflower Un-Casserole; baked sweet potatoes; rice; brownies; and the remains of the Jell-O. That was dinner, and the Squirrel family approved it.

A Month with Charlotte Mason #4

But if we’re not to undervalue children’s capabilities, not to ignore or abuse their mental as well as their physical needs, not to sidetrack their spiritual lives, not to fall unthinkingly into utilitarianism, what is it that we are to do? Let’s ask the same questions that Charlotte Mason did.

First of all, what is education about? Why must children learn at all?

She says that “our business is, not to teach him all about anything—isn’t that a bit of a stress-reliever?-- but to help him make valid, as many as may be of

'Those first born affinities,
'That fit our new existence to existing things.'” (Wordsworth, "The Prelude")

In other words, a child has the right to learn what it means to be part of the human race, to be living in this world and to be in a relationship with God the Father; and he needs to learn in order to grow.

(Remember the definition of leisure proposed in the second post? Having the freedom (time, space, opportunity) to discover what makes you fully human.)

Second, we ask what the child is to learn.

Charlotte Mason said, “The object of education is to put a child in living touch with as much as may be of the life of Nature and of thought…. a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we must train him upon physical exercises, nature, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books….Add to this one or two keys to self knowledge, and the educated youth goes forth with some idea of self management, with some pursuits, and many vital interests.” That simple, right?

A more detailed curriculum? Miss Mason felt that there were several non-negotiable subjects that all tied in with each other and balanced each other. From her Volume 6, Philosophy of Education:

“But what if in the very nature of things we find a complete curriculum suggested?....A child of man has a natural desire to know the history of his race and of his nation, what men thought in the past and are thinking now; the best thoughts of the best minds taking form as literature, and at its highest as poetry, or poetry rendered….as art….he is a child of God, whose supreme desire and glory it is to know about and to know his almighty Father: as a person of many parts and passions who must know how to use, care for, and discipline himself, body, mind and soul: as a person of many relationships,--to family, city, church, state, neighbouring states, the world at large: as the inhabitant of a world full of beauty and interest, the features of which he must recognize and know how to name, and a world too, and a universe, whose every function of every part is ordered, by laws which he must being to know. It is a wide programme founded on the educational rights of man….Our part it seems to me is to give a child a vital hold upon as many as possible of those wide relationships proper to him.” Those were the things she thought it was most important that every human being should learn—the things that make us fully human.

It may not sound very "leisurely" to tell (or remind) you that Charlotte Mason’s students, by high school, were expected to be on their third or fourth foreign language including Latin, to be taking two or three branches of mathematics and the same in science, to have studied more history and geography than most of us ever learn, and to be able to recast both Bible lessons and current events into lines of verse; not to mention keeping nature notebooks and more. For many of us (and our young people) that may not be realistic, although it’s certainly not impossible; I’ve heard of super-accomplished CM-educated graduates who have covered an amazing amount of material in their high school years, and who may not even realize what an out-of-the-ordinary (yet within reach of others) thing they've done.

But the key to this is not so much copying every branch of everything in the same way that CM did (studying all the same languages just because she did, or ignoring new areas of science), but following her principles, grounding children in the habits of attention and observation from the time they're small (as well as the moral-type and hygiene-type habits), and studying the subjects we do cover with books, Real Books—with Real Things as well, but largely with Real Books, inspiring real ideas and real questions, modeling real vocabulary, awakening real curiosity, offering real mind-food.

More on Why Books in the next post.

A Month With Charlotte Mason #3

In Home Education, she said they needed to begin by asking themselves “Why must the children learn at all? What should they learn? And how should they learn it?” And that after they had considered these questions, they would be in a position to direct their children’s studies…as long as they started in the right place, following a few truths about human beings and natural laws that you can’t disobey without causing damage, and starting and ending with the one who made those laws.

For Charlotte Mason, that was with the idea of God.

Actually she starts more with a lot of talk about oxygen and wool clothes and children not eating fried foods, that gets people very confused, but right at the beginning of Home Education, she says there are just three big thou-shalt-not's for adults raising or teaching children, that come right out of the Gospels and form a code of education. One of the don’ts is not to hinder children in their relationship with God as their heavenly Father. She says we hinder them if we overlook or make light of their natural relationship with Almighty God; if we twist their thoughts about God to suit our own purposes, or even if we overdo certain kinds of religious talk. We are not to do or say anything that will damage the child’s own relationship with God.

The other two big don’ts are not to offend children and not to despise them. To offend them is the sin of commission, meaning both doing harm to them, and allowing them to do wrong. It also means not following what we know about the physical care of children, moral training, intellectual training, or spiritual teaching; mistreating them in ways that cause them to stumble.

Despising children is not doing the good that we should do in loving them or teaching them, because we undervalue their intelligence, their value as persons, their capacity for good, or even their capacity for bad. It means not taking them seriously. “We may not meddle directly with the personality of child or man. We may not work upon his vanity, his fears, his love, his emulation, or any thing that is his by very right, anything that goes to make him a person.” (Charlotte Mason, School Education)

She forgot how afraid she was of Uncle Henry, and poured out to him her discovery. "It's not right or left that matters!" she ended triumphantly; "it's which way you want to go!" Uncle Henry looked at her attentively as she talked, eyeing her sidewise over the top of one spectacle-glass. When she finished -- "Well, now, that's so," he admitted, and returned to his arithmetic.

It was a short remark, shorter than any Elizabeth Ann had ever heard before. Aunt Frances and her teachers always explained matters at length. But it had a weighty, satisfying ring to it. The little girl felt the importance of having her statement recognized. She turned back to her driving.--Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Understood Betsy

What is Mama Squirrel reading?

Still reading: Terrible Lizard, by Deborah Cadbury

"[Buckland's] appetite for information became insatiable: it was as if the layers of rock that enveloped the globe formed the pages of a history of the earth. But if this was so, what would be written on them? And how did all this fit with the extraordinary 'crocodile' found by Mary Anning?"

Just finished: Wondrous Strange,by Lesley Livingston. Not Mama Squirrel's usual kind of book--this was passed on by The Apprentice, something she was given to read for her high school book club. Too gory for anyone below high school, and it won't appeal to anyone who has theological qualms about reading anything about Faery, but: it's well written, often humorous, mostly avoids bad language, and does a wonderful job incorporating original ideas with traditional fairy lore and Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. It reminds me, in places, of The Dark is Rising (which I know some of you do not like, and I can understand that), and the movie Enchanted, and even the part of The Magician's Nephew where Jadis shows up in London and starts ripping things apart (only in this case it's Queen Mabh). There's already a sequel out as well.

Silver is shiny enough

Congratulations, Apprentice.

Why Mama Squirrel isn't cooking tonight

Tonight is the awards night for Skills Canada at our regional level--that is, the two local school boards have a prize-giving ceremony for ALL the categories. The Apprentice has won bronze twice before, and she knows she's going to win at least bronze tonight because there were only three hairstyling competitors from our board at the competition last week. But in spite of that one bobby pin she KNOWS she left sticking out (did you know Squirrels tend to obsess about things? did you? did you?), she's hoping for something shinier this year. Gold medallists in each category go on to the provincial level.

Usually the awards night is close to where we live, and since it's a long sit (like going to a graduation ceremony) and usually very crowded with students, teachers and parents, just Mama Squirrel goes along to cheer on The Apprentice. But this year, because it's been so crowded in the past, it's been moved to a bigger place at the other end of town. And because it starts quite early and it takes awhile to get there, and because there are fast food places right near there, we are going to take all the Squirrels and go out for burgers first.

There are hockey moms. There are music festival moms. I'm a hairstyling mom.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #2

Post #1 is here.

So let’s go back to the opposite of utilitarian, what we’ve called leisurely. We have the usual definition of leisure as spare time, fun and games, something easy, what you do to relax; there’s Lynn’s definition which included ceasing from anxiety and contemplating higher things; we have the Roman idea of space set aside for thought or conversation; we have Northrop Frye’s idea that irrelevance is not necessarily a bad thing; we have the key phrase “without which we cannot be fully human.”

So if we put them together, we might define leisure in this way:

Having the freedom (time, space, opportunity) to discover what makes you fully human.

But then we also have that very odd connection with our word for school, a place where you’re made to go, listen to what does not interest you, do what you wouldn’t choose to do for as many years as the government says you have to. Why does that just not seem to fit?

And you may wonder what all this has to do with homeschooling. Many of us have kept or taken our children out of school precisely so they wouldn’t forced to be just another brick in the wall. But since utilitarianism is a big part of our culture, and the schools most of us were taught in reflected a utilitarian educational philosophy, it can sneak into our homeschooling. It might show up in worrying too much about provincial/state standards, or basing our criteria for learning on how many booklets children have filled in, or on how well they construct bar graphs and learn their spelling lists. Or we can react to this and go with something that has much less rigidity, a much less parent-directed kind of learning-without-school, where the children are making the decisions about what they will learn and how they will spend their time. John Holt (in Freedom and Beyond) described a cartoon showing a kid in a child-centered school who asks his teacher “Do I have to do whatever I want again today?” But that’s not exactly what Charlotte Mason envisioned either.

In Home Education, she said that parents needed to begin thinking about education by asking themselves “Why must the children learn at all? What should they learn? And how should they learn it?” And that after they had considered these questions, they would be in a position to direct their children’s studies…as long as they started in the right place, following a few truths about human beings and natural laws that you can’t disobey without causing damage, and starting and ending with the One who made those laws.

(Disclaimer here: I have unschooling and "very relaxed homeschooling" friends, and I am not denying that for some people, some of the time, a de-toxing approach works very well. But we're talking here about why CM isn't the same as unschooling.)

Repost from 2008: Kings and heroes, brave, good, and otherwise

I originally posted this in the summer of 2008, when I was planning Crayons' grade 2 year. I thought it was worth going back to along with our Month with Charlotte Mason.

My own second-grade Social Studies, in the experimental '70's, was called Environmental Studies, a word none of us had ever heard and which, I don't think, was ever fully explained. It took us forever to copy that off the blackboard and on to the covers of the new notebooks we were handed. I don't remember a lot about it, either, except for a trip to the sugar bush and some kind of a neighbourhood field trip where we walked around the block and pointed out various kids' apartment buildings. I think the baby chicks we hatched and any other science we did may have been lumped in there as well. For sure, though, it didn't include history.

Can second-graders do more than go to the sugar bush? Would we have "gotten" history in the second grade? No, not in the same way ten-to-twelve-year-olds do, or in the same way teenagers or adults do. Most seven-year-olds don't totally get maps, or dates. They don't get abstract ideas, cause and effect, or political things. But they do like stories, characters, heroes, villains. They do remember what happened and who did what, if not always why. It's the same in geography...I remember The Apprentice's map of the Mississippi, that started somewhere in Alaska. But she had the right idea at least.

So we read the stories of kings and heroes, the brave and good, and the otherwise. Some of the stories may be what Josephine Tey calls Tonypandy; some may be disputed or offer currently unpopular viewpoints. Did King Alfred burn the biscuits?--probably not. Does it matter? Are we teaching untruths or trivialities? Would it make more sense just to wait until they're older and more discriminating?

No, because we are teaching more than facts and dates. We are teaching "norms and nobility," to quote David V. Hicks. "How to live," to quote Charlotte Mason. We are giving them heroes--feet of clay though they may have--to "people" their imaginations. And we are building a foundation for later history teaching--again to quote CM, an understanding that we are not the only people, and our time is not the only time; that people long ago may have known less about technology, may have had attitudes about churches and kings that we don't share, but that they weren't any less intelligent or less human.

Does it matter that we don't start right at the beginning of time, or that some of the history we do is out of sequence? (Bible stories are history too, but we don't confine them to an "ancient history" year! And then there are biographies that come up out of chronological order, and dates connected with artists and writers and the Guinness Book of World Records...) No, not at this age; all "long ago" tends to be a bit hazy anyway when you're still figuring out the difference between a hundred and a thousand; it's after that that children can start making better sense of timelines and other more sequential tools.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, Introduction

Maple buds in our yard (photo: Mr. Fixit)

These are notes from the CM talk I did this weekend, called "A Leisurely Education." They've been edited and added to...I'm going to be posting these in bits and pieces starting today and throughout April. They're based mostly on Charlotte Mason's book Home Education, but you don't have to be reading the book to follow the notes.

Ten years or so ago, when our family first went online and also got serious about Charlotte Mason homeschooling, there were few third-party things, like how-to guides, to help explain what CM was about. In a way that was good, because if you wanted to know what it was about, you had to do a fair amount of reading for yourself. Now all you have to do is Google Charlotte Mason and you’ll get e-books, websites, paraphrases, Yahoo groups, and all kinds of other stuff to help explain, interpret, re-interpret, plan, apply, combine, record, staple, bend and fold CM in a very confusing lot of different ways. It's easy to get tangled up in the secondary stuff that has grown up around Charlotte Mason the educator and the methods that were used in her schools. That includes the Ambleside Online free curriculum project which I’ve been involved in for almost as long. It's an excellent curriculum that applies CM ideas very well; I think it’s done some great things to help homeschoolers take CM methods seriously and get some of the original CM books and articles online, getting away from the ideas about CM being all Victorian tea parties and nature walks that were common a decade ago; but this is about Charlotte Mason's ideas, not so much a look at AO. You need to understand the ideas before you can really use the curriculum.

Especially the whole question of what a “leisurely education” means, and how we can create that for ourselves. So in preparing for today, besides trying to determine the preferred pronunciation of “leisurely” (I'm going with short e), I’ve tried to focus mostly on one of Charlotte Mason’s own books, the first one she wrote in the 1880’s, Home Education. Her other books cover a lot of helpful and practical material, especially for those who have older children or who want to go even deeper into some of the educational and spiritual questions that she raises. Volume 3, School Education, has some very important thoughts about how we view authority, which is probably even more relevant now than it was then; but I think that the first book covers a lot of the basic principles that she expanded on in the later books.

So first of all let’s look at the idea of leisure. The Greek word for leisure, when I looked it up, is put into English letters as SKHOLE, which is also the root of our word school. If you look up the Latin word schola, you find out that, according to at least one online dictionary, it meant an alcove containing a tub in the public baths, or an alcove or space set aside for relaxation or conversation in a palaestra, which was a sports club. So school is meant to be a bubble bath? Or a talk in the locker room?

Well, no. Leisure in the schola sense did not mean Fred Flintstone in a backyard hammock, although Charlotte Mason did describe her methods as “reposeful.” It might be defined as having space and time for minds to meet. Lynn Bruce said back in October that leisure was “ceasing from anxiety and merely utilitarian preoccupations so that one can contemplate higher things, those pursuits without which we cannot be fully human.” (Sounds a bit like Mary and Martha.) If you noticed, she used a key word there, utilitarian. Utilitarianism is exactly the opposite of the kind of leisurely learning, thinking atmosphere we have in mind here. It focuses only on immediate usefulness. It’s why, according to Ruth Beechick, our public school curriculum got overloaded with science during the Cold War and the space race. It’s why the biggest reason for pushing high school and then college or university is so kids will make money when they graduate. Utilitarianism spends a lot of time worrying about being relevant. I think Northrop Frye hit it bang on when he said, “Education is a matter of developing the intellect and the imagination, which deal with reality, and reality is always irrelevant.”

You might think that an emphasis on education being relevant, practical and useful would be a good thing, but the problem is that the usefulness becomes less about what’s taught than the usefulness of the students to the system, the machine; we end up as numbers, or like the song, just another brick in the wall. As Lynn said, less than fully human.

(More in the next post. #3 is here.)

Why I like Math Mammoth even more now

We are up to page 80 and 81 of the Math Mammoth Light Blue Grade 3-A Worktext, in the chapter on times tables.

This is what Crayons did today for math, following the directions on those pages:

Reviewed skip counting of 2's and 4's.
Skip-counted by 10's.
Filled in a chart: 1 x 10 = , 2 x 10 = , etc.
Filled in the other half of the chart: __ x 10 = 10, etc.
Drilled fifteen multiplication facts, mostly from the 10-times table.
Drilled fifteen more multiplication facts, of the ___ x 10 type.

Answered this word problem:
a) You see chickens and cats walking in the yard and they have a total of 22 legs. How many cats and how many chickens are there?
b) Find two other solutions to the previous problem.

Did six more multiplication facts, set up vertically.

And filled in a multiplication table, with the tables that haven't been covered yet blacked out. (In other words, filling in the 0's, 1's, 2's, 4's, and 10's.)

That's it--a total of two pages (and twenty-two legs).

But this is why I really like Math Mammoth...because page 82 is completely different. At the top there's a diagram of a ruler showing 5 centimeters at the top and 50 millimeters at the bottom. First you change centimeter measurements into millimeters, and vice versa. Then you do a series of questions like this:

2 cm 2 mm = 22 mm (example)
5 cm 4 mm = __ mm
__ cm __ mm = 37 mm

Now is that a clever way to practice 10-times tables, or what? It reminds me of an exercise Charlotte Mason had her students do converting shillings and pence, to teach them something about place value.

The last activity on the page is to go around actually measuring things in centimeters and millimeters.

And then the next lesson works on the 5-times table.

I like this stuff for teaching and reviewing times tables--it's not fancy, but it's not all the same old drills either.

The last nine days of the term

We are in the last two weeks of our homeschool term (we finish at Good Friday). These weeks are a bit geared-down, finishing things up and not really starting much new. I have some new things in mind for the spring term, though.

Both girls:

Memory songs and hymns (see post from earlier this week)
The last few Old Testament-and-beyond stories from Through the Bible. (How come the Old Testament just stops suddenly? What happened in between then and the New Testament?)
The Pond on My Windowsill--reading about dragonflies and other such things
Swiss Family Robinson
Dinosaur DVDs from the library (I'll post about those later)--we call it "Dinosaur Cinema"

Ponytails:

Continuing Key to Geometry, Christian Kids Explore Chemistry, Easy Grammar Plus, Analogies, Keyboarding for the Christian School, and Abraham Lincoln's World.
Starting Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?
Still working on Plutarch's Life of Poplicola and books from her extra reading list.

Crayons:

Reviewing time telling.
Doing a chapter on times tables in Math Mammoth.
More work in Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting (this week) and All About Spelling Level 3 (next week).
Still working on The Jungle Book and At the Back of the North Wind.
Dinosaur books and other extra reading.

What to do with crumbly bran flakes

Well, you can make chocolate-bran flake balls. Or you can make Bran Flake Cookies--we use a recipe from The Not Strictly Vegetarian Cookbook. (Like oatmeal cookies.)

But I made Bran Flake Muffins. These are the basic version, but I think they'd work well with sour milk or thinned yogurt, and only 1 tsp. baking powder plus 1/2 tsp. baking soda. I doubled this recipe and added raisins to only one half.

1 3/4 cups flour (I used whole wheat)
3/4 cup bran flakes cereal
1/2 cup white or brown sugar
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 egg
1/4 to 1/2 cup oil
1 cup milk, more or less (can be part fruit juice)
Raisins or other dried fruit, optional

Combine dry and wet ingredients separately, then combine gently. Bake at 375 degrees for about 20 minutes. The final texture depends somewhat on how wet you get the batter. The first panful I made came out fairly dry and solid, but still pretty good; to the rest of the batter in the bowl (with the raisins), I added a bit of extra milk, and I think that was an improvement.

If you want a bit of a stronger flavour, you could add some molasses.

Yeah, imagine that

The link to this New York Times piece was sent to our local homeschool list.

"Imagine, for instance, a third-grade classroom that was free of the laundry list of goals currently harnessing our teachers and students, and that was devoted instead to just a few narrowly defined and deeply focused goals.

"In this classroom, children would spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own."

Wow. So innovative. Think anyone will take them up on it?

Which reminds me, I have to go and get ready for school this week.

We are still on Spring Break (pretend we're live-blogging)

The weather is positively balmy. Perfect weather for March Break, even if it gets cold again this weekend. Every so many years you get one of these...

Mr. Fixit (having his week of holidays) treated us to a couple of thrift shops and a burger out, by way of celebration. Crayons found herself two summer shirts and two pairs of shorts, each two for a dollar, and picked out all by herself. Mama Squirrel found three hardcover Mitford books, all ones she has but she knows some ladies at church who like Mitford books too so they're easy to pass on. We also stopped at the supermarket to get bagels, ketchup, and sugar-free Jell-O to make gummy worms. (Just the Jell-O is for the gummy worms, in case you were worried.)

The Apprentice will be off to work this afternoon--hair customers don't take March Break off.

Crayons had a visit last night from her friend Schmoo and her Only Hearts Club doll; Schmoo gave Crayons' doll Anna Sophia a fancier braided hairdo, so this morning Crayons requested that The Apprentice do her own hair (Crayons, not The Apprentice) to look like Anna Sophia. She did a good job too! Anna Sophia came along on the shopping trip and Crayons found her a new cocker spaniel at the thrift shop--just about the right size for a 9 inch girl.

Mr. Fixit is now outside the Treehouse doing outside things that involve running a lot of water. Ponytails is helping him. Crayons and Anna Sophia are out there too. And Mama Squirrel, fortified with a large cup of fast food coffee, will now go back to extracting key points from Home Education.

2:30: The Apprentice is just leaving for work. The gummy worms are freezing (they smell like one of The Apprentice's hair dye solutions). Mr. Fixit is listening to the Rachmaninoff and Nana Mouskouri albums he got at the thrift shop. Ponytails is sewing something for Anna Sophia. Crayons is somewhere...

About 4:00: Ponytails watched her favourite cooking show at 3. Mr. Fixit finally convinced Crayons to come inside for awhile while he had a cup of tea. Mama Squirrel started heating frozen cabbage rolls for an easy dinner (since The Apprentice won't be here). (The Squirrelings will probably have sandwiches.) The lime-flavoured gummy worms turned out kind of strange...maybe it takes some experience to get them right, I'm not sure. There was almost too much gelatin in them...or maybe it was that lime flavour that made the girls go ewwww... Well, it was worth a try.

The Squirrelings watched a Three Stooges video with Mr. Fixit. Mama Squirrel started the first of several loads of laundry. Ponytails started sewing something else that she wouldn't let Crayons see. Crayons pleaded for a few more minutes outside. Mr. Fixit checked his email. Mama Squirrel sorted her typed notes.

5:30: We finished dinner: cabbage rolls, instant mashed potatoes (finishing the end of a box), reheated meat loaf, and yogurt. Crayons asked Mr. Fixit if he would play G.I. Joes with her later (what they were doing yesterday--playing with his boyhood Johnny West and G.I. Joe toys), but he said he might think of something else this time...after he rests for awhile.

7 p.m.: Ponytails is ironing and is waiting to use the computer. Crayons is upstairs play ironing. Mama Squirrel just finished a review that was due and doesn't want to look at a screen for the whole rest of the evening...well, maybe just to finish this off later. Mr. Fixit came in and said he was heading out to the electronics store (he needs a stereo part) and to pick up The Apprentice from work. Both girls decided to go with him, leaving Mama Squirrel to do another couple loads of laundry and keep working on what needs to be worked on.

8:45: The Apprentice is home and has finished her cabbage roll. Mr. Fixit helped Mama Squirrel finish the dinner dishes and is slightly disgruntled about the Gummy Worm debris stuck in the saucepan. (Obviously we got something out of whack with that.) The Apprentice had a good story about a buzz cut, and Mr. Fixit had one about the guy at the electronics store who got talking about the Good Old Days of CB Radios and Cassette Tapes, and who looked at the Squirrelings and said, "I guess you've never heard of any of that." Obviously he doesn't know their dad well enough to know the answer to that...

And now we're going to watch Wonder Woman, and sign off here.

Dreams and Designs (Finishing Treehouse Review Week)

Treehouse Review Week

I'm going to finish out this Review Week by mentioning an e-book that nobody asked me to review--I just liked it and wanted to pass it on.

The title is Dreams and Designs: Homemade Supplies to Complement Your Homeschool, and it's by Donna Campos. This is one of the freebies you can get when you register for the TOS Homeschool Expo. And since the price of the e-book is US$12.45, and the cost of the conference is only $19.99 through March 31st, you're almost as far ahead to register for the conference and get the e-book plus a bunch of other downloadable goodies. Have I sold y'all on that yet?

Anyway, Expo or not, this is seriously one of the better e-books I've seen. I like resources that make homeschoolers' job easier instead of harder, and this is one of those resources. Without giving away everything that's in it, it is packed full of clever stuff that would actually work for a lot of homeschoolers, that might save you money instead of getting you to spend more, and that makes good use of easy-to-get materials.

I also really like things that fold flat. Sample idea from the book: using trifold presentation boards as a morning-opening-type calendar/weather/etc. board. More ideas: how to improvise felt boards and quite a few things to do with index cards. There's an 8-page sample here.

As I said, you can order this through TOS Magazine's Schoolhouse Store, at the link above; or you can get it as part of your virtual conference freebie package. Either way, this one's a cut above the ordinary.

Critical Thinking's Balance Benders (TOS Review)

Treehouse Review Week

This has been a pretty quiet "Review Week" so far--I have some new products, but we're not quite ready to post about all of them yet.

Here's one we've been using for the last couple of weeks:

Balance Benders from The Critical Thinking Co.

When I heard that the Review Crew would get to try out products from Critical Thinking, I didn't know if we'd get math, logic or something more unexpected. Balance Benders is kind of all three. We were sent the Beginning Level, aimed at grades 2-6; there are three more difficult levels covering grades 4-12+, 6-12+, and 8-12+. (That's typical of Critical Thinking's books--many of them come in several levels but get more challenging within each book.)

What I discovered is that these are what our family has always called "yogurt cup problems." This dates way back to The Apprentice's first year using Miquon Math, when I rigged up a balance made from yogurt cups. The idea was to play around with combinations of Cuisenaire rods and small objects, learning concepts such as "what you do to one side, you have to do to the other." Our balance never did work perfectly, but it was enough to get the point across, and the name has stuck. In the Miquon series you also get worksheets that show combinations of balls and cubes; you have to figure out things like if one big ball equals four small balls, and one cube equals two big balls, how many small balls would that be?

These are the same sorts of things. Each page has an illustration of a balance holding various combinations of shapes--maybe a square, a triangle and a circle on one side, and two squares and a triangle on the other. (Just for an easy example--there's an actual sample here.) You have to choose which of several statements would always be true about the equation that's illustrated--for example, that a circle equals a square. It's good practice in deductive reasoning, and it's also--at this level--sort of a pre-pre-algebra. Here's a sample from Level 3, for comparison.

Third grader Crayons--who, as I said, has had some Miquon and "yogurt cup" practice with this sort of puzzle--whizzed through about the first twelve pages (of about forty practice pages--the rest are solutions), and then noticed that the questions started to get a bit harder. I don't know if she'd rate these as totally "fun"--she's at a stage where "challenging" doesn't always equal "fun"--but I think they're worthwhile, if only to give her a different kind of math activity (that she doesn't see as math). I think they'd be helpful for elementary students (or maybe older ones, using the higher levels) who are a bit burned out on numbers but who wouldn't be as intimidated by shapes. Since we're not finished the book yet, I'm not sure whether she'll be able to handle the whole thing this year or whether it will start to get a bit beyond her. [UPDATE: Crayons finished the book in late spring, doing a couple of pages a week. The end of the book wasn't a whole lot more difficult than the beginning, at least not beyond mid-elementary capabilities.]

Final Take: An interesting addition to a math program, and not too expensive.

The price: US$9.99 each.

Dewey's Disclaimer: We received this product free for purposes of review. No other payment was made. The opinions expressed in this review are our own.

Peach Cobbler with Dumpling Crust

Treehouse Peach Cobbler

Bottom:
1 28-oz. can sliced peaches, drained
1 cup slightly runny homemade peach jam

Combine these in the bottom of a large greased casserole that has a lid. Heat uncovered as you preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Take it out when it bubbles.

Top:
The dumpling dough from Butterscotch Dumplings. As follows: 1/3 cup sugar, ½ tsp. salt, 1 tbsp. butter or margarine, 1 ½ cups flour, 1 tbsp. baking powder, about ½ cup milk. Cream the sugar, salt and butter; add flour mixed with baking powder alternately with enough milk to make a stiff batter. (You can use the juice/syrup drained from the peaches as part of the liquid.)

Drop in clumps on the top of the hot peach mixture. COVER and bake at 400 degrees (or at least 375) for 20 minutes to half an hour or until the dumplings are baked through and slightly browned. Optional addition: combine 2 tbsp. brown sugar with a tsp. cinnamon and sprinkle over the top when it comes out of the oven--put the lid back on and let it sit for a few minutes.

Serve with milk or yogurt.

Living underground

No, I'm not blogging about basement apartments.

Brenda at Coffee, Tea, Books and Me has started a series of posts on The Underground Economy. Among other things, she says

"I've thought about this book often in the twenty-plus years since reading it (over and over). It came to mind a couple days ago as I walked through Goodwill and noticed all the beautiful clothing, shoes, household items, etc. one could purchase for pennies on the dollar from their original cost. I think of it when I am at the grocery store and see how much money is being charged for baked goods, processed items, and all pre-made foods (of course, not all being unreasonably priced)."

I've had kind of the same thought on my mind since our last successful rummage sale trip, last weekend--rummage sales either haven't been as plentiful this year or they're just getting harder to find, and the thrift shops haven't had much for us lately either. Of course that might just be because we've been more in a getting-rid-of-stuff mood...but anyway, we haven't brought home a lot lately. But at last weekend's fill-a-bag sale we found a good pair of jeans for Crayons, a pair of denim shorts for her as well, five pottery mugs still with tags (we didn't have ANY pottery mugs, all our mugs are just..."mug stuff" and a lot of them have Christmas trees on them...), a Josephine Tey mystery, a Baby Snooks old radio cassette for Crayons, and a few other little things. The point of this is--for the price of a fill-a-bag, we ended up with things that we hadn't been able to find (who sells Josephine Tey books?) or hadn't thought we could afford. The pottery mugs lined up at the front of the shelf have made me very happy all week every time I open the cupboard door, and Crayons is also very happy with her fancy embroidered jeans.

I've thought of the same thing, with a bit of envy, when I think of people I know who are way more successful at tightwadding at we are, or at least manage it in different ways. I've thought of it when cool little things happen, like the guy who walked up to us in the store, handing out free cream coupons. I've thought of it when we managed one of the little leftover successes, like banana-mango cake.

We aren't necessarily living in the "underground economy"--we're just making do with what we have (and trying to adjust as financial changes come along). But sometimes making do turns out to be a pretty good thing too.

Mmm...chicken. Mmm...garlic. (What's for dinner?)

I was really happy that Gayle fixed her menu-plan links to include Chicken, Mushroom and Broccoli Alfredo. I was even happier that the sauce turned out to be based on heavy cream and not on mushroom soup. And that's because the last time we were at Giant Tiger, a man--we think he worked there, but even the cashier didn't seem to be sure when we asked her--came up to us, kind of mumbled something, and handed us two coupons for free milk or cream. Not even a free pint of cream, but a free litre of cream (that's four cups for the Americans). He gave one to me and one to Mr. Fixit.

Whipping cream is $6.19 a litre.

Whoo hoo.

So we got one litre of the slightly lighter cream that Mr. Fixit likes to make ice cream with, and one of whipping cream. And that's why I was happy to have a way to use it up (besides the obvious, making whipped cream).

I left the mushrooms, salt and rosemary out of the recipe, but otherwise made it the way it says, and served it over fusilli. The Apprentice--our Alfredo addict--approved. Crayons couldn't figure out why there was "whipped cream" in the chicken, and we had a brief discussion that somewhat resembled the DHM's playdough story. (For those of you who enjoy the tales of her young friends Blynken and Nod, she has a particularly good one up today, about maps and all the socialization that homeschooled kids don't get.)

We also had a raw veggie plate (I put the mushrooms there instead of in the chicken), canned pineapple, and very small helpings of chocolate cake-in-a-mug. We didn't need dessert, but something about the spring-is-coming sunlight made things feel a bit celebratory.

What's for supper? (Leftover pork and a twist on banana cake)

What we had to work with: leftover pork, leftover perogies, leftover roasted potatoes, leftover gravy. Frozen vegetables. Two frozen bananas and a cupful of mango-yogurt freeze.

What we did with them:

Scalloped Pork Casserole

Cut the pork, potatoes and perogies into smaller pieces. Combine in a large casserole and cover with gravy (adding extra liquid if you don't have enough gravy). Add a chopped onion if you're going to be baking it long enough to cook the onion through--otherwise you might want to saute the onion first. Sprinkle with paprika. Bake until everything is cooked/heated through and most of the gravy is absorbed. Add some sour cream if you want, and let that heat through as well. You could also do this whole thing on top of the stove.

Frozen Green Beans

Put beans in water. Bring to a boil. Eat.

Canned Beans in Sauce

To stretch the meal and make the youngest Squirreling happy. It also kind of went with the pork.

Tangerines and Mango-Banana Cake

I made a guess about whether to use the standard 2 tsp. baking powder or switch to the baking powder/soda combination that you use for more acid mixtures; I think I guessed right because the cake rose well and had a good texture. We have a few pieces left for breakfast too.

Ingredients:

2 bananas (I used somewhat thawed frozen ones) and 1 cupful of mango/yogurt puree, somewhat thawed
1 egg
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Small amount of additional liquid
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
3/4 cup brown sugar

Mash, cut up or otherwise combine the fruit, and blend it with the egg, vanilla and oil. Mix the dry ingredients separately and add to the fruit, adjusting liquid as needed. (I added just a little water.) Bake in a greased 8-inch square pan for 30-40 minutes at 350 degrees, testing with a toothpick. (This one took about 40 minutes.) This could also be baked as muffins, at 375 to 400 degrees for about 20 minutes.

A good book for a snowy day

Today there's so much snow here that you couldn't even see the front steps, much less walk down them. (Mama Squirrel fixed that--she's hoping for some packages, and anybody who's ever seen NFB's Special Delivery (a piece of animation for adults, not children) will know why you have to keep things clear for the mail carrier.

Anyway--if you're looking for snow books and your kids are a bit past The Snowy Day but maybe not ready for The Long Winter, here's a book that our Squirrelings enjoyed at that age: Oliver and Amanda and the Big Snow. How could we not identify with a snow book that starts out with "Digging Out?" (The Oliver and Amanda books are structured like Frog and Toad, with four or five short stories in each one.)

And if you're really an expert on snow stories, you can always go back to our Carnival of Homeschooling: Snowed-In Edition, and see if you can identify the bits of books there. (Answers here.)

A ketchup kind of meal (What's for dinner?)

Dinner's from the freezer--we're low on fresh things.

Frozen cabbage rolls (a small package--they were on sale at Giant Tiger)
Frozen mini-sausages
Baked potatoes (last of the bag--they were getting soft)
Carrot sticks, sour cream, applesauce etc.
Fruity Oatmeal Muffins and Mango Freeze (recipes below)

Fruity Oatmeal Muffins, because the oven was already on at the right temperature:

2 scant cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup rolled oats
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 egg
1 cup milk, swished with the bottom bits of two jars of peach and strawberry jam

Mix dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients. Correct flour if needed (I added a bit more.) Combine gently, scoop into muffin pan and bake 20 minutes at 375 degrees.

Mango Freeze:

Part of a bag of frozen mango cubes (frozen fruit was on sale a couple of weeks ago)
3 small fruit yogurts

Run through the food processor until smooth and fluffed up. If you do this ahead of time, scoop into small dishes or one larger bowl and put back into the freezer until you want them.

What's for supper? (Hold the tomatoes)

That subject line wasn't referring to throwing them--just eating them. To avoid the distress that pasta sauce causes to some Squirrels, Mama Squirrel made a spaghetti dinner tonight without tomato sauce. General recipe: brown a pound of ground chicken with chopped celery and mushrooms. Cook half a box, or a whole box, of spaghettini. Drain the pasta and put into the slow cooker. Top with the chicken-vegetable mixture, including all the pan juices. Season with pepper and oregano and add some cheese on top (we used uncoloured old Cheddar). Cook until the cheese is melted (if everything's already hot, it only takes an hour or so in the slow cooker). (If you'd rather put the whole thing in the oven, you can do that instead. Or just serve it immediately from the pan, if you're ready to eat. We weren't. We were busy shovelling snow.) Scoop it all out as is, or scoop the top part out into a serving bowl so that you can pull the pasta out separately.

If you don't want to dump everything in together and then have to unmix it afterwards, then just keep the pasta separate from the chicken and vegetables; cook it separately when you're ready to serve it.

We had this with the Hillbilly Housewife's Garlic Bread Sticks (leaving out the extra salt), carrot sticks, and sliced kiwi fruit for dessert.

Just read the story already

I was asked to do a story-and-craft session with the preschoolers at co-op tomorrow. I came across one book I liked, and thought I'd do a quick browse online to see if anyone had come up with fun activities to go with it. The book's been around for a long time, right? Some preschool teacher somewhere has probably used it for storytime.

This is the first thing that came up for it.

And that's why we homeschool.

(That also reminded me of the DHM's recent conversation with her young friend Blynken, where she refused to define a big word that she'd used. Sometimes we need more story, less explaining, right?)

P.S. I'm still deciding on a book. I'll let you know what I picked tomorrow.

Happy 5th Blogiversary to Us

And now the morning news with Mr. Koala (and his bag of milk)...


On February 18, 2005:

It was discovered that the tsunami resulting from the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake uncovered an ancient city near the coastal town of Mahabalipuram in India.

A man was arrested by Gardaí in the town of Passage West in County Cork, Ireland, after he was discovered attempting to burn sterling bank notes.

The UK Food Standards Agency orders the withdrawal of over 350 food products from sale following the discovery that a batch of chilli powder used to produce a batch of Worcestershire sauce subsequently used to produce processed foods was contaminated with the possibly carcinogenic dye Sudan I.

And we launched Dewey's Treehouse!

In the past five years we've had big messy snowstorms, big messy rainstorms, and one really big messy windstorm.

Our apple trees have gotten big enough to have real apples on them.

We've raked an awful lot of maple leaves.
We've also seen our Squirrelings grow much bigger, the Squirreling parents grow a few years older, and Dewey lose a little more of his nose. We've had some rocky times. We've had many reasons to give thanks.
We've won a Homeschool Blog Award, and some lovely reader-nominated ones.
We've made great blogging friends, even those we'll never meet in real life.

It's been a blast.

Photo credits: Mr. Fixit and Ponytails

Lent Devotions

This is a book we've had since the Apprentice was about Crayons' age. I remember going through it very faithfully one year in particular--I think it was nine or ten years ago--and making all the symbols, trying a lot of the recipes and crafts. I think we might still have some of our symbols in the bottom of a box of decorations--I'll have to pull the box out and see.

The only "funny" thing about this book is that there are no devotions or activities for the Sundays of Lent. If you follow it straight through ("Day 2," "Day 3," etc.), you'll wind up short. The reason? Sundays aren't technically part of Lent--they're "little Easters." So on Sundays, you're on your own. But I think that might work out all right here, because we usually skip family activities on Thursdays when the Apprentice is working.

Today's activity is supposed to be carving a bar of soap into the shape of a cross, a reminder that our sins were "washed away." We usually use liquid soap, so I was thinking about decorating the pump containers instead. We'll see how it goes--everybody is still feeling a bit tentative today after a couple of Very Yuck sick days.

Just for Crayons: Mama Squirrel's favourite horse story

Someone else has been thinking about the hard-to-find Pamela and the Blue Mare.

Catching up (and Happy St. Valentine's Day)

Last week wasn't a very bloggish week. The weather stayed mostly dry (around here, although not in a lot of other places!) and we did all the usual Squirrel stuff. Mr. Fixit has continued to work on cleaning out some of the dark recesses of the Tree, coming up with some of the most amazing stuff that had dropped down down down. He even managed to find our kids' harp which had gotten (for some reason) put up on one of the joists of the furnace room ceiling (where we keep kites, leaves for the dining table and things like that).

Mama Squirrel went to a church social and played Mennonite Golf, which you don't find mentioned online too much because its proper name is Ten Card Golf. It's one of those very social games like Uno or Cheat that you can learn in a few minutes (because it's easy for other people to help you if you don't have a clue what you're doing), and it can take all evening if you want it to. Although it was cards instead of marbles, it reminded me of the big wooden Aggravation boards that my own Grandpa Squirrel made maybe thirty years ago, much like these. I still have one of his boards, and remember long evenings spent eating snacks and playing "the marble game" with my grandparents and whoever else was around.

Crayons and Ponytails both used the sewing machine, Crayons for the first time by herself. Mama Squirrel helped her make a felt doll pillow and then a fabric book cover--Crayons sewed all the seams. Ponytails experimented with the fancy stitches that Mama Squirrel never has time for, and dressed up a dish towel with machine-embroidered scallops. (An afterthought about that...we have two volumes of a popular children's sewing machine series, which spends a lot of time having kids follow mazes on paper and do non-fabric crafts to get them used to the machine. Crayons and I read through the first book, but she was distinctly uninterested in anything that didn't actually involve "sewing something." The Real Thing. Mama Squirrel had no problem with that.)

We went to a library sale which wasn't at a library, it was at one of their "service buildings," which basically means a warehouse, and that's what it was--boxes of books all over the place, stacked up on racks and in big wobbly piles, with strollers blocking the aisles, toddlers running in between the boxes, and little kids crawling under the racks with parents calling things after them like "do you see any books on renovation under there?" We did find a few books, but it wasn't the sort of place where you wanted to stay very long.

Monday is the Family Day holiday in Ontario. We're not sure yet how we're going to spend it...stomach viruses are still making their way around this area and have criss-crossed through the Treehouse more than once, so we're keeping things open.

How come your kids don't know that?

The Review Crew has started a sort of mini-carnival each week, with a homeschooling question to answer. The question for this week is "How do you know if your kids are keeping up with their peers?" (Click on the ship to see more entries--they will be posted on Tuesday.)
I guess you could rephrase that "How do you know they know what they're supposed to know?"

I've never worried much about that. First of all, it depends on who's making the list of what kids are supposed to know. Maybe their list isn't the same as mine, but who's to say that theirs is better, even if "they" might be the provincial government? Better for whom? I was never that interested in having standardized kids.

Second, even people who have gone through a whole education system have often missed something. Or a lot of things. How else to account for all those surveys that show how many of us don't know the most basic facts of geography, or physics, or about the Bible? I was reading something just this weekend from someone in New Mexico who kept having phone order takers insist that New Mexico wasn't a state. Someone else added that they'd had similar trouble living in Delaware.
Third, even if we do miss something, it's usually fairly easy to fill in or catch up. I may have posted before about Ponytails' teacher last year (when she was in public school) having a "thing" about graphing--it's not something we spend a lot of formal time on here, but it doesn't take a lot of time to explain. When The Apprentice started tenth-grade math in public high school, we had covered most of the elementary algebra topics at home (mostly using PurpleMath.com and a couple of library books), but again hadn't done much co-ordinate geometry. She knew the concepts as far as quadratic equations; just had somehow missed out on the "rise over run" part. But no big deal--have you ever known a high school course not to start with a quick review of last year's work? She caught up quickly and has gotten high marks in math ever since.
Finally, the Squirrelings (and most other homeschooled kids I know of) usually know about a lot of interesting things that aren't on the "standardized" list, or sometimes aren't even in the homeschool plan. Crayons just called me a few minutes ago to say that a whole bunch of chickadees were outside the window. She got all interested awhile back in John Haywood's Atlas of Past Times. (She's also one of the youngest kids I know who can tell you about "a master bedroom with an ensuite." Too much experience with open houses?) Ponytails' grade seven curriculum includes logic, money management, photography, nineteen-century world history, French verbs, and Plutarch's Life of Poplicola; but she's also following her own interests, right now mostly in things like design. She also made us ham and cheese crepes for lunch.
So do I ever get worried enough to look through the provincial standards and wonder if we're doing it wrong? Honestly, no--well, hardly ever. With Ponytails being home right now for one or maybe two more years before high school, yes, I did have a look through the middle school topics. I printed out the guidelines for French, and considered whether or not it would be worthwhile adjusting our history and science to include what the public schools were doing. (We decided not to.) But we were more interested in using this time to work on what Ponytails needs to work on. And what she's interested in. And what our homeschool curriculum suggests. That's more than good enough, in Mama Squirrel's opinion.

Math Mammoth (TOS Review)

Treehouse Review Week

Math Mammoth Home Page
Free Samples Download
Placement Tests
FAQ (including ordering information)

"Fully reproducible math workbooks
and worktexts for grades 1-12.
Incredibly affordable!"
I mentioned a few weeks ago that we would be trying out Maria Miller's Math Mammoth series with Crayons this term. We received both grade 3 books in the Light Blue Series (more specifics on the grade 3 books here), and I printed out the first chapter.

"The first chapter in this book deals with addition and subtraction strategies. The student does a lot of mental math, learns addition and subtraction terminology, touches on algebraic problems in the lesson about addition/subtraction connection, practices borrowing, and more."

What else do you do in Grade 3? "Then we tackle the multiplication concept in chapter 2. After that come multiplication tables in chapter 3, so multiplication does take a big part of book A. Then comes a chapter about clock and time (chapter 4) and a chapter about money (chapter 5).

"In part B, we study place value with thousands (chapter 6), then measuring and geometry (chapters 7 and 8), followed by division in chapter 9. In chapter 10, we study a little about multiplying bigger numbers, and finally in chapter 11, it is time for some introductory fraction and decimal topics."

Why do I like this so far? As I've said before, I like the three-year curriculum we've been using with Crayons, but in its final year it does get a bit esoteric with Fibonacci numbers, measurement, and graphing concepts--and I've felt that she really did need more work this year on basics. I wanted to be sure that those arithmetic "acorns" she'd stored up didn't get buried under a lot of other leaves and nuts--nice leaves and nuts, but not what she most needs right now.

It might be that Timmy-Tiptoes part of being a Squirrel: dropping those nuts down deep through the hole in the tree, but not being sure exactly what went down there, or how you're going to get them out again later.--previous Treehouse post

I also like the balance we're getting between a bit of "mom teaching time" and then a reasonable amount of problems for Crayons to do alone--this works very well with the way we like to learn here, and seems to go at about the right pace. I like the uncluttered feeling I get when we work through these pages--they're not fancy, but they offer enough variety to keep things interesting, and include self-checking activities like finding all the answers in a long line of numerals. (If the answer isn't in there, you did it wrong.)

"When you use these books as your only or main mathematics curriculum, they can be like a "framework", but you do have some liberty in organizing the study schedule....This curriculum aims to concentrate on a few major topics at a time and study them in depth....This is opposite to the continually spiraling step-by-step curricula in which each lesson typically is about a different topic from the previous or next lesson, and includes a lot of review problems from past topics. This does not mean that your child wouldn't need occasional review. However, when each major topic is presented in its own chapter, this gives you more freedom to plan the course of study and choose the review times yourself."

This works for us.

An important question for our family: do you need a colour printer? In the third-grade workbooks I downloaded, the colours do make the pages prettier; but they also seem to work fine in black and white. If you're looking for material for younger children, you might want to check out the samples for those years to see if you want them done in colour. [Update, October 2010: We printed out the 3B book in colour because it has several chapters about geometry, measurement etc. which use pictures of rulers, measuring cups and other things that show up better with different colours.]

What is Math Mammoth like in general?

Math Mammoth offers a whole array of downloadable workbooks, from full curriculum, to collections of worksheets on single topics. At first the different series may seem confusing, but the website pretty much explains the differences, for example, between the Blue and the Light Blue books. The Blue series is more remedial or supplemental; Light Blue is designed as a full, largely self-teaching curriculum for grades 1-5.

What is there for older students? Very glad you asked: check out the middle-school and high-school stuff here, including the Make-It-Real series of workbooks. "Make It Real Learning products are workbooks that contain activities or problem situations taken from real-life, with real data. Some examples of the situations are: cell phone plans, autism, population growth, cooking, borrowing money, credit cards, life spans, music downloads, etc. etc. Each activity-lesson starts with basics and goes into more in-depth and challenging evaluations and questions."

What does this cost? It all depends on how much you want to get at one time. You can get the whole Light Blue series, for example--that is, all five grades plus answer keys, a worksheet maker etc.--for US$99 as a download or $104 on CD. Prices of one year's Light Blue curriculum (including the support materials) vary slightly between the Math Mammoth page (it says there they are $29.50) and the Kagi store download page (it's listed there as $33.36). You can also order printed workbooks through Lulu.com. General ordering information is here.

Final Take: Over the past few years, I've often noticed Math Mammoth's generosity in offering samples and prizes (I've won a couple of their other products myself), and their interest in working with homeschoolers. I think it's their flexibility that seems to make them a good choice for homeschooling--you can get what you need to start with, get more pages or more help if you need it, and even make up some of your own stuff with the support materials. There is no fancy encryption or stuff that makes printing limited or difficult. And the book we're using has been pretty much print-out-and-use--there's no big learning curve for the parent. I don't know how the materials for the upper years compare to other curricula, but I'd certainly include them in the possibilities for math in the years to come.

Dewey's Disclaimer: This product was received free for purposes of review. No other payment was made. The opinions expressed in this review are our own.