It followed me home, can I keep it? (book finds)

I have had a couple of chances to search through used book bins over the last couple of days...this is what made it home, more or less.

Shop, Save, and Share, by Ellie Kay (about saving money on groceries--unfortunately a lot of her strategy depends on Sunday coupon inserts and double coupon stores, neither of which we have here)

Felicity Saves the Day (American Girl)
Josefina's Surprise (American Girl)--our girls are into American Girl stories right now

Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott (just a paperback, but we didn't have a copy)

My Little House Christmas Crafts Book
Making Dolls and Dolls' Clothes, by Lia Van Steenderen (I was so happy to see this on the library discard shelf--we've taken it out several times over the years and I would have been sad to have it disappear)
Sew the Essential Wardrobe for 18-Inch Dolls, by Joan Hinds and Jean Becker (another book I was very happy not to miss--it even has its envelope of full-size patterns)
Hearthstrings: How to Make Decorative Garlands for All Seasons, by Carol Cruess Pflumm
A partially-there book of Dover birthday invitation postcards
Skills for Survival: How Families Can Prepare, by Esther Dickey, 1978. Includes such wonderful meal suggestions as cooked beets stuffed with greens.

Sally Go Round the Sun, a book of songs by Edith Fowke. My Squirrelings are too old for this vintage book, but I thought it was worth bringing home.

The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963, by Christopher Paul Curtis
The Pool of Fire, by John Christopher (one of the Tripods series)
One Tintin book
One Happy Hollisters book
Teddybears ABC, by Susanna Gretz (also too young for our girls, but we like Gretz's teddybears books) [Note: this one was recommended for tiny ones, but we looked at it and don't like it quite as much as Teddybears stay indoors. The Apprentice thinks it's too much like Alligators All Around.]
The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, by Alice Dalgliesh

The Bug Game, by Ampersand Press (not a book, but it came home with the books)

Apprendre à Ecrire Sans Faute (Write Without Mistakes--a language workbook)

Wild in the City, by Jan Thornhill (picture book about urban wildlife)
The Kids' Science Book, by Robert Hirschfeld and Nancy White
Science on a Shoestring, by Herb Strongin

Sugar, sugar: improvised butterscotch sauce

We had some maple icing in the fridge, leftover from Mr. Fixit's birthday cupcakes (which were really banana muffins). Actually it was more butter than sugar--I got the proportions a bit off. I had the idea of thinning it down and using it in rice pudding, but we were out of rice.

We also had some leftover butterscotch pudding, the instant kind--something Crayons had asked for, but we didn't eat the whole package.

I combined the chunk of icing and the pudding with a bit of water in a large measuring cup, microwaved it for a minute, stirred it, and microwaved it for another minute.

Instant warm butterscotch sauce. Good over plain cake, muffins-in-a-pan, or something else not too sweet.

Not that I'd expect that everybody (or anybody) out there would have leftover maple icing and leftover butterscotch pudding, but when you have potentially compatible leftovers, it's always worth a try.

What to read with your kids?

Check out Ann's photo post "Best Picture Books" at Holy Experience.

Why we are not good mall material

We haven't been to the big mall here in awhile. It was rainy this morning (i.e. no yard sales), and a couple of us were looking for shoes and other things, so Mr. Fixit suggested we go shopping.

Crayons and Mama Squirrel went to the discount department store and bought a pair of summer shoes for Crayons marked down from $10 to $5 and then they took another 50% off at the checkout, so the final price was $2.50.

And we found an Algebra Adventure DVD for Ponytails, in a clearance bin for $2.99.

Then we went to the bookstore. Mama Squirrel spent a gift card on a book about staying out of debt. (Note: I respect this author's financial expertise, but she does use some language that some people would find offensive. Just saying.)

Other than that...well, Mr. Fixit and Ponytails found a couple of things they wanted as well (Ponytails got a tank top, a shirt, and a pair of church shoes). One store was offering a discount to "students and teachers with i.d." so Ponytails used our support group's membership card (the clerk asked "what is that?" but accepted it anyway). They saved about $15 overall. The shoe store offered a discount to Canadian Automobile Association members, which at least helped with the sales tax...and then Mr. Fixit got another 20% off Ponytails' shoes because the cashier said that if he texted a certain number and typed the name of the shoe store, he would get an instant coupon over the phone that he could use right there. So he did.

We did pay full price for a box of Timbits. :-)

An addition to Crayons' Grade 4 Literature

I forgot we had a copy of this: Life of Robert Louis Stevenson For Boys and Girls, by Jacqueline Overton. I think we can fit that one in, or at least part of it. There are so many Stevenson books and poems that are part of our school that it's good to be able to connect them a bit.

How do you spread out a school year?

Day by day, like Cindy?

Listed by chapter or page but undated, like the Deputy Headmistress?

I have settled on a middle place: I have a year's plan divided up by months. I like to know how many chapters we are supposed to be into a book by the end of October, or roughly when we're going to get to a science or craft project that requires supplies, or when a library book needs to be put on hold. That way if we miss a Monday for Thanksgiving, or someone's sick, it doesn't mess the schedule up too much to have to put the week's work off till next Monday. The idea is just to get to where we're supposed to be by the end of the month.

I take into account things like really only having three workable school weeks in September, two in December, and three in March (we take March Break).

I can always sit down on Sunday night and figure out how big a piece of the month's work we can reasonably chew off in the coming week...but I'm not doing that this far ahead. I just like to have a rough idea at this point.

It helps to go into enough detail to include chapter titles and topics--you sometimes see connections and patterns that you might have missed. Whatever Happened to Justice? mentions Thomas Paine, and one of the Write with the Best lessons uses an excerpt from Paine. I don't usually try to jiggle them closer together--but it's nice to have a note that we'll be returning to a person or a topic later on. Or if there are chapters covering almost identical material in different books--I make notes on what to skip.

It also helps when you can see where a book's probably going to be done before the year's end, or where you're going to have to double up on readings. One of Ponytails' history books will be done in May; luckily, that's just where we're going to have to pick up the pace with the other one.

It also helps if you look at the month's work and feel either motivated or exhausted. Exhausted probably means that you need to stretch something out or cut it out altogether. I cut out a few things after looking at the year's plan...I had hoped to read a book about Alexander the Great with Crayons, but it's just not going to happen with the rest of the history we have to do. Maybe next year.

Here's a sample of the plan for the upcoming year. I don't bother to include things like Bible reading (unless there's a specific place we're trying to get to) or daily grammar pages. I also don't have a lot of details included about Ponytails' science lessons, since she does that with her dad. My plan's in a Word table, but this is a text version.

Ponytails, September:

Christian Studies: Mr. Pipes: Clement; Hail, Gladdening Light; Gregory of Nazianzen; Prudentius. Lewis readings 1-3.

History: Justice: Cause is Law, Higher Authority, Higher Law (refers to Thomas Paine). Foster: Intro (Janus), Under a Lucky Star, Ides of March, Cleopartra, Caesar's Son, Cicero, Conspirators. Bauer: 6, 7, 8. Story of Canada: chapter 7, Confederation Days, to top of page 178.

English: Elements of Style, 8 lessons. Begin writing Unit 1: Free Verse. Weekly Wordplay Cafe.

Literature: Watership Down, 2 chapters/wk so approx. 6 chapters. Read Bulfinch chapters 2-4 (skipping 1 for now). Start reading Shakespeare play. Poetry as assigned.

Science and Geography: Richards: Universe & its Origins, Dead Planets Living World, The Odd Planet. (May not get that far if we're doing map work.) Biography chapter 1-3. Readings from geography list. Nature readings together.

Math: Start work with Dad. Weekly group math time (3 times).

Languages: Latin lessons 1 (Days 1-5), 2 (Days 1-4). Learn Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in Latin. Learn "In Nomine Patris." French 3x/wk (approx. 9 lessons).

Fine Arts and Citizenship: Streatfeild: The Six, Mr. Fosse. Music and picture study. Ourselves chapter XII. Start Plutarch (should get to lesson 2 or 3 of 12).

Gracious Arts: Alcott chapters 1-3. Schaeffer chapter 1 The First Artist, chapter 2 Hidden Art.

Crayons (some of her books are the same so I won't repeat them):

September:

Christian Studies: Bible studies, 3-4 lessons.

Language Arts: Daily work with Mom, still to be planned. Weekly Wordplay Cafe.

Math: Daily work with Mom, weekly group time.

Literature: Poetry, start Stevenson. Kidnapped--start and see how far we get.

Science and Nature: Read How to Think Like a Scientist. Start some Franklin experiments (still to be chosen). Start Story Book of Science if time.

History: Read book about Franklin. Start GW's World, through "The Friendly Printer." Also read Seventh and Walnut (it's short). Writing/narration activities as planned.

More on this fall's homeschooling (Part 3)

MATHEMATICS

I already mentioned briefly what we're doing: Ponytails is finishing off Key to Geometry and Key to Decimals, and then will be starting Key to Algebra, and probably doing practice Gauss competition tests at the grade 8 level. She's planning on doing most of her math with Mr. Fixit again this year.

Crayons will be finishing Math Mammoth Light Blue Grade 3, because we got into it late in the year, and then we'll download Grade 4. I've been very interested to see where/how the Miquon Math she'd always used fit in to this newer curriculum; where we can go fast because we've already covered a topic, and where we have to slow down for math potholes. Not surprisingly (if you know Miquon), she has a very good sense of place value; she has a good understanding of how numbers work, and she's probably a bit ahead in multiplication, since Miquon starts that early. She's great at money math, not so good at telling time, but we'll keep working on that.

We'll be doing a weekly joint math time--I'm still working out the details on that. Some of what we'll be doing will be coming out of Critical Thinking's Math Detective book (the gr 5-6 level), since we have it on hand; but I don't want to do exactly the same format every time...the goal is to get a bigger sense of mathematics, to learn about the really interesting parts of it, not just "what you get in school." (If you've never checked out the Living Math website, there's lots of inspiration there.)

GRACIOUS ARTS

Otherwise known as Home Economics or Family Studies...but it's more than that. We are going to read through The Hidden Art of Homemaking (maybe just parts of some chapters), and supplement that with Marmee's Sugar N Spice Studies (nice around the holidays), a book on teatimes, a book on making basket gifts for people, and other books on crafts and creativity. We'll also read Louisa May Alcott's novel Jack and Jill, since a lot of that book is about "brightening the corner where you are" and finding the beauty around you.

CITIZENSHIP

A catch-all category. Whatever Happened to Justice? could fit in here, but I'm counting that under history this year. We'll be reading Plutarch's Lives (probably just Ponytails the first term), some of Charlotte Mason's book Ourselves, and Noel Streatfeild's book The Fearless Treasure. (We've never used that last one yet, so it will be an experiment.)

FINE ARTS

We'll probably follow the Ambleside rotation for picture studies and composer studies, except that I want to include Tom Thomson in this year's studies...it's a good year to do this since at least one museum within reach will be hosting a Thomson exhibit.

Art instruction: this is pretty much open. Crayons, although she loves to craft, is going through a spell of thinking that she can't draw, so it's not something I'm going to push right now. Ponytails has her own artistic interests she's working on. We will incorporate narration drawings and other activities into the year's work and leave it at that. (I was pretty happy, though, to find tins of watercolour pencils and charcoal pencils at Dollarama this weekend for $1.25 each.)

LATIN

We'll be following the lessons in Our Roman Roots, probably three times a week.

FRENCH

I had planned to have Ponytails start one of the Mission Monde levels, and work something out myself for Crayons. When I got started working on Crayons' curriculum, I realized that we could probably do at least the first half of the year together, and then maybe get MM for Ponytails after Christmas. I looked at the Ontario ministry guidelines for grade 4 and grade 8 French, and they're really not that complicated...no offense to anyone who might be offended by that, I just mean that, for a ministry of education outline, it's pretty simple and clear what's supposed to be taught, and we can cover that with our own books. Our theme is going to be Les Insectes, based on a Canadian activity book (from a used book sale) called Les Insectes (surprise). We'll learn bugs along with verbs.

I think that's it for now...

What's ahead in the Treehouse homeschool?

Up in the Treehouse, Mama Squirrel has been hunched over a desk with a pen in her furry paw, post-it notes stuck to her tail, and a look in her eyes similar to that of a determined but frustrated suitcase-packer.

However, that's not a very leisurely place to be, for either Mama Squirrel or the Squirrelings. And the answer, of course, is not to cram everything in tighter, but to let go of what most likely won't matter on the trip. Or afterwards.

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

Okay.

But we are still going to fit in a travel-sized package of Latin this year. And work on French, in which we have gotten unavoidably but sadly behind.

Crayons, going into Grade 4, will be doing Ambleside Online's Year 4, more or less, which covers mostly American history of the 1700's. (We won't be reading This Country of Ours or Abigail Adams.) Geography, nature, and some of the science will be different. However, we're at a very interesting point with the two Squirrelings that are left homeschooling, since some of the Year 4 books also appear on Carol's Pre-7 book list, which we like very much and which gave us a base for planning Ponytails' Grade 8. So this year we'll be doing Age of Fable and It Couldn't Just Happen together, along with Shakespeare and some of the usual other together-things.

Ponytails will have two strands of history: Augustus Caesar's World by Genevieve Foster, and world/Canadian history from 1865 to 1965, using The Story of the World Volume 4 and The Story of Canada which covers, in this squirrel's opinion, too much too fast to be a favourite CM resource, but which is good for a middle-school look at Confederation, the World Wars and so on.

Math will be mostly Math Mammoth for Crayons and Key To books for Ponytails, although we'll also be doing some math journalling. Crayons will be reading Jean-Henri Fabre's The Story Book of Science and doing some Benjamin Franklin science experiments (maybe these, maybe these). Ponytails will be continuing to study science with Mr. Fixit (a.k.a. Dad) but will also have a (short) science reading list.

I'll post more details as I pull them from my tail notebook.

Duplo becomes a learn-to-read tool

Filth Wizardry has a great idea for repurposing Duplo blocks.

Cooking without recipes: Summer Edition

What's for supper?

Pizza Pasta. I had thought of making Pizza Roll-ups, but it was too hot to turn on the oven. So this is what I did: browned a pound of ground chicken in a non-stick skillet, added some cut-up pepperoni, a few mushrooms, a chopped green pepper and a bit of canned pasta sauce, and let all that cook while I cooked a potful of fusilli. Just before the end I melted some mozzarella and cheddar over the top of the skillet.

BTW, one of the best frugal and energy-saving tips I've tried recently from the Tightwad Gazette books is the pasta method from the late Mary Leggewie of HomeschoolChristian.com. Bring the water to a boil, add pasta, bring it back to a boil, turn off the heat, cover the pot, and cook for about twenty minutes, stirring a couple of times to keep the pasta from sticking. It really works!

Raw vegetable plate: cucumbers, zucchini sticks, a few carrot sticks.

Chocolate Microwave Cake with Raspberry Sauce. (our post about microwave cake) The raspberry sauce was made like this: I partly thawed some frozen raspberries (a couple of cupfuls?). In a saucepan I combined two cups of water, two tablespoons of cornstarch, and a couple of good spoonfuls of raspberry fruit spread; I cooked that until bubbly and then added it to the berries, and we drizzled the sauce over slices of chocolate cake.

Happy Canada Day from Dewey

Bettina's Baked Cottage Pudding

From A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband

I've tried versions of Cottage Pudding before and always found them too dry or bland--I prefer baking muffin batter in a pan if I want something quite plain, or vanilla microwave cake, or maybe the biscuit batter from our shortcake recipe. But Bettina's version--with a couple of adaptations for 2010--is quite good, and three out of five Squirrels would like to have it again. Mama Squirrel was unsure of the amounts on this, but it made plenty--especially because only three out of five squirrels tried it.

Bettina's Baked Cottage Pudding with Lemon Sauce

1 cup flour
1 2/3 tsp. baking powder (who wants to measure that? I just put in about 2 tsp.)
1/4 tsp. salt
1/3 cup sugar
1 well-beaten egg
1/2 cup milk
2 tbsp. melted butter (I used canola oil)
1/4 tsp. vanilla or lemon extract (I used lemon)

"Mix dry ingredients, add egg and milk. Beat well and add melted butter and extract. Bake 25 minutes in a well buttered mould. Serve hot with the following sauce...." My notes: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease or spray a small lidded casserole, and bake for about half an hour or until the edges are pulling away from the pan. Let it stay in the pan while you make the sauce.

Lemon Sauce

1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 tbsp. flour (I used about 2 tbsp.)
1/2 tsp. salt (I used about half that)
1 cup hot water
1 tsp. butter or to taste
1 tsp. lemon extract or 1/2 tsp. lemon juice (I used 1/2 tsp. lemon extract and that was plenty)

With a whisk, combine dry ingredients in a saucepan. Slowly add the hot water. Cook over medium heat until thick and bubbly (this only takes a few minutes if you start with hot water). Mix in the butter and flavouring.

Now I'm sure Bettina would have nicely unmoulded her pudding and then served it drizzled with some of the sauce, maybe passing the rest in one of her wedding-china sauce servers. But this is what I did: I left the cake in the pan, went around the edges with a sharp knife and also sort of cut through it three times each way. Then I just poured all the sauce over the top and served it from the pan.

(And now you know why housewives were so happy to discover self-saucing puddings!)

"Permission to be serious": Carol Bly on education

I just finished reading the late Carol Bly's Beyond the Writer's Workshop. This wasn't much like any other how-to-write book I've ever read...most of them are set up more like "classes," with "lessons", or are at least fairly sequential. This was more like having a very smart but very intense person come for a visit and talk your ear off for a week about everything that's on her mind and then some...and then try to connect it all back to writing.

I found myself getting more and more frustrated with her obvious biases, her meanderings into psychology, her anecdotes that were intended to prove a point about writing or thinking but that just made me wonder more about why she was telling them or why she had reacted to certain events as she did. Then I got to the chapter on teaching writing to elementary students, and this:

"Throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, schoolteachers were likely to be joy killers--they were people who disciplined us for not practicing penmanship just so or for misspelling or for laughing aloud in class or for not folding our hands on our desks. In reaction, first the "progressive" schools, then other private schools, and finally the public schools, began in the 1930's to encourage individual personality and especially fun in elementary classrooms. Quite right too.

"The irony is that American children have been watching kidding and practical jokes on television for fifty years. They are a long way past the days when children learned somber hand skills and violin playing in the cultivated living rooms of their elders. These days they are tossed into fun day-care groupings at less than age one. They are bused to fun, interactive museum demonstrations. At home they master fun computer games at an early age. They are choking with fun. Schools of education....need to pull up rein and consider whether or not a better task for education might be saving the children's own serious nature, not barreling them into still more and more superficial fun.

"We had better do the oddly psychological work of giving children "permission" to be serious."--Carol Bly, Beyond the Writers' Workshop, published in 2000.

In that regard, I think Carol Bly and Charlotte Mason had a common philosophy. The business of education is a serious one, and though it can also be enjoyable, we need to take learning seriously and make sure our children understand that as well.

I had a short conversation this week with my nine-year-old about that. We were reading The Insect Man, Eleanor Doorly's quirky but interesting little biography of Jean-Henri Fabre. Did you know that, at least according to this book, Fabre lost his teaching position and was essentially drummed out of town for promoting higher education for girls? I pointed out to my daughter that we women enjoy a huge privilege that wasn't available to many girls even in the 1800's. I did not go into the fact that it is not available to girls in many parts of the world even today, but it was on my mind as well. If our right to an education was so important that someone like Jean-Henri Fabre was willing to put his job on the line for it, what right do we have to trivialize it?

Ricotta desserts, and ricotta whipped topping

"Bettina" might not approve of putting ricotta cheese to use in desserts, and usually it is too expensive for us to recommend it as a frugal ingredient; but our local supermarket occasionally runs specials on an Italian-style brand of dairy products--their Parmesan, their ricotta and so on--and that's when we pick some up.

We haven't made frozen Tortoni for awhile, but we do sometimes make Cocoa Ricotta Cream when we have a container of cheese on hand. It's very good, but you don't want it after a heavy meal--ricotta desserts aren't usually sweet, but they are rich.

Tonight we had one of those sale-priced 2-cup containers in the fridge, and Father's Day company coming (just Grandpa Squirrel, but he's important), and strawberries and raspberries to make shortcake with, but no whipped cream. We could have used plain yogurt, or just had the fruit on top of the plain biscuit cake, but there was the ricotta, and Mama Squirrel remembered a recipe for Ricotta Topping in the Goldbecks' American Wholefoods Cuisine. So that's what we did. Short version: run the ricotta cheese plus some yogurt plus some honey plus a little vanilla through the food processor, or beat with electric beaters until fluffy. The recipe also called for a bit additional cream cheese, but that seems optional if your ricotta is already pretty creamy.

An option to make all this more frugal would be to use a homemade version of ricotta cheese, like the Hillbilly Housewife's version. I've made it and used it in main dishes, but haven't yet tried it in desserts. If I do, I'll let you know.

The Ladybugs' Picnic

Made by Ponytails for the Apprentice's "young ladies'" party this weekend: Taste of Home's Ladybug Appetizers. (Photo at that link.)

Notes from our experience making them:

1. Use sturdy crackers. We forgot to get round crackers and settled for saltines, but after even a couple of hours in the fridge, the crackers started to get a bit limp. They still tasted good but you had to pick them up carefully.

2. We didn't have any chives, so left them out of the cheese mixture and used bits of parsley stems for the antennae. (Somebody on the Taste of Home site commented that ladybugs don't have antennae anyway. But we thought they were cuter with them.)

3. Ponytails tried to follow the exact directions at first, but found that with our tomatoes (we had grape tomatoes, not cherry) she needed to use more than the half-tomato recommended to make a ladybug that looked like more than just a splotch of red on the cracker. Instead of cutting the half in half, she just put a slit in the back for "wings." Once you've done a couple, you'll see what we mean. Just cut them the way that makes sense to you.

4. Black food colouring added to white cream cheese and sour cream doesn't make black, it makes gray, as any kid who's ever painted can tell you. After adding quite a bit of food colouring and still getting somewhere between purple and gray, we experimented with adding a bit of brown and a bit of royal blue, and that did darken it a bit more; on the tomatoes, it did look pretty much black. I think another time I would just try for purple spots or whatever you think looks good on a ladybug. (Maybe yellow spots?)

5. In spite of all our little difficulties, Ponytails did a fantastic job decorating the bugs, and all the young ladies were Amazed.

I'm in the mood for frugal

For the next little while, we're going to hang out with my new frugal superhero: Bettina from A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband, by Louise Bennett Weaver and Helen Cowles Le Cron, 1917 edition. (Downloadable in lots of formats.)

The recipes in this book, as the planksconstance review says, are, um, very 1917. They remind me of the ones in my great-aunt's 1920's Modern Priscilla Cookbook. Lots of canned pimiento, beefsteak, and white sauce over everything. One quick little dinner Bettina whips up has no less than three sauces made from scratch. But on the other hand, Bettina is a generous soul who likes to help out her not-quite-as-economical friends; she's up on all the latest fuel-saving technology (did you know fireless cookers were a hot kitchen gadget in the early 20th century?); and her principles, if not always her exact recipes, are worth examining.

The Depression Kitchen blog also reviewed different editions of this book--there were revisions in the 1930's and the 1940's. Only the first edition is actually online. "Bettina's" sequel, A Thousand Ways to Please a Family, isn't online either--maybe somebody will upload it sometime. (Note: Kessinger Publishing has reprinted both books.)

Anyway, our first look at Bettina's housekeeping comes in the first chapter, as she and Bob (who looks like a 1917 Ken doll) return from their honeymoon and make themselves a "simple" dinner from their emergency shelf (and from a few fresh things left by relatives who guessed they'd be returning soon).

So what does Bettina keep in her pantry? Canned pimientos, of course. Canned everything: tuna, salmon, dried beef, corn, mushrooms, peas, string beans, lima beans, devilled ham, tomatoes, condensed milk. Marshmallows (definitely something you can't live without!). Salted codfish. Cookies. Olives. Pickles. It reminds me of Mr. Drucker's Deluxe Special. (Scroll down there.)

And what do Bettina and Bob cook up for themselves in ten minutes? Creamed tuna on toast strips--and buttered rolls. (have some bread with your bread, dear?) Canned peas with butter sauce--I assume that's the only way they could choke down the canned peas. Strawberry preserves that magically appear from somewhere. Hot chocolate with marshmallows (obviously they had some chocolate, sugar and vanilla and a few other staples).

Bob is very impressed. Obviously the marshmallows helped.

So what's the point of all this, now, in 2010?

1. Have some sort of easy, long-lasting food put by, both for major-major emergencies like ice storms, and for more everyday last-minute meals. Your shelf doesn't have to include pimiento or capers or preserved kumquats. What will you and your family actually eat? Years ago tofu was our after-work-fast-meal standby, but since then some of the Squirrels have found they can't eat soy, so that's off the list. Be creative, but also realistic: if your kids like canned baked beans with sliced wieners, then do that. Add in a few carrot sticks and call it a meal. Not everything requires butter sauce. Or marshmallows. If it's peanut butter sandwiches, eat it with thanks, and plan better for next time.

2. Bettina points out that they got better deals on their canned goods by buying in larger amounts. It's the same now. Stock up on staples when or where they're cheapest for you. Brenda says that she buys lots of her favourite canned tomatoes when they're on sale. (Brenda is always a great source of pantry inspiration.)

3. Don't be rummaging through recipes when dinner has to be on the table in twenty minutes. Have a few things you know how to make really quickly--like eggs, or salmon patties, or hot sandwiches. But when you do have time, do a little research. Look for inexpensive, pantry-friendly, adaptable recipes. Student cookbooks are often a good source.
4. Bettina sets great store on having things "nice"--hence the pimiento, the toast strips, the butter sauce. The marshmallows. Not to mention her trim percale bungalow apron. In later chapters she also manages to have some kind of flowers or fruit on the table for decoration. Now I do not wear aprons, and I hardly ever put flowers on the table--bringing the outside in is not always a good idea for Mr. Fixit's allergies. But there are other ways to make even a quick meal a little better than just "the ordinary." What can you add for "some little surprise," as Charlotte Mason suggested? Sometimes I find something nice on sale--shelf-stable juice, chow mein noodles, a box of cherry tomatoes--and I save it till we need a little extra touch with dinner. Leftover pumpkin doughnuts or something like that add a little humour, if perhaps too much sugar, to the breakfast table.

5. Enjoy the people you're eating with. That's why Bob and Bettina are such a cute couple.

Just Carrot Cake

This isn't the customizable Blinky-Blink Carrot Cake I posted about a couple of years ago. This one has no nuts, no coconut, no raisins, and no pineapple--which is exactly what The Apprentice requested for her birthday this week. (It's also dairy-free, unless you frost it with cream cheese frosting.) I found it in The Harrowsmith Cookbook Volume 1. It makes lots (a 9 x 13 inch pan), and has a noticeable honey flavour since you're not blocking it out with other ingredients.

Carrot Cake

submitted by Lynn Hill, Ilderton, Ontario

3 cups flour (I used unbleached)
2 tsp. baking soda
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. cinnamon (I used only 1 1/2 tsp.)
1 cup honey (I had only 3/4 cup honey, so I filled in with 1/4 cup brown sugar)
1 cup oil
4 eggs
2 cups grated carrot
1 cup raisins or chopped nuts, optional

Measure dry ingredients into bowl. Stir and add honey, oil and eggs. Beat hard by hand for 1 minute. Add carrots and nuts/raisins if desired, and beat to mix.

Pour into a greased 9 x 13 inch pan and bake at 350 degrees F for 35 minutes. But be careful--it will brown quickly because of the honey, and might not take quite that long--ours was done sooner. As soon as it smells "done," it probably is.

We covered it with cream-cheese frosting and put an enormous number of candles on it.

A package from Hampstead House

We don't get brand-new books all that often.

But I saw some things that might be useful in the last HH catalogue, and I had a credit note for some stuff that had gone out of stock, so I decided to send in an order.

Violet Comes to Stay: this will be a birthday gift for a young relative later this year.

World in a Box: I posted about this earlier today.

Watching Water Birds, by Jim Arnosky.

Mouse Tail Moon--a book of poems, also for a birthday gift.

Stars & Planets: a book with lots of tabs, things to unfold, photos, and a poster in the back. Even The Apprentice thought this was pretty cool.

Photos: Ponytails

Learning Geography (Things we like, including Aunty Dot)

Aunty Dot's Incredible Adventure Atlas, by Eljay Yildirim, is Crayons' favourite geography resource right now [2013: and still is!]. We bought it a few years ago from Hampstead House; it was published in 1997 but is still listed on Amazon. Aunty Dot and Uncle Frank have won a trip around the world; the book is full of their letters home (real letters in real envelopes), maps of their travels, and photos of their souvenirs. "Well, here we are in busy Beijing. Elephants weren't such a good idea--if we'd stuck with them we would never have gotten here! Beijing is a real contrast from our journey across the Tibetan Plateau, where we hardly met a soul. There were plenty of yaks, though--very useful animals!"

Children'sAtlas.com: "The Book, CD-Rom, and Website That Work Together." I posted about this rummage-sale find a few weeks ago. Published in 1997, still occasionally available (on Amazon); the CD-Rom runs fine on our computer but the website is gone. Crayons found this a lot of fun and fairly challenging, although she bought up all the "souvenirs" so fast, by playing a couple of favourite games and winning a certain number of points, that she lost some of her interest in trying out the other activities...we'll probably bring it out again next fall anyway.

We found Hammond's Discovering Maps in a sale bin at a department store. There is another edition available on Amazon, but this one is pretty up to date (2006). Ponytails has been using this for general map skills, and the Apprentice also found it useful for a twelfth-grade class that required knowing facts about the "world's longest rivers" etc. It also offers little tips like the fact that if you point at the North Star with one hand and at the horizon with the other, the resulting angle will tell you how many degrees north or south of the equator you are. (How you're supposed to measure the angle while holding your arms like that, I'm not sure, but anyway...)

Maps and Globes: a classic Reading Rainbow selection--looks like a little kids' book, but there's a fair amount of information in there. "Globes (unlike flat maps) are shaped exactly like the earth--like a ball or sphere. They are very tiny models--the earth is really 30 to 40 million times bigger than the globe in your classroom. Globes, because they are round, put all the world's geography in its proper place; they give the truest possible view of the whole earth."

Geography Songs--don't all homeschoolers know about these? "The British Isles, the British Isles..." The Apprentice used to sing the Scandinavia song at the top of her lungs on the swingset, which the elderly lady next door found amusing as well as educational.

[2013 Update:  There were a couple of other resources originally included in this post, but they turned out not to really make the grade, so I've cut them out.]

Food we really eat, recipes we really make

Specially for Ponytails: here's a link to the webpage for CBC's Best Recipes Ever, a cooking show we both like to watch. If you like Canadian Living-style family-oriented recipes, this is your show. If you like to see how those recipes are actually supposed to look, this is your show. If you like food adjectives like ooey-gooey-goodness, this is definitely your show.

Very educational.

New nightwear for Crystal

Crystal is Crayons' 18-inch doll. We found her at a yard sale last summer. She's very pretty but needs The Apprentice to help her with a bad case of bed-head.

The patterns are from the doll pattern book that goes with Bunkhouse Books' Stitches and Pins. There are doll-size patterns available for all the sewing books, including the boys' book Buckles and Bobbins (although the doll clothes there are still modelled by girl dolls!). They also sell individual patterns, including the pajamas, but the books are a better deal. You can probably follow the doll package patterns without having the main book to refer to, especially if you have medium sewing skills and have done doll clothes or real-size clothes before; but I wouldn't give just the doll package to a young or inexperienced sewer unless there was someone around to help. The patterns are full size and easy to photocopy, but the directions are brief and (at least in the pajama pattern) occasionally forget to mention things. The Triangle Scarf, Pajama Pants and Top turned out well; I tried the Slippers but they didn't stay on Crystal's feet. [Forgot to mention: Crayons did some of the sewing on this along with Mama Squirrel.]

If the fabric looks vaguely familiar, it's because we used the leftovers from last year's "Sense and Sensibility" apron project.

"OK, guys, photo shoot's over."

They don't make them like this anymore

Some finds from a Saturday yard sale...History of Ancient Rome, by Jean Defrasne, from the Myths and Legends series, the same small books as Stories of Alexander the Great and Stories of the Norsemen. They're unassuming little dustjacketed books, translated from French and printed in Britain in the 1960's. They have only a few pictures. But they sure do keep your interest...people in these books scale mountains, stagger and collapse, harass the Carthaginian army, and resist the onslaught. Centurions shout commands in hoarse voices. The trampled soil disappears in pools of blood.

The vocabulary is challenging:

"Already, Hannibal was growing weaker. His thoughts seemed to be far away with his native city of Carthage now, abased and defeated.

"'I have done everything for my fatherland,' he continued slowly, 'but what has my fatherland done for me? After Zama I was appointed Head of State. I restored order. I filled our treasury with gold, I covered our countryside with olive groves and orchards, I prepared our revenge, prudently but persistently. My adversaries betrayed me to the Romans and so I was exiled, declared a public enemy, my house was razed to the ground and no one was even allowed to pronounce my name.'

"He shivered; his strong body began to struggle against the grip of death.

"'Carthage,' he said, staring with glazed eyes, 'land of greedy and cowardly jackals, you will die. Your conquerors will scatter salt on your ravaged soil, and your proud elders will end their days in the underground cells of Rome.'"

I also found a book called When the World was Rome, by Polly Schoyer Brooks and Nancy Zinsser Walworth. Apparently the same authors wrote books on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but I'm not familiar with them. The format is kind of like one of those junior Time-Life books, sort of a chunky hardcover with some black and white photos and drawings. The language is fairly difficult for children, so I'd guess that the book would be good for maybe the middle school years, for students who still like the feel of a bigger book. This one doesn't have the staggerings and shiverings of the Myths and Legends volume...it's more straightforward history, but not uninteresting. Sample:

"But power soon corrupted Nero and he sank lower and lower into vice, losing all sense of decency and morality. When he divorced his wife to marry the vicious, seductive Poppea, his domineering mother tried to interfere. Poppaea taunted him with being afraid of his mother, who, she said, was plotting his downfall in order to rule as empress herself. So Nero consented to poison his mother, but Agrippina had antidotes for poison. Nero then staged a shipwreck, but his indomitable mother escaped and swam to safety. Finally he left it up to his soldiers, who stabbed her to death."

And on that note...

No-bake fruit and chocolate balls, latest incarnation

I've posted about this "recipe" before, but it changes every time I make it. It can be made gluten-free, dairy-free or whatever depending on the chips, cereal etc. that you use.

Latest version, with amounts very indefinite: most of a 12-oz. bag of chocolate chips; half a bag of unsweetened coconut; 1 package (about 12-15) dried figs, with their hard little stems chopped off; small amount of orange juice; and a couple of cupfuls of rice krispie-type cereal, divided. Also something to roll the balls in, either coconut or something else like ground oatmeal or graham crumbs. Run all ingredients except for about half of the cereal through the food processor, until it is a fairly solid, slightly sticky mass of pulverized stuff. Add a little more orange juice if you have to, but not too much. It's okay if there are still some small bits of chocolate etc. that don't get mashed before the mixture won't move around the bowl any more.

Transfer to a larger bowl and mix in the remaining krispie-type cereal, enough to give it some texture but not so much that it won't hold together in balls. Roll in small balls and roll the balls in coconut or other coating...or leave plain if you prefer.

I don't always have rice-krispie-type cereal around and you can make very good balls without it, but adding it seems to lighten up the dense fruit-chocolate mixture a bit, and it also adds a bit of crunch.

Math is more than minusing

Ruth Beechick once complained that school readers used to push all the really interesting stories to the back of the book, and maybe you got to them at the end of the year. Supplements in math class can be like that too--if you do them when you get around to them, you may never get around to them. We don't always have to be bound to the Big Fat Math Books, at least not all year long.

I think that's what was wrong with most of the math education I got during school: most of it, progressive as we were all supposed to be in the '70's, was simply arithmetic. A few angles here and there, but mostly it was about doing the basic operations. Once in awhile they hauled out the expensive kits of attribute blocks, or gave us laminated cards with "math experiences" on them, but even the teachers didn't really know how to use that kind of math stuff, so it was always back to arithmetic in the end.

Which, in a way, didn't serve us too badly; at least, as I've said before, I do know my times tables and I don't get caught too often on those silly trick questions like "what's 8 divided by 1/2?".* But I also hit that girl's grade 4 math block around long division, and it was never the same after that. I do know for sure that we never did any math research, or studied mathematicians, or looked at mathematics as something big and interesting that grownup people did. It was just what you did after reading class and before gym.

So I was very interested to read "Mild-Mannered Math No More" by Cheryl Bastarache in The Old Schoolhouse, Winter 2008-9 issue, and to also find it online. This article talks about basing your math course around a math notebook that's full of more than just sums: you can include "notes, copywork, research, challenges, responses, and fun stuff." In other words, like a scientist's journal, or a Book of the Centuries, or a Latin notebook, or any other notebook-with-a-plan like that. A book full of stuff that's actually interesting...and, as Cheryl says, if you're brave enough, you could make that "the centerpiece of your curriculum."

*The answer is 16. 8 divided by 1/2 means how many halves fit into 8?

Ooh, oxygen!

Fun with chemistry and Jean-Henri Fabre: click on the PDF of Eleanor Doorly's Insect Man and read the chapter on pages 20-21. (Penelope, Geraldine et al are an English family visiting France and trying to find all the places where Fabre lived.) We happen to have a set of Bonjour magazines from Mama Squirrel's own school days and one of them has photos of Avignon, which we used along with this chapter. Since most people haven't saved their 1977 Bonjours, you can look at these pictures on Wikipedia.

Well, at least nobody got killed.

Rummage Sale Geography

Something neat we found last Saturday: the Interfact Reference Children's Atlas. And the CD-Rom still runs on our XP system, even though it's ten years old. Not bad for a dollar!

One more reason I am still liking Math Mammoth

Is it only coincidence that the two math programs we have liked best both have the initals MM?

Actually, so did one we didn't like as much, but never mind.

This is what I'm happy about: included in the support materials with the downloadable Grade 3 Light Blue curriculum is a worksheet generator for all the Grade 3 topics! Times tables, measurement, money, clocks, addition, subtraction, everything.

I also like that you get a Canadian version of the money chapter (there's a European one as well)--very helpful.

Switching to this program is probably one of the best things to come out of the Review Crew this year for Crayons. I'm only sorry that I didn't use it earlier with Ponytails, because I think she would have liked it too. (Ponytails has been using some of the Key To books this year.) I know there are lots of other good math programs out there, but I'm happy we got a little shove into using this one.

On birthdays and frugality (links and thoughts)

Getting Freedom From Debt (or Cents to Get Debt-Free) has a guest post about DIY Birthday Cakes.

Nothing New Nothing Wasted has some thoughts on the wastefulness of birthday decorations and disposables.

Here's our own post about Birthdays, Frugal and Otherwise, from a few years ago, with a link to this frugal-birthdays post at The Common Room. And here are the posts from Crayons' Horse Party (last year), Flower Fairy Party Menu (two years ago, with extra comments about the cupcakes), and Butterfly Birthday (five years ago). Other ideas we've used are meeting friends at a park (booking a (free) gazebo in case of drizzle) or having a party that's mostly outside--does save on decorations. Or a tea party for little girls--if you already have the teacups and things, your decorating problems are solved. I read, I think in the Tightwad Gazette, about a parent who took birthday guests to either a flea market or a thrift shop, giving them each a couple of dollars to spend. As far as the issue of the guests bringing presents goes...we've struggled with that one, and solved it at one party by asking them to bring supplies for MCC school kits instead. (That inspired one of the guests, who asked the kids at her own next birthday to bring needed supplies for an animal shelter. We've also been to a wintertime party where it was requested that we bring mittens, hats etc. for a mission for homeless people.) Our kids have been to some very creative parties too where the main activity was sewing or some other craft...one of them brought home a rice-filled hot bag one time. For the Apprentice's ninth birthday, we hot-glued things on painters' caps (cheap from the paint store) and had backyard games like charades.

One idea that was less successful for us was the time we took little Apprentice and her friends to a McDonald's playland--I posted about that a long time ago. That was a year when we opted for "simple" (as in "make it simple for us") instead of "frugal"--but some of our "frugal" parties have gotten better reactions from the guests. This weekend's bowling party was more on the "simple" than "frugal" end, and we did use some disposables (because it's hard to manage china plates at the bowling alley), but there's nothing to say that you should never have parties like that either. We like to support that family-run business, they charge a reasonable price for an hour's bowling plus free chips and drinks, and it was something that Crayons was really looking forward to. We thought about doing a home-based superheroes party, but this time around, she really wanted to do something like bowling...and after a busy rest-of-the-weekend, I was just as glad not to have to figure out party games. So I don't apologize for that. (Besides, we lucked out--the people who had the party room just before us left all their pink balloons up on the wall!)

Anglewings or angelwings?

We're not sure--anyway, this looks just like the butterfly that Crayons found this morning. Folded up, it looks like a dead leaf--but when it opens, you can see the tortoiseshell pattern.

Forgotten fractions?

I found this article (and quiz) by Brian D. Rude through a comment on another blog.

Can you pass the fractions test he gives his first-year college students? Can your kids? And what does that say about the success/failure of North American education?

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #30 (On Dandelions)

How are we supposed to end this?

We started with A Leisurely Education. Freedom from the small round of busywork, opportunity to grab hold of something bigger, learning to see ourselves (including our children) more as we are in God's time and in God's universe. Living without futility.

And I'm ending with dandelions.

The Treehouse backyard this week has been covered with yellow dandelions. Much-maligned little flowers that provoke criticism from the neighbours (spraying's in disfavour, but they would like to see us at least hard at work rooting them out). They're not good for much except making more dandelions (okay, I know you can eat them too). The first big batch are either going to seed or were cut off last night with the lawnmower, but they'll be back. [As in, within 24 hours.] Nobody really gets rid of dandelions forever, even if they want to--they're stubborn. And we don't want to get rid of them. In spite of the seasonal allergies kicking in around here, we like our dandelions.

I get the feeling that cultivating a yard full of unfashionable dandelions is somewhat like our approach to education, and maybe our approach to life. This is a time of too many conflicting ideas, at least around lawn care. Lawn spraying is now illegal here (we didn't spray anyway), but people still expect you to have a weed-free, dandelion-free, well-trimmed piece of grass around your house...more or less the same as anyone else's. Educational powers talk about diversity while squeezing out the individual. They dump a lot of fertilizer, if you'll pardon the metaphor, and try to control what grows and what doesn't.

Keep the dandelions growing, if only as a reminder that our natures are stubborn and won't be satisfied with educational sludge. Leave enough room for the intangibles and the poetry--as Cindy said, we can always catch up on grammar later.

A game of romps (better, so far as mere rest goes, than games with laws and competitions), nonsense talk, a fairy tale, or to lie on his back in the sunshine, should rest the child, and of such as these he should have his fill.--Charlotte Mason

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #29: Fragmentation, trivialization, and redemption

"Our four children came home from their private boarding school in Rhodesia for the last time. They were well-dressed, well-shod, well-fed, prosperous-looking children. Only when one listened to their vapid chatter, limited by both vocabulary and knowledge, did one glimpse the distressing poverty of their minds."--Joyce McGechan, "To Prosper in Good Life and Good Literature," Parents Review, 1967

I've been struggling to write the last two posts in this series, trying to decide on an ending. I think I just had this one handed to me in one of Grandpa Squirrel's Toronto weekend papers. Click over to Saturday's Globe and Mail and read Margaret Wente's interview with Camille Paglia. [LINK FIXED] (Warning: several of the comments afterward contain language that is just not nice.)

I do not agree with her viewpoint on other important issues, but she has gotten the problems of education absolutely correct. Just--wow.

"When I went into graduate school at Yale, the professors of poetry were the leading lights on campus. Can you imagine anything comparable today?"

"Art history survey courses are in the verge of extinction. Teachers have no sense that they are supposed to inculcate a sense of appreciation and respect and awe at the greatness of what these artists have done in the past. The entire purpose of higher education is broadening. But since then we've witnessed the fragmentation and trivialization of the curriculum."

"The long view of history is absolutely crucial....I believe in chronology and I believe it's our obligation to teach it. I've met fundamentalist Protestants who've just come out of high school and read the Bible. They have a longer view of history than most students who come out of Harvard."

"Educators need to analyze the culture and figure out what’s missing in the culture and then supply it. Students find books onerous. But I still believe that the great compendium of knowledge is contained in books."

"At the primary level, what kids need is facts. They need geography, chronology, geology. I'm a huge believer in geology – it's all about engagement in physical materials and the history of the world. But instead of that, the kids get ideology. They're taught that global warming has been caused by factories. They have no idea there’s been climate change throughout history. And they're scared into thinking that tsunamis are coming to drown New York."

How can we stay out of this "landscape of death" and create an oasis of hope? According to Camille Paglia, the answer is not in teaching critical thinking, ideology, or hysteria over drowning polar bears. It's in poetry, geology, the long view of history, physical books, geography, art appreciation. It's the struggle against fragmentation and trivialization. Question is, will anyone listen?

"Our shabby little crew, with few material advantages, have a good life. They work hard at lessons and on the farm. Then duties done, they run free on the veld, catching butterflies, collecting stones, watching birds, gathering wild flowers. Evenings for them are all too short. Specimens must be identified, labelled, catalogued. There are still unread books on the bookshelves, as well as old friends to be re-read. Daddy must hear someone's latest effort at poetry composition, or told the anecdote about George IV's false teeth.

"Thanks to Charlotte Mason and the PNEU school these children of ours are, in fact, rich."--Joyce McGechan

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #28: Sunday Ponderings from the Parents Review

"Geology I dabbled in, having met with "Lyell's Principles" in the School Library. A piece of spar still remains which I obtained from the lowest Lias at the deep cutting, then being made, on the London and Birmingham Railway; I loved to gaze from the top of its banks on the three spires of Coventry. The slight knowledge acquired of what was then a new science was like a seed thrown into the ground, which did not germinate till long years after. I still eagerly pursued Entomology, chiefly with Wratislaw."--"Memories of Arnold and Rugby 60 Years Ago," by a Member of the School, in 1835, '36 and '37. Parent's Review, Volume 7, 1896, pg. 127

"Fifty years ago, when that famous pioneer of science, Dr. William Buckland, was Professor of Geology in the University of Oxford, it was his pleasant custom on occasion to announce to his class at the close of a lecture, 'Tomorrow, gentlemen, we shall meet at the top of Shotover, at ten o'clock.' And to the top of Shotover Hill the class would ride or walk from Oxford the next morning, and there the professor would talk to them in his vivacious, impressive fashion about the formation of the hill on which they stood, its limestones, clays, ironstones, gravels or fossils, on the evidences of denudation or the methods of stratification. And if things got a bit dull he would take especial delight in giving the most fastidious of the equestrian freshmen a practical lesson in geology by leading their horses through the stickfast mud on the slopes so that they might remember the nature of the Kimmeridge clay. And, doubtless, they did remember it, with the help of Common Room jokes thereon.

"Dr. Buckland, like every great man of science (and if one may presume to judge from programmes alone, like the truly scientific promoters of the work of this Union) was thoroughly convinced of the supreme importance of the school out of school, of out-door education. Buckland used often to say that such geological terms as stratification, denudation, faults,--to mention only a few of the commonest--could never be understood through lecture-room teaching alone. Shotover Hill was to him a lesson in geology, far superior in force to any which could be learnt from books or lectures, however admirable, and however rich the illustration by diagrams or pictures, or even by actual specimens of rocks and fossils. And all such illustrations in the lecture-room itself, Buckland used with a liberality that was utterly astounding and disconcerting to the academic Oxford of his day.

"Yet Buckland was teaching young men, not mere children, and might justly have relied to some extent on their fairly mature intelligence to grasp his verbal explanations of geological phenomena. But with the true teacher's instinct he studied his own mental processes, and asked himself, 'Now, could I really, thoroughly understand what a fault looks like, could I have a vivid mental picture of it from books and diagrams if I had never seen the thing itself in the rocks?' And being aware that the intense reality of his knowledge came purely from his early friendship with the rocks themselves at Lyme Regis, and Bristol, and elsewhere, from a long-continued intimacy with the thing and not the name or even the picture of the thing, he made it his business to bring his students to see the thing itself, since in such a case the thing could not be brought to the students.

"This, then, is the testimony and the practice of one who was a master of earth-lore. No less significant is the evidence of one whose study lay amongst the great stone-books of art. As Buckland was the pioneer of geological studies in Oxford, so was John Henry Parker (now resting in the quiet of St. Sepulchre's, near Jowett and T. H. Green) the pioneer of the study of Historical Architecture. In one of his books on Gothic Architecture, which have been the source of a new joy in life to throngs of students, Mr. Parker tells us with the brief unmistakable words of a master: 'The only real way of thoroughly understanding architectural history is to go about and see the buildings themselves.'"

"If Buckland and Parker thus insist on the necessity of bringing the real thing before the eyes of students of university age so that the thing may teach its own lesson, how much more essential to right understanding is this 'real' teaching for children of school age, and how absolutely the only right sort of teaching for the very young whose school days have not yet come."

--"At School on Hampstead Heath," Parent's Review, by Mrs. Grindrod, 1897

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #27

A housekeeping note: I had to decide whether to make the "month" end with April, or go for a nice round number of posts. I think I'll go for the round number.

When it comes down to personal application of Charlotte Mason's philosophy, we've done better at some things here than at others....and knowing that our homeschooling achievement isn't perfect is probably as it should be. We are human beings, after all, trying to take hold of what's offered but doing so, often, rather imperfectly.

Some people find it strange that the original PNEU programmes defined so strictly what was to be done at each level during each term, since Charlotte Mason talked so much about the individual. But was it as cookie-cutter a curriculum as that sounds? Let's look at that for a minute. Each student was assigned certain pages in certain books to read or have read to him/her. Each one had a certain number of memory assignments--though those could vary, they were things like "Two hymns by Keble." Each one was expected to keep nature journals and, when old enough, history records (century charts, books of the centuries etc.). Each one was expected to make certain handicrafts (such as "a child's dress.") Each one was to be learning arithmetic, French, etc., though it was thought more important that each one be making progress than that a particular level be reached each term.

So--yes, it was all laid out, and there was a suggested timetable of subjects, and Charlotte Mason felt that the PNEU was doing parents and teachers a favour by going through the publishers' lists and picking out the best in-print choices at the time--plus having a few books specially written by PNEU members and friends. But what wasn't spelled out in the programmes is more "suggestive," as Miss Mason might say: what the children were supposed to think about such and such a fairy tale, what ideas they were supposed to take from a passage of Plutarch, or what vocabulary and what multiple-choice-type facts they were to have learned from a science chapter. Susan Schaeffer Macaulay tells a story about her childhood visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and how she "discovered" a famous painting by Rembrandt. She points out that nobody told her to stop looking at it, or what to think about it, or even what it was about. She just absorbed what she needed from it. The freedom that was given within a PNEU term was not in the assignments (find three catkins and three tree buds) but in the ideas; in each student's "digestion" of all this material, in each one's response, and in each one's growth.

Still, I think if our own family has erred in our application of CM, it's often been on the too-relaxed end rather than in the too-rigid...the parent's and child's comfort zone pushes our own natures forward, but those laws of learning have a voice of truth that we can't ignore. I think that, for instance, often our Squirrelings go away too fast after listening to something read aloud, when according to Charlotte Mason's plan they should stick around to discuss it a bit more. For one reason and another, we've read school books aloud at an older age than is probably ideal, and we've delayed written narrations for the same reason-and-another. I've never sat under a tree with my knitting and demanded that they go look at some other tree and then give me a full description so that I can identify it--I probably wouldn't know what it was either. I thought the Squirrelings were getting a pretty good overview of what's in the Bible, and they could even sing the Old Testament and New Testament books in order, but then I realized that they still didn't know how to find even the books quickly, much less chapters and verses. (We're working on that.) I'm not sure if they know what a catkin is, or a fjord. And I sometimes think that we could have done better at cultivating habits of perfect attention from the time that they were small...although, being Squirrels, that isn't something that comes naturally.

I find the years...particularly the school years...slipping away too fast, and with them, the number of chances we have to start fresh, learn new habits, rediscover what learning is about. And, ironically, I seem to understand this education thing better as my Squirrelings get closer to leaving the nest. (Well, they're not THAT close yet, but you know what I mean.)

If I could give the Squirrelings one thing during the next homeschooling year--which will probably be Ponytails' last before high school--it would be to increase their love of learning, that sense Charlotte Mason described as "everything seems to fit into something else"--and to extend it to some of the areas that stay at the edge or just outside of their personal circle of relationships. History and geography, even with good books, are often too far away from their own world to seem real. Literature sometimes seems to have just too many pages; math is unending (I'd like to try some math journalling with them), and French verbs are just made up to pester people. Isn't the boredom of doing something because somebody's making you do it what we're trying to avoid? So do we then make our curriculum easier, drop books or subjects, expect less, if this way doesn't always cause a sort of earthquake of learning? What do you do when, after all your well-thought-out planning, your kids find more to discuss from an Arthur episode than from a history chapter?

The lesson I've had to learn myself is to be patient with both the teacher and the students; and not to take the teacher's striving for "nice lessons" too seriously. (Charlotte Mason said much the same thing--that we cannot depend too much on our own wisdom in presenting lessons.) I've come to the conclusion that some students, in some subjects, will be like lettuce, springing up quickly and obviously; others are more like carrots under the ground, that must not be yanked up before they're ready. I've also had to remember that squirrels have a habit of taking acorns but then burying them to be used much later.

These are the things I saw the younger Squirrelings doing today: catching a Red Admiral butterfly...and letting it go again after we figured out what it was. Noticing that the centres of forget-me-nots look like embroidery. Finding forget-me-not poems in two Flower Fairies books. Designing a crocheted hair scrunchie. Helping cheerfully with chores and projects. Practicing on a yard-saled recorder. Standing in the driveway singing. Playing MultiEight (online word game) and beating the grownups (I think that was yesterday). Putting together an awesome photography/Powerpoint nature assignment with music. Improvising orange-cream cheese filling for blintzes. Re-reading Magic Elizabeth (this makes several times). And yes...playing on the Stuffed Animal Site after school work was done. We celebrate our childrens' growth in the sometimes unexpected places, and trust for the rest...

Which doesn't mean that there still isn't room for teacher improvement as well. Definitely there are things in which I'd like to boost our CM-ness, without violating the uniqueness and particular gifts of these Squirrelings. But that'll keep for another post.

Where's the Month with Charlotte Mason?

It's co-op day, I have a crocheting lesson to get ready for some homeschooled girls, and we're busy here as well studying forget-me-nots (a flower Anna Comstock forgot to put in her book) and reviewing subtraction. In other words--

I'll post later! Trying to decide how to wind this all up...as Ponytails makes crepes and Crayons hands me an EARTHWORM.

You all have a nice day too.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #26

So we were talking about the timeless aspects of what we currently call a Charlotte Mason education, but which has a history pre-dating Charlotte Mason herself. Can we get hold of the soul or spirit of this kind of education so that we can discern where to stay faithful to what CM wrote, and use what she used, and where we re-invent?

In one of Cindy's latest study posts on Norms and Nobility, she writes:

"The rest of Chapter 3, Part II may well be the heart of the chapter, the point being that we are not raising (teaching) children, we are raising adults. This is where the transformational power of ideas comes in. If we change our thinking in this one small area, we completely change our educational philosophy."

And maybe that's it.

Because when I started thinking through this post, I came up with a few basic CM ideas like these: training in the habit of observation, the habit of attention, the habit of books; emphasizing the value of the natural world (not worshipping it, but as the creation of the Heavenly Father); expecting that children can and should do small jobs perfectly and then work up, emphasizing quality over quantity. And the emphasis on facts not being presented "without their informing ideas."

I also thought about the PNEU programmes' structure, listing books and subjects rather broadly and generally, rather than trying to make sure that every hero and every concept are accounted for and categorized. There is an avoidance of time-wasting activities that no self-respecting child would choose to do without coercion and that do not advance the child's knowledge or abilities. And on the teacher's part, there is an avoidance of too much patronizing explanation.

Which brings us back to what Cindy said. We are raising young people, and while they definitely need time in their lives to be children, without being rushed, pressured, and burdened with knowledge they're not ready for (NOTE: non-family-friendly news content in that link), they also need the opportunity to grow, to be provided with mind-food according to their needs and appetites as human beings. I like seeing the little bitty plants and seeds go into the garden in spring, but I'm expecting that by the end of the summer, barring disaster and rabbits, we'll have tomatoes and beans.

In one sense we may see an afternoon's nature outing as a chance to let children to be children, to relax a bit but get moving at the same time; to drop the need for 'tween attitudes at least long enough to get interested in a newt or a garter snake; to have fun playing in the way children used to play before coaches and computers started telling them the next move. And as Charlotte Mason says, there are places in children's play where adults may not intrude. But at the same time, by giving our children that opportunity to see, to be curious, to compare and record, to tell back, to paint robins and violets with real art materials, to show us their discoveries; by giving them some space and time to play; and by not giving them a worksheet to be filled out on each detail of their afternoon, then we are treating them more as adults, as our equals in intelligence, as partners in discovery, as sharers in this journey.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #25

Where does CM advice become the most nitty and gritty?

Is it in the general comments, the principles and philosophy, given in her six volumes...which transition into the later parts of those volumes, describing specific work and practices of the PNEU schools? Or the technical details of the Form III Programme #90 for 1921? Is it only in CM's own books, or in the more diverse viewpoints given in the Parent's Review articles? Is it in Eve Anderson's video appearance (which I've never seen), or PNEU teacher Mrs. Norton's taped interview (available from Sound Word Associates)? Is it in the array of books by various parents and educators that have attempted to bring CM principles into the 20th and now the 21st centuries?

In other words, is it more meaningful for me to track down Selfe's Work of the Prophets (used in 1921), in hopes that I can either use it as is or learn from it as a comparison...or to read suggestions from thoughtful CMers who have found new books that meet the same needs? How much should I worry if the nature notebook or Book of the Centuries doesn't get off the ground? How come we're talking about "leisurely" and then realize that, according to the Form III schedule, our twelve-year-old is supposed to be narrating Dumas in French and starting German as well? If we want to have the "whole CM package" as she described it, what stays and what goes? (I assume that relatively few of us are doing Sloyd and Swedish Drill as they were practiced a hundred years ago.) What if our circumstances or the children we're teaching are very unusual? How long will Kipling and Kingsley continue to be meaningful? Where does old CM meet new CM, and your CM meet my CM, and become timeless CM, CM without boundaries?

What, you're expecting me to have answers to all that?

I do not think it's quite as simple as saying that none of the specific books are integral to CM methods and we really don't need that emphasis on Victorian literature; or that since there was nothing particularly amazing about pulling bits of yarn through canvas with a crochet hook, we can dismiss CM's recommendation of making "Smyrna rugs" and find something else we'd rather be doing; or that since children's needs in science and math have changed so much, we have to rework the whole thing, while still trying to respect students' intelligence. Did CM herself succumb to a few late-Victorian educational fads, or was she simply selecting the best of the new ideas that had come in at that time? (Like Scouting.) Is that what we should be doing--pulling the best from our own educational time? Is there anything now worth pulling from? (Perhaps we might include computers, websites, software and DVDs when we ask that last question.)

One instructive book, that I brought as "Exhibit A" to the conference workshop, is Melissa Wiley's Down to the Bonny Glen, from the Martha Years series. (The uncut original version.) If any of you don't know, the author is a homeschooling parent with a deep understanding of Charlotte Mason's philosophy. Her "Miss Crow," Martha's new governess, anticipates CM by about a hundred years in her handling of Martha. Go through the book and you'll pick out the principles: masterly inactivity (seeming not to be watching, but aware of everything), concern for hygiene, interest in Martha's natural environment and in her wool-dying skills, bringing in new books such as Burns' poems, and showing both respect and firmness. Miss Crow fills the same needs as Anne Shirley's Miss Stacy and Clara's grandmother in Heidi. She doesn't preach or nag; she expects diligence but encourages a love of learning. She teaches Martha to care more deeply, not only about lessons but about the world, about life.

So Miss Crow, though she's created from Melissa's post-CM imagination, can serve as a model of CM principles in a pre-CM world. With that in mind, perhaps our own imaginations can create equally wise and creative educators from other time periods. What might an enlightened tutor have done in Elizabethan times? Or in Colonial America? Even Charlotte Mason did a little imaginary time-travelling, in her "dinner table a hundred years from now." What do you imagine a CM education might look like for your own great-grandchildren? Will they have found any better English plays than Shakespeare, or anything more necessary than the Bible? (Assuming Bibles are still legal.) Will they still be studying Plutarch, Mozart, Mary Cassatt? Will they still skip the first chapter of Ivanhoe, laugh at Wamba's impersonation of a priest, and sit up straight when Robin Hood makes a sudden appearance? Will they still feel the excitement of the final contest with Brian de Bois-Guilbert? Will they still learn to love the first childhood classics, the Pooh stories, the Garden of Verses, Jeremy Fisher? (What a mercy that was not a pike.)

More tomorrow.

A Month with Charlotte Mason, #24

Last night I found myself deep in Charlotte Mason's School Education (the third volume in the Home Education series), because I was thinking hard about how what we do for school here does or doesn't match up with CM goals. (Sometimes it doesn't!) I did take some time out to watch the last part of Mr. Holland's Opus with Mr. Fixit and Ponytails, including the part where Mr. Holland's school cuts out all the music and drama courses because of lack of funds and because the administration does not value those things.

Vice Principal Wolters: I care about these kids just as much as you do. And if I'm forced to choose between Mozart and reading and writing and long division, I choose long division.
Glenn Holland: Well, I guess you can cut the arts as much as you want, Gene. Sooner or later, these kids aren't going to have anything to read or write about.

It's hard to get away from the discussion and thinking over educational questions that have come up in Ontario over the past couple of weeks, questions about political correctness, about the school vs. the family's role in teaching anything beyond the "basic" subjects. The Toronto weekend papers were full of comments from people who would seemingly like nothing better to get their hands squeezed tightly around the minds of my children. We've also been talking about spiritual warfare as part of a study at church. It all leads me to a sense not so much of despair but of urgency, a sense that if our children are to have a chance to stand against not only systematic reprogramming of personal values but against the Vice Principal Wolters of the world, we need to give them some very strong tools to do it with and we need to do that now.

Ray Bradbury and Aldous Huxley, though not necessarily kindred spirits to CM, agreed on one point: that books, real books, are the strongest of those tools. Take books away from people, either physically or by taking away their ability to read them (or their belief that books are valuable, or their understanding that some books are just paper with covers while others are more than that), and you can reprogram your subjects to think any way you want. Find them again, and the winter of frozen minds starts to thaw and bud into spring. It even happened in the Bible.

That's why slaves were forbidden to read. That's why printing presses and newspapers are often damaged or closed down during times of political turmoil. Knowledge (not just information, as Charlotte Mason repeatedly said) is power. Thinking is power. Reading is power. We have the natural world, we have Mozart, we have paintings, we have so much more there to discover...but beyond that, we have books. They are still there. We can still read them. They disappear from the library shelves and from publishers' lists, but they often show up (as if in retaliation) as e-books and on used booksellers' sites. Nobody's taken away the Harvard Classics online. Nobody's yet taken away your right to buy books by David Hicks and Richard Mitchell. Or Bibles, at least for the time being and at least in this country. Or Shakespeare. Or the books that inspired Frankenstein's monster. If they humanized him, can they do less for us?

The definition proposed here for "a leisurely education" was having the freedom (time, space, opportunity) to discover what makes you fully human. Without a doubt, that freedom is being pulled away. Pull back as hard as you can, as long as you can.