Ocular Athletics

Yes, it's the first Ocular Athletic Thursday of the new school year!! Here are today's offerings...

A Book

Books are an endless source of entertainment, and they are good for your reading skills. I do not know how writers get all the patience to write a book, I mean, they all have to write page after page of long words and when you finish one page it's off to the next page. A book can be big or small, thick or thin, fact or fiction. (Man, that did run on like a song.) I like books about myth and legend, but I like best of all books about dragons.

P.Took

A Key by Samwise Gamgee

Today,dear reader, I am writing about a key. Just a small aluminum key. There is no design on it. It is about one inch long and about one centimeter wide with a rectangular hole in the middle. It unlocks a Viking treasure chest!

Ave Maris Stella

We've been trying to learn this song this month:

Ave Maris Stella, Maria!
Hail, bright star of ocean, Maria!
Dei Mater alma, Maria!
God's own Mother, holy, Maria!
Atque semper Virgo,
Ever sinless Virgen,
Felix caeli porta,Maria,Maria!
Heaven's blessed portal, Maria, Maria!

And we also made a variant of Alice Gunther's craft idea featured in the July issue of mater et magistra. She used a wooden lighthouse--we improvised with legos. Ignore the pirate poster.

Monarchs

The boys came home from the tennis courts with two monarch caterpillars a couple of weeks ago. After a few days of milkweed they chrysalized and hatched out right on schedule. This was a big relief to me as our last attempt at this resulted in a dead chrysalis. A Daddy-long-legs chewed through the casing and sucked it dry. I was shocked! I didn't think they could do that! We made a point of meticulous vacuuming around the aquarium this time. Death to Spiders!!! At least in the house.

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!"

Treasure Island

This book is way too scary for bedtime! The muppet version (And A Child's Garden of Verses) made me forget just how creepy Robert Louis Stevenson can be. I don't know why since The Master of Ballentrae gave me nightmares when I read it in my early 20's. We had just finished Secret Water by Arthur Ransome and as are all of his books it was a fairly in depth study. This one covered mapping and surveying and I thought Treasure Island would be a good follow-up and get us started in our Chesterton studies for the year. I'm anxiously awaiting his essay on Stevenson to arrive from the American Chesterton Society.In the mean time I am keeping a weather eye for blind, piratical, beggars bearing black spots....

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--)....