Ten things I'm doing to plan Year Eight better (and a bonus if you read carefully)

1.  Because I try to homeschool frugally, and also because we're on the last Squirreling: I've been going through all our potential resources and seeing what might line up with or amplify something already on the list.  The ecology book we're using has the right idea but comes up short on examples, for example, explaining in an interesting way about different biomes: desert, grassland, rainforest, tundra.  But we have a couple of good books with extra information on those topics (one simple one we've had forever is the Usborne Living World Encyclopedia).  I wouldn't base a term's work around books like that (that are mostly pictures), but we do have them on the shelves. So those are going on sort of a second booklist of good reference stuff, and I'm making notes on the schedule at the places where we might want to haul them out.

2. Because I've been doing that, I can see, out of the books that did NOT make it into this year's main list or reference pile, which ones we are so unlikely ever to use again that I can happily send them to a church yard sale this weekend.  Which gives us more room on the shelves for the good stuff.

3. Because we go to a church that sings hymns, usually several of them, all the verses, in four-part harmony, AO's list of hymns is sometimes pretty basic for us.  We sing them, but we don't usually need to learn them.  So most of next year's hymns will be the mostly German-authored ones found in Mr. Pipes and Psalms and Hymns of the Reformation, ones that are not as familiar.  We read the book a few years ago but didn't learn many of the hymns; this year we'll just use it as a hymn reference.  I found that several of the hymns are in the old Mennonite Hymnal that we use at home--but that they are often different translations from the ones Douglas Bond includes. We will see which ones we like better, over the year.  (I also noticed that June's hymn, "Let Us with a Gladsome Mind," is by John Milton.)

4.  Because we don't have a passel of kids around anymore to just enjoy singing with (on the other hand), Dollygirl's Lydia's repertoire of folk songs has suffered over the last few years. (Scots Wha' Hae is the exception.) So the AO Year Eight folk song list should be plenty challenging as is.

5.  Because I don't like to waste time and materials on science experiments with negligible learning value, I've gone through the science textbooks we're going to be using, and written only the for-sure ones into our weekly schedule. That way I am not thinking that I need to track down a nine-volt battery, a stick of butter, or a fresh carnation for next week's science, if it turns out that we've a) done it before or b) wouldn't do it anyway.  That also leaves room for better experiments, demonstrations, or even online videos showing somebody doing the same thing (especially when it's complicated or expensive).

6. Because I'm kind of wobbling right now on the best English history textbook for Dollygirl (the Apprentice says "I kind of liked Churchill!"), I've scheduled in both Churchill's The New World and Arnold-Forster's History of England.  I'm planning on having her start with AF at least, and we won't do both at once, but if we switch over to Churchill at some point, the pages are ready to go.  Here's the bonus for careful readers: the page schedules for Arnold-Forster are now on the AO website, on the Year 7 Lite and Year 8 Lite 36-week schedules.  You can access the book at archive.org.  (Last year I downloaded it as a PDF file and printed out chapters as we needed them.)

7.  Because we've done a lot of Shakespeare already, and because there is going to be a lot of Shakespeare-era focus in Term Two, I'm using A Man for All Seasons as our Term One play, and All for Love in Term Three.

8.  Because I'm doing all this over-planning for next year, including marking in holidays, I can lighten up some of the weeks, or add in seasonal stuff.  Our Term II starts at the beginning of December, and we will get three weeks of it in before the Christmas break--but if whatever it is doesn't really need to get done then, it can go on the schedule for January.  The artist we're studying in Term II is Albrecht  Dürer, and we have a copy of Martin Luther's Christmas Book, illustrated by Dürer; we'll also look at his painting Adoration of the Magi during that time.

9. Because I've been going through so many of the Year Eight books, I've been learning lots myself, and that definitely helps.  I've written occasional quotes and notes and "why did he say that's?" into the schedule, like this:
-- chapter 22, Democracy and the Constitution. "The Founders were afraid of democracy, and to protect liberty they created the Constitution as a way to weaken democracy."

10.  Because I know I will probably come across some good stuff or want to make some changes before September, I'm holding off from printing out most of the schedule until the last minute.

Mission Possible: Year Eight!

The Ecology of AO Year Eight (Part Two)

Part One is here. 

The work for this school year takes a key thought from Whatever Happened to Justice, chapter 14, "The Human Ecology." "The two fundamental laws are part of the fabric of the universe, like the laws of physics and chemistry. Where these laws...are obeyed, life gets better."

So that gives us two important books right there:  Whatever Happened to Justice?, by Richard J. Maybury, and Exploring the World Around You, by Gary Parker (not on the AO list).  Parker's book on ecology is one of the Master Book series that includes Exploring the History of Medicine, which means it's about as Creationist as you're going to get.  Normally I do not try so hard to find Creationist-oriented science books, but concepts like survival are very fundamental, and it's important that we serve them right side up in the first place. Do we live in a kill-or-be-killed world? Do we want to live in one?  And how does global warming and that stuff fit into what we believe about Creation, about God?  A third key book for this year, discussing similar questions and other really big stuff, is How to Be Your Own Selfish Pig, which is listed now for AO Year 7 but which Dollygirl hasn't read yet.  And don't forget  How to Read a Book, which, this year, deals a lot with arguments and propositions.  Some of the writing assignments for this year tie well into the ideas from these books: there will be a speech, a newspaper article, and two essays, all of which can draw on the world and its problems of environmental and human ecology.

It's also a perfect time to read Ecclesiastes, and that's scheduled at the end of the year.

The rest of science for this year will be divided between two of Dr. Jay Wile's Apologia textbooks: the parts of Physical Science that deal with the earth's atmosphere, water, weather etc.; and the last four modules of General Science, about human physiology.  There will be some other nature reading, keeping a nature notebook, and making notes about the Apologia experiments and lessons.

We will be reading Edith Hamilton's Mythology, just for a change. I think Dollygirl will also enjoy Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves (The Faerie Queene Book I), by Edmund Spenser and Roy Maynard.

Through history and literature we get to see how these ideas play out:  the problems of North American colonization and different groups of people trying to live together (who was here first?) can be compared with similar issues raised in Kon-Tiki and our other geography book, Journey to the Source of the Nile by Sir Christopher Ondaatje (not in the Ambleside schedule).  There are  the life-and-death questions that John Donne raises (adults might want to read Philip Yancey's chapter on Donne in his book Soul Survivor, which gives it a rather poignant context); and the problems of government and justice in The Merchant of Venice, in the trial and death of Charles I, in the story of Sir Thomas More, in Plutarch's Lives, and in the novels of Sir Walter Scott. 

And on top of that, we get to use The Roar on the Other Side: a Guide for Student Poets.  If you did The Grammar of Poetry in Year 7 and feel a bit burned out by iambic pentameter, this book is an oasis on the poetic desert.  Plus it has enough hands-on writing exercises to qualify as a good chunk of a course in Creative Writing.  Plus it has a whole bunch of extra poems in the back.

Things come together.  The connections are there without our having to force them.

Related Post:  Ten Things I'm Doing to Plan Year Eight Better.

Let's talk about AO Year Eight (Part One)

"When I was young I told a tale of buried gold, and men from leagues around dug in the woods.  I dug myself."
"But why?"
"I thought the tale of treasure might be true"
"You said you made it up."
"I know I did, but then I didn't know I had."  ~~ James Thurber, The 13 Clocks

It has been nine years since I had a student going into Ambleside Online's Year Eight.  You forget a lot in nine years.  What I did remember, from our first round, was a lot of difficult, and most of it not as appealing nor as easy to understand as the Middle Ages, King Arthur emphasis in Year Seven.  I also remembered that Year Eight covered an awful lot of ground: from the start of the Tudor era, the Renaissance and Reformation, through the Elizabethans and the Stuarts, through Cromwell, the Puritans, and up to William and Mary at the end of the 1600's.   For Canadians, that period covers an introduction to the First Nations peoples, the founding of New France, and the beginnings of the fur trade. (Americans get to study the Pilgrim Fathers and the early colonies.)  I remembered the Apprentice reading Cavalier poetry, Utopia, Whatever Happened to Justice?, and a version of Everyman...and Children of the New Forest, since we were trying to coordinate somewhat with Ponytails' Year Three (same time period).  We tried reading some of The Betrothed on Project Gutenberg, but it was just too big a book for us to handle that way, and the public library didn't have a copy (still doesn't), so we dropped it after a few chapters.

Now might bring a certain knight of gay and shining courage--"But, no!" the cold Duke muttered.  "The Prince will break himself against a new and awful labour: a place too high to reach, a thing too far to find, a burden too heavy to lift."  ~~ James Thurber

That's an awful lot to dump on a middle-schooler.  Not to mention all the literature, science, math and everything else that's part of a school year.  How are they supposed to make sense of all this, and not get so burned out that they forget about love of learning?  How's a homeschooling mom supposed to get fired up by a curriculum outline where almost Every Single Book is by John something or other?  The mere fact that so many of this year's readings can be found in the Harvard Classics is worrisome.  It wasn't like we were going to desert Ambleside or anything, but I was feeling like Year Seven had been a bit of a picnic compared with what lay ahead.

A lock of the guard's hair turned white and his teeth began to chatter.  "The Todal looks like a blob of glup," he said.  "It makes a sound like rabbits screaming, and smells of old, unopened rooms.  It's waiting for the Duke to fail in some endeavour, such as setting you a task that you can do."  "And if he sets me one, and I succeed?" the Prince inquired. "The Blob will glup him," said the guard.  ~~ James Thurber

I was more interested in giving Dollygirl a wonderful and manageable Year Eight than I was worried about being glupped.  I looked really carefully at the original P.U.S. programmes that covered the same time periods as Year Eight (they're not on the Ambleside website, you will have to go to the CM Digital Archives if you want to see those terms).  There were a few differences: less incidental material for history and literature, more plant study, more writing spelled out.  I took the general format and started swapping books around.  What I came up with wasn't bad, but I wanted a way to communicate "here's what to do when" to Dollygirl--as in, more specific instructions and possibly a weekly checklist.  When Ponytails was in Grade Eight and using AO's Pre-Year-Seven, I used Carol Hepburn's outline as a weekly checklist and let her set much of her own schedule. Would that work?  By this time I was also looking at the AO 36-week schedule for Year 8 and wondering how much of that we were going to end up keeping and how much might be different.

So this is what I did: don't try it at home.  I copied Carol's outline into a file, thirty-six times, changed up the Pre-Year-Seven books for all the AO Year Eight, P.U.S., and other books I thought should go in there (like math books and Canadian history), and then started copying in the page breakdowns from the AO schedule.
Actually it didn't look so unworkable.  In fact, it was so workable that I started seeing where I could add in a few of the "extras" from AO Year Eight.  Science was going to include a unit about the heart and lungs--well, there's where we would read about William Harvey.  The writing guide we had included a sample essay by Francis Bacon which was also on the AO schedule.  If we dropped Shakespeare in Term Three, we could fit in Dryden's play about Antony and Cleopatra, All for Love, which is hidden in the Free Reading list.  Et cetera.

Then I cut stuff. It hurt, but I really pruned it down.  I chucked a useful but boring plant book; even if the P.U.S. did botany every single year, and the readings weren't long, it wasn't contributing much.  I trimmed down the literature and the geography.

And what I ended up with was...more or less...AO Year Eight. Or somewhere between Year Eight and Year Eight Lite.  Scrambled into our own sequence, but still mostly there.

Year Eight is going to be great.

The Golux gazed a last time at the Princess.  "Keep warm," he said.  "Ride close together.  Remember laughter.  You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After."....A fair wind stood for Yarrow and, looking far to sea, the Princess Saralinda thought she saw, as people often think they see, on clear and windless days, the distant shining shores of Ever After.  ~~ James Thurber 

(Part Two will explain what we're keeping and what we're switching.)
Related post: Ten Things I'm Doing to Plan Year Eight Better.

Looking Ahead in School: some plans for Grade Eight

It is early yet, but I do have some plans laid out for Dollygirl's Grade Eight.

More or less, it's Ambleside Online's Year Eight, which focuses on the Renaissance and Reformation period up through the 1600’s.  You can see the AO plan here.

The biggest change we will make is to continue using H.O. Arnold-Forster's History of England in place of Churchill's history.  We own Churchill; the Apprentice used it; I've re-examined it; and I still think we'll be better off with the younger-focused book, particularly if Dollygirl is to do her own work in history.[UPDATE: we used A-F in the first term and then transitioned into Churchill.]

We'll also use Van Loon's Story of Mankind, and George Brown's vintage high school textbook Building The Canadian Nation.

For geography, we have a choice of Christopher Columbus or Cartier Sails the St. Lawrence in the first term.  In the second and third terms, I am looking at Journey to the Source of the Nile (Ondaatje), about an attempt to follow in the footsteps of nineteenth-century explorers. Another book with more Ontario interest is The Bruce Beckons, about the Lake Huron area; and I'm hoping to re-subscribe to Canadian Geographic, which is a good source of stories on current issues.

Science will include Apologia General Science, for a study of human physiology, and Physical Science, the modules on the atmosphere, water, weather, etc.  We will also read through Parker's book Exploring the World Around You, which unfortunately is a bit on the dry side, but I make everybody here read it because it contains important concepts and vocabulary about ecosystems.  The physiology study will be supplemented with Exploring the History of Medicine (same series, more interesting) and Dr. Paul Brand's book Fearfully and Wonderfully Made.

Charlotte Mason had students at this level study plant life in detail, almost every term.  The English students used Marie Stopes' book on plants; in the late 1920’s, some international substitutions were offered, including First Studies of Plant Life (Atkinson) for the U.S. students.  (Both books can be viewed at archive.org.).  I found that a book we own,  ABC's of Nature, covers many of Stopes' plant topics, so we will probably use that for grade eight. But I like Stopes' chapter "The Geography of Plants," and I am hoping to include that later in the year.

We will be using most of the English and literature resources listed on the AO website.  Our choice for grammar is The Easy Grammar Plus, the second half of the book.  For "composition" we will use some of Jill Dixon's Write With the Best Volume II, mainly the parts on essay writing.  I like the fact that the lessons use Paine's "Common Sense" and Bacon's "On Education" as models, and the emphasis on essay writing also ties in well with the Unsolved Problems chapters in Whatever Happened to Justice?  (We usually get through just some of those chapters in the third term,  and I have the girls choose one "hot topic" to write about.)  Dixon also encourages students to read through Strunk and White's Elements of Style, so we will do that.

The devotional books for grade eight will be the ones from the Year Seven list, not the Year Eight, since she hasn't read any of them yet. One addition to Bible studies will be read the Reader's Digest book The Bible Through the Ages.  It's a good overview not only of Bible history but of how methods of communication changed over the centuries, from the oral tradition through hand-copying and later to printing. 

And those are the plans so far!

Why it's good, often, to lay out your week

Sunday-night planning is tradition for a lot of homeschoolers.  At our house, because the trash gets picked up early Monday mornings, it's part of the Sunday evening routine: take out the garbage and recycling; make sure  any public-schoolers have signed permission slips or whatever they need; and go over the week's homeschool work.  That's when I rescue the 2-litre plastic bottle from the recycling, because it's on the supply list for a science experiment; when I track down a book that's gone missing from the shelf; and when I try to figure out the tune to the next hymn or folk song.  It's the homeschooling equivalent of looking in the cupboard and seeing if we have enough oatmeal and sugar to make cookies tomorrow.

But the best kind of planning goes beyond that.  I don't mean in a compulsive, track every minute every paragraph way, but in terms of overall goals.  Do you know, for example, what pages or chapters or topics your students are going to read this week, or that you're going to read to them--and if they read their own work, how are you going to communicate those plans to them?  Or if you don't plan ahead to that extent, do you at least know what books or materials they're going to use this week, and in what sort of order? If you have older students who do written narrations, do you have a couple of the readings tentatively (or definitely) marked for that?  If you want older children to help younger ones with math or reading, are there particular topics this week that would be a great match for those kids (or not)?

If there's a new and difficult book you have worried about starting...and for AO Year Sevens, there are a few of those...your planning time is also the time to boost up your own confidence and ability to communicate what's important or special about this book.  A couple of school years ago, I decided to start reading Silas Marner to Dollygirl.  Silas has been the butt of bad-English-class jokes since about the day it was published, but it honestly doesn't deserve its long/boring bad rap.  But like Shakespeare plays, it's easier to follow the book if you have some kind of a character guide; so Dollygirl got one made from "Mom's doodles"--like stick figures. Like meeting too many people at once in real life, it's hard to make sense of all those names without a bit of a hook; but it doesn't have to be complicated.  Just drawing the bad guy in an evil-looking hat or with a sword is enough.

You might have been thinking about a particular child's learning style, say a VSL-type, and wanting to incorporate some good ideas you read about in Upside-Down Brilliance.  Some parent/teachers can think on their feet and come up with stuff on the spur of the moment: "Quick, grab ten books off that shelf and put them in alphabetical order."  But for the rest of us, it makes more sense to preview the week's plan and pencil in some "let's try this" ideas, than to finish Friday and wonder why the week dragged so much.

Real-life examples:  At the Treehouse, this is the week we start Whatever Happened to Penny Candy, so I'll pull out the family box of coins.  This isn't just for amusement--we have some U.S. and other coins in there that have "reeded" edges, which is something discussed near the beginning of the book.  Why do coins have the features they do, such as reeding?  It's based on a question of honesty (keeping coins intact, not being able to shave off the edges without being detected).  I also noticed that there's an article in today's paper about Bitcoins, which I don't think we'll need for Chapter One but which is worth hanging on to for a later chapter.

When I look at Monday's work, I realize that we have three book lessons in a row, unintended, and they're all on British history (or history of literature), or British geography, also unintended.  Simple fix:  since we're rotating history and science, Monday's main history lesson moves to Tuesday, and we'll do science experiments today instead.  And what's that Robert Browning quote in the first chapter of English Literature?  About a magic place--

"Where waters gushed and fruit trees grew
 And flowers put forth a fairer hue,
 And everything was strange and new;
 The sparrows were brighter than peacocks here,
 And their dogs outran our fallow deer,
 And honey bees had lost their stings,
 And horses were born with eagles' wings."

Oh--it's from "The Pied Piper."  Well, I'm not going to re-read the entire poem during our opening time today, but maybe the last part.

For geography--well, Dollygirl will be doing most of the other readings today on her own, so it wouldn't hurt to read In Search of England together, and then we can talk about the narration project I want her to do over the term.

And so on.

A final note, and this is important:  I am not a compulsive planner in every area of life.  For instance, I've tried writing detailed dinner menus for the week, but for us it doesn't work well; if we have the pantry ingredients, we're usually good with day-ahead meal plans or even "it's three o'clock, what are we going to eat?"  As long as the food gets on the table, it seems to work.  I'm not knocking those who prefer to know every meal a week ahead: if others are cooking or you have to buy ingredients, it's good to know what's coming up.

I know some people reading this will have more children, more books to read, and more plans to write.  It is not possible to pre-read and pre-think absolutely everything during the week, and I'm not suggesting that our look-ahead weekend planning is the right way or the only way to homeschool, to do Charlotte Mason, or even to do Ambleside Online.  If your students are more independent than mine, it may be possible to just turn them loose with a checklist of chapters to read.  For us, it works better to have a bit of a Mom-plan.

P.S.  The funny side of planning:  I called down to Mr. Fixit to ask if he had a piece of cork for Dollygirl to use in a science experiment.  "Yes, but you'll have to thaw it," he called back.  Thaw it?  "Not pork...cork!"