Castle in the Sea

Outdoor Schoolroom (with Gratuitous Iron Chair)

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 17 May 2013 15:14:00 +0000

My camera comes home on Sunday! And my daughter is coming with it! Meanwhile, I'm reduced to doing photography with the webcam, because finding the other camera, and then the camera cable, and then waiting for photos to upload, is such a bore.

The weather, on the other hand, is not a bore. So we've been doing a lot of this lately:

You can't really see all the math on the whiteboard, which hangs so conveniently on the chain-link gate. It's a major improvement on the plain gate, I must say. Anyway, I set up this shot from the iron coffee table, just as the computer was running out of charge, and I didn't see the extra chair in the way till too late. So just think of it as an artistic add-on to the composition.

P.S.: Today's school, which took about an hour:

1) Amy Welborn's Book of Heroes: Began the section on the virtue of fortitude. There's also a list of virtues on that board, but you can't see it, either.

2) a double-page spread in our Usborne Introduction to Art, on Christian art of the Renaissance (Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, Leonardo).

3) finished Life of Fred: Goldfish, reading chapters 18 and 19 and doing all practice work, both on the board and independently.

4) one section of Augustus Caesar's World.

While we read and talked, Crispina was doing macrame, which she learned at American Heritage Girls last night. So that was some handwork . . .

New Today

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 17 May 2013 11:43:00 +0000

Western Civ I, the Spiral-Bound Edition You've All Been Waiting For.

Same great lesson plans, new great binding. Check 'em out.

(cross-posted)

More Plan-Pondering for Primary Kids: UPDATED: Big Gigantic Post with Some Resources

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:40:00 +0000

My planning for 4th and 5th grades next year progressed this far in the chill and drear of February and then stopped. Now, as our days unravel into summertime, I need to pick it up again.

Our standardized testing next week will tell me, in a cut-and-dried way, as accurate an assessment of our learning experience as Spam is an approximation of actual meat, how we've done this year. My own admittedly subjective feeling is that it's been a good year. We chose good books to read, and we saw them through (and a couple we may see through over the summer, though I won't do any other formal work): Augustus Caesar's World, George Washington's World, David Macauley's City, Galen and the Gateway of Medicine, The Living Forest, various Holling C. Holling books, various works of historical fiction, and, of course, Life of Fred.

We've done almost the entire Fred elementary series this year, starting with Apples and flying through Butterflies, Cats, Dogs, Edgewood, and Farming. We're now almost finished with Goldfish -- this series ends at Jellybeans -- and as we catch up to our grade level/s, it's starting to seem challenging, almost like . . . real math.

Here's an example. In real math Crispina, who is finishing third grade, is still trying to learn the multiplication tables. In her real math workbook, she's been working on single-digit multiplication. Today, however -- and I can't quite remember the whole process or narrative that got us to this point -- she had a breakthrough while we were doing Fred. Well, okay: In the last couple of chapters we have, variously, worked on the 3-times table, learned to compute area and volume, and seen the pattern in multiplying by numbers like 10, 100, 1000, and so on. The "Your Turn to Play" section at the end of each chapter has given us a chance to play with these concepts and others. At the end of the answer section for "Your Turn to Play," we've been given four practice problems -- a mix of addition, subtraction, and multiplication -- to work.

Yesterday, Crispina didn't know how to multiply something like 52x4, so we worked a couple of those together. Today, she flew through the practice problems, and then began spontaneously multiplying things like 222x2. She went from 111x2 all the way to 444x2 -- when she got to 555, we realized that the pattern was going to break down a little, since multiplying 5x2 gives you a 2-digit answer. So she did a few of those bigger numbers and got them right. Score one for taking a concept and running with it, and for perceiving uses for a pattern!

Anyway, suddenly she's working with multiplication ideas far beyond what the third-grade workbook has been giving her. Helier, who's doing the Fred books with us, hasn't quite passed up his real-math self quite so dramatically, but I predict that in the next book or so, he will. This is pretty exciting. It's so exciting that I'm pondering biting the bullet and doing Fred for our main math program next year, instead of as a supplement. We'd still do it together, as basket reading. I guess maybe I'd still give drill pages. If I can get hold of a Saxon 6/5 book cheaply, I might use it as a supplement for both children (in a major reversal of my previous thinking). But suddenly Fred is seeming challenging enough to stand on his own, in a way that I hadn't expected. Hmm hmm hmm.

****

Other thoughts for next year:

For both children:

The addition of some memory work to our basket routine. I'm not willing to buy into a whole classical scheme of memory work, but it seems to me that some resources to provide us with a handful of facts and rules to memorize weekly would be a useful thing. To that end, I'm mulling the purchase of the following:

Classically Catholic Memory's "Beta" Teacher's Manual. I don't really want the whole program, lovely though it looks. But it seems to me that the manual, which contains memory work plus other suggestions, might be a very useful resource for memory- and copywork. We were planning to follow our history trail into the Middle Ages and Renaissance next year, so the history memory work for this year would work for us. I'd also be very interested in the memory work for geography, science, religion, and poetry, even if what we're reading doesn't line up exactly. Also, we're not studying Latin formally, but Latin memory work will not hurt us, particularly as it seems to be largely hymns and prayers which we ought to know, and in some cases do know, anyway.

Ditto Memoria Press's new English Grammar Recitation program. Again, I really don't want the workbooks. I just want us to have a grammar rule to memorize weekly, as a gloss on our copywork and dictation. Our workbooky grammar year this year has been good in many ways, not least in that it's encouraged both children to work more independently. But I think we've had enough of that.

Besides these resources, my rough list of basket books right now contains the following:

Abraham Lincoln’s World

St. Joseph Church History

Famous Men of the Middle Ages

Our Lady’s Dowry

The Way Things Work

Stories of Beowulf Told to the Children

In the Days of the Guilds

Kon-Tiki

The Bee People

Life of Fred

(possibly Saxon 6/5)

Lodging at the St. Cloud

other historical fiction, TBA

(this is a really incomplete list -- I need to shop my shelves again for selections for art, music appreciation, and so on. I know they're there!)

Helier's booklist for 5th grade looks like this (today):

Holy Bible: beginning with King David

Famous Mathematicians***

Beowulf the Warrior*

The Sign of the Beaver**

The Seaside Naturalist***

Fr. Marquette and the Two Rivers**

Augustine Came to Kent*

The Captain’s Dog**

Secret of the Andes**

Beorn the Proud*

Cleared for Action!**

The King’s Shadow*

Amos Fortune, Free Man**

Hidden Treasure of Glaston*

Brave Buffalo Fighter**

Trumpeter of Krakow*

Giant of the Western Trail**

Stuart Little****

Crispina's, for 4th grade, looks like this:

Catholic Picture Bible

Brendan the Navigator*

Tree in the Trail**

Kat Finds a Friend**

Beowulf the Warrior*

Jean Lafitte, Pirate Hero of 1812**

Find the Constellations***

Augustine Came to Kent*

Seaman**

Sacajawea**

Josefina books**

Etheldreda*

If All the Swords in England*

The Story of the Amistad**

Orphans Find a Home**

Little House books*

Little Plum****

Fairy Doll****

Stuart Little****

Betsy-Tacy and Tib****

Minn of the Mississippi**

Elizabeth Blackwell, First Woman Doctor***

Sewing With Saint Anne

*=Old World History

**=New World History

***=STEM reading

****=literature

bold italics=BUY

I think we'll also continue Duolingo for German, as a spine. A friend was mentioning a series of simple German readers which might be fun to do as well. Each child could have a reader added to his/her box of books.

So our daily block schedule would look more like this:

Weekly Schedule

Grades 4 & 5

2013-2014

Monday Basket memory work Life of Fred/math old-world book another book	Tuesday Basket memory work Fred/math new-world reading science reading	Wednesday Basket memory work Fred/math old-world reading geography reading	Thursday Basket memory work Fred/math new-world reading	Friday Basket memory work Fred/math other reading: literature, art, music, etc.
Table Work Copywork German	Table Work Copywork German	Table Work Copywork German	Table Work Copywork German	Table Work Dictation German
Reading Old World Religion Literature	Reading New World STEM Geography	Reading Old World Religion Literature	Reading New World STEM Geography	Reading Old World Religion Literature
whatever	whatever	whatever	whatever	whatever

My schedules become less and less specific and structured as my plans progress -- this way if I change my booklists I don't have to write a whole new schedule. Our basic shape doesn't change: Old- and New-World histories; religion; math; science; geography; language; literature. CM devotees will notice that I haven't built in specific blocks for things like handwork (though I'm getting Crispina the Sewing With Saint Anne book because I think she'll like it), picture study, composer study, and so on. Typically for things like art and music we use resources we have: iTunes radio, artist monographs, Usborne surveys of art history, as well as how-to books, of which we own many. Our "nature study" is pretty unschooly, too, and can be summed up in three words: Just Go Outside.

That "whatever" block along the bottom of the schedule is a function of my having nixed the idea of scheduling two basket times. Let's face it: we will do one basket time. We may start the day with it. We may end the day with it. Sometimes we may do nothing else but (as we're doing now, in fact). Some books on the kids' individual book lists may become basket books. I may recycle The Way Things Work from Helier's science this year, because I don't think he got that much out of it, reading it on his own, and it might work better as a group read with K'nex projects.

Almost assuredly we won't read absolutely everything on absolutely every list, but these are the books I'm going to make sure we own this year, because someone will read them sometime. Later, maybe, I'll do a version of the kids' lists in which I prioritize: which books will get read first? which books will be must-reads, and which will be "fill-in-the-blanks" books, for when somebody just needs something else?

So, that's where we are . . .

********

Meanwhile, some favorite resources of late (or lately rediscovered in my bookmarks):

Math

Adapted Mind

We're not doing the paid subscription, which apparently opens up worlds of wonderfulness to anyone with a credit card; meanwhile there's plenty on this site for free. I especially like the video page, with Khan Academy videos arranged according to primary-level concepts, and free access to interactive practice pages.

Free Math Worksheets

I've been using their blank multiplication chart as a drill for both children. I love tables, rather than lists of facts, because it's easier for children to see patterns and relationships as they fill in the grid. They have just about every kind of practice, for every kind of concept, imaginable -- for free.

History

In my bookmarks from the papal election (which already seems a hundred years ago!): this interactive graphic of every pope from St. Peter to Francis. As we'll be doing history from the fall of the Roman Empire forward next year, this ought to be a fun addition. What I think I'll do is make a "basket" bookmark for things like this, to pull out periodically during our basket time.

A friend posted a link to this cool article about Viking jewelry the other day. I'm adding it into the high school plans, but the youngers will enjoy it as well.

The British History podcast. Glad I stumbled back over this! It's going into the high school plans for sure, but I may pre-audit some podcasts for the youngers. If memory serves me, the guy who narrates these is mildly salty, in a sort of characteristically British way that doesn't bother me, but might bother someone else . . .

The Story of the World, by Elizabeth O'Neill. Via Michele at Mater Amabilis, this is a beautiful old living history book, available free.

General Stuff

Easy-Peasy Homeschool. I haven't tried this yet -- I'm trying to keep my kids off the computer as much as possible. But if you're looking for something planned-out and free, this is a goldmine.

Nice Idea of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:40:00 +0000

From Rosemary at Content in a Cottage, my favorite go-to for my home, garden, and general beauty-fix, comes this cool shelving idea:

This lovely urban space is obviously designed for grownups -- no toddlers in a house with framed art at floor level! Still, what I thought when I saw this picture was how nicely the idea could translate into a home with children, particularly a homeschooling home: line a narrow space, or a free wall in a study/library/den/schoolroom where you either don't have room for traditional shelves or where you'd like something different, with ledges like these.

Use them to face-out beautiful picture books or laminated maps; line up jars of colored pencils or other supplies. Increasingly I'm frustrated with the depth of regular shelving, which is great for holding books library-fashion (and currently I need more of that kind of shelving), but gets wasted if I try to use it for things like art supplies. So much gets lost in the space, pushed behind other things or reduced to a jumble of clutter. Plus, the depth of traditional bookshelves means that they eat up floor space. My own hall is so narrow that to fill it with bookshelves would be to render it useless for walking down, which is sort of the chief purpose of a hall. Still, there's a lot of wasted wall space . . .

As I think about homeschool spaces -- here's one example I've seen recently of a space with some good ideas, though I critiqued it rather fiercely in this conversation; meanwhile, here is another I liked -- and then despair when I consider the merger of dream and reality (i.e., I wake up to the fact that nothing even approaching these spaces exists anywhere in my house), the conclusion I keep coming to is that shelves are the issue. Shelves. It's all about shelves. If I build the right shelves, what I want will come.

Right?

Today at Abandon Hopefully: a Western Civ II Preview

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:29:00 +0000

Check it out.

Spring Homeschooling; or, What to Do When Everyone Runs Out of Gas

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:44:00 +0000

It's beautiful out, as I may have mentioned. The kids have been camping in the treehouse. In fact, they're up there now with the box the new water heater came in (today, finally; the plumber helped them get the box up the ladder into the tree, and did not ask what they were doing out of school). I don't know what they're doing with the box, but they're busy, happy, not fighting, and immersed in arboreal nature study of one kind or another. So if anybody asks me what we're doing in school right now, I think I'll answer, "Independent research on the theme of Tree Life."

We are, however, still doing some Mom-driven school, gently, mostly to finish the basket books we've been reading all year, which I care about a heck of a lot more than getting through workbooks. This morning we read Amy Welborn's Book of Heroes (St. Jean de Brebeuf as example of prudence); Life of Fred: Goldfish (played around with multiplying by 10, 100, and 1000, noting that you can multiply by these numbers without having to think much, if you know enough math to count zeroes; we also calculated the volume of a fish tank and then the volume of two fish tanks the same size); and Augustus Caesar's World, in which we learned that late in his life and reign, Augustus was hailed -- first spontaneously by citizens at the theater, and then formally by a declaration of the Senate -- as Pater Patriae. Interestingly, though I didn't point this out to the kids, in our other strand of history we're studying the life and world of another Pater Patriae, our own George Washington. We'll see if they make that connection -- I'm going to try to keep my mouth shut and let those things percolate.

So, we did school for about an hour, and they each read for about half an hour independently, and then I turned them loose to live in the tree again.

Other stuff:

While we were reading aloud, Crispina, age 9, got out the grocery bags of shirt cardboard which my father had collected in the last years of his life (we're talking hundreds of sheets of shirt cardboard from the cleaners), and which my mother brought us when she came to visit last weekend. While we were reading about fish tanks, she constructed a three-dimensional house, about the size of a small fish tank, out of four sheets of cardboard, then gave it a hinged roof, so that the house could be opened and played with. We didn't calculate the volume of the house, but we could, should the occasion arise. She then took out a stack of catalogs, cut out some people, and stuck them onto cardboard as well, for a family, for whom she proceeded to make some cardboard furniture.

"I read about this in Betsy-Tacy," she told me. "They do this exact same thing."

And that, my friends, is how we do "narration" around here, mostly.

Meanwhile, Amicus, age 15, has finished his biology and German classes at the college and is writing a research paper for me on the Roman conquest of Britain. No word yet on how we're going to narrow this topic, but I have suggested that he might find some more specific focus. Maybe when he gets back from the soup kitchen we'll have time to sit down and talk about it.

So, that's how our days have gone of late. Loose, but not slack, if you know what I mean. It's been a busy year, and we're all tired, so it's nice to relax into being together with fewer outside demands, and into what the natural world has to offer us in the glorious springtime.

Thinking Aloud . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:32:00 +0000

. . . about Western Civ 2 . . .

Come join the fun!

Muhthuh's Day

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sun, 12 May 2013 22:25:00 +0000

I mean, it's been nice. The sun is shining. We had breakfast outside after Mass. My darling husband gave me a geranium, which is significant on a level with his giving me a hydrangea, which he did give me last year. The hydrangea is the other of the two flowers he hates most in all the world. You wanna know from sacrifice: go look at my red geranium in its basket hanging from the branches of the camellia tree by the back door and understand that red is the color of all martyrdoms large and small.

We are having the kind of May weather that has transience written all over it: everything rain-washed and cool, the green back yard dappled with late sunlight through the new leaves. The coreopsis are blazing against a backdrop of lily fronds. The roses are opening. I planted climbing roses this year, mostly, because they're tough and because I envisioned my front porch wreathed in fragrant bloom. That hasn't happened yet, but the buds are swelling, which is something. In the sunny garden by the driveway, the first of my New Day roses has unclenched one sweet yellow fist. In the backyard shade gardens, the ferns have unrolled their fishbone forms above the last of the white violets, and the clump of hostas I divided a few weeks back has become an entire bed of stirring green-gold.

I keep going outside to look at things, because if I don't pay attention it will all be gone, and I won't know where it went. That is, in a few weeks it will all be gone anyway, this almost-liquid greenness, consumed in the mosquito-clouded June heat. I keep making us eat our meals outside. I keep urging the children to sleep in the treehouse, which they did Friday night. In the dark I climbed up to read to them and say the rosary; for a long time, there we sat, looking down on the dimly shining roof of the big gray van, the sheen of the laurel leaves in the light from next door. The sky was cool and clouded, and the wind moved over us.

"This is beautiful," I said. I said it several times, in fact, until one child remarked, "We know."

"Well, it is," I said. "We should notice it."

"Why don't you sleep up here with us, then?"

It was a good question. Why didn't I? Because Daddy isn't sleeping up here was one answer. Because you are sleeping up here was another. Not that I wouldn't want to sleep with them -- heaven knows I've slept with them enough times before -- but . . . how do you say it? Sometimes grownups don't need to crash children's parties, even when the children have invited them, so that technically it's not crashing. Sometimes the grownup's job is to say, No, this is your experience. Mostly, I think, the grownup's job is to go sleep with the other grownup, because as comforting as the sleeping grownup presence might be for the children, the knowledge that the grownups are sleeping together in their own bed, having their own shut-eye party because that's what old people do after ten at night, is comforting on a deeper and less conscious level.

So that's what this grownup did. Rumor has it that one child came quietly inside, spent the night on the study futon, and crept back out again at daybreak to her sleeping bag in the tree, but not having seen it happen, I cannot comment on the veracity of this intelligence. Not commenting, too, is my job sometimes. Now that child has put her sleeping bag in the tree again, because the night is supposed to be clear, if a little chilly. My job in a minute is to start a fire in the firepit and set the outdoor table because really, we don't want to miss any of this.

Spiral-Bound Plans Are On the Way!

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sat, 11 May 2013 14:59:00 +0000

It's my hope that by next week the spiral-bound edition of Western Civ I will be available for purchase. It will be a little spendier than the perfect-bound version currently on sale, because for reasons that seem kind of opaque to me, producing a coil-bound book costs more than producing a regular paperback -- still, as with the current perfect-bound edition, we'll be offering the coil-bound at an introductory discount.

So much goodness! So little time! So many options for every budget!

I'll also be sharing my thoughts and ideas as I plan Western Civ II, to cover the Medieval and Renaissance eras. As I'm imagining things now, the format will be a little different, with materials arranged in units according to time period and options offered within those units. This is my favorite era, and there's just so much on offer that it's impossible to narrow things down to one spine text, for example. Still, the plans will include a weekly format with specific directions addressed to your student, so that essentially, once you've made some initial decisions, from week to week the course will teach itself. Of course, I'm still trying to envision how exactly to body this over on paper: maximum flexibility, but also maximum structure, to accommodate the needs of as many families as possible. But we'll work it out.

(cross-posted)

Western Civ I: Preview #1

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:59:00 +0000

For those of you having trouble previewing the Abandon Hopefully plans on the bookstore page, here's a little taste to get you started:

THE YEAR AT A GLANCE

SEMESTER ONE:

WEEK 1: EARLIEST CIVILIZATIONS/MESOPOTAMIA

WEEK 2: EARLIEST CIVILIZATIONS/EGYPT

WEEK 3: EARLIEST CIVILIZATIONS CONTINUED

WEEK 4: ISRAEL/KING DAVID

WEEK 5: ISRAEL/HEBREW POETRY

WEEK 6: GREECE/MYTHOLOGY/FORMAL ESSAY DUE

WEEK 7: GREECE/MYTHOLOGY/ILIAD

WEEK 8: GREECE/ILIAD

WEEK 9: GREECE/ILIAD/PLUTARCH

WEEK 10: GREECE/ILIAD

WEEK 11: GREECE/ODYSSEY

WEEK 12: GREECE/ODYSSEY/FORMAL ESSAY DUE

WEEK 13: GREECE/ODYSSEY

WEEK 14: GREECE/ANTIGONE

WEEK 15: GREECE/ANTIGONE/PHILOSOPHY

WEEK 16: GREECE/PHILOSOPHY

WEEK 17: CATCH-UP/REVIEW WEEK

WEEK 18: EXAM WEEK

SEMESTER TWO:

WEEK 19: ROME/EARLY DAYS/AENEID

WEEK 20: ROME/REPUBLIC/AENEID

WEEK 21: ROME/AENEID

WEEK 22: ROME/AENEID

WEEK 23: ROME/SHAKESPEARE/EMPIRE

WEEK 24: ROME/SHAKESPEARE/EMPIRE

WEEK 25: ROME/SHAKESPEARE/EMPIRE

WEEK 26: ROME/BEGIN RESEARCH PAPER

WEEK 27: ROME/START RESEARCH/ROUGH DRAFT OF ESSAY DUE

WEEK 28: ROME/EARLY CHURCH/RESEARCH/2^ND DRAFT DUE

WEEK 29: ROME/EARLY CHURCH/RESEARCH/FINAL DRAFT DUE

WEEK 30: SPRING BREAK/CATCH-UP/REVIEW WEEK

WEEK 31: ROME/EARLY CHURCH/RESEARCH PAPER

WEEK 32: ROME/EARLY CHURCH/RESEARCH PAPER

WEEK 33: EARLY CHURCH/AUGUSTINE/RESEARCH PAPER DUE

WEEK 34: EARLY CHURCH/AUGUSTINE

WEEK 35: REVIEW AND CATCH-UP

WEEK 36: EXAM WEEK

*****

SEMESTER ONE

WEEK ONE

	READ		LISTEN		WRITE
_ _ _ _ _ _ _	THE “TO THE STUDENT” SECTION IN THESE PLANS FOC 1 GREAT MYTHS: BABYLONIAN (ALL) US 1 BH 3-24 A: JFW 12-16 B: CC “DESCRIPTIVE ESSAYS” (BEGIN)	_	FWC 1	_ _ _	NOTEBOOK AND COMPOSITION ASSIGNMENTS BELOW GRAMMAR: A: JG ONE LESSON/EX B: K.I.S.S. ONE EX (“EX”=”EXERCISE”)

Notebook

History and religion: Begin your page with significant dates from your reading. Then narrate what you have read, providing an overview of these opening moments of ancient history, as well as background to your nascent study of scripture.

**You might opt to add some Mesopotamian art into your notebook here (either copies of actual art, or your own rendering of Mesopotamia-style art), and/or a piece of original creative writing (a story or poem, written by you, set in ancient Mesopotamia, or in the biblical world your reading describes). If you have begun your page with some cold hard data, this could stand in for your narration.

Literature: Consider what you learn of the Babylonian view of the world as expressed in these myths: what is the universe like? What are the gods like?

NB: We’ll just assume that everyone knows they aren’t real gods. Right now your job isn’t to compare them to the one true God and find them wanting. Assume for the moment that we all know and accept that they’re idols, and that in real life we aren’t persuaded by them as deities. For now, just do an end run around that thought, and focus on them as you might focus on some scientific phenomenon, or on any fictional character in literature, by being interested in them as they appear here, and in how other characters interact with them. Ask yourself: What is the relationship between man and his universe and man and his gods? What is the afterlife like?

And for future reference, in dealing with literature let’s assume that this is our MO. The job of the literary scholar is not to go looking for proofs of transcendental truth in literature (though they may well be there), but to be interested in the life of a work of literature for its own sake, as a scientist would be interested in the activity of microbes on a laboratory slide, not so much because they point to the existence and greatness of God (though he may rightly think that they do), as because they’re just interesting.

Composition:

A: JFW, read pp 12-16, do exercise on p. 17.

B: CC, “Descriptive Essays” – http://www.ck12.org/book/Commonsense-Composition/r1/section/1.1/ -- Learning Objectives to the first set of exercises. Write a descriptive essay on a topic of your choice.

Web resources

Myths of the World retold by Padraic Colum (assigned text)

http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/omw/index.htm.

Video: Civilizations: Ancient Mesopotamia (6 parts)

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc8m9DHxH4E

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh_NbU7n3Rg

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFxPXKBUDdE

Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG9XkIs32ow

Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqo_327znks

Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmMdzXgnv38

Video: Epic of Gilgamesh with 4,000-year-old lyre

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TSWEeBGhz4M

Interactive Iron-Age game

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/interactive/games/ironage_life/index.shtml

Random comments on writing about literature

http://abandonhopefully.blogspot.com/2009/05/random-comments-on-writing-about.html

(cross-posted)

PS: Pardon the few incidents of formatting weirdness. Also, all these links are live on the blog page, so you can preview them as well. That's just a taste of what the plans are full of.

Also, in the plans I have provided -- fear not! -- a key to those cryptic abbreviations: FOC is Warren Carroll's Founding of Christendom, US is the Understanding the Scriptures text from the Didache series, BH is Werner Keller's The Bible as History, and the A and B options listed refer to alternatives for composition and grammar. The A option uses Jensen's Format Writing and Jensen's Grammar, while the B option involves free online alternatives which I thought were really good: Commonsense Composition, a "flex-book" from the CK-12 site, and K.I.S.S. grammar at the high-school level.

Announcements

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:11:00 +0000

As you may already know, if you read yesterday's post and have sufficient peripheral vision to take in the sidebar as you read this, the first Abandon Hopefully Western-Civ plans are finished!

I'm beyond grateful to the friends who read and responded in great detail to my various drafts of these plans: Caroline, Elizabeth, Eva, Kimberly, Martha, and Sarah. Their feedback was beyond helpful, and if I may say so, I'm pleased with the results. What we have here is, perhaps, short on pretty -- I didn't include art images, for example -- but long on resources. In addition to lesson plans for a three-strand integrated course covering the history and literature of the ancient and classical world plus a side of scripture study, the book also includes extensive web resources covering not only extra background for history and literature, but also art, music, daily life, and other enriching elements. Each week's plans encourage further independent research on the student's part. Additionally, there are formal composition and grammar options for those who would like them, including free online alternatives. Most of the important texts for the course are also available as free online e-texts, so that while I recommend having hard copies of books to make notes in (in pencil! lightly! out of consideration for the next reader!), it is possible to do this course on a very short shoestring if you have to.

I've added sections on record-keeping, transcripts, evaluating student writing, and other issues related to homeschooling the high-school student. There's a comprehensive index of the web resources included in each week's plans, so that parents can easily preview them without having to flip through 36 weeks' worth of pages to find them.

This particular volume is perfect-bound, like any paperback book, because it has an ISBN number and will be available eventually through outlets like Amazon. If you buy this volume, just email me and I'll be happy to send you a .pdf file of the student plans to print out and put in your student's binder, since perfect-bound books are a little hard to photocopy from. A spiral-bound version, which will be offered for sale only through this blog and the Abandon Hopefully support blog, is in the works. Meanwhile, this "beta" version is offered at a reasonable discount, so if you're on a budget, beat the rush and snap it up now!

I'm now working on Western Civ II: Old World. This volume will cover the Medieval and Renaissance eras, with lesson plans in the same format and the same set of appendices. I've just been pre-reading Robert Wilken's The First Thousand Years as one "spine" option; it's meaty but engaging, dovetailing nicely with the place where our Western Civ I course leaves off, in the early Church and detailing the spread of Christianity over the globe in its first millennium. Other "background" books I plan to include are Thomas Woods' How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization and Belloc's Characters of the Reformation -- though if you like the Warren Carroll Christendom series and want to continue with them, that will be an option as well. We'll also be reading excerpts from Bede, Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon poetry, medieval lyrics, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, excerpts from The Canterbury Tales, a little Dante, sonnets, Shakespeare . . . It's a great year, and my aim is to have those plans available by midsummer, not least because my own son will be using them next year, and I gotta getta move on.

Western Civ I: Preview the inside! Or click the cover image in the sidebar!

(cross-posted)

April Was National Poetry Month

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 10 May 2013 01:33:00 +0000

And I don't really remember what I did, except that it mostly wasn't poetry writing. Friends, here are some highlights:

Oh, um, no, no, not that. We didn't do that. We didn't sing that song. Or anything like that. Instead, we

*had some rain.

*dug up vinca, which is now coming back, because it don't call itself vinca for nothing.

*watched asparagus come up in the rose garden, which is sort of creepy if it's not what you're expecting.

*had some more rain.

*cleaned house according to a strict daily schedule for about ten days, which ended last Friday.

*planted tomatoes, banana peppers, and cucumbers.

*had some more rain.

*went to the Farmers' Market, where the New Yorker lady who sells hostas invariably asks, if you happen to catch her eye, "You ready to gahden, honey?"

*Yes, yes, we are ready to gahden. Sell me some hostas! Quick! Before it rains again! Honey!

*planted hostas. Also peonies, Shasta daisies, stonecrop, lamb's-ears, and Russian sage. For the win.

*took in a stray terrier who would have been the perfect dog for my mother, if only he hadn't turned out to belong to a lady up the street. For the dog-rescue non-win.

*acquired a treehouse. Definitely for the win.

*had more rain, which I'm sure was a win for somebody, but left us beginning to feel mildewy about the ears.

*went to the Farmers' Market some more.

*acquired an Eagle Scout. Win-Win-Win. But it also rained.

*And rained.

*remarked that the water in the East Fork river is about up to the bridge we have to cross to get to the Bi-Lo, church, and just about everywhere else we go.

*remarked that not only is the water in the river up to the bridge, but it's also probably warmer than what comes out of our taps right now.

*acquired houseguests. Last time something went out, it was Christmas, we had company, and what went out was the furnace.

*perceived a fateful pattern.

*lost houseguests. Used our YMCA memberships extensively for hot-shower workouts.

*almost acquired a new hot-water heater today, BUT NO! Home-warranty company ordered wrong one.

*offered it up.

*read today that Pope Francis says that Christians who complain become Mr. And Mrs. Whiner.

*offered it up twice. For the win.

*had some rain.

*finished some work. Not poetry, but some of you will be happy. It's kind of in "beta" right now, as they say, so on sale at a decent discount. Check it out.

April is National Poetry Month

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 15:19:00 +0000

So I'm trying to re-light the fire under myself, to do something with this poem cycle, Richeldis of Walsingham, which I began . . . twelve years ago? Maybe? Parts of which I still like, other parts of which not so much. Mostly I need to figure out why I'm writing it, what bigger picture gives it urgency and shape . . . if any. Right now it's all kind of a mess, but I'm not quite ready to let it go.

Here's a piece now:

Ora

Biddan: Ic bidde. We bidden.
Bed-making. Bidden, the soul’s housewife sweeps
Clean the clod-cold hearth, furnishes fire
To see by, with sighing more wordful than words.
In the heavy bound breviary, turned to on table,
Its green knots and gold brooch-bright, unbroachable
As Himself the Heaven-King, the way-in widens.

So she might have written, if she had written.
So she might have said -- Ic bidde. We bidden.
So I write, because the real words lie hidden.

*

Veni Creator Spiritus –
A single voice

Rises, falls
Againt the chapel’s clunch walls.

Waves rise
And fall in disordered furrows

On the distant, rounded shore
Washing something closer

And closer
To landfall, though still unlooked-for

As the future
Manages always to appear

Out of nowhere and become
The present, the past, the outcome.

*

Still, at home, the warm-flanked hounds
Sigh and twitch on the hearthstones. All her grounds –

The little lambent curve of river, the trees
Catching at the wind as

It hurries inland, the flat meadow
Humped with new-raked hay, the dun cow

A dim, breathing shape beneath the moon –
This mortal earth sleeps as if alone

Hear It, O Ye Dead!

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 04:00:00 +0000

Ora Pro Nobis

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 01:30:00 +0000

In the Silence of Saturday

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 20:46:00 +0000

Of course here it's not really that silent, even with the children outside. Luke and Joe from around the block are here to play, and Helier and Crispina are up in the tree house with them, not shouting for the moment for some reason. The house is quiet enough: just the gurgle of the aquarium filter and the dog's snoring. For the last hour I've been doing prep work for tomorrow's dinner, putting lamb chops to marinate in olive oil, garlic, rosemary and mint, and making spanakopita -- in a casserole dish, let me hasten to add, not in impressive triangular filo-wrapped packets, the construction of which just seems like a potential exercise in total emotional fragmentation to me -- so that all I have to do after Mass in the morning is put it all in the oven. Right now dessert is baking, little filo tartlet shells filled with slivered almonds and glazed with raspberry compote. I made this recipe up off the top of my head, knowing that what's really for dessert is whatever's left over from chocolate breakfast, and I hope it's edible.

In a minute I have to go shower and find something suitably Easterish to put on for the Vigil, where Aelred is singing the Exultet and I'm cantoring the Litany of Saints. Turn back up here at midnight, and you'll hear one other thing we're singing. Will have sung, by then.

Waiting, waiting. That's what this day is about: the thisness and thatness of making the time go by. The disciples, of course, thought that the entire rest of their lives, the dreary aftermath, would comprise a seeming eternity of thisnesses and thatnesses, all the little meaningless actions by which meaningless lives fritter themselves away in a vacant universe. We who know how the story turned out only have to fritter for an afternoon, but somehow that afternoon always seems to go on a lifetime.

My favorite reading for Holy Saturday:

Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.

Hell trembles. Waiting, we don't tremble. The universe isn't vacant. The King who was kissed will wake.

Holy Saturday Lamentations

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Jerusalem, Jerusalem: Offices of Tenebrae for Holy Saturday

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 02:30:00 +0000

Lament like a virgin, O my people:
Howl, ye shepherds, in sackcloth and ashes:
For the day of the Lord is at hand,
Great and exceeding bitter.

Gird yourselves and lament, ye priests:
Howl, ye ministers of the altar:
Cast up ashes upon you:
For the day of the Lord is at hand,
Great and exceeding bitter.

Full Matins and Lauds of Holy Saturday . . .

Reproaches for Tenebrae

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 22:00:00 +0000

How God Thinks

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 21:51:00 +0000

Pope Francis:

God always thinks with mercy: do not forget this. God always thinks with mercy: our merciful Father. God thinks like a father who awaits the return of his child and goes to meet him, sees him coming when he is still far away . . . What does this mean? That each and every day he went out to see if his son was coming home. This is our merciful Father. It is the sign that he was waiting for him from the terrace of his house; God thinks like the Samaritan that does not approach the victim to commiserate with him, or look the other way, but to rescue him without asking for anything in return, without asking if he was Jew, if he was pagan, a Samaritan, rich or poor: he does not ask anything—he does not ask these things, he asks for nothing. He goes to his aid: This is how God thinks. God thinks like the shepherd who gives his life to defend and save his sheep.

More . . .

Mercy

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Obediens

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 14:54:00 +0000

Crucifixus

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:37:00 +0000

The Watch He Kept

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 01:27:00 +0000

NOTES ON WATCHING IN THE NIGHT

On an ordinary sunny day six years ago this summer, my father suffered an utterly unexpected heart attack and, after lingering for two days, died. The last night of his life, when we all knew that he would die before another night, Aelred and I took it in turns to sit up with him, to bear him company while my poor shattered mother got some sleep.

I forget how long our watches lasted -- two hours, maybe, or three. In my off hours, I lay covered with a thin hospital blanket in a recliner in the dark waiting room, listening to the breathing of strangers around me, all waiting even in their shallow sleep for whatever the morning would bring, joy or heartbreak or more waiting. Then Aelred would come in and touch my shoulder, and I would get up and take the elevator to the eternal bleached daylight of the intensive-care floor, to sit on a cold plastic chair at my father's bedside, while his blue eyes searched the ceiling and a machine did his breathing for him.

I knew what the morning would bring. If my father didn't die in the night, as I sat by him holding his hand, it was a certainty that he would not outlive it for long. Already his fingers felt chilly in mine. Though he was awake and sometimes looked at me, his was the intent, uncomprehending gaze of a newborn baby, who knows that he has heard a voice somewhere before, but has never connected it to a face. To all appearances, the ceiling made at least as interesting a study to him as I did.

As I sat there talking to him, singing to him, praying, saying nothing, I felt -- as far as I can remember -- nothing. The night was sunk too deep in itself, and I was too far beyond sadness at that point. Earlier that evening, a century ago at least, Aelred and I had gone together to the hospital chapel and jointly broken down in tears, he as much as I, because he loved my father. Then, I was thinking to myself, We'll never be happy again. How could we be? How could we be happy without my father's laugh, his aptitude for losing himself in thought, his twisting a forelock of his hair as he scratched notes on a legal pad with a yellow number-two pencil? How dared the sun even come up any more, I thought, if my father wasn't going to see it, if it wasn't going to slant through the windows of an upstairs room where he sat drawing a goldfinch in oil pastel? How dared it? How could we dare to want it to?

I had thought those thoughts until my brain couldn't think them any more. In the middle of the night, I put them all aside to sit and watch, knowing that I would do anything, throw any switch, to send us down a different track with a happier ending, and knowing also, in numb resignation, that there was nothing that I could do.

Not a day goes by that I don't think of my father and miss him. I offer every Mass I go to for the happiness of his soul. I think less often these days of the actual event of his dying, but tonight, praying before the Blessed Sacrament on the altar of repose, amid its Gethsemane flowers, I remembered that long dark night.

I thought of the disciples, trying to watch and falling asleep, and at first what I imagined was that I knew what they had felt like. I don't remember ever being so tired beyond tired, so freighted with sorrow, as I was then. It's a wonder I didn't fall asleep there in intensive care, upright on the hard chair with monitors blinging all around me. If sorrow beyond feeling made me tired, I suppose it also propped me up. Though grief weighs several tons, and you want to pass out after an hour of carrying it around, at times there's also something weirdly bracing about it.

Then it occurred to me: sitting with my father, I had known something that they could not have known with any certainty. I knew that the person with whom I sat was going to die. Really I think I'd known it from the moment I first walked into the hospital, though maybe I'm just the kind of person to whom catastrophe always seems the most likely outcome. At any rate, by the time I came to be sitting by that bedside in the bowels of the night, I had relinquished any last lingering claim I had to hope -- not, maybe, to the larger kind of hope that tries, at least, to see beyond the grave, but to the here-and-now hope that in a week or so we'd all be laughing at the scare Dad had given us.

I don't know what he knew, if anything, about his condition just then. I don't know what he saw or heard, or what he was able to hope as he lay in that strange in-between state, in which the rest of us in the conscious world were doing all the waiting and grieving.

In Gethsemane, however, the situation was reversed. It was the person soon to die who knew, beyond the faintest whisper of a doubt, that the morning would deliver Him to His death. He also knew perfectly well, I imagine, that despite His having dropped broad hints to all and sundry, and especially to His particular friends, those friends could not possibly have digested those hints so as to know what He knew. The sleep they slept was the sleep of innocence. The watch He kept was the wakefulness of knowledge and grief and dread, as the hours stalked past and the fatal torches guttered in the distance.

And, kneeling, I thought to myself, No: I know how that feels, a little.

Well, all right, I don't know. I won't claim to know the mind of God at that or any other time. Still, my heart went out to Him, dreading the day the Lord had made. Like every other day it was the day of His own making and choosing and loving, yet the thought of it brought him sorrow beside which my own sorrows are like dandelion seeds on the wind.

At the end of the Holy Thursday service I knelt and prayed a while, to comfort someone beyond my paltry power to console. Then I got up to look for the rest of the family, who as it turned out had already gone home. So I went back and knelt there again for a little. And then I came home myself, and I read to the children, and now I'm sitting writing this in the quiet house, the dog snoring beside me on the futon. I watch, he sleeps. In a few minutes, because whom are we kidding here, I'll go to sleep, too, though my sleep is hardly all that innocent. Whether I watch or whether I sleep, the morning will bring what it brings.

Holy Thursday Seder Menu

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:03:00 +0000

roast chicken leg quarters with garlic and rosemary
spinach salad with almonds and cranberries
rice pilaf
haroseth
homemade matzoh (read: firecake)
baklava
red wine
coffee

Here's the order of service we use. I set the table with blue-and-white dishes, silver, and candles -- this year I put three tall votives in a wooden bowl filled with sprigs of thyme. On the cabinet, a big vase of rosemary, for remembrance. And now my hands smell like rosemary; I wonder if the baklava I'm about to make will taste of it . . .