Homeschool Diary: Keeping Records, Puppies, and Wasps

I’ve been experimenting with different recordkeeping methods this fall.  Mississippi does not require me to keep any records (a fact which often surprises people) but I like to keep them anyway.  In some seasons I do better than others.  The one thing I can say for homeschooling in New York and Missouri is that it forced me to write things down.

I had been using the EC Teacher Planner to keep track, but there just isn’t enough room.  I like to record conversations and some of the questions that people ask, and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to do that, unless maybe I made my own “conversation log” or something else that I don’t really want to put time and effort into.

So I went back to Sue Elvis’ videos about using Evernote to keep unschooling records. (I also watched these videos, which were helpful, too.)  I had tried this a couple of years ago, but the habit never stuck.  When I watched the new videos, I realized I had set up my Evernote notebooks wrong; originally, I had a notebook for each child, which meant a lot of laborious copying of notes between notebooks whenever there was shared work.  I didn’t realize that the same thing could be taken care of using one notebook and tags for each child.  So I set up a Term 1 notebook and started adding notes.

I like keeping track of our learning using Evernote — although I’ve kind of dropped the ball in October.  I can nurse the baby to bed at night and use my iPad mini to catch up on our day without too much trouble.  But what I was missing was the day-to-day.  Did every kid do math or only some of them?  How many times did we do math this week? What about reading? Latin?

I think I could (and probably will try) to tweak Evernote to account for some of this dailiness, but first I thought I’d give journaling another try.  The good news is, I can keep up if do it on the blog, because I can type on my iPad mini and add pictures.  (Theoretically, I mean.  If I upload the photos from my iPad to Instagram or Facebook first, or if I would sit down and work on the storage space on my Mac for the big camera.)  The bad news is it feels kind of cumbersome typing everything out every day.  (Also, I know what you’re thinking; why don’t you just make up a checklist or a chart and print it out, then file it, Angela?  Because that would make too much sense and I’m kind of incompetent.  The problem I have with printed materials is that I spend so much time fighting with their formats and then after a short while, I usually forget to use them.)

Anyway, since I did keep track of last week – at least as much as I was able – I thought I’d post it in case you were interested in what we were up to.  I have to tell you right now, though — it was a nutty week.  Gareth was home for fall break (which was not what made the week nutty), and I knew there was a lot of planned “stuff” on the docket, but the unplanned stuff was… well, very unplanned!

 

Monday (October 17):

A long day for me, but only because I had to go here and there all day. I took Huck to the doctor in the morning (sinus infection), Abby to PT in the afternoon (she has met 4 of 5 of her short term goals already!) and G and K to the carpool for dance class after dinner.  (Gareth went along to see local friends.)  I was only gone five minutes, so I left the boys at home by themselves. When I came back, George had been stung twice in the face by a wasp. I took over his kitchen chores, did some laundry, bathed the baby, read a couple of books to JM (Building a Bridge and Cross a Bridge, because he is fascinated with bridges after our trip to my mom and dad’s), and after that, I was quite ready to stop and get ready for bed. George’s face was pretty swollen by that point, though, so we did some googling to find out what was normal and decided that he might be having a “large local reaction.”  Having already given him Zyrtec and ibuprofen, we determined that we would just have to keep an eye on him.

The only schoolwork I did with anyone directly was with Chipmunk : we did his phonics flash cards and half a page of Dancing Bears A. Otherwise, the boys worked independently. George and Huck did math (George, Singapore 5A Intensive Practice – estimating; Huck an exercise on area in Singapore 4A), Dennis did his Greek, and all 3 worked in their Latin books. We’re still on Lesson 2 of First Form. It’s going to take us forever to get through this book.

This was K’s class day, so she was in the computer room most of the day.

The boys read their schoolbooks and religion, and George told me about Pioneers of the Old South, the settling of the Shenandoah. Chipmunk worked in his Draw Write Now journal and looked through a bunch of Let’s Read and Find Out science books I picked up over the weekend. Before bedtime, he was paging through Destination Moon (a TinTin book) and giggling, so I think he was reading at least parts of it. He read to Andy from his All About Reading Level 2 reader before bed.

Lots of playing outside and time with the puppies today, especially for the little boys.

Bedtime book: By the Shores of Silver Lake

Tuesday:

Late start this morning.  The side of George’s face was completely swollen, and he could barely open his eye. I started off the morning by calling the nurse line just to make sure we were doing what we could. JM wanted to read Building a Bridge again, and the other boys did their animal chores and messed around outside while I was feeding Abby and getting my own breakfast.

Chemistry day for K, so she was up early and online.

In the morning – math with Huck, reading with Chipmunk, math with Dennis, prayers, the Gospel of Matthew, read aloud from The World of Capt. John Smith and a story from Viking Tales while the little boys modeled with floam. A long, interesting discussion about angels, contingent vs. necessary beings, fallen angels, possession, exorcism, and the rite of baptism in the Extraordinary Form, with some referencing to The Baltimore Catechism, v. 3.   Everyone involved from G (newly 20) on down to the 9 year old.  Dennis and George read their schoolbooks before and after (in spite of George’s swollen eye.)

In the afternoon – I took Leo to speech for his very first visit, came home to find that George’s face looked still worse, and turned right back around to take him to the doctor.  I think he frightened the ladies at the front desk.  We left with prescriptions for steroids and antihistamines.  While I was gone, Dennis did the rest of his math, Greek, and religion, and Huck read his schoolbooks.

Bedtime: Read Tractor Mac Tune-Up twice to JM and Leo.  (Tractor Mac is a little twaddly, but much beloved in our house ever since we read them to George when we lived in rural upstate New York.  This is one we didn’t already own, and is good for boys who like to know what all the parts of an engine are called.)

Chipmunk read to Andy from his reader.

Wednesday:

Another late start.  On the other hand, it has been so hot lately that I understand why the boys are still in their summer pattern of wanting to head outside to play as soon as they wake up.  It isn’t supposed to be 90 degrees this late in October.  The other problem we are having is the dog.  She has essentially stopped nursing her puppies, at least in the day time.  They are not quite 3 weeks old, too early to be weaned.  So we had to spend extra time all day coaxing her into the box with the puppies, trying to get her to lie down (or at least sit) so the puppies could nurse.  Huck’s theory is that it is too hot to be all jammed up together like that.  I’m sure the kids are all learning quite a bit from this experience, but it is very stressful for a soft-hearted mom.

K read some books to Abby — Little Green (a lovely board book about a hummingbird) and Chicken, Chicken, Duck!

Morning — We had Morning Time again.  Marked the feast of St. Isaac Jogues and the North American Martyrs (in New York, we often visited the shrine at Auriesville), prayed, read more of the Gospel of Matthew, another Viking Tale (the kids think Harald is rather over the top), and about Mary Stuart in The World of Capt. John Smith.  Dennis narrated yesterday’s reading about William of Orange, and we tried to get Leo to do a narration of yesterday’s Viking Tale.  Then we attempted to sort out the chart of Tudors and Stuarts in Capt. John Smith.  While I read, the boys built machines and buildings with Duplos, and Abby played on the floor.  She is starting to be able to sit nearly on her own for short periods of time, which is amazing progress in the past week or two.

Before MT, Huck did his math.  (He is almost finished with 4A.  Tomorrow, I hope.)  Dennis read in Age of Fable and Rocks, Rivers, and the Changing Earth.  George did his chores — probably while listening to an audio book — but I think the most he could handle this morning was checking all his news websites.  The antihistamine is apparently stronger than Benadryl.  (He reported to us at lunchtime that the Archbishop of Kansas City did not have good things to say about Hillary’s VP pick.)

Afternoon — Andy took G, K, and George to the Installation Mass for the new bishop of our diocese.  It was held in the convention center downtown and lasted 2.5 hours.  The other boys stayed home with me.  I took a nature walk around the yard with the younger ones, and the twins spent a long time reading Mysterious Benedict Society books.  Then I read to Chipmunk, Leo, and JM, kid-picked books: a chapter from Sarah Witcher’s Story for Chipmunk; Flood Warning! (a Let’s Read and Find Out book) for Leo; and Bear’s Bargain for JM.  Math with Dennis at quiet time, and we spent more time trying to get the dog to nurse her puppies.  I nursed my baby for about an hour and watched a couple of videos on Facebook — one on Down Syndrome, the other an inspiring video about a man with cerebral palsy and how physical exercise is improving his condition.  After quiet time, JM ate a couple of meals’ worth of food to make up for refusing to eat breakfast and lunch and the other boys tried to work with the dog, rescued escaped chickens, read some more, and played outside.

Evening – Speech homework with Leo, and some of us watched the debate, calling out fallacies. Andy and G listened to it on the radio outside in the garage while they put up a giant kennel to make it impossible for the dog to escape the puppies who need to nurse.

Thursday –

Abby’s Special Instructor (SI) came in the morning.  Huck spent the entire time staring at one math problem and getting frustrated when he couldn’t get the answer in the book.  All the problems he missed were area problems of composite figures, which meant they were multi-step and required some writing. He tried writing some things down, but the numbers were all over each other and it was hard to tell what he had done. This is why we have an OT evaluation scheduled, and an appointment with a neuropsychologist. I am 99.9% certain this is dysgraphia.

Chipmunk worked in his Draw Write Now journal and made a clay airplane.

I also did reading with Chipmunk, played a blending game from AAR with Leo, did some Right Start A subitizing activities with Leo, using fingers and the abacus, and I had George show Chipmunk how to play Corners and enter large numbers on the other side of the abacus. I tried to do an RS E lesson with George about how to do division with remainders on the abacus, but the steroids were making him irritable and restless. Dennis read his school books. We also did some Latin before lunch – well, really English grammar, as we talked about subject/predicate and diagramming.

In the afternoon, Dennis still had math left from Weds, so he did that.  George and Huck read their schoolbooks.  (George finished Pioneers of the Old South today or yesterday.)

Evening – An early dinner because the boys all went to FNE (Federation of North American Explorers… basically the Catholic version of Boy Scouts).

Friday –

Our long out-of-the-house day.  Band and choir, with a walk on the Germantown Greenway and a trip to Whole Foods in between.  Huck collected leaves to identify for his FNE requirements.  We made it a little way past the .5 mile marker before we had to turn around.

After lunch in the van, we went to the G’town library to get library cards for the kids enrolled in band, since they can get free library cards even though we don’t live there.  We didn’t have much time to look around, but it’s much bigger than our library. Then we brought Leo to speech and tried (and failed) to keep JM occupied in the waiting room. K finally took him on a walk. The other boys read their library books.

We got home about 3 and everybody scattered, mostly to computer time.  Andy and I went to our first supper club with some local friends, so no bedtime reading; K and G put the little boys to bed before we got home.

Saturday

Not technically a school day, but books were still read, etc. K had a lot of homework to do and a math assessment to take online, and even G was sitting at the table doing homework (translating the Confessions of St. Augustine from Latin.) The little boys and I walked around the yard, examining trees and mole tunnels. Leo played with the moon sand, and then spent a lot of time cleaning it up. He also 409’ed the doors.  Extra chore day and Mass in the afternoon, since G is flying back to VA tomorrow. We had BBQ from Corky’s for dinner.

Bedtime: Leo’s speech words

Books to JM and Leo: Boo! It’s Halloween (library book, lots of Halloween jokes and rhymes), How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?, Tunnels (Gail Gibbons)

Abby practiced sitting up while I read.

Sunday

Andy brought G back to the airport first thing in the morning, which was quite depressing, but at least it will only be about a month until we see him again at Thanksgiving.  Andy took Abby and me out to look at the office space he is thinking of renting, and then we went to lunch, and unexpectedly, to the Verizon store to replace my ancient phone.  We spent two hours in the store and then my phone got hung up in the restore process at home.  It was very frustrating, and it’s still not set up right.  I wish we hadn’t tried it on a Sunday afternoon, but when else is there?

In the evening, I helped K with the letter of intent she was writing for a music scholarship, and read some books to the little boys (which Dennis listened in on, too): Boo! It’s Halloween again (none of the boys seem to get the jokes), Mooncake, A House is a House For Me.

Family rosary, and we crashed into bed.

**I see that I left out a religion essay that K wrote and also George’s Singapore 5A Intensive Practice workbook.  He didn’t work it in every day this week, but he did use it this week.

 

 

Rethinking the School Year

I started the school year sort of like I was preparing to hurl myself into a burning building.  I didn’t like the looks of the schedule but certain things had to be done in the name of Education.  Besides, other people seemed to be able to handle it, why not me?

The short answer is: because I can’t.  And because living like you’re perpetually running through a burning building is no way to live, really, even in the name of Education.

Plus we all got sick.  (It was the “September Virus”. )

Some of us got a little sicker than others, but fortunately — no hospitals this time.  Antibiotics for both my two littlest ones and many breathing treatments for Rose, but we did finally mend.

I should just have looked through my archives, because this is apparently a cycle I go through every September.  (Here’s another post from 2014, in which St. Francis de Sales talks me down from the cliff.  This year it was St. John Henry Newman.  More on that in a minute.) I start out trying to do all the things I think I am “supposed” to, and then by the end of September I am tweaking everything down because I’ve remembered that I have small children who don’t sleep.  In order to regain some sanity, I often pull out some favorite unschooling books, just to give me a little perspective from the other side.

The book that seems to help most is this one:

A Little Way of Homeschooling: Thirteen Families Discover Catholic Unschooling

I like the collection of prayers in the back, which includes a prayer to Our Lady, Undoer of Knots.  And I like the calm, reassuring tone of the book.  I also like the essays included in the back, written by four women who are not quite unschoolers, but not quite anything else either.

Kind of like us.

This year, I had an epiphany when I read the quote Willa uses to begin her essay (and by the way, I am so happy to see that Willa is blogging again!)  Here it is, from St. John Henry Newman:

How much more profitable for the independent mind, after the mere rudiments of education, to range through a library at random, taking down books as they meet him, and pursuing the trains of thought which his mother wit suggests!  How much healthier to wander into the fields, and there with the exiled Prince to find “tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks!” ~St. John Henry Newman, Idea of a University

This sounds like something I might be able to do — although it’s often the “mere rudiments of education” that give me the hardest time, with late readers and dysgraphia in the mix.  But I think that Newman is arguing for the educational “feast” here just as Charlotte Mason does, the difference being that Newman is not figuring schools and school schedules into the equation (at least in this quote).  Therefore, there is a lot more freedom present in Newman’s quote.  Charlotte Mason was ever practical, and she was working with school timetables.  I spent some time over the summer investigating schedule-making in the Charlotte Mason tradition, and this was not the first time I have tried to divide up a large number of books and subjects among my kids.  If I will remember to remind myself next August, though, it will hopefully be my last.

My house is not a school, not even a wonderful Charlotte Mason school. (Even teachers in Charlotte Mason’s schools had problems keeping up with the schedules, though. A quote from that article which particularly resonated with me:

I will refrain from enlarging upon the involved state of affairs when there are children working partly in one class and partly in another; nor will I discuss what happens when one has a child of 10 who cannot read. Suffice it to say that one is inclined to wish that either he would go away or else that every other child would vanish into empty air, leading one free to follow absolutely strictly one of the ideal timetables to which have been so cleverly, so thoughtfully, and so comprehensively drawn up.

I had the impression she saw forward through time to my house.  HT: Sabbath Mood Homeschool: Is Following a CM Schedule Impossible?)

I don’t know that following a CM schedule is impossible for other people, but it sure is difficult for me.  Cycling through so many books and schedule changes makes me feel frazzled and distracted, particularly since the biggest chunk of my “school day” is devoted to doing math with five kids and phonics with two.  While short lessons often work for us in math and reading, our attention spans cannot handle switching through a large number of books and lessons in other subject areas.  It seems backward when you talk about people with ADHD tendencies needing a smaller number of books that they can sink into, but the “short” ADHD attention span is really a misnomer.  We tend to hyperfocus when we’re interested or involved in something, and when we’re made to switch away from that thing, it does NOT feel good.  In fact, we will not be able to focus on anything else.  We will be distracted and frazzled and feel as if, indeed, we do have short attention spans.  But if we were allowed to really exercise the true powers of our attention span on something that interested us, maybe it would be easier to focus on those things that don’t.

It’s tough as a mom to have this kind of attention span as well, because, especially with a baby in the house who doesn’t nap well, there are a lot of household tasks to accomplish and often only five minute increments in which to do them.  I can’t switch my focus that fast.  It makes me feel overwhelmed already, and adding in a complicated schedule only makes it worse.

Because I doubt I’m the only who ever gets overwhelmed by a self-inflicted schedule, I thought I’d write down some of the tweaks and changes I’ve made this year to try and deal with “it all”.

I’m acknowledging that I am an introvert who needs a minimum amount of sleep to function.

I am a mother of nine.  I am also a strong introvert, and I have a baby who does not reliably sleep through the night or take naps.  This means two things for our day.  I can’t always (even usually) get up before my kids, and I need a break during the day to close my eyes, or at least to go in my room, put the baby in the crib to play, and shut the door.  I tried scheduling (i.e. writing down on the schedule, it didn’t always get done) time with some of my younger kids near breakfast and then math right through the afternoon.  This made for a tired, frazzled, and grumpy Mommy.  Everyone’s day is improved when I take a break, and I need at least 6 hours of sleep a night to function — ideally 7.5, but that doesn’t happen every night.  Below 6 hours and my brain starts going on strike.  I can beat myself up for not being able to sit down at 8 AM every morning to do 1st grade work with my 6 year old, or I can just accept the situation and move on.

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When I’m able to take a shower makes a huge difference in how our days go, but see above for needing sleep.

Everything I read on the Internet tells me that I’m supposed to be dressed and ready before my kids get up.  I completely agree with this, because on the days that the baby wakes up a little before 6 and then goes back to sleep after she eats so I can shower, we get a lot more done.  But sometimes she’s up for two hours in the middle of the night, or she gets up and doesn’t go back down, and on those days, I just have to accept that I am not going to be able to get everything done.  I’m not going to be able to get in all the math, or we won’t be able to read aloud history, or something else, because there are several therapy appointments a week (for various kids) and those are non-negotiable. I’ll continue to try to get my shower in as early as possible, but this is a tough year and I have to be able to function. (Can you see a theme here?) I can’t skip a shower every day, and anyway, feeling clean and being dressed is part of being functional; it’s like putting on the air mask that drops down from the airplane ceiling before putting it on your child.  Mom’s no good if she can’t breathe.

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Some subjects are now “strewing” subjects to allow time for more teacher intensive subjects.

After we started our academic work in August, I discovered that my dyslexic thirteen year old was farther behind in math than I realized, even though he had been working through some of the Key to… math workbooks over the summer.  To make a long story short (I can try to write the long version in another post if you’d like), after doing a lot of research, I made the terrifying decision to switch him to RightStart Math.  I say “terrifying” because RightStart is very teacher intensive, which was one of the reason I didn’t choose it for my older kids way back when I first heard about it, eight or nine years ago.  But if I am going to focus my energy in one subject, then I have to ease up in others.  I’ve decided, for instance, that science works perfectly well as a “strewn” subject.  Art is something else that works better when I don’t assign us all to work on something, but instead sit down to draw myself, or just set out a bunch of art supplies.  I do have to be somewhat intentional about this, but strewing the content subjects often seems to work pretty well for us.

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Instead of scheduling in smaller increments with assigned activities, we’re using a morning “school” block with a list of priorities.

Sometimes the person responsible for loading the dishwasher takes too long.  Sometimes I can’t take a shower until 9:30.  Sometimes I’m ready to sit down by 8:15 and the 6 year old has been up since 6 AM and is occupying himself by bothering his brothers.  Though I started out trying to schedule the kids for certain times to work with me, now I tend to grab whoever is available. If there’s a time crunch I have a list of priorities I work through. Math for my 13 year old and reading with my 9 year old are always the highest on the list. Then I work through math with everyone else, reading with my 6 year old, Latin with the middle boys, Morning Time readings, and after lunch read-alouds with the younger boys. I never get everything done in a day, but if I miss something the day before, I try to pick it up the next day. It’s not really a formal loop schedule but it sort of works that way.

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I don’t stress if the boys read one book at a time instead of 3 or 4 pages from many books every day.

The middle boys focus on a few books at a time instead of stretching more books out for longer, and I’m okay with that.  They almost always finish the entire stack of books in the time frame I originally mapped out for them.  (When we choose the books for the term, I stick a post-it in the front of each one with the pages per day written on it.)  Being willing to accept some variation on their part means less energy expended in keeping them “on plan” on my part.

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I don’t mean to make it sound like everything works perfectly for us now, but it does work better.  Sometimes I still get overwhelmed with all there is to do.  I think that is just the nature of the beast, being a mom of a large family with many special needs. Sometimes I ask my husband, “Please tell me that it will be okay,” and the other day he answered, “I think this is what okay looks like.” Life is never going to go “perfectly”, as planned.  It doesn’t have to in order to be good.  Sometimes I just need to be reminded of that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homeschool Diary: Week 1

Homeschool Diary is my sort-of weekly account of life at our house.  I used to call these posts “Learning in Review”, but I like the name “Homeschool Diary” better.  Here are a few facts to keep in mind when you read these posts:

• I have eight kids still at home, in grades 12, 8, 5, 5, 3, and 1, plus a VERY BUSY 3 year old and an infant with Down Syndrome.
• Most of my kids have some sort of special need. ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, articulation and fine motor issues, Tourette Syndrome, and now Down Syndrome – we have dealt with or are dealing with all of the above.
• My tag line says that we are Relaxed Homeschoolers. That just means that sometimes we junk the curriculum and follow our interests. We use too much structure to be unschoolers and sometimes not enough structure to be considered anything else. It doesn’t mean that I don’t ever get frazzled and burnt out, or that our family is at all “relaxed”. We are not Type A control freaks, but on average my babies have always needed about 4 hours less sleep than the “average” child, if that gives you any clue.
• These are the snips I remember from our week, or that I thought were interesting. It isn’t everything we did, and on the other hand, you can’t see any of the blood, sweat, or tears that happened behind the scenes either.

Here’s how the first week of back-to-school went, by the numbers:

• Doctor’s visits — 2
• Antibiotics prescribed — 2
• Special Ed evaluation — 1
• Calls to insurance company — I lost count
• Early Intervention visit — 1
• Glasses repaired — 1 pair
• Injuries with more than the usual amount of blood — 1
• Birthdays — 1
• Morning Time Attempted — 2
• Times we did Latin — 2
• Baby Naps — not enough

If I had known how much “stuff” this week was going to involve, I would not have decided to add in school on top of it.  We would have just waited a week.  But the baby woke up on Monday morning with her eyes all gunked shut, and that kind of kicked everything off.

The week continued on from there.  On Day 2, the child who didn’t seem sick enough to go to the doctor on Day 1 did indeed seem sick enough to go to the doctor and was prescribed antibiotics for a sinus infection.  On Day 3, a series of calls to my insurance company culminated with them telling me that oops, they were wrong to tell me that my child’s speech evaluation was covered, because the provider’s address had changed.  Did I mention that this happened in the provider’s office right before the evaluation, and that they had been telling me it was covered for days, every time the office sent me an email or called me to tell me I wasn’t covered and would need to pay $250 at time of service?

That was probably the most frustrating point of the week, although Thursday was also a difficult day, but only because I tried to handle an almost full schedule.  It turns out that I still can’t fit in time with everybody in a single day.

It’s always mornings that get me.  You’ll note that I have a shower for myself penciled it at three different times.  That’s because Rose’s schedule is all over the place right now.  After I make some changes and our schedule starts to actually work, I’ll post it — not just the first four hours of the day.

So the week was exhausting, and definitely one of the hardest first weeks back that I have experienced in 16 years of homeschooling, but it wasn’t really terrible either.  Rose’s eyes are better and I am off dairy again, which I think was partially to blame.  (Her nasal passages and tear ducts are small and easily clogged, and when I eat dairy, she seems to have a lot of extra mucus production that can’t go anywhere.  So — no more dairy for me, and she seems to be improving.)  We had Rose’s first home visit by a special instructor and that went well; the SI is very young and everybody likes her.  The dart war injury was bloody, but small.  (A scalp wound, caused by hitting his head on the door.)  And Leo didn’t need the full-blown $250 version of the speech evaluation, so the bill ended up being somewhat smaller than that — no thanks to the insurance company.

(I’m putting off making all the calls about Rose’s bills.)

Books

The kids — at least those who could read — accomplished quite a bit for a first week.  As is our practice,  I assigned some books and allowed them to choose others. K, as a 12th grader, is doing three online classes this year — AP Latin and Chemistry from Kolbe, and AP Calculus with Wilson Hill — and three home-based classes — Religion, Literature, and Economics.  For religion, we are using the MODG 12th grade syllabus with Anne Carroll’s Following Christ in the World, supplemented with Toward the Eternal Commencement, the fourth book in the Our Quest for Happiness series.  She’ll be doing economics with her father using Economics, Work, and Prosperity by Russell Kirk, and literature with me on the theme of “Reading the World”, mostly modern literature, with the goal of hitting every continent.  K wanted to start close to home and then move outward, and we’re lucky enough to live in the American South, so we’re starting with Southern writers (probably Flannery O’Connor.)  This week she just did a couple of online orientations and the first week of the religion lesson plans.

The middle boys did more.  I plan to list their term 1 book lists in another post, but they were quite dedicated to doing the full list of assignments, and so they mostly did.  George’s books come almost entirely from AO Years 7,8, and 9 (I’ll have to explain my thinking behind that combination in another post) and the twins are mainly reading from AO Years 4/5.  (They don’t want to read the same books, so it takes a little juggling.)  I am a little concerned that their schedules are too heavy, so we are going to see how it goes this week and then we may trim a little.  As far as I could tell, these were the favorite books of the week:

King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Roger Lancelyn Green (AO Year 5) — Huck’s pick this week.

Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories , Illustrated Junior Library edition (AO Year 4) — I wrote down that Dennis should read “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” for the first term, and he had read them both by Thursday afternoon.  I’ll have to check, but I don’t think that our edition is abridged.

The Brendan Voyage (AO Year 7) and Pioneers of the Old South: A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings (AO Year 8 Free Reading list) — George’s picks.  Pioneers is an interesting book. When it came in, I flipped almost immediately to the section on Maryland to see how it treated Catholics. I was pleased that it seemed pretty evenhanded.

To the younger boys, I read an interesting new picture book that I picked up earlier this summer:

Small Wonders: Jean-Henri Fabre and His World of Insects

Actually, everybody enjoyed this one. The twins thought it was particularly interesting, because both of them have read books by Jean-Henri Fabre (Storybook of Science, The Story of Everyday Things) and didn’t know that he was real. (I think they are confusing Fabre with Uncle Paul?)

We’re also reading aloud Homer Price and On the Banks of Plum Creek.  Our copy of Plum Creek is actually included in a hardback anthology of the first three books that I picked up off a bargain table years ago. It includes the original illustrations, as well as coloring on the frontispiece from my now 13 year old and a pressed leaf from one of our trees in New York. Chipmunk stuck a sweet gum leaf in it a couple of months ago when Andy was reading Little House in the Big Woods to them at bedtime.  Now when we read it to the next set of kids, we’ll have another layer of history to talk about.

Nature Study

Black Swallowtail butterfly, in our homemade butterfly container — a Rubbermaid container with a piece of window screen for a top.

Butterflies and caterpillars are very popular right now, probably because there are so many of them around this time of year. All the caterpillars are big and fat, and the Monarchs have begun migrating through.  The boys have been catching butterflies in our lone remaining sweep net (I think we used to have three) and bringing them inside to keep in a homemade habitat for a few hours or a day so they can observe them.  Chipmunk, Leo, and I have been drawing butterflies, too.

I have a slot on my schedule in the afternoon for “Outside or Art, Science Experiments, Nature Journals”.  Not everybody chooses to do art or science experiments, but a few of the kids have.  Dennis is reading Rocks, Rivers, and the Changing Earth for science this term, and did a couple of experiments in the sink while I was drawing butterflies with Chipmunk and Leo.

(I wish I could show you Leo’s butterflies, but for some reason I can’t upload photos taken on my iPad unless I have first posted them to Instagram or Facebook.  A raw iPad photo will show up on my blog upside down. Leo is 6, but has some fine motor issues. Until a few months ago, he did not do any representational drawing at all.  But now he’s feeling confident enough to attempt butterflies, and looking at them makes me happy.)

I’m planning a whole post about caterpillars and butterflies — equipment, field guides, etc.  If Rose will give me a few minutes to work on it, that is.  She is full of get up and go now that her heart works!

 

 

 

Learning in Review: Week 6 and 7

Weeks 6 and 7 (the two weeks before Halloween week) were been busy ones — in a good way, and in a not so good way, too.   I am seriously contemplating going to a 6 weeks on/1 week off year-round calendar next year.  I’m not sure how to make that work around high school students who follow traditional academic schedules with outside classes, but at around 6 weeks I could definitely use a couple of teacher in-service days!

I have to warn you that this is going to be a somewhat longish post because I’m catching up a little bit… but I print these posts at the end of the year and store them in a binder as a sort of hard-copy journal.

(And another brief note about the photos: I’m still being forced to use photos from my iPad instead of my camera.  The trackpad on my Mac is not working now, so I’m also having to use one of our two Dell laptops — that are supposed to be dedicated to school use — to work on.  Because these laptops are often in use, I wrote most of this post on my iPad mini.  Using one finger to type.  So if you find any typos or formatting blips — like pictures that are turned the wrong way — that I may have missed, I apologize.)

First, the good: Gareth came home for fall break!  It was nice having him around this week, and it will once again feel odd and quiet after he leaves.  Not that he’s such a loud kid (that’s a bit of an understatement), but we sometimes used to have conversations while I was making dinner and now mostly I just watch grocery haul videos while I cook — because, you know, there is something fascinating about watching another mom show me the snacks she buys her kids at Costco.

(I am not kidding about this.  I really do like to watch grocery haul videos. I just wish more big families would make them.  My favorite grocery/meal planning/shopping videos are by Jamerill Stewart — who does have a large family — and How Jen Does It, who does not.)

Anyway, we took Gareth out to eat for his (belated) birthday and hit a bookstore last weekend.  George bought the long-awaited new Rick Riordan novel, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, and devoured it in about a day and a half.  The bookstore we like to go to is mostly new but does have a small used section, and I found a couple of books that I have been meaning to read for a while (and that are on Ambleside’s Year 12 list): Gifted Hands, by Ben Carson, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which probably almost everyone has read but me at this point.

Chipmunk picked out a book called Try This!: 50 Fun Experiments for the Mad Scientist in You by National Geographic, and is keen to try out the lemon battery experiment. We have all the materials; it’s just a matter of Chipmunk not showing up to remind me at five minutes before lunchtime, “Can we make a lemon battery now?” and me remembering later on in the afternoon when there really is time.  And Leo chose Richard Scarry’s The Adventures of Lowly Worm, which we have been reading over and over again for the past several days. Rather, we have been reading the part called “The Broken Foot” over and over again for the past few days.

I don’t know if Richard Scarry actually wrote this one or not.  There are some typos in the text, and the caliber of the writing is a bit lower than it is in Richard Scarry’s classic storybooks.  But Leo loves Huckle and Lowly (and also reading about casts apparently) and he doesn’t seem to mind.

More good busyness: Altar Server Training, which is also helping us all with our Latin; ballroom dance and high school theology group for the older kids; band and choir lessons, which had a break last week but started up again this week; and FNE, which involved a camp out last weekend, the first ever for some of my boys. (Huck came down with a cold and couldn’t go with his brothers, so he stayed home and ate ice cream and watched old Doctor Who episodes instead.)  Andy was too busy supervising to get pictures, but there was canoeing and cooking on a campfire and sleeping in a tent on a cold, dark night and a heritage festival at a nearby state park where the boys got to dry fire a musket, throw a tomahawk, and watch a blacksmith make bullets. And Chipmunk sang 2 or 3 verses of the Battle Hymn of the Republic for everyone… Which he has memorized by listening to his favorite CD, the soundtrack to Ken Burns Civil War, over and over. So it was good, even without pictures.

The busyness that was just sort of “enh”: Andy was out of town for all of week 6, I had a doctor’s appointment, Chipmunk had vision therapy, we had to buy food, and Katydid took the PSAT. This year’s PSAT incorporated the changes that are coming to the SAT in 2016. The paperwork took longer, the test itself was longer, and all told, everything took a good four hours. Based on what Katydid reported, the changes to the reading section are maddeningly in line with Common Core, but she said the entire test seemed easier to her, and she didn’t think it was just because she was a year older. Scores won’t come back until after Christmas this year, which is later than in the past, so… We’ll just have to wait and see.

And the bad busyness: We have been busy trying to find a new home for our dog. When the boys run and wrestle, she often gets overexcited and plays much too rough with them, and her constant barking at night is annoying the neighbors. We got an angry complaint last weekend from one of our neighbors who turned out to be having a very bad day and who brought us some beautiful roses from her bush to apologize…. But the dog, erf. I think she’s still going to have to go. (If you know anybody who needs a giant outside dog who likes to bark and chew hoses and recycling, let me know. Actually, she’s a very friendly dog, and I think she just belongs on a farm with older boys who don’t wrestle quite as much.)

Oh, yeah, and I think we did some schoolwork, too…

Pre-K/K:

While my 2 and 5 year olds don’t precisely do schoolwork, I thought I would start with them because I didn’t mention them last time. I have to tell you that what my 5 year old is doing will probably look a lot like pre-k to many of you (except for the fact that he has taken over the bulk of kitchen clean-up on his own these days.) Most of what he’s doing would be considered “Practical Life” , or art:

• loading and unloading the dishwasher
• emptying trash cans
• swiffering (dry and wet)
• collecting and sorting laundry
• vacuuming
• helping cook and bake
• sawing and nailing wood
• punching paper with punches of different shapes
• playdough
• making things out of cardboard boxes with tape, scissors, yarn, etc.

Many of you are looking at that list and wondering if he’s assigned all those chores. The answer is, he’s only assigned to collect and sort the laundry. The rest of his activities are completely voluntary, and don’t think I don’t appreciate the fact that he does more work around the house than the big kids on many days! But, he’s 5, and this too shall probably pass.  Unfortunately.

He also gets 30 minutes of iPad time every day, which he uses to do Starfall apps and Montessori phonics and handwriting. That’s also completely up to him.

My 2 year old is still spending a lot of time coloring on the same piece of cardboard.  When he finally decides he’s done, I think I’m going to frame it.

(At this point, there are so many layers of crayon and oil pastel on the cardboard that it’s like one of those scratch art projects.)

And of course we read books… although not as many as I would like.

Picture Books (read to the boys 8 and younger multiple times)

All of these except Arthur’s Halloween (which, honestly, I am not terribly fond of) are family favorites. Too Many Pumpkins has lost both covers at this point, and Petunia — while a more recent acquisition — was one of my favorite books as a child.

Board Books for the Two Year Old

 

2nd/3rd Grade

Chipmunk is working steadily through Singapore 2A, and would probably be able to go faster if I could get my act together.  He had apparently figured out how to carry on his own but not how to borrow.  So we have been working on borrowing this week.  We’re also continuing with our homemade reading lessons. Chipmunk participates in our morning time and I read aloud to him and to his younger brothers two other times a day (usually), but he also spends a lot of time outside.  And he likes to play chess on the iPad.

We just finished up The House at Pooh Corner as our read-aloud.  Technically it was for Chipmunk, but Leo and the twins also listened in.  No one much liked the ending.  Not because it was bad, of course, but because it was sad, and all of us wanted more Pooh.

4th grade (Ambleside Year 3.5… ish)

The Men Who Found America has officially made it onto my favorites list.  This is an Ambleside Year 3.5 selection, but I don’t know why it hasn’t been included in one of the regular years.  I find it to be a very balanced and highly readable treatment of some of the most important explorers of North America.  I also like it a lot for copywork selections.  All of Huck’s copywork is coming from this book right now.  I choose a paragraph from each chapter and write it down on Handwriting Without Tears paper for Huck to copy.  A paragraph usually ends up being a few days’ worth of work for him, since he’s only required to copy one page a day.  (He still has problems with handwriting, which is why we are not using cursive or smaller paper.)

The other books Huck is reading right now:

• Loyola Kids Book of Saints (He finished up Saints & Heroes by Ethel Pochocki.)
• The Incredible Journey by Shiela Burnford (I know this is included on the Ambleside lists somewhere, but I can’t remember for which year.)
• The Secret of Everyday Things (Farbre, Year 3.5)

Plus a bunch of books about chess.

We also wrapped up all the topics from Singapore 3A that I wanted to cover with him, and next week we’ll begin 3B.

4th grade (Ambleside Year 3.5/4… ish)

Dennis finished several of his books in Week 6 and needed new ones, so we went back to the list and the shelves and found some more.  He finished up:

The Cure of Ars: The Priest Who Out-Talked the Devil
The Struggle for Sea Power by M.B. Synge
Crossbows and Crucifixes: A Novel of the Priest Hunters and the Brave Young Men Who Fought Them by Henry Garnett

Although some of M.B. Synge’s books are given as alternatives on the Year 3.5 and 4 book lists, The Struggle for Sea Power (which is largely about England’s battles with Napoleon) is not one of them.  Dennis enjoyed it and learned not only quite a bit about Napoleon from it, but also some bits and pieces of poetry, too. But when it came time to pick a new history book, his one request was, “Can we read a book written by an American?”  I have heard this same complaint before about some of the books Ambleside recommends as history spines, especially for the first part of American history; they are largely written by British authors in the early 20th century (This Country of Ours comes immediately to mind) and, as Dennis informed me,  they “usually think the British are better than everybody else.”  In particular, I think Dennis took issue with how Synge handled the War of 1812.  I had been going to hand him This Country of Ours, but instead we settled on George Washington’s World and H.A. Grueber’s The Story of The Thirteen Colonies and The Great Republic, which is used by Memoria Press.

(You’ll also note that this is all somewhat out of chronological order. This happens because I let my kids choose their reading from a handful of titles that I approve. I do find that they usually can keep things straight, and it certainly doesn’t seem to hurt the connections that they make.)

Dennis also started The Blessed Friend of Youth – Saint Don Bosco and Hornblower Goes to Sea, a condensation of the Hornblower books for young readers. (HT: Jen’s booklists.)

7th grade (Year 6.5)

There is no Ambleside Year 6.5, but that’s kind of what we’re working on this year for George in 7th grade.  Last year he expanded the modern focus of Ambleside Year 6 to last all year instead of just one term, and now he’s going a little more in depth into Greece and Rome.  I started out the year asking him to read The Iliad (Lattimore translation), but it proved a little too tough for him.  Since really all I was after was an introduction to the real story (he’s read or listened to many adaptations for children), I am letting his listen to the Iliad on Librivox.  The recording on Librivox is the Samuel Butler translation, so it’s somewhat archaic and also uses all the Roman names for the Greek gods — which is a bit confusing.  But I couldn’t find one of the other, more modern translations online.  While Gareth was here, we had some interesting lunchtime conversations about the Iliad and the Odyssey, since he had just finished reading both (again) in his freshman literature class.

Other books George is reading for school:

• St. Athanasius
• Great Myths of the World
• Augustus Caesar’s World
• Whatever Happened to Penny Candy
• Archimedes and the Door of Science

As far as science goes, we were going to follow AO’s Year 7 science, but George has been reading so many books about animal behavior and wilderness survival on his own that I haven’t worried about science at all yet for him.  (I should sit down and do a compilation of all the books he’s gone through in the past several weeks.)

Other books George is using:

• Saxon 7/6 (with the Saxon Teacher CDs)
• Prima Latina
• Seton Religion 7
• Seton’s Better Handwriting for Young Catholics

My goal is to get back on track with grammar and to phase out the handwriting book, which George has been using to refresh his knowledge of the cursive alphabet, and to phase in actual copywork.

11th grade (timeframe corresponding to AO Year 9)

Katydid’s schedule finally started to click during these two weeks.  It took a long time this year, which seems to be the pattern with junior years, at least in my house.  (Or anyway, she’s the second kid who’s had this problem with juggling junior year.)  But she finally seems to have gotten things sorted out with her German teacher, Environmental Science seems to be moving along fine, and I can’t say enough good things about the teacher of her Precalculus class at Wilson Hill Online Academy.  The quality of the teacher is making a huge difference for her in math.  Her grades haven’t changed too much, but her attitude toward math is much, much better.

Outside her classes, we’re still struggling to make the proper time for reading and writing.  Katydid handles her own schedule (a practice which I believe has helped Gareth in his first year in college).  I don’t give her prescribed times to do anything, but I do give her deadlines for narrations, papers, etc.  I hope to wrap up our first term work around Thanksgiving, but right now Katydid is still working her way through The Scarlet Letter, Pope’s Essay on Man (AO Year 9, and easily the most difficult thing she is reading right now), C.S Lewis’ Mere Christianity, primary source selections from Seton’s American Literature for the colonial period, and selections from Prose and Poetry of America (St. Thomas More, Volume 3)about the colonial period.  She has also been reading from William Bennett’s America: The Last Best Hope (Volume I): From the Age of Discovery to a World at War.
And so that’s where things stood as we went into Halloween week, a week in which we always (every year) get sick.  This year was, unfortunately, no exception, although the cold was pretty mild.  But more about that in the next Learning in Review post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learning in Review 2015-16: Weeks 3, 4, and 5, in which I try to cover the basics

Some years time seems to go by quickly.  Second trimesters tend to do that, too.  The good news is that some of that second trimester energy has finally kicked in for me, and I have been able to tackle some of the problem areas in the house which have gotten out of control over the past few months.  I also actually made some homemade gluten free raisin bread for breakfast this Sunday instead of just doling out Cheerios in paper bowls.  (Did you know that most varieties of Cheerios are entirely gluten-free now? Except I still can’t eat them because they contain cornstarch.  Oh well…) Since I changed my diet a couple of years ago, my pregnancies do seem to be a little easier — less back pain, fewer contractions, a little more energy.

The bad news is that this isn’t really translating into more homeschooling.  (It has translated into a pantry that I can actually get into to put food away, which is also important.)  We’re still struggling to develop a good routine.  We have a lot of different factors to take into account this year.  For example:

1. Changing up the chore routine because Gareth went to college.
2. Mom is pregnant.
3. The two year old’s favorite pastime is to sneak into the bedrooms with a crayon and close the door.  (Fortunately, oil pastel is easily removed from most furniture with Murphy Soap and water. )
4. The two year old’s second favorite pastime is to stand on a chair and yell at the top of his lungs whenever anyone tries to talk.
5. The two year old’s third favorite pastime is to try to climb out the front window through the screen. (It’s a low window, don’t worry.)

You probably get the picture.  Then there are Katydid’s online classes to plan around, the fact that we’re totally out of the house all morning until early afternoon one day a week, and this used to be the day we used to do the “extra” chores — like cleaning the bathrooms, picking up all the shredded kleenexes and post-it flags the two year old has plastered all over the floor in the computer room (tied for his third favorite thing to do, actually), excavating the floor in the boys’ room so you can actually walk through it… etc., etc.

Anyway, we have sort of a de facto routine going which allows us to accomplish a modest amount most days, but I tend to feel guilty when I read Facebook and blog posts about what other moms are doing.  I am not doing much pre-reading, I am only managing math three days a week with a couple of my kids, reading lessons for my non-reading 8 year old are a stretch even for short Charlotte Mason lessons, and if Morning Time happens twice a week, it’s a good week.  We also have yet to pull out a nature journal after one of our nature walks, I haven’t picked up Latin again my twins, and grammar is hit and miss (mostly miss).

But we’re trundling along.  On the plus side, we are taking nature walks almost every week, George and the twins are reading quite a bit on their own (and they like their books), I feel like both Huck and Chipmunk are making progress with their math in spite of the fact that it’s only happening three times a week, and I’ve got George going with both Latin and written narrations. (Not Latin narrations, although that would be awesome.)  Katydid is starting to get her classes all sorted out, although she’s had some administrative troubles with German, and I’m reading to my eight year and five year old about an hour almost every day.  (Almost every day, in two thirty minute time slots, in case you’re wondering.)

Maybe it all works out in the end.  What I discovered from the college application process — and now, after seeing how Gareth is doing at Christendom about mid-semester — is that those years in which we didn’t get much accomplished (the ones in which there were infant twins and a couple of moves, for instance, and even that one high school year that didn’t have a whole lot to put in it) were kind of leveled out by the better years.  His ACT scores were good, he did a good job on his essays, and he was even chosen as a finalist for Christendom’s full tuition Padre Pio scholarship.  And he seems to have made the transition to a difficult liberal arts program pretty well.  Not that I don’t still worry about not doing enough with my kids still at home, but I guess it’s easier now for me to take a deep breath and not freak out about it.

A few details… with only a few Instagram/iPad pictures, because my computer is giving me trouble and I can’t download any photos… (I’m hoping to get that fixed soon!)

One of the biggest events of the last three weeks… The twins turned 10! They decided they wanted to make a Candyland cake and decorated it with Teddy Grahams and gummy bears.  The Hershey’s Cookies and Cream bar (Dennis’ favorite) is supposed to be a raft on the river.  The jury is still out as to whether or not the gummies in the water fell overboard or purposely dove in to go swimming.

Math

I mentioned in my last Learning in Review post that I had picked up Singapore 3A for Huck, which seemed an odd choice because he is a mathy fourth grader.  I did it to patch some of the holes left by our exclusive use of Beast Academy.  We were actually switching back and forth, covering a little bit of Singapore, then back to Beast Academy, when Huck got a little deeper into the distributive property section of Beast Academy 3B and I discovered that while Beast Academy teaches kids the reasons behind multidigit multiplication pretty well (eg., 67 x 3 = (60 x 3) + (3×7)), it never ever, in all four books at this level, teaches kids the regular method for multiplying 67×3, where you just carry the 2.

At that point, our discussion went like this:

Me: “Do you want to see how to do this a shortcut way?”

Huck: “Sure.”

I show him how we all learned how to multiply larger numbers and explain how it fits with what Beast Academy just showed him.

Me: “So do you want to go back to Beast Academy or do you just want to do some more shortcut multiplication in Singapore?”

Huck: (looking at me like I’m insane)  “I want to do it the shortcut way.”

So we covered that section, which didn’t take long, and then we moved on to long division with remainders, which took a bit longer to click, but only because he was doing so much of it in his head and skipping steps that I gave up and showed him the shortcut way to do long division, too.  We are probably going to move on from 3A in the next week or so, after we cover adding and subtracting money (which basically means keeping the decimal point lined up.) At this point, I think we may be done reviewing 3B by Christmas.

As far as Beast Academy goes… I think we’ll be using it more as a supplement.  Unfortunately, it’s a little too Common Core to serve as our exclusive math program anymore.  While it is nicely challenging, sometimes it is also needlessly complicated.

Written Narrations

Over the summer, I read a terrific blog post by Karen Glass called “Beginning Charlotte Mason’s Methods with Older Students”.  This post is not only helpful to those who may be just beginning a more Charlotte Mason-ish/living books approach with children aged 11 or 12 and up, but also to anybody who’s wondering what appropriate writing goals are for grades 7th-12th, anyone with kids who were late readers and writers, or anyone who maybe — like me — doesn’t follow the Ambleside Online curriculum or Charlotte Mason’s methods in general to the letter.  The post focuses heavily on written narration and composition, and how to help your child make the transition from oral narration to written narration, and from there, to the formal study of composition.

I was interested in reading this article particularly because George, as a late reader at the age of 10.5 and a dyslexic, definitely did not start shifting into written narration mode at the recommended time of 4th or 5th grade.  Reading didn’t really click with him until the middle of 5th grade, and although his reading is now excellent, he still has problems with spelling, language mechanics, and translating the sentences in his head onto paper.  We also don’t do many oral narrations in the most formal Charlotte Mason sense — after a single reading, while calling it a “narration” — which I think probably does help with writing, except that it absolutely kills my kids’ enjoyment of their books.  This is not to say that we never do narrations; on the contrary, I ask for narrations quite often.  But I never call it “a narration”, and it often comes some time after we (or they) have finished the reading, in the context of a normal conversation.  This certainly still gives me a handle on their comprehension of what they’re reading as well as giving them an opportunity to chew on their readings a little bit, to see what they think about them, but our informal conversations can be a little more difficult to convert into the written word.

I’ve just started asking George for two or three written narrations a week.  He types them on the computer because he doesn’t like to write by hand, and after he does them I show him some things about language mechanics and spelling and we talk about how you shouldn’t say, “Oh, yeah,” in a formally written paragraph, and then that’s it.  It’s mostly about the practice at this stage, because many of these issues will simply get better with time, experience, and more reading.  I’ve also asked Dennis for his first written narration, which I am allowing him to type as well because handwriting is difficult for him.  Dennis doesn’t have the dyslexic hurdles that George has had to deal with, so he’s beginning these at about the recommended age.  I’m curious to see how this works out, as I didn’t ask for written narrations from my older kids until they were 12 or 13.

So far George has done written narrations of Augustus Caesar’s World and Great Myths of the World.  I asked Dennis to narrate (in writing) from The Cure of Ars: The Priest Who Out-talked the Devil (A Vision Book).

 

Reading Lessons

A page from Chipmunk’s binder, in which he wanted to write down all the words he knew how to spell and then we had a reading lesson.  It wasn’t the most exciting set of sentences I could have come up with.  Usually I try to make my writing for early readers a little more interesting!

The main problem I have about not using a planned out reading curriculum is that it’s really easy to let reading slide, especially when the non-reader in question has a habit of disappearing before you can make him sit down.  But I think that approaching reading in this more informal way can be a lot more meaningful to the child.  It certainly seems to go more smoothly.  Since Chipmunk’s eyes are still bothering him (after almost 18 weeks of vision therapy), it’s easier for him to read words I write on paper than to read the smaller font of a regular reader, even something like Go, Dog, Go.  So generally what we do is this: when we sit down to “do some reading”, we might start out with him spelling words with tiles or writing some words down that he already knows.  I try to build on that knowledge to teach him new words.  (For instance, he spelled “apple” one day — “appl.” I told him about the silent e, then we used “apple” to add “little” to his list.)  Then I usually take the words we’ve worked with and write a little story with them.  I usually try to make the stories a little creative (i.e., funny), but sometimes (obviously) my creativity fails me and we are left with standard reader fare.

My other non-reader is five and currently using the Montessori phonics apps on the iPad on his own.  Sometimes I feel a little guilty about it, but if he learns to read this way, I will jump up and down and shout glory hallelujah, having thereby avoided the usual three to five years of agonizing over it.

Read Alouds

Our current nightly read alouds are Ambleside selections, so I won’t link them:

Winnie-the Pooh (A. A. Milne) — finished

(After we read the first chapter, my boys proclaimed that “Paddington was better.”  I don’t think they’re saying that now.  As soon as we finished Winnie-the-Pooh they immediately asked me for The House at Pooh Corner.  They especially liked the Heffalump.)

The House at Pooh Corner (A.A. Milne) — halfway through

The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling) — Andy is reading this one to the boys at night

(You can see what we’re reading for Morning Time in my recent update!)

 

Picture Books

(I know there were a few more of these, but either I can’t remember them or I can’t find them to see their titles!)

I have to include a note here about Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.  This is a book about three Swedish girls, in a series that my mother-in-law — whose family is Swedish — grew up reading as a young girl.  There is a boy series, too, called Snipp, Snapp, Snurr.  We only own this one book and I don’t know that I’ve ever read it to anybody.  I found it when I was changing out the seasonal book basket, and I asked Leo if he wanted to read it.  It is about girls, but he grudgingly consented… only to demand that I read it again as soon as it was over.  So, just because you have a bunch of boys, don’t totally discount the girl books! Your boys might surprise you.

 

 

 

My First Podcast… and a Morning Time update

A little shameless self promotion this morning… I recently had the privilege of talking to Pam at Ed Snapshots about how we have Morning Time with our larger than average family.  I wasn’t sure what to expect about recording a podcast but it was a lot of fun!

You can find the podcast here: YMB#5: Big Family Morning Time: A Conversation with Angela Boord

In the podcast, Pam and I talk about how our family has managed a Morning Time for most of the past ten years or more with a wide mix of ages and lots of toddlers.  (Hint: It’s not perfect and it’s certainly not quiet!)

Our Morning Time is a little different this year than it has been in past years, because our schedule has had a big mix-up with our oldest going to college and our chores being redistributed and one day of our week taken up with outside activities and me being pregnant.  We’re only managing to sit down together about twice a week (although I’m working on that) to do more than say our prayers.  I’ve had to reassess what I was planning to read, too.  Here’s what we’re doing for Morning Time now:

Saint of the Day
Memory/Latin: The Confiteor
The Thinking Toolbox: Thirty-five Lessons That Will Build Your Reasoning Skills

Our Lady’s Book

Tree in the Trail

And just yesterday we tried out Focus On Middle School Physics  at the twins’ request.

(I think this program is probably a little on the easy side for middle schoolers, so I’m using it for my 4th graders this year because they wanted a science text with experiments and an experiment kit — available from Home Science Tools.  It does seem to lend itself to reading aloud, though.)

We have Morning Time in stages this year.  My high school age daughter stays for prayers, Latin memorization, and The Thinking Toolbox.  I read Our Lady’s Book and Tree in the Trail to all the boys, including my 7th grader, and we have a lot of discussion.  If he wants to leave to do his other schoolwork around this point, that’s ok.  Then I read the Physics book to the twins and Chipmunk (age 8) listens in, too… although he has his own Elementary Chemistry book that I read to him later on, when I just focus on reading to him and my five year old (although his big brothers often listen in as well, even if I’m reading picture books.)

That’s what’s working for us at the moment.  It’s definitely not perfect, but it does seem (mostly) to be doable — which is what counts in the long run, I think.

 

 

First week of the new school year… sort of

I’m trying to fix an issue with Feedly, which doesn’t seem to be updating my feed.  So if some of you see this twice, I apologize.

I keep pushing back the beginning of our school year.  First I was hoping to do some work with the boys in July and August when it was hot so we could take off some time in September when it was cooler.  But no energy, brain fog, etc, and getting Gareth ready for college plus two long, cross-country trips (one to bring him to college) put an end to those plans.  Then I was going to start school for everyone on August 31.  But we got sick.  (Some kind of wicked cough/flu-ish thing).  So last week only Katydid completed anything like a real schedule; I tried to read to the boys a little more and we got some of our books nailed down, but that was about it.

This Tuesday is our new goal for the “official” start of school.

But I thought I would report on our Week Zero anyway.  For one thing, I haven’t posted anything in a long time.  (You may or may not have noticed.) I have a few drafts in progress, but I’ve run into problems with adding photos.  My “start-up disc is almost full” perpetually now so I have to delete pictures in order to download new ones.  I’ve tried moving my Aperture library to an external hard drive and then just automatically downloading all my new photos onto the external hard drive (which is theoretically possible), but none of the external hard drives seem to work with this Mac.  Is there anything I’m missing?  If you have any ideas, please let me know.

I have a few Instagram pictures for this post, but alas, not very many.

For a second thing, it isn’t as if the boys have been sitting around twiddling their thumbs either.  I was folding laundry over the weekend and got into a discussion with most of the boys about mag-lev trains.  (Because isn’t that what everyone talks about with their kids while they fold laundry?) Anyway, in the course of the conversation, it became clear that Dennis (age 9) had read most of our books about magnetism this summer and that he had a good idea of how mag-lev trains worked.  Chipmunk and Leo (age 8 and 5) happily demonstrated with their toy trains.  I got up afterwards and wrote it all down in a notebook as proof that somebody did something this summer other than watch a bunch of mindless TV.

And for a third thing, I thought you might like a peek at the plans I do have for the year, such as they are.

One of the many block worlds the boys have been building lately, complete with its own economy and natural disasters (aka “Hurricane JM”).

Year 11

Since Katydid did the most academic work last week, I’ll start with her.  Last year, we relied heavily on Sally Thomas’ Western Civ 2: The Medieval World online lesson plans, after I made an Ambleside Online-type spreadsheet schedule for her Term 1 but had a hard time following up for Term 2.  Katydid liked all the links that Sally provided along with the readings (nicely divided by week, with writing assignments included), so we just shifted onto Sally’s schedule around the later Anglo-Saxons.  Although Sally also provides her lesson plans for 11th grade and Early Modern/American history — very helpfully, I might add — the 11th grade plans are in daily checklist format without the links and discussion which made earlier lesson plans so appealing to Katydid, so I told her that this year I would try to provide the same sort of links for history, literature, and religion on the high school blog that we created a few years ago and have used here and there when necessary throughout her high school years.  My intention was to put the lesson plans themselves online, a la Sally, but due to the circumstances of this summer, I only got as far as making a spreadsheet of Term 1 as overview.  So she’s working off that, and I’m putting related links online.

Katydid’s Year 11 is based on AO Year 9, with generous tweaks and substitutions by me.  Here’s a screenshot of part of her Term 1 schedule.  (We’ll be making changes over the course of the month as she determines what sort of workload she will have with her online classes: AP Environmental Science, German II, and Precalculus.  She’s also working her way through chemistry as a corequisite to APES, using the Spectrum Chemistry materials.)  Essay on Man, Gulliver’s Travels, the Alexander Pope poems, The Elements of Style, and Traditional Sentence Style are all AO titles, but the others are our choices. America As Seen by Its First Explorers: The Eyes of Discovery is a neat book about what North America was like when the explorers explored it. (What else would they do, right.  Anyway…)  I just took selections for the regions that we had the most experience with: Mississippi with De Soto (for whom the county we live in is named), upstate New York and French Canada, the Midwest (we used to live in Missouri), and the Mississippi River.  (AO’s geography selections in some of the upper years seem to me to be British Isles heavy.)  She wanted to read The Scarlet Letter, and the American Literature book from Seton contains primary source material collected from a Catholic point of view, which Katydid also wanted to include.  We’re only planning to use selections from the Colonial period up to about the Civil War this year.

The entire schedule is too much, though, and we’re going to have to adjust.  Last week Katydid’s German II and AP Environmental Science classes began, and they are both a lot of work.  (I don’t think she was expecting that from German, which she is again taking with Kolbe, because the workload for German I wasn’t that heavy).  She starts Precalculus this week.  Chemistry is what is throwing a wrench into the works, because she didn’t get nearly as much done over the summer as we had hoped.

Music for Everyone

Katydid’s voice teacher of the past four years moved away this year, so I had to find another musical outlet for her.  What I found was a music program for everyone.  One (early) morning a week, we pack everybody in the van so the boys can participate in a beginning band program and Katydid can sing in a choir.  There’s a gap in between their classes, so during the gap we drive to a nearby greenway and take a short nature walk.  Then I drop Katydid off at her class, and I take the boys for a quick grocery trip.  It’s exhausting (primarily the grocery shopping), but we get a lot done.  For better or worse, I’m considering working in Chipmunk’s vision therapy on that day, too, since the eye doctor is not far away from music classes, but about a forty-five minute drive from our house.  Then I would just have one driving day all week.  (Something I have never managed before.)

Year 7

George and I sat down last week to choose his books for the term from a stack I had collected.  Originally he had wanted to do an American history and outside Europe year, but when I sat down and thought about it… and looked ahead at high school… and thought about how my older two had done things… and thought about Gareth’s freshman classes (at a Catholic liberal arts college)… I decided that it might be better just to pick up the other 2/3 of AO’s Year 6, which covers the ancients.  To be honest, I don’t think AO does a great job of the ancients or of the world outside Europe, but trying to do a more traditional Ancients/Medieval/Early Modern/Modern history rotation in high school has necessitated quite a bit of squishing for us, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing either.  So George is going to do a sort of Year 6.5 this year, at least until December or thereabouts, when he’ll hopefully pick up AO Year 7.

We’re doing our Year 6.5 a little differently than just using AO’s Year 6 ancient world recommendations, which focus entirely on the Greeks and Romans.  We swapped out Bullfinch’s Age of Fable for Padric Collum’s Great Myths of the World, and instead of Guerber’s Story of the Greeks and Story of the Romans, George wants to read from Susan Wise Bauer’s History of the Ancient World, which covers the entire ancient world including China, Africa, and the Americas.  He’s also going to read The Iliad, since he’s listened to many children’s versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey on audio, and I think he read Black Ships Before Troy last year.

I don’t have any neat and tidy spreadsheets to show for him, though; all I do for the boys is to sit down with a stack of post-its and a calculator, which I use to divide up the reading in the books we’ve chosen for the term.  I write down how many pages they should target per day on the post-it, and I stick the post-it in the front of the book.  For some books they read according to the schedule, and some books they end up reading faster.  I am fairly relaxed about this.

Year 3.5/Year 4 (Grade 4)

The twins are technically both in 4th grade this year, but they are vehemently opposed to reading the same books.  So I went through the booklists for AO’s Year 3, 3.5, and 4 and wrote down the titles I thought each of the twins would be interested in that they hadn’t already read.

(More of my hi-tech homeschool planning.)

I also added titles from our shelves that I thought they would like.  Actually, we owned almost all the books listed, and I just picked up a few titles that looked particularly interesting or that filled gaps I thought needed filling.  (Not that I need excuses to buy books.)  Right now most of these books have been collected to the twins’ shelf in the kitchen, and Dennis and Huck have both put together a stack of books they want to read.  Huck’s stack actually includes a bunch of books that I didn’t write on this list that were just hanging around as free reading during the summer, but since he did it on his own before I could prompt him, I’m inclined to just let him work his way through the stack.

By the way, the twins will not read all these books this year; it’s just a list to choose from.

Year 2… or maybe 3?

Chipmunk’s birthday falls so near the cut-off date for grade placement in our school district that he could be in either 2nd grade or 3rd grade.  Because he’s a late reader, it’s easier to think of him as being in 2nd grade.  I liked the look of AO’s Year 2 for him this year, so most of the books I collected for him (for me to read aloud) come from AO Year 2.  Right now we’re reading from the book Built To Last (subtitle: Building America’s Amazing Bridges, Dams, Tunnels, and Skyscrapers.)  We’ve already renewed this book once, but that might just be because I can’t get my act together for regular bedtime reading.

Year 0 (Kindergarten)

Leo is five this year, and supposedly in kindergarten.  Please do not tell him this, though, because it is a matter of some contention.  Any learning this year that is my idea will have to be done by stealth.  To this end, I have loaded the iPad with Montessori and Starfall apps.  I’ve also been rethinking my approach to teaching reading, which will apply to Chipmunk as well.  Five of my kids are excellent readers, but I often think they learned to read in spite of me — or at the very least, not because of me.  I tend to always begin with the idea that I will be a much better homeschooler and stick to a consistent and well-developed phonics curriculum.  But after a while… we both get frustrated at the slow pace of the phonics curriculum and the lack of interesting reading material.  So at that point I throw out the phonics book and bring out the readers and we just read.  (Usually it’s at this point that we discover the underlying visual difficulties that are going to cost us thousands of dollars not covered by insurance to fix.)  The readers aren’t that interesting either, but we fight through them.  And then the kid spends his time looking at Stephen Biesty Cross-Section books or playing Spell Tower on the iPad and is suddenly able to read words like “castle” and “September”.

So this year, faced with my seventh kindergartner, and a not yet reading eight year old… I thought, if I sit down with everybody to do math for thirty minutes, and I sit down the little boys to do reading, too… I will spend three or four hours every day doing nothing but math and phonics.  Ok, so no, that is not happening.  For one thing, JM will only stand at the table and peel the labels off crayons for so long.  For another thing… I’ve been homeschooling for 14 or 15 years, and I have at least as much to go.  For me, there is no quicker road to burn-out than to focus solely on the basics day in and day out.

To make a long story short, I couldn’t bear to even think about trying to make this child sit down with a workbook every day.  So I decided that we would take a more informal approach that would maybe take into account sight words (which I find are not dealt with very well in most phonics-based curricula).  These blog posts about the Charlotte Mason approach to reading at The Joyful Shepherdess blog have been very helpful as I’ve thought about how I want to approach reading instruction this year.  It turns out that I had the wrong idea about Charlotte Mason’s approach to reading, mostly because I had always thought of it as more of a look-say approach.  As it turns out, I missed all the phonics that is supposed to be laid as a foundation.

I’ve also been rereading Teach a Child to Read With Children’s Books, which I do periodically.  I bought this book back when Gareth was a struggling reader (and the book was in print).  I’ve never seemed to be able to get it off the ground, but it’s good to have it in the back of my head.

So there’s a peek at our year as it stands right now.  I have a feeling we’re going to lean toward the more unschooly end of the spectrum this year, but some years are like that.

 

Winter Term Ending

I got on Facebook yesterday to ask a local homeschool group about driving schools, and Facebook informed me that it had been fifteen days since my last blog post.  “Write another post?” it said, and so, sure, here I am.  I’ve been meaning to show you a little bit from our winter term, which we wrapped up a week or so ago — although when I said so, the kids asked me, “What’s a term?” So you see, these “terms”, I guess they are really just figments of my imagination.

Anyway, we’ve reached that point in the school year when it is increasingly hard for me organize the kids and myself to do much of anything formal.  (“Low tide”, I guess.)  The first half of February was somewhat spring-like, with bluets and even a daffodil or two.  On the day our first daffodil bloomed, we had an ice storm, and that was the beginning of the end.  We got two or three ice storms in a row, and then two snow… I don’t want to call them storms exactly, so maybe we’ll just say events? Two snow events in a row! This is a big deal here, where we can go several winters without having any snow lay on the ground.  The boys even got to go sledding down the hill in the backyard, build snowmen, and — of course — have a few snowball fights.

 

(JM wasn’t too sure about the snow.  He’d never seen it before. How different is this from these snow pictures of five years ago? I do miss those big nor’easters, in a way… but I don’t miss the long weeks it took all that snow to melt! )

We did take the opportunity to read all our picture books about snow, which was fun because the winter-themed picture books so rarely relate to our weather down here.

Blizzard was a Christmas present for Chipmunk this year; I was surprised to see that it was about the Blizzard of ’78, which I actually lived through, too.  I was five years old and my family still lived in northeastern Ohio then, and what I remember about it was that our power went out and my grandpa had to come through the snow to get my mom, my baby sister, and me to take us to his house.  There’s a picture somewhere of my little sister being bathed in a little pink plastic tub on their kitchen table.  I regaled the boys with my stories, but I’m sure they found the book much more interesting.

We read Snowflake Bentley during one of our snow “events” and Huck wanted to get out the microscope to see if we could look at snowflakes, too.  So we did, and we couldn’t get the snowflakes to stay on the stage without melting, but the microscope itself was a big hit and we spent a long time looking at almost everything else.

(We own both a dissecting scope and a microscope, both from Home Science Tools.  Huck is using the dissecting scope here to look at a mandarin.)

I also finally finished reading Paddington Helps Out to Chipmunk (and anybody else who would listen) and then I started Along Comes a Dog by Meindert de Jong.  We’re almost done with it now — one chapter left — and my seven year old and my four year old have both been riveted by this book.  Myself, I thought it ought to come with a few warning stickers for sensitive readers. (Like me.)  Having kept chickens, the boys didn’t flinch too much at the amount of chicken violence in the book, but sheesh… the thing about the chicken’s toes made us all sit up and blink a little. (I won’t tell you exactly what because that would be a spoiler, but… wow.)  This is an AO recommended free read in… Year 3, I think?… but I would recommend that if you have a sensitive reader, you just stay away.  If you’re raising farm kids, though, it’s a good book.  De Jong obviously spent a lot of time around chickens.

George blew through a truly impressive list of books this winter… but I didn’t write them all down.  He finished the modern history section of The Story of Mankind, and we were going to start on the next two-thirds of AO Year 6, but then he decided he really didn’t want to do ancients, so he’s reading the remaining Landmark 20th century history books that I bought at the beginning of the year and Winston Churchill: Soldier, Statesman, Artist. I also handed him Watership Down, and he read that in a matter of days. So much for keeping that until AO Year 7.  He does have books that he reads slowly, but — not too many.

Dennis and Huck also finished up the books that they had been reading for a while — some of the books on AO’s Year 3.5 booklist for Dennis and some Landmarks and a Christian Liberty Nature Reader for Huck — and so we decided to have an exam week while the teenagers had a spring break from their Memoria Press classes. (Celeste makes detailed posts about their Charlotte Mason style exams if you’d like to see a good example of a Charlotte Mason style exam. Ours are similar.  We have been doing these for about five years now, and they’re a good way to wrap things up, to see what the kids remember .  Gareth actually sent one of his answers from our ancient history course along with his college applications.) I had George write (type) some of his answers, which was his first foray into the written narration.  If you were to meet George now and see all the books he reads, you would never know that he was dyslexic.  His spelling and language mechanics might therefore come as a surprise.  Last spring when I asked him to try typing a narration, he could barely figure out how to write a sentence.  (This stands in direct contradiction to the way — and the amount — he talks, by the way.)  When I asked him to write a few answers to his exam questions this year, I got whole paragraphs with punctuation and not too many spelling mistakes or missing words.  Progress is always nice to see.

Dennis and Huck are also making progress.  Our schedule change as well as clear expectations (no choices) turned out to be exactly what they needed.  Also, they are doing well with their separate math programs — Saxon 5/4 for Dennis and Beast Academy 3 for Huck.  (For reference, they are both technically third graders this year.)  Huck has been steadily chugging through the 3B book.  He does all of it independently with very little help from me.  Occasionally (very occasionally) he runs into a problem with double stars which apparently means that you will possibly need help from more than one adult in order to solve the problem and then he has to ask his non-mathy mother for assistance.  The last one I did with him I had to cheat and use long division, which he hasn’t covered yet.  Then we looked up the answer in the back of the book to see the way you were supposed to do it (by making lists of factors), something that probably wouldn’t have occurred to me in a million years.  Huck likes this level of challenge and does well at it, but there is absolutely no way he could finish all four workbooks in one academic year.

The teenagers are just keeping up with their classes.  They took the National Latin Exam, went to their new creative writing group, and translated a lot of Cicero.  Gareth had an interview for a full tuition scholarship at his first choice college, which we should hear about this week (prayers appreciated), and then I hope that — with his permission — I can share some of the whole college application/scholarship process that we went through.  It turns out that relaxed homeschooling did not actually ruin his life.  But I’ll write more about that later hopefully.

There were more things that we did this winter — Chipmunk drew quite a bit and there was much discussion (and argument) about wolves — but this is it in a nutshell.  The sun came out this weekend for three whole days (!) and it was warm and beautiful.  Now it’s raining again and chilly, but the pears and forsythia have all burst into bloom, and I think spring is finally here.  We made a few changes for our spring term — and hopefully (also !) we’ll be going on vacation in April — but I’ll tell you about that in my spring learning in review notes.

 

 

 

 

See Me Homeschool: Thursday, February 19

 I am just squeaking into this linkup at Ordinary Lovely at the end of the month! The challenge is to show an actual homeschool day using only pictures and no words.  I’ve often kept track of our days using words, but never just pictures.  So I gave it a shot, using only (or mostly) time stamps.  See us homeschool on a fairly typical winter Tuesday in northern Mississippi…

 

<Insert the pictures various people promised me from Crossfit, choir, and Boy Scouts but failed to take >

9:30 or, “The Remains of the Day.”

A Homemade Calendar of Firsts

Last year at this time I was reading Laurie Bestvater’s book The Living Page and finding myself, like many others, inspired to get back into the habit of keeping notebooks.  One of the notebooks she mentioned that set off a particularly bright light bulb for me was the Calendar of Firsts.

A Calendar of Firsts is a multi-year calendar that records the “firsts” of each season: the first daffodil, the first red-winged blackbird, the first 90 degree day, the first red maple leaf, the first snowfall… you get the idea.  (You can find a slightly longer explanation here.)  When I initially read about the Calendar of Firsts, my first thought was, What a great idea for the garden! As a gardener, you tend to get a sense of when things happen every year in your zone and in your yard — when it’s okay to plant peas, when to put out the tomatoes, when to expect the first frost — but unless you have records it remains sort of a sense.  You see the daffodils blooming and think, I should check the weather to see if I can put spring greens in this week, or you see the oak leaves beginning to unfurl and think, What did Almanzo say about planting corn in Farmer Boy? How big is a squirrel’s ear anyway?  But of course it would all be much easier — that sense would be a little firmer — if you could flip back through the pages of a notebook to see how your seasons have run for the past few years.

So I know the Calendar of Firsts is supposed to be for the children — especially children who are a little too young to keep a proper nature notebook.  But I am enjoying keeping one just for myself.

Not that it’s entirely for myself, of course.  I’m a mom and I like to talk to my kids, so that means I say things like, “Hey, look, did you see the bluets in the front yard today? You know, those little blue flowers? I think that’s the first time I’ve seen them this year, so I’m going to write it down in my book today.”  It’s hard to keep anything entirely to yourself when you’re a mom, and sometimes that’s a good thing.

Anyway, it’s taken a while to get from my light-bulb moment to an actual, physical notebook that I’m using, but I thought you might like to see what I did and the sorts of entries I make.

I keep my calendar in a plain 7.5 x 10 inch unruled Moleskine Notebook…

Just like this one.  When I was considering how to keep my calendar back in January, I went looking for the specially-produced Calendar of Firsts that Jen mentions on her Notebooks – Resources page.  I had looked at it last year, but the $40 price tag and the wood cover had kept me from pulling the trigger.  (Even though it was beautiful.)  But when I went looking this year, I couldn’t find it for sale or mentioned anywhere.  None of the perpetual or gardening calendars or five year diaries I could find online seemed to fit either, so instead of trying to figure out where the special Charlotte Mason one went or if it was still available, I just decided to make my own.

My first step was to go hunting through my shelves and papers to see if there was anything I already owned that would suit my purposes.  (Celeste at Joyous Lessons has a very nice printable “Nature Calendar“, which I also considered, but then I remembered my problems with technology.  And with getting papers hole-punched.  Heavy sigh.)   Last year when I was determined to be a better notebooker (and to make my children better notebookers), I bought some moleskine notebooks for all of us to use as commonplace books, etc.  I know there are other, cheaper notebooks out there, and any notebook with plain pages would work for this actually — but I like the moleskines with the soft covers.  It’s just a “thing”.  (I have a lot of “things” about office supplies.  Ahem.)

Anyway, I had one that I had originally determined to be a “Gardening, Self-sufficiency, and Homesteading Notebook”, but I had made only one or two entries in it.  After some quick math (which I hope I did right), I determined that I could still divide the remaining pages into two columns (a day per column) to imitate the layout of Red Mountain School’s Calendar of Firsts and have enough pages to cover a year.  So I carefully ripped out and saved the used pages and then I got to work with my ruler, a felt-tip pen, and a set of Schaeffer fountain pens.

(I soon went in search of a flexible plastic ruler instead of this hard wooden one, though.  It was a lot easier to press the flexible ruler over the curve of the pages.)

I’m not a calligrapher, and my fountain pens aren’t great, so I ended up just doing my frontispiece (“frontispiece” makes it sound so official) with the fountain pens.  I do love fountain pens, but these cheap Schaeffer nibs were kind of scratchy.  So I ended up doing most of my work with felt-tip pens.  I wasn’t sure whether I wanted the Year column at first or the lines under the entries, but then I thought that it would make the calendar easier to follow visually if I didn’t try to mix years on the same line — for instance, putting an entry from 2015 on February 7 but in 2016 writing down an entry on February 6.  Then, to keep my entries separate visually, I experimented with putting in the lines under the entries, freehand.  But it probably would have been better if I had grabbed a black pen.

This is what it looks like without any lines under the entry:

I was just afraid that all the text would run together.

(You can also see that I was using different color pens.  My favorite multi-colored felt-tips are these:

(Paper Mate Flair Medium Point Pens.  I really like the black ones for regular drawing, too.  Their tips don’t squish like the pens in the sets specifically labeled for “drawing”.)

(In any case, I’m of the opinion that spring notes should often be written down in green ink.)

I’m really happy that I moved beyond the “perfect” to the “good” and actually started using a Calendar of Firsts, but I want to emphasize that I could have done the same thing in a regular spiral notebook.  It doesn’t have to be fancy (just take a look at my handwriting), but I did have fun exercising my creative side a little bit.  And it was nice to recycle something on which I had already spent money but wasn’t using!

Linking up with Keeping Company at Joyous Lessons!