The School Year

It was a rocky start this year. It seemed every time we got a routine going it was interrupted. I know this is the theme for homeschooling but it was even worse than usual this year. Things have settled down a bit and this is how our weeks are going...
Everyday we do math and Latin. On Monday we do poetry; on Tuesday we do art and Botany and Earth Science; on Wednesday it's music and Nature study; on Thursday it's health; and Friday it's geography. On most days we read, have spelling lessons and try to cover some history. Missing this year is Ocular Athletics and we all miss it. so I'm trying to fit it in somewhere.
I'll be blogging in more detail about the different subjects. Some things are going really well,like geography, some things are endured like spelling and some things need serious adjustment like music (not our best subject unless you count memorizing the lyrics to Toby Keith's greatest hits---which I don't!!)

What we've been up to

We started school a few weeks ago and have been trying to establish a routine. It is going pretty well so far. We had a good routine going last year and it has been fairly easy to fall back into it. We are moving ahead in Latin with Latina Christiana II. I meant to add more English grammar but there doesn't seem to be enough time in the day so for now this will have to cover that too. I'm hoping to cover about 500 years of history--1500 to 2000--this year. However, the Renaissance is impossible to rush through! We'll see how it goes.
The high school years are looming ahead of me and I want to use as many of G.K. Chesterton's books on authors and saints as I can fit in. To that end we are reading (or are going to read) alot of Stevenson, and Dickens. Kipling, too. The hobbits are already familiar with St. Francis and St. Thomas Aquinas. And of course, Chesterton himself. More Father Brown, definitely and maybe some of his other fiction. Napoleon of Notting Hill perhaps. No point in over planning!!

Wrapping up the year

After the Easter break it is always hard to get back to the old schedule. Add in beautiful spring weather and baseball season and you have fidgety hobbits that are not at all interested in Latin declensions. So I've let that go for now and we are concentrating on finishing up a few loose ends like math books and spelling workbooks so we can start fresh next fall. Even Ocular Athletics has become stale. Luckily for me I bought a copy of Nancy Carpentier Browns study guide of The Blue Cross. Just the thing for a very enjoyable end to a very Chestertonian year!

What's working

I just finished the quarterly report required in New York State and so this seems like a good time to review and see what is working. Surprisingly, quite a lot. There has been significant tweaking done since this post but not as much as some years.
The self propelled Bible study never got off the ground and the twins are working through Bible History by Johnson,Hannan,and Dominica and Ken is reading The New Catholic Picture Bible. The rest of the religion outline is working although we are behind with The Adventure of the Amethyst. The boys love this book and sit rapt every morning as I read aloud the further adventures of the Lovell children. Today the older three were baptized. (the youngest was baptized earlier during an illness). Tomorrow--First Holy Communion. As converts ourselves this book really hits home and also the children ask the real questions of their friend the Bishop that my boys would ask. Is it a sin to spit in your brother's bath water? Are all Christians Catholic? Is there any salvation outside of the Church and what is hell really like? (Tough one). This book is great and we are loving it.
Latin is going well and I have resisted tweaking here. We are on lesson 16 of Latina Christiana (second conjugation!). Lingua Mater didn't make it though. The twins just aren't ready for a composition course yet. Instead we are working through the writing part of Voyages in English 7. Today they gave talks they had written on how to tie knots. For some reason I can't fathom they are not giving me any grief about this. We are also continuing Poetry Monday (copying of poetry into a lesson book, memorization optional)Ocular Athletic Thursday, and narration Friday (they are narrating The Trojan War and Adventures of Odysseus by Padric Collum--even Ken). Spelling is going amazingly well with the Seton workbooks and awhile back the boys declared spelling their favorite subject. I guess that fit I pitched was for nothing.
Math was switched to Saxon 7/6 as less confusing and time consumming. Ken is reviewing 3rd grade math with the new Seton Math 3. He likes that book so much he has been seen to pat it. I think it is the art work but he likes that it only does one thing a day. I didn't realize that the Saxon method of doing several math topics a day was confusing him. String, Staightedge and Shadow is going well and we read from it once a week.
History has completely changed. The Old World and America just didn't cut it here and we are now using The Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer. This is really sticking--Joe aced all the ancient history on Jeapordy a couple of nights ago. Okay, it was teen Jeapardy but still, he's only twelve!
So, thanks mostly to Seton workbooks (I can't believe I'm typing this!)this year is going very well and another benefit has been that after this week's stomach bug everything just fell back into routine. There was a routine to fall back into!

The Subjects

To begin at the beginning, here are the proposed subjects for the coming school year:

Bible-the hobbits are fairly ignorant of most of the bible, in spite of my having read a couple of children's bible books to them. This year we are going right to the source and I will read the bible and they will (hopefully) narrate. I'll also use You Can Understand the Bible by Peter Kreeft as a parent resource. For Catechism, I found this gem-An Explanation of the Baltimore Catechism by Rev. Thomas Kinkead in a box of books to be thrown out at our Parish so I snagged it! It is a very living explanation of the catechism. I also have monthly themes planned, August is Ave Maris Stella, September is for reading aloud Adventures of the Amethyst, October is for the Rosary and the battle of Lepanto (and Chesterton!), November is of course for saints, etc.

We will stick to Latina Christiana for Latin and I hope to review what we covered last year in book one and also get a hefty chunk of book two into our heads.

English will be Lingua Mater--hopefully the whole book but we'll see. The youngest hobbit will use Intermediate Language Lessons and Ocular Athletics will return. I also bought spelling workbooks from Seton. I have tried over the years to get the hobbits to spell correctly and have spent an inordinate amount of time devising programs and spelling lists. Enough! This is where the rubber hits the road and they will pass those weekly spelling tests or else!!!

For math I want to use Making Math Meaningful by Jamie York. This is a Waldorf book but pretty thorough and includes alot of math tricks like how to multiply by 11's and casting out nines to check multiplication. We also will use String, Straightedge and Shadow by Julia Diggins to get us started in Geometry. Little Hobbit will learn his math facts...or else!

We will meander through New York State history this year and also use The Natrual History of New York by Stan Freeman and Mike Nasuti as a spine for nature study. And because I can only stand United States history for so long I will also read aloud The Old World and America and add some appropriate historical fiction. The Dark Ages aren't so dark in this text!

Art and music study will follow the sequence in What Your 4th (and 7th) Grader Needs to Know. Not bad selections really. I will post on these as they come up.

The Hobbit twins will also study Chemistry and Earth Science this year. We will start with The Mystery of the Periodic Table by Benjamin D. Wiker. After reading the first couple of chapters I think this will be a good book for narration. I haven't decided what to use for Earth Science yet. They will also read The Complete Book of Marvels by Richard Halliburton for geography.

Well, this is the rough outline and is subject to change at any time or as my father always said, "That's the plan now let's see what happens!"

Planning, again

I've been planning and planning until my head is spinning and history is yet again trying to take over the curriculum....so I just let it all go. What we are doing at present is slowly reading through the Core Knowledge sequence of books (yes, starting with What your Kindergartner Needs to Know! You should hear the groans, but everyone listens avidly and are oh so proud of knowing all the answers!) and creatively strewing books about on the topic of the day.
In September I plan to start a serious study of Latin again using Latina Christiana, reviewing book I first and hopefully moving on to book II before the year is out. This was the surprise winner from last year which I started mostly because I had bought the video lessons and figured I better use them. The discipline of this type of Latin instruction trickled down to all our other activities. I, of course tried to tweak this and added too much other stuff (Minimus, Our Roman Roots, and those new workbooks from CHC). I will try very hard not to do that again.
Other than that, I want the boys to be familiar with Kipling, Dickens, and Stevenson so they will know what GKC is talking about when they read his thought on these authors when they are older (high school?)and have a good idea of the flow of history. That's it. Those are the goals. Now we will see what happens!

Planning...

Despite the lack of activity here, I have been planning. Really. It's just that the weather has been so beautiful and things have been hectic and ....well, you get the picture. But still, I have been mulling things over and have some idea of what I want to do next year. Mostly, I want to instill a Catholic conscience in my boys and in myself. It has been an awakening to discover that Catholics have a viewpoint very much at odds with the World's. I know this should be obvious but it wasn't. The more I read of Chesterton the more amazed I am by his Catholic conscienceness. As a convert he didn't develop this as a child in the usual way,through careful training in the Faith, like St. Therese of Lisieux for example. But this way of seeing things as they are in relation to Christ as opposed to man is truly his great gift. So I am trying to be very careful about the books I am choosing. Not totally Catholic but sharing that viewpoint. For instance, Parables from Nature by Mrs. Alfred Gatty (already not pc as she identifies herself as her husband's wife). Is this book too protestant? Too babyish perhaps for the hobbits? No and no as it turns out. I've read a couple stories and while they have a fairy tale quality they also are full of thoughtful insight on nature. And they are free of the personification of critters so prevalent in the Christian Liberty nature readers. Not that I disapprove of the personification of critters, I love Beatrix Potter after all but I find it annoying in a story about the life cycle of crabs or spiders. Also, I was impressed by Mrs. Gatty's use of Dante quotes as chapter headers. She mostly uses Bible verses but Dante is there too. I read in the brief bio of her that she was home-educated by her father (a chaplain on the Victory with Nelson) and had translated Dante at the age of 17. What better way to form a Catholic conscience? So Parables from Nature is a keeper.

These are the thoughts that have been occupying me lately. And I do have a tentative schedule worked up. Now, if I can resist the temptation to keep adding just one more wonderful ....book...subject...what if they never learn that... (never mind that I never knew that--what ever that is--)....

It's June...

so it must be time to start planning for next school year! I've started this blog to organize my thoughts and keep a journal of our homeschooling. I've been reading a lot of Chesterton lately and I want my boys to have, not an education like Chesterton's exactly, but an education where they are prepared to read Chesterton and be able to assimilate his insights, commonsense, and absolute love for the Catholic faith. I don't know what kind of education Chesterton would have wanted for his children if he had had any but I assume his wife, Francis, would have had something very Charlotte Mason-y in mind. My own school is going to center around Latin studies because looking back over the past year Latin is the subject that really stands out as a success and in ways I never anticipated. I started it because my oldest daughter told me that Latin and unit multipliers were the only two things she learned in school that were useful in college (she's a nurse) and I had the DVDs for Latina Christiana and thought I might as well use them. But the discipline that a serious study of Latin required carried over into all the other subjects and even into the running of our home which was becoming overrun with boy clutter and dust. It's still cluttered and dusty just not soooo very bad as before! Anyway, this is going to be my musing space and this post from the Bookworm is going to be my guide.