A is for Airplane (Deep in the Heart of AO Conference, May 2016)

A is for airplanes, airports, and Atlanta, where (both times) I just barely made the connecting flight to and from Dallas. The airplanes were fun; the airports, not so much.

B is for bags: two of them.

C is for comfortable shoes, for which I was grateful.

D is for drizzle, which is what we had Thursday. Also for Dawn doing drill (Swedish).

E is for enthusiasm.

F is for fangirls, and not the kind you'd think.

G is for gravy and biscuits. Also for group photos.

H is for hayride and campfire. Also harmony, four-part.

I is for Instagram, where you can see people's #heartofao2016 photos.

J is for joyfully hugging hello.

K is for keys.

L is for long walks and lineups, but you don't mind those when there's interesting company.

M is for music, and Megan Hoyt's new book about it, which I didn't manage to get a copy of at the conference, but it's on the list.

N is for nature study, sometimes unintended.

O is for organized.

P is for PrimePeriwinkle, who is blogging her way through the conference. Also Prufrock...no, Plutarch...no, Prufrock, I meant Prufrock.

Q is for quiet. It wasn't, much, except for early in the morning and late at night.

R is for ready for business.

S is for swag bags, over 200 of them, filled by our crack team of helpers including one under the age of three.

T is for Texas, as in, deep in the heart of.

U is for umbrellas, which Kathy thoughtfully brought along for the drizzle downpour.

V is for van service, which is how I got home from the Toronto airport.

W, X is for WaXahachie. Also for Wristbands.

Y is for y'all.

Z is for Ziploc bags, to keep your socks and everything else organized.

Heading out tonight

See you in Texas!

Homeschool Conference today!

Conference Weekend!

The L'Harmas Charlotte Mason Retreat: All You Wanted to Know?

1. Irony: a Charlotte Mason weekend was the first time I a) helped navigate the drive down to Kingsville with a GPS, and b) plugged my iPad into the free WiFi in the hotel so I could send an email home. Welcome to the 21st century.

(photo found here)

2.  The Windsor/Essex Charlotte Mason Education group outdid themselves (is that ungrammatical?) in making everybody feel welcome, providing wonderful homemade food, and turning a church foyer into an amazing CM environment full of wooden apple boxes, books, and nature collections.  Education is an atmosphere...

3.  The leaves of the Manitoba maple don't look like any other maple leaves I've ever seen.  (What we learned during nature time.)  I also found out that you can confuse it with poison ivy!  (We don't have Manitoba maples in our part of Ontario.)

4.  People, people, people.  People from the U.S. and all over Southern Ontario (oh, and I forgot, one from Quebec).  People I knew, but mostly people I didn't...or at least hadn't met in person.  People I am very glad to have talked to and hope to connect with again.

5.  We had lots of talk about Charlotte Mason and notebooks...notebooks as kind of organic things that reflect individuality and choice...if a student is allowed to make his own choices about what gets included, and if the notebooks have value, are kept, treasured, reflected on.

Photo of Trie Cloister (in New York) found here

6.  I had been thinking about cloisters since last week, ever since we started the "Romanesque" chapter of Architecture Shown to the Children.  Then suddenly, Friday night, one of the speakers mentioned quiet, peaceful, sacramental spaces...physical ones or inner ones...maybe a place where we listen for the divine voice?  If the majority of the educational world is an anxious, busy place, then maybe a Charlotte Mason-inspired approach of living ideas and leisure could be compared to a garden sanctuary like the one pictured above.

Just a thought.

7.  Can we do this again next year?

Dollygirl's Grade Six: School Plans This Week

The first week of Term Three--a four-day week because of Easter Monday.  "Afternoon work" includes reading time (including poetry); all art lessons including drawing, calligraphy techniques, and picture study; composer study; time for composition; crafts and skills (including workshop time with Dad); outdoor time; work in ongoing notebooks or "people pages."  Swimming lessons are Monday nights.

The biggest change in this schedule is that almost all the read-aloud books (the "'fun" ones such as Fellowship of the Ring; the retelling of The Aeneid; and the poetry), plus writing (compositions) and fine arts subjects, are unscheduled and have to wait for the afternoons.  This is both a good and a bad thing:  good because it's flexible, but bad because we have to make sure they get done and that everybody doesn't go off to do something else.  I'm writing in a tentative plan for this week's afternoon work.

If this schedule doesn't work well, I'll re-integrate the afternoon subjects.

Tuesday

New Testament (20 minutes):  "The Journey Northward," two printed-out pages from Saviour of the World (photo:  Mount Hermon)

Arithmetic (30 minutes):  review work this week, because we won't have the new books (Key to Percents) until the conference this weekend.  We might use Clue Finders 5th Grade Adventures.

Natural history (30 minutes):  "A Piece of Coal"

Singing, break  (total 30 minutes)

Memory work  (10 minutes):  begin working on a poem

History (20 minutes):  Story of Greece, "The March of the Ten Thousand"

"Writing" (copywork) (10 minutes)

French (30 minutes or as decided)

Afternoon work:  Picture study; readalouds; written work;  outdoor time weather permitting


Wednesday

Natural history  (20 minutes):  Stars and Planets (read and narrate)

History (30 minutes):  Augustus Caesar's World, "Out of Persia," pg 170-174

Studied dictation (30 minutes allowed for study and then writing)

"Drill"  and break  (30 minutes allowed)

Memory work

Geography (20 minutes):  Study of Cornwall.  Map questions to be answered and places to be marked on outline map before reading.

Writing (copywork)

French

Afternoon work:   Volunteering at thrift store


Thursday

Old Testament:  readings from The Book of Adam to Moses, "with necessary omissions"

Arithmetic

Grammar (30 minutes allowed):  Continue with "Case closed," and maybe do a fun activity too

French songs, break  (30 minutes total)

Memory work

History (20 minutes):  Story of Greece

Writing (copywork)

Shakespeare play (30 minutes)

Afternoon work:  Composer study; readalouds;  introduction to calligraphy techniques


Friday

New Testament:  two printed-out pages from Saviour of the World

Arithmetic

Cititzenship (30 minutes):  start book about Winston Churchill, Never Give In

"Drill", break (total 30 minutes)

Dictation  (unprepared--10 minutes allowed)

Grammar (20 minutes):  How to Speak Politely

Writing

Singing and Memory Work  (30 minutes total)

Afternoon work: Art time; readalouds; short calligraphy practice time; writing assignments; plus discussion of "weekend reading" and personal Bible study.

Saturday

Mom goes off to play.

Tools of an old homeschool mom: "Key To" Math and more

Tomorrow night is our homeschool support group's annual curriculum show-and-tell; parents talk about new (or old) materials they're using, or just put it out on tables for others to look at.  It's kind of a lead-in to spring conference-and-catalogue season.

Remember how a couple of years ago I was wearing my "dinosaur t-shirt" over the discovery that Cuisenaire Rods were no longer such a hot curriculum item?  Well, tomorrow night I'll be wearing it again, I guess: I'm doing a five-minute talk on Miquon Math's big brother, the Key-To series, which has been around, seemingly unchanged, since 1971.  I heard about these worktexts when we started homeschooling, but we got into other post-Miquon math programs and didn't have a use for them until about three years ago, when Ponytails got to middle-school age and Mr. Fixit was teaching her math.  Since then I've also used parts of Key To Fractions and Key to Decimals with Dollygirl, and I'm thinking of ordering Key to Percents--one of the only ones we don't have.

So for show-and-tell night...other years I've brought the materials for a typical year of Ambleside Online (whatever year(s) we were doing at the time), or things we received during the year we were on the Review Crew.  This year I was thinking of bringing some stuff to celebrate our "veteran" status...this may also have something to do with the fact that I have a birthday sometime soon, and although it's not a particularly significant one, it's still edging me closer to that big double-digit. 

What would you bring to prove that you were homeschooling during the '90's...or the '80's?  What are the dead giveaways?

1.  Your set of Calculadders is not via download, not on CD-Rom, but stored in a file folder (unless you still have the cardboard box, like Carol).  (I plead guilty, although I have to say that we've only used them off-and-on.)

2.  Your Timetables of History goes up to only 1990.  (Guilty as well...but that's because I bought ours at Goodwill.)

3.  Your Timechart History of the World goes up to only 1998.  (And when I bought that one, it was new.)

4.  Your Saxon math books are all hardcovers.  (We have just one: Algebra 1/2).

5.  You have a set of Powerglide French stashed away...all on cassettes.  (Yes.  We do.  We got it used, The Apprentice used it, and I let her write right in the workbooks since I got such a good deal on it.  Now, of course...I can't get any more of them.)

6.  When you started buying books at friends-of-the-library sales, they were still clearing out books from the '50's and '60's (or even before).  (This is true...although I didn't have kids yet.)

7.  You still have some of those books.

8.  You still use some of those books.

9.  Your copy of For the Children's Sake looks like this:

10.  Or maybe like this.

How about you?

Linked from the Carnival of Homeschooling.

In which "Cuisinart rods"* become yesterday's homeschool

Boy, do I feel like a relic.

Today was our local homeschool conference.

I presented a workshop about making the most of a limited homeschool budget. As an example of homeschool resources that are inexpensive and versatile, I mentioned Cuisenaire rods. I didn't bother bringing any to demonstrate with.

Later in the day, a couple who had been in the workshop came up and asked me about the rods I had mentioned. I suggested looking for them at one of the larger booths--a very good, longtime vendor--that I knew carried Miquon Math.

Well, they still have rods in their catalogue, but they didn't even bring any with them today! I said, "I'm guessing maybe Cuisenaire rods aren't such a big seller as they used to be?" Yep.

And to top that off, the virtual online rods formerly at the Arcytech site have also disappeared, along with all the other good Java manipulatives they used to have. So you can't even "pretend play" with them.

Hoo boy. Maybe my next year's workshop should be "things we used to use way back when."

*Clarification:  the people at the conference did not call them Cuisinart rods.  I was just joking about that because I posted a long time ago about the crazy names and spellings I've seen for the rods.