What DID we do all day?

Montessori Buy, Sell, Swap

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 19:18:00 +0000

Hello! Do any of my readers have any leads on a good Montessori Buy, Sell, Swap group on Facebook? I found a couple, but I want to make sure I use one that is reputable and bustling. I wasn't paying attention when Yahoo! Groups shut down, so I don't know what happened to Montessori Swap.

Leave a message if you have any good intel!

Thank you!

New Work Plan Style

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 21:08:00 +0000

2019-2020 work plans, New style

The work plans/journals the boys used last year were different than those they used in the past. For about five years they used laminated, card-stock work plans combined with paper clips that they could move from one side of the card to the other as they finished their work. I wrote a post about this style of card five years ago. To summarize it quickly:

The cards were usually divided into daily and weekly sections.
The paperclips for the daily work needed to be returned to the left side of the card at the end of each day.
The paperclips for the weekly work were refreshed at the end of the week.

Here is a photograph (below) of Me Too's work plan as it looked in June of 2019.

Work Plan: Old Style

The boys' cards were just for work they did individually, whether independently or with me. I had my own card like this for the work that we did altogether as a family, and still do. Their individual work last year generally took 2-3 hours. I try to limit the work we do altogether as a family to 1.5 hours. Each year a little more of the work on the family plan seems to slip off and make its way onto their individual plans. There is also, of course, work that isn't on the plan but would be considered part of the school day if they went to a traditional school: field trips, music practice, physical fitness, literature, etc.,

This worked well for us for a long time because I am what I call a "thread" homeschooler. We decide which "threads of inquiry" will be active, I organize my resources, we start, I keep track of where we are, when we decide it's time to stop we stop, the next time we pick up that thread we pick up where we left off. I've never been the type of homeschool mom who has an urge to fit things into a school year or stop and start things on certain dates. I own an staggeringly large number of magnetic bookmarks, my favorite way to keep my place.

Out with the old, in with the new

We've liked these paperclip work plans for so long I never thought I'd move away from them. So why did we? Kal-El will be considered a high school freshman in the fall of 2020. Two years ago I started to research what some of the colleges he may eventually consider will expect him to have studied in high school. Working backward, I had a pretty good idea of a few things he needed to finish before the end of eighth grade. To that end, there were just a couple of things that I felt we didn't make enough progress on during seventh grade, and we had to make up some lost ground during the summer of 2019.

When the boys caught on to the new idea that I might have some timing goals they quickly expressed an interest in having some control of their own. They wanted to see "the big picture." They wanted an idea of what I expected in a year, an idea of how that might break down into a week, and the ability to be ahead or behind within a single year as they saw fit. I took this to be a good sign that 10 years or so of mostly-Montessori education had done what it was intended to do.

For these reasons, I tried something different last year, and it worked out very well. I'll admit there was a time around March when I looked at Kal-El's progress and was concerned. He was drastically far ahead in a couple subjects and significantly far behind in a couple others. I must say, he sounded JUST like his father when he said, "Mom, I know what I'm doing, I've got this." And as it turns out, he did.

I started by printing 36 weeks worth of weekly work plans like these:

They were not very different from our paperclip work plans. They represent the lines of inquiry that are open, or specific resources we are using, and there are boxes to check that represent the number of times of week something needs to be done in order to make the amount of progress we have planned. Because our records don't disappear daily or weekly like they did with the paperclips, the boys have greater control over their own ability to work ahead or behind. As always, what constitutes a "day's work" has been verbally established by mutual agreement, usually over a long period of time. We do not tend to start a bunch of new things at once. New things are feathered in, and figuring out the expectations is not a sudden or painful process.

All of this went into a 2" binder I prepared for each of them. I bought and made tabs for each week of the year. Behind each weekly tab went a copy of the weekly work plan, the week's scope and sequence for subjects that are using multiple resources in a week, and any printables they needed that weren't already bound by subject. We use Everbind binders because the lay-flat design doesn't seem to crack at the seams like other binders do. A 2.5" would have been better, but I already had this size. I also like the sleeves on the front so that I could personalize each boy's binder with their favorite things on the cover (below).

Five years of tweaking our paperclip work plans had given me a fairly good idea of how much we can accomplish in a day, a week, and in a year. Last year, for some subjects it was as simple as figuring out how many lessons we needed to do in this year and dividing by the number of weeks. I try to never schedule anything for more than four days a week. This doesn't mean the boys don't have school work five days a week, it just means they don't have every subject every day. It also makes it easier to leave a day for a field trip or necessary life appointments.

Some boxes have a line where they can record a chapter number or exercise number. I plan include a little more of that on our 2020-21 work plans. I keep a bookshelf in our classroom stocked with books that coordinate with our lessons. The boys recorded what they read at the bottom of the page. I can put the book names in myself if I have something in particular I want them to read. This year that will look a little different and be on a separate page because I needed a little more room.

This style lets us keep what we liked about our old work plans: the ability for the individual child to decide which days to do which works and do them in the order they wish. The switch to paper plans lets them keep record of working ahead and keeps them aware of when they are in danger of falling behind.

You may have noticed that there are a couple of subjects that are scheduled five days a week. Last year was the first time ever that I used some resources that were both intended to take one school year and have a schedule that had not been prepared by me. Unfortunately some of these were designed to run five days a week for 33-36 weeks. I am not a fan of this. It only takes one bad day for the pre-printed schedule to be an absolute mess. I prefer a timeline that is not tied to a particular day of the week. I like to call them "day one," "day two," etc., and never schedule more than four days. I also prefer a 32-week schedule. We still work 36 weeks, but we prefer the last four weeks to be lighter so we can take advantage of nicer weather when it comes. However, if I want these resources to truly only take one school year, the idea of defining the work, dividing it into segments, and completing each segment on a shorter timeline of one week is valid. I knew the curriculum was like this when I chose it, but liked it enough otherwise to choose it regardless. When faced with this type of schedule monster you have four choices: ditch the curriculum, ditch the schedule (so you are not confined to a year,) do some extra work (homework, weekend work), or find parts to eliminate so it fits. The first couple of weeks the boys wound up with the first "homework" in their lives, as they had to spend some of their weekend doing work they didn't complete. We suffered through some long Fridays as they cleaned up work in areas where they procrastinated. After a while they started to do a little extra on their lighter days and/or remembered not to skip a day in certain subjects. Due to differences in personality and experience, some kids would have a hard time emotionally not sticking to the schedule. Some kids just delight in doing Monday's work on Monday and Tuesday's work on Tuesday. My boys are so used to those paperclip plans that the flexibility is just spilling over to this as well. My oldest practices his violin many hours a day and finds he would rather do a little work on the weekend to give the weekdays a little more breathing room. He doesn't even feel compelled to comply to the idea of "week" versus "weekend."

Where applicable, I put one week's scope and sequence at a time behind each week's tab. Below is one week's worth of Anatomy. The boys put an X in the box when they complete a segment.

Sometimes the scope and sequence was formatted in a way that didn't split up behind each tab, such as the grammar scope and sequence below. In that case I made a separate tab for "Grammar" at the front of the binder and the boys referred to that when they did their work. I could have made extra copies of this, cut them up, and put them on a separate piece of paper for each week but didn't want to take the time.

For your reference, I've made a list of some of our resources from last year. Remember this was the 2019-2020 school year, grades six and eight. I plan to write a post with the resources we will use during 2020-2021 soon.

Math: Life of Fred, 4x/week . Montessori presentations 2-3x/week
Kal-El: Life of Fred Pre-Algebra 1 with Biology
Life of Fred Pre-Algebra 2 with Economics
Me-Too: Life of Fred Pre-Algebra 0 with Physics
Life of Fred Pre-Algebra 1 with Biology
Both: Montessori second section of squaring and cubing
Keys of the Universe album.


Science:
Anatomy:  Guest Hollow Junior Anatomy Curriculum 5x/week
See Also:  Life of Fred above. Thanks to Fred we are doubled up on science this year.

Grammar:
Guest Hollow Beowulf's Grammar.

Writing:
Kal-El:  Writing With Skill, Level 1. Second half. Did the first half in 2018-2019.
Me-Too: Intermediate Language Lessons, Part 2

Other Language Arts:
  Editor in Chief Level 1(both boys).

  All About Spelling
Kal-El: Level 6-7
Me Too: levels 5-7

Copywork: The Founding Fathers: Quotes, Quips and Speeches

Geography:

Pin it! Maps.
World and Continents bundle
USA and US History bundle.

Scripture:
Herein Is Love, Vol. 3: Leviticus

Bible verse memory system.

       hymn study (see "music" below)

History:
Story of the World: Volume 3: Early Modern Times.

Beautiful Feet Books:
  Intermediate Early American History just the end, then start
  Modern American and World

Spanish:
Somos Asi: En Sus Marcas

Music:
violin
piano
  The History of Classical Music. Beautiful Feet
Federation of Music Clubs Music Theory Test (level six this year) Practice tests are available
here.
Hymn Study: All volumes of Hymns for a Kid's Heart. I discussed these in detail in  in this post.
American Music:  Sing for America by Opal Wheeler.

Habits:
Boyhood and Beyond, Bob Schultz

Government/Economics/Civics:
Tuttle Twins Series

Art:
Art Lab
Drawing Lab
Paint Lab
Clay Lab
Art for Kids: Drawing, Kathryn Temple

Picture Study portfolios by Simply Charlotte Mason.

Shakespeare:
  Shakespeare in Three Steps. Twelfth Night.

Poetry:
  The Poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier: A Readers' Edition

Went to Bed Montessori, Woke Up Charlotte Mason

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 13:21:00 +0000

Kal-El, Once Upon a Time

A funny thing happened to me last year. I went to bed one night a Montessorian and woke up the next morning in Charlotte Mason Land. (Is there a word for people who use the Charlotte Mason method in their homeschools? Like "Masonites" or something?)

Those of you who follow me on Instagram @whatdidwedoallday are probably not surprised. For those of you who only follow the blog, I am much more active on Instagram lately than in this space. It is a much easier place to share the little moments from day to day. This space is good for the "big idea" times though.

Anyway, this was all a big surprise to me. I didn't even know it was "Charlotte Mason" until I had been doing it for months and months. It certainly wasn't a planned transition although it was certainly a child-led transition based on observation and response. Last fall I wrote about how our school year started out with a funky feel and how I fixed it. I provided the boys with more of the types of learning experiences they were craving and asking for and less of the types they weren't. All of a sudden they couldn't get enough literature-based learning. At the same time, all of the things that seemed like "peripherals" in our Montessori-inspired homeschool started to take on a starring role. Our day was chock full of history stories, literature, composer study, poetry, narration, dictation, copywork, picture study, drawing, notebooks full of little bits of our "favorites" from everything we were learning, a notebook full of interesting vocabulary words, Bible reading, hymn studies, Bible verses memorization, living math books, and the study of virtues and/or habits. ALL of these things are things I introduced to the boys because of my study of Montessori. All of them are part of a Montessori environment. In fact, I'm not sure that what we are doing has "left" Montessori at all. Maybe this is what Montessori looks like as the children approach adolescence? As you run out of "presentations" that have "materials" the elements that remain have their day in the sun.

I don't know for sure and the days of "dying to know" what happens now in a "real Montessori environment" are behind me. Kal-El will be twelve this December and is nearing the end of "Montessori elementary." Maria Montessori had some very interesting things to say about adolescents, but the path isn't mapped in the same way that it was for the previous developmental stages. We have no plans to move to a farm this year either. If you would like to learn more about how Montessori can look in adolescence outside of an Erkinder program I recommend looking at the Montessori Rocks website. But even beyond the Montessori crystal ball going dark, I've been teaching the boys at home now with Montessori observation of the child and preparation of the teacher and environment at the heart of our homeschool for many years. I feel good going forward with that observation and preparation as my guide regardless of what the result is called or whether it matches what someone else would do. However, I can tell you this, it matches a WHOLE LOT of what the Charlotte Mason method does.

I searched to find resources to fill our new needs and little ways to make my life as a their homeschooling guide a little easier. I wasn't confident that I would find any because all of these were areas where I had never found a lot of resources via the Montessori literature I was reading or the Montessori companies I was used to frequenting. I have a theory I am nurturing that these elements play a big part in a Montessori environment but are talked about less simply because they lack special "materials." I wonder if because they take up so few album pages in relation to presentations that have "materials" they look less important on paper. I have a feeling trained Montessori elementary guides have been taught the place of these elements in the environment but their training, specific to multi-age classrooms of thirty, wouldn't translate to the homeschool if they did try to pass it on. I don't know, it's just a theory.

Despite my misgivings I did find a lot of help, but over time I realized all the help I was finding had "Charlotte Mason" written on it. So, I found some things to read about Charlotte Mason. I have to say I am confused. How did she know how *I* was going to want to homeschool *my* kids?

I have no intention of attempting to become an expert on Charlotte Mason, but I do enjoy reading about how to do the jobs I do as a mother, wife, and teacher better. I am finding myself continually excited to find interesting writings that apply so specifically to the things I do with my boys every day. As I do this reading I keep thinking things like "I wish I had know about that resource/company when I was looking for Montessori picture study help," "I wish I had known this information about fitting habit formation into a Montessori homeschool," or, "I wish I had this training in teaching my Montessori child narration."

So, I will continue to share on Instagram and, when I have something bigger to say, here on the blog. Is it Montessori? Is it Mason? I don't know. I have to say that I think that anyone who carefully observes children is bound to reach some conclusions in common. I've also said it before that a Montessori homeschool isn't going to look like a Montessori school and maybe that makes it look a lot more like Charlotte Mason sometimes.

I'm not actively "trying" to emulate a Charlotte Mason homeschool. We have been a Montessori-inspired homeschool for a very long time and this is just what grew from that. There are hints of all the Charlotte Mason we do in the Montessori literature and there are hints of Montessori things we do in the Charlotte Mason literature. There are Charlotte Mason purists just as there are Montessori purists and I'm sure I will make neither of those groups happy.

For those of you who have Montessori-inspired homeschools or even Montessori classrooms, I plan to share those resources that I wish I had earlier in our Montessori primary and elementary journeys. I hope they can be some help to you if you can get past the fact that the books and companies may have the words "Charlotte Mason" in the title. There are probably some of you who have been following Charlotte Mason's methods all along and taking some inspiration here regardless. I love hearing anyone's Montessori story or Mason story or any story in-between so I hope that some of you will share those with me in the comments.

Family Work: Our Scripture Reading, Memorization, and Hymn Study Resources

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 21:55:00 +0000

This photo is just snippet of one of the bookcases in our family room. As indicated in this post, our Montessori homeschool is following more of a Charlotte Mason structure this year. Our work period now consists of three distinct blocks of time: family work, guided work, and individual work. We start our morning with our family work which some call morning time. After our Family work is completed the boys eat a quick snack. Then, one child starts independent work while the other child starts guided work with me. Then, we switch. Kal-El gets mom first on even days, Me Too on odd. Most of this work consists of things that have been on their work plans in the past. I just restructured things this year so that all the things we can do together are lumped at the start of our day. I also separated the things they needed to do separately from each other but with mom or things I wanted to keep an eye on from things they could do completely alone.

In January I talked about how we added purposeful time with scripture to the beginning of our day. Today I wanted to share some of the resources we've been using during that time (affiliate links are included with most for your convenience).

This segment of our morning time/family work includes scripture memory, reading from the Bible, hymn study, and prayer.

We start with scripture memory. We are by no means keeping up with the Awana kids, but I did want a more organized approach to our memory work than we had in the past. I decided I wanted to start with perhaps the 100 most-beloved Bible verses. To keep it simple, I went with a a list of "The 100 Most -Read Bible Verses at BibleGateway.com."

We are learning them in order. Everyday the boys take turns reciting the one's that we have mastered. The verses on the page I linked are NIV. We read daily from an NIV Bible but prefer to memorize Old King James because the rhythm makes them easier to memorize. So, I copied the verses by hand on to index cards using the King James and numbered each card at the bottom. I keep them in the pink index card box on the bookcase in the picture at the top of this post. Kal-El recites the odd cards on odd days; Me Too recites the odd cards on even days. Kal-El checks Me Too's work and vice-versa. Right now we only know about 13 of these and it only takes a few minutes. We'll have to see what happens as the list gets longer.

Next, we read a chapter of the Bible from this NIV, Life Application Study Bible. My husband likes his Bible to have as few "extras" as possible. They boys and I on the other hand love all the footnotes. When Me Too picked his own NIrV Bible, he was adamant that it have "footnotes" and a soft "leather" cover like mom's (Kal-El's hardcover keeps separating from the spine). He picked the Kids' Quest Study Bible. At any rate, when I am reading to the kids it is really nice to be able to glance down at a footnote when Jesus does something confusing like command a fig tree to wither and die and explain what just happened. I feel like our family Bible has never failed to have a footnote when I've needed one.

We are not reading the Bible in any particular order right now. We read a chapter a day most days and we read a full book before moving on to another one. They boys have been picking which book to read next usually based on something they are interested in. They chose Matthew about a month ago and we've decided to continue in the Gospels leading up to Easter. However, they are adamant that we read Judges after that. This is the boys' favorite part of the day. They always say "more please" when I stop reading. I love that they demonstrate an attitude that seems to say "this is the most important book in the world and the things in it are the most important things we will learn." I'm not even sure how that happened.

Next we study a hymn. One I thing I do is own a copy of the two hymnals our church regularly uses. I take mine to church even though they have them in the pews and I put a check mark next to the hymns every time they sing them. That way I can remember which hymns are popular at our church and can make sure they know them for when they start attending the adult service rather than children's church (seventh grade). Our church uses Majesty Hymns and Hymns Modern and Ancient. I used our family address stamp to mark the inside of the front cover in case I leave them on accident. I also noticed our church only owned Majesty Hymns in red so I bought a blue one.

We have been singing straight out of the hymnals. However I recently discovered a resource for hymn study that I really love. I bought all four volumes of Hymn's for a Kid's Heart. I love that the title reminds me of another favorite resource of mine, Honey for a Child's Heart (literature recommendations complied by a Christian.). But I really love is that each hymn is introduced with a story, often a story about a child. For example, in volume one they introduce Holy, Holy, Holy with a story called "The Boy Who Thanked God" about the composer of the hymn as a child. There is often a separate devotional story in addition. There are beautiful illustrations. They provide several Bible versus that relate to the hymn and a prayer that relates to the message of the story. They also provide the complete four-part sheet music (so your child can learn to follow a regular hymnal) and all of the verses. Each book also comes with a CD that has children (children's choir and soloists) singing the hymns with full orchestral accompaniment. The boys feel they are "very grand" arrangements. They like grand arrangements.

As part of preparing our hearts for Easter, we chose to begin working in Volume Four today, Passion. Coincidentally we had just read about Palm Sunday in the book of Mark and the story was about the role of children on the original Palm Sunday and the special power a child praising God has to silence Satan. We sang "All Glory, Laud and Honor."

Separate from the check marks I make in my hymnals at church, I had been compiling a list I call "hymns I think my kids should know no matter what." I can happily report that nearly every hymn that was on my list to date is included in these books already.

We sing the same hymn for as many days as it takes until they seem to know it comfortably but not necessarily have the lyrics memorized. I like that these books have so many different elements so I can split them up and do a different element each day for a while. So that we don't forget what we've learned, whenever repeating the newest hymn yet again seems a little stale I let the boys pick one of the hymns we've already learned instead (Kal-El on odd days, Me Too on even days. Are you sensing a trend here?).

Finally, we close with a prayer. It could be the one in the hymn book, or a spontaneous prayer said by one of us. However, if you are looking for an unusual resource for some thought-provoking prayers I can suggest "Prayers at 8:30" by Stan Schmidt, the author of the Life of Fred math series. It has 104 unusual prayers each with an illustration. You can read more about it through the link and on that page there is a link that provides sample pages.

EDITED TO ADD: Thanks to my current blog crush, Farmhouse Schoolhouse (be sure to check her out on Instagram as well), I was recently made aware of two new resources: Rich and Rooted Passover, and Slow and Sacred Advent. These two e-books by Jennifer Naraki look like a great way to guide some of your scripture time during these seasons. You can view a sample page of Rich and Rooted Passover here.

Attributes

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 16:57:00 +0000

post contains affiliate links

Here Me Too is working on "attributes" work (set theory, patterning, deductive reasoning). You can see behind him Kal-El is working on the flags of Asia with our Pin It! Maps. We have these sorting circles. You could use yarn, ribbon or string. We also have these Attribute Blocks. I can't think of a way around needing those if you are supplementing your homeschool with this work. The circles have a 20" diameter and are collapsible. There are 60 blocks in the block set. They consist of five shapes in three colors, two sizes, and two thicknesses. Our larger pieces are about 3" x 3". You can get a "jumbo" version of this set with bigger blocks but I don't know how full your circles would get when you use a lot of pieces at once.

We use our sets with task cards from ETC Montessori. The boys completed the lower elementary set in the fall and I think they started the upper elementary after Christmas.

Lower elementary attributes cards
Upper elementary attributes cards

The lower elementary set has the advantage of coming with a small teacher's album of sorts including presentations. It is not a perfect material. It worked well enough. However, some things were very poorly thought out. For example, it comes with "H mats" and grids (2x2, 4x4) to place your block on but the squares for placing your blocks are smaller than the blocks. Also, there is a game at the end that is unplayable. It seems like nobody actually tried to USE the material.

The upper elementary set doesn't come with a manual. I called about this and they said "the instructions are on the cards." Sort of. Some cards make more sense than others. Also, it seems from the cards that these should have come with a set of labels for choosing labels for your rings but didn't include any. We write them on paper or on little dry erase boards which they prefer.

The task card Me Too was working from looked like this:

Check out the cute paper clip! A company named Avirgo sells these on Amazon. We use them to keep the boys places in card sets as they work through them. The have dozens of different kinds. We have Star Wars, Minions, and Harry Potter.

The card tells him to place certain blocks in the circles as drawn. The thickness of the outline tells you if it is thin or thick. If you are teaching a kid to do these, it is important that the next step be labelling the circles. Sometimes Me Too tries to add the remaining blocks as instructed because it doesn't tell you to make the labels. This can go very wrong very fast. If they place the selected blocks, label, THEN add blocks it goes perfectly.

Diagonals of Polygons

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:58:00 +0000

We reviewed polygon nomenclature today. We built with the geometric sticks on a white board for ease of labeling and drawing diagonals. I showed them the diagonals of a pentagon. Me Too asked to draw the diagonals of the heptagon and was eager to try it out on more shapes. Kal-El said he wasn't interested in doing any more shapes and suggested Me Too continue alone while he did something else. Me Too continued on and did the octagon, nonagon and decagon.

Meanwhile, Kal-El reappeared with some graph paper. Our work in Life of Fred recently covered placing points on a graph. Unprompted, Kal-El drew a graph and plotted the points we already knew (number of sides, number of diagonals): (5, 5) and (6, 8). Then he connected the points (with a geometric stick at first, but it got bulky so he eventually used it as a straight edge) and used his graph to try to predict what Me Too would discover on the white board.

He was disappointed that it didn't work. Me Too was getting different results. I explained that this kind of graph works well when a progression is linear but that the relationship between number of sides and diagonals isn't linear. I told him I think that the word for the relationship would be exponential but I'm not sure. He suggested that there might be a formula. So, I looked it up.

Here she is: n(n-3)/2

We worked the formula together for the heptagon we had already completed to make sure it worked. Then Kal-El used it to predict Me Too's results for his remaining polygons.

I suggested he try to think of a polygon relationship that would be linear and he decided on the number of sides and the number of diagonals leaving each vertex. We drew this graph together.

Narration and Dictation

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 21:03:00 +0000

I found two resources lately that have been a big help with our narration and dictation work. As many of you know copywork, narration and dictation are a part of the Montessori experience. One would find engaging things the children are reading in the natural course of their studies and choose excerpts to practice. I have a tendency to forget to do this (I've never once remembered to do this). I also wanted a little more guidance as to how long the excerpts should be at the start and how they should change as the child progresses. For those reasons we have supplemented our Montessori work with Writing with Ease by Susan Wise Bauer for the past few years. This year we reached level three and the dictation got a little tough. I would read the excerpt for dictation many times, many times more than implied in the book, and the boys still would not remember the whole thing in order to write it down.

I asked for help on the Well-Trained Mind forums and someone kindly pointed me to Susan's videos on YouTube. I didn't even know that she had a series of videos on YouTube. I have since watched them all and really enjoyed them. I know many of you also use WWE and may not know about these videos. In particular, I wondered if many of you were also getting stuck on dictation at level three. You will see in the video that this takes a long time and many repetitions. So long, that it takes two videos to show her son's work.

I now work with my sons in my own style, but structured the way Susan works with her son in the video and they now are able to do the dictations. However, as you can see, this is no longer a five-minute endeavor (16 for her) and it has made it harder to do WWE every day. I worried that this would be a problem because I already felt guilty that my fifth grader was only in WWE level three. But then, I discovered a document that contained Susan's updated recommendations for the timeline of WWE and the following series, Writing with Skill. It turns out I need not have worried. There is a lot in this document, but these were the important points for me:

Fifth grade is probably too young for Writing With Skill
Many students are ready to move on to WWS/original writing after only three levels of WWE (not all four)

Also of note:

she points out that the dictations will take more than the three repetitions prescribed in the book and gives tips.
she points out that children finished with WWE 3 still need work on narration and dictation but, as in Montessori, these should be pulled from their other learning (science, history, literature, etc.,)

She gives four possible progressions through WWE and WWS including some that put another series in-between. One of these doesn't have them beginning WWS until eighth grade. I looked at her recommended bridge work and didn't particularly like the choices. If I choose to put in a bridge I will use the Developing Writing Through Grammar series. It looks fun and creative and certainly like the type of things my boys like. I have decided that when we finish WWE level three I will not use level four as Kal-El's main writing curriculum. He will either move on to WWS or DWTG (probably the latter). Me Too is two school grades behind him so will probably do WWE level four and I can have Kal-El do only my favorite dictations as I discover them for additional practice. Because the boys want to read every book that is excerpted in WWE it helps us choose some of our literature for the year. I like Susan's choices.

Rest: What we can learn from Martianus, Mason, Montessori, Mackenzie, Mary and Martha

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 03:19:00 +0000

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season! Happy New Year! Thank you to everyone who after reading this September post left encouraging and helpful comments on the blog or on Facebook and to those who sent encouraging and helpful e-mails. I read Teaching from Rest a second and third time time and Honey for a Child's Heart again at least twice. I have also been reading a lot by and about Charlotte Mason. I started with For the Children's Sake by Macaulay and have since moved on to Charlotte's own work (albeit the modern English versions) and started her six volume set. The set is expensive to buy in hardcopy but is very reasonable if you can use the Ambleside Kindle editions. I started with this one. Several people familiar with these authors have pointed me in the direction of further reading that I might enjoy. I plan on continuing my path of learning in this area. Thank you.

Following my last post, I regrouped over a weekend and started the next week from a much better place than I was. I feel like I was able to pinpoint much of what was wrong, rediscover what our homeschool does well, and could see the start of the correct path before me. Just because I can't see the whole path right now doesn't mean I couldn't start walking.

For clarification, it has was I who was feeling pressured and overtaxed at the start of this school year. I feel blessed that I don't think the children have felt pressured at all (except for at youth orchestra, but that's another story and too personal to share). They had some very lovely, very enjoyable school days. They expressed excitement to start school in the weeks leading up to it and had not been resisting our activities or anything like that. They had been choosing their own work and working deeply. It was me with the problem.

Actually, it has was me with three problems.

1. Aiming for "rigor" rather than "diligence."

2. Dissatisfaction with never finishing my own to-do list and not recognizing that what I was calling "interruptions." is actually what I should call "my real life."

3. Guiding an academically-focused homeschool instead of a God-focused homeschool.

I did what I always do when faced with a problem, I look in a book. Hey! I haven't thought about Super Why for a long time.

Note: I might not have as many problems if what I always do when faced with a problem was "take it to God."

Moral: Always get your advice from God not Super Why. In this case, I actually did both. I must embarrassingly admit that it was the books I looked to first that reminded me to do that.

Question: Why do I read so much about Classical Education and Charlotte Mason when I'm a Montessori homeschooler and Montessori has been working so well for us?

Montessori and Charlotte Mason and Classical Education have a lot in common. There are a lot of ways to homeschool correctly and these are just some of them. Many of those ways don't even have proper names. I think that if you make a Venn diagram using two or more of any thoughtful, intentional educational plans you are going to find that they have a lot in common. Learning about how other methods treat the particulars that overlap can be highly informative.

Although they have much in common, there are also things that these methods disagree about or things that are just different. As I said, I picture a Venn diagram. If everything were the same it wouldn't be a Venn diagram, it would just be a circle. Something peculiar about Montessori is that is was never preimagined as a homeschooling method. In a true Montessori environment "The Group" is a working part of the method as much as are the materials, the approach, and the guide. There are those who feel Montessori without the group is not Montessori at all They would go as far as to disagree with me when I include Montessori among my "ways to homeschool correctly." We'll agree to disagree. Montessori is also an unusual homeschooling method perhaps due to the aforementioned opinions against it; the proprietary nature of the training; and the specialized, albeit optional, materials involved. All of this adds up to a situation in which the resources available are far more limited than for other more popular methods. To compound the problem, when you read about Montessori you are not necessarily reading very much about homeschooling.

In contrast many, many people use Classical Education and Charlotte Mason methods at home and a lot has been written about it. Because these methods do have so much in common with Montessori they provide an excellent place to look and learn about what Montessori homeschooling can look like and find a way to prop up the leg of the "Montessori table" that is missing without that "group."

Question: So what went wrong?

I think it is important that the "way" you homeschool suits the parent doing the homeschooling well. It might even be more important than how well it suits the child as any good, thoughtful, intentional method has a wide range of possible applications and that, within that method, a place on the spectrum can be found for most children. I think the problem is that I have found a method of working with my children that works very well for them and for me, Montessori. But, as I've learned more about other methods that overlap with Montessori in a way I find appealing I started to lean too strongly toward those other methods in a way that lead me outside of the sections that overlapped on my imaginary Venn diagram and into an arena that doesn't suit me or my children. In other words, I started this year leaning too Classical and it doesn't work for us.

From what I gather from Mackenzie's book, Teaching from Rest, this is a common phenomenon when you are keeping the scales balanced between virtue and vice. She describes this as follows:

In his landmark book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton tells us that secular culture is made up of virtues gone wild, and we see this tendency clearly when it comes to our teaching. If studiousness is a virtue worth cultivating, I find that I am drawn toward vice on either side of it. On the one hand, I am drawn to steamroll over my kids, to lord over them with checklists and grade levels without regard to their nature as unique persons made in the image of God. On the other, I am drawn to negligence or carelessness. I comfort myself with adages about children learning all the time and, hoping that my child will encounter an idea for himself without my interference, fail to form my student's affections out of fear that such work is coercion or manipulation...

...Rest is the virtue between negligence and anxiety, but many of the homeschooling moms I have met, myself included, find themselves more likely to fall prey to one camp or the other. When we are weak in virtue, we inch toward vice." (Mackenzie, loc 308)

Maybe every homeschooling family feels this way at times, but I like to think that it is particularly prevalent among Montessori homeschoolers. The Montessori method at the elementary level is special in that the curriculum is a web that spans six years and the child can position himself just about anywhere on that web at any time during those six years. And yes, we are always reaching for the ideal of the self-motivated child choosing their own work, and how long to stay at that work. So we are in an awkward position of having one eye on the totality of things we would like them to discover in six years; the other eye on the child; and our hands pinned under our rear end so we exercise restraint, so we don't interfere too much, so we don't interrupt, but at the same time, try not to interfere too little lest we miss the "perfect moment" to make the "perfect connection" to something else on the web. Just try saying that sentence out loud in one breath and you'll get an inkling of how that can feel sometimes. And this anxiety begins way back in Primary. Primary parents: this is the conflict you are feeling when you worry that they "haven't chosen anything," "are choosing the same thing too often," "choosing something too easy," "choosing something too hard," or just "not choosing what you really wanted them to choose." I think Mackenzie described a Montessori homeschooler perfectly. Who better to bounce back and forth from negligence to anxiety than a newbie-Montessorian?

Classical homeschooling provides a lovely antidote to our fear of doing too little and not making it through the material. We can look at how Classical homeschoolers fit "all of the things" into a day or a week and use it to learn how we can fit those things into our day or our week. We can grab classical resources for some of the things that these methods have in common--three-year cycles, history as a story, copywork--and use them to give our Montessori homeschool some structure that it perhaps needs to make up for the lack of the "group" or to make it just less big and scary sometimes.

However, after too much Classical reading the idea begins to creep in that you are going to get to lots and lots of things every day: grammar, history, writing, narration, spelling, math, foreign language, etc., But here you are. You are still trying to be a Montessori homeschool and let the child "deeply explore" each and every one of these things, which can take an hour per item. For me personally I found that instead of fully enjoying an hour we spent exploring a new idea my inner monologue is saying, "This is taking too long. We are never going to get to all of our dailies today." These are things that happened to me in the first week that as a Montessorian I should have been overjoyed to witness:

Kal-El decides to see how many electrical devices he can add to his circuit and still have a working set-up. The answer: many.
Me Too slowly examines every slide we own (many) under the microscope and shows me his favorites
Kal-El is looking up a vocabulary word in the dictionary to dictate to me he gets caught up reading ten other words he finds on the way and exclaiming over the pictures. Then, when looking for the next one he sees a photograph of an organ. He remembers learning at the symphony last week that the largest pipe organ ever built had 33,114 pipes. He decides to count all of the pipes in the picture to see how many that organ has.

Instead of enjoying this, I'm thinking "That's not what I wanted you to be doing today. We aren't going to have enough time left over to get to everything else on our plan." This is because we are aiming for rigor rather than diligence.

Rigor versus Diligence

It is easy to perceive of Classical education as rigorous, and in fact I'm sure it is sometimes applied that way. I remember reading in The Well-Trained Mind that Susan Wise Bauer was pressured by the publisher to to make the book lean toward rigor but she wanted to make it clear that her own application was much looser and what I would describe as diligence. It is diligence that can make the Classical method so successful and yet peaceful. And it is that diligence that we can borrow and bring to our Montessori experience rather than rigor which will get us through the material but will not blend well with the Montessori idea of the joyful child.

Mackenzie describes it this way:

"We have this desire to give our kids what we call an academically "rigorous" education. Andrew Kern and Christopher Perrin both taught me a bit about that. In my conversations with them...I asked them how we could pursue a rigorous education while retaining a sense of rest. What I didn't realize at the time was that the word "rigor" comes from the Latin rigor, rigoris, which means "numbness, stiffness, hardness, firmness, roughness, rudeness." Rigor mortis literally means "the stiffness of death," which I think we can all agree is not the goal of homeschooling children." (mackenzie, loc 278)

My family has been successfully homeschooling with Montessori methods for more than eight years and I have been learning from and borrowing from Classical elements for at least five of those. This year is the one year I crossed the line between diligence and rigor and we hadn't even completed one week of school before I knew it. I could instantly feel that stiffness and numbness.

Mackenzie warns:

"Don't aim for a rigorous education, Kern and Perrin both told me. If we are aiming to order our children's affections, learn to love what is lovely, join in the great conversation, and cultivate a soul so that the person is ready in every sense of the word to take on the challenges around the corner and on the other side of the college entrance exams; work toward "diligence" instead. (Mackenzie's emphasis, loc 278).

Likewise Charlotte Mason states:

For instance, take the aspect that education is the science of making relationships. That concept seems to solve the curriculum question. It shows that the main purpose of education is putting the child in living touch with as much of nature and thoughts as possible. If you add a couple of skills that help the child self-educate, then the student will go into the world after graduation with some ability to manage and control himself, a few hobbies to enrich his leisure time, and an interest in lots of things. (Mason, loc 55)

Mackenzie goes on to contrast rigor with diligence:

'Diligence' comes from the Latin diligere, which means to 'single out, value highly, esteem, prize, love; aspire to, take delight in, appreciate.' What we are really aiming for in giving our children a rigorous education is not just doing hard things, but cultivating a habit of focused attention. The word 'student' comes from the Latin studium, meaning 'zeal, affection, eagerness.' A diligent student, then, takes delight, eagerly and with great zeal, in what he loves. (Mackenzie, loc 278)

Boy, does that sound like you are reading from Maria Montessori or what? My main goal as a homeschooling parent has been, from the beginning, to raise children who love to learn. It is primarily for this reason that I was unwilling to risk sending them to school and allow someone else to accidentally squash that love of learning in any way.

I am aware that there is a danger that this post can come across as critical of Classical Homeschooling. That is not my intent. I am discarding only some parts of the Classical method as I understand them because those parts, as I interpret them, do not suit me as my boys' teacher (see what I did there) or my boys. As I stated earlier, I think it is important that the the "way" you homeschool suits the parent doing the homeschooling well and that I think that at times it might even be more important than how well it suits the child. During all of these years of blogging there have been many times when I could tell by the types of questions a parent is asking and the frequency with which they asked those type of questions that the parent was just not a Montessori homeschooler at heart but rather a Classical homeschooler. I have at times told them so although, in retrospect, that nugget of advice has ever been well-received. But I seriously think it is difficult enough for parents to find peace at home without adding the unnecessary complication of homeschooling your child using a method contrary to how you, the parent, are wired. On the other hand, I don't find it surprising that we do this. As teachers and as parents we have a tendency to teach to our weaknesses rather than our strengths. "I'm good at X, so X will be fine. I better work hard at Y so that the kids don't wind up weak in that are like I am." This is admirable and loving. It is also how we often wind up with music teachers who are bad at math doing math with their children every day but never actually teaching them an instrument. I digress.

Now, if you are a Montessori homeschooler looking for a way to fill in the blanks regarding how this (Montessori at home) is going to look and Classical education starts to make you lean toward rigor rather than diligence, Charlotte Mason is a wonderful balancing antidote. So is Sarah Mackenzie, who seems to me to be some of Charlotte Mason/Classical homeschooler but I haven't noticed a statement that says so. It's hard to tell due to the overlap between Classical and Mason. That's just fine.

What I had to do this fall is redefine or clarify what my priorities in this homeschool. For me this means that a 3-4 hour work period is important. Not just the luxury of having an uninterrupted 3-4 hour work period, but that this work period be the ONLY work period spent specifically in the school room. The Classical models that I am familiar with are not 3 hour work plans. Montessori wasn't much of a help either. In a brick and mortar Montessori elementary school, the elementary children are not there just for the morning. The 3-4 hour work day is something that Charlotte Mason and I have in common as a priority. Because Mason has somethings in common with Classical that Montessori does not, it is a place to look and see how we can add Classical to Montessori in a more Montessori way. Sarah Mackenzie's book and blog have some great concrete steps to take toward this. She even refers to keeping the the "birdseye view" and the "eye on the child" at the same time. But these are intentionally nonspecific regarding academic content. Some Charlotte Mason resources I founded help me see how the nitty-gritty details might look on the ground.

Here is a link to Sarah Mackenzie's blogpost on planning: Amongst Lovely Things: Planning
Here is a link to some sample Charlotte Mason daily schedules: Daily Schedules and Weekly Schedules

Is This the Real Life? Is this just fantasy?

It is very tempting to just pull quote the entire section of Sarah Mackenzie's book in chapter two subtitled "The Cake under the Couch" here. But that wouldn't be fair. Understand that I had a very difficult time limiting my quotes here. I highly recommend you read the book, especially this chapter, this section and the following section titled "Why Your Daily Grind is Holy Ground."

There is a moment that has always stuck in my mind. It is the time that our next door neighbors at our first house, where we were newlyweds, introduced us to friends of theirs at a party. They said, "This is [my husband]. He is a lot of fun. This is [me]. She is such hard worker." This is not to say that my husband does not work hard, or that I am not fun (someone back me up here). But, I'd have to say that they summed us up pretty well. The boys always say that we all have superpowers. Mom's are "reading fast" and "working hard." I know that I am not alone.

We are called to work. That part we have down, more or less. We homeschooling mothers are quite adept at spinning our wheels, working dawn to dusk to make sure our children have everything they need. We toil tirelessly to create lesson plans and assemble curriculum that will ensure our children know everything they need to know before they fly our coop.

We worry. We fret. We know, deep down in the core of our being that we are not enough. That what we offer is a pittance compared to the task before us. We feel small and insignificant because we are small and insignificant. (Mackenzie, loc 180)

I have been doing a great job planning and preparing the environment but we were having a rough time getting to everything I had planned. And, when we did get to it all there was a certain satisfaction but not a certain happiness. This general uneasy feeling easily would easily turn to general grouchiness because I had a pretty good idea of what was slowing me down: the kids. Sarah Mackenzie describes this beautifully. She asks:

What is keeping you from speeding through the reading curriculum, flying through the math book, checking off the less plans, and maximizing efficiency? Usually the answer is people. Can you hit the pause button on your frustration long enough to realize that people rank infinitely higher than anything else on the list? Have you considered that God may have scooted these people into view for the very purpose of slowing you down?

Whatever is getting in the way of your plan for the day--the toddler's tantrum, the messy bedroom, the sticky juice leaking all over the fridge and into the cracks of the drawers, the frustrated child, the irritable husband, the car that won't start, the cake the dog dragged under the couch...whatever that intrusion into your grand plan for the day is, it's also an opportunity to enter into rest. (Mackenzie, loc 248)

Mackenzie points out that Hubert Van Zeller states in Holiness for Housewives and Other Working Women, "When a person interrupts what you are doing, you [ought to] recognize a representative of Christ." However the quote that really struck me to the core was one she quoted from C.S. Lewis:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life--the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls on's "real life" is a phantom of one's own imagination. (emphasis mine)

If all of these interruptions are my real life and God is sending them to me, why do I let these things frustrate me instead of bless me? I think it's the nature of parenting but only when you fail to accept the cyclical nature and the unending nature of the task, when you try to replace the mission God has given you with a mission of your own, and when you try to take the credit for yourself when things are going well and then you will feel the heaviness when your manmade plan isn't going well.

Mackenzie reminds us:

Do you see? We must drop the self-inflated view that we are the be-all and end-all of whether the education we offer our children is going to work out. We are too quick to feel both the successes and the failures of our job as homeschoolers. Our kids test well on the SAT and we pat ourselves on the back. They are miserable writer and we scourge ourselves for failing them. But He never demands that we produce prodigies or achieve what the world would recognize as excellence. Rather, he asks us to live excellently--that is, to live in simple, obedient faith and trust. He asks us to faithfully commit every day to Him and then to do that day's tasks well. He's in charge of the results. (Mackenzie, loc 378)

And earlier:

Rest begins with acceptance. Or, perhaps more accurately, with surrender. there will always be more you can do. You will never complete your tasks entirely, because just on the horizon is tomorrow, and tomorrow the to-do list starts anew. It is so exhausting--sometimes demoralizing--to realize that our work in raising up and teaching our children is never really done. But we must remember that we were never intended to finish it. (Mackenzie loc 234)

We find rest through acceptance and surrender. "Surrender your idea of what the ideal homeschool day is supposed to look like and take on, with both hands, the day that it is. Rest begins with acceptance, with surrender. Can we accept what He is sending today?" (Mackenzie, loc 263)

So what is it that my children really need?

Well, I have always had quite a few ideas. However, I started out the year with the strong feeling that I was not giving them what they needed in the way they needed it. Fortunately I found that Mackenzie had a lot of suggestions in this area. Frankly, trying to flesh out this single section of this blog post has left it unpublished for months so I am going to just put these quotes out there in bullet points and publish already. I promise I starting writing like a grownup again in the next section.

In fact, unshakable peace is not tied to my success at all. It's tied to faithfulness. We rest in knowing that if your children grow up to ask us why we did what we did--why we focused on cultivating wonder and curiosity, on learning hard things such as Latin and algebra, why we didn't fill up our days but focused on living well and gazing on Him--we can answer them with confidence.(Mackenzie, loc 308)
We want to bless our children "not with shiny curriculum or perfect lesson plans, but rather with purposeful, restful spirits." (Mackenzie, loc 198)
My child doesn't need me to fret and fear; she needs me to love and guide her with grace. (Mackenzie, loc 294).
The true aim of education is to order a child's affections--to teach him to love what he ought and hat what he ought. Or greatest task, then, is to put living ideas in front of our children like a feast. We have been charged to cultivate the souls of our children, to nourish the in truth, goodness, and beauty, to raise them up in wisdom and eloquence. It is to those ends that we labor. (Mackenzie, 198)

Where is our focus?

Most of my own frustration comes from forgetting what my real task is in the first place. He's called me to be faithful, yet I'm determined to be successful. (Mackenzie, loc 361)

Have I been taking my responsibility to raise children who love learning more seriously than my responsibility to raise children who love God? I couldn't trust the public school to teach my children a love of learning but I'm okay with outsourcing teaching them to love God to our church's pastors and Sunday school volunteers? No, that is thought-provoking but I don't think that describes me accurately. There are several main reasons people don't homeschool, but certainly one of the more popular ones is fear, fear that we won't do something very important well enough. So many families outsource their child's education because they are afraid that they will mess it up if they do it themselves. I have always felt confident that I could homeschool my boys. But faith? That's really important and I've been outsourcing more of it than I should out of fear. In the book Almost Christian by Dean, Dean writes that while church communities are important, what the parents model is more important. Church communities "play second string when it comes to the transmission of faith" (117). Dean writes, "Teenagers' ability to imitate Christ depends, to a daunting degree, on whether we do," (112).

So, it seems that the most important thing I need to model every day is how to imitate Christ. When I am constantly cranky and snappish because all of the "interruptions" (people) are getting in the way of my grand plan (education and a clean house) I am not spending any time imitating Christ. The most important lesson I have to teach is not being taught. Those interruptions are not interruptions, they are our life.

So oddly, the way I fixed our homeschooling issues from the beginning of the year was to ADD something to our already full day. We now start the school day with reciting verses and reading a chapter or two from the Bible. We have changed our focus. Then we hit the rest of our work plan, but frankly the kids aren't ready to leave my lap on the couch quite yet. I have accepted this and surrendered to it. So, we are working through Life of Fred together. It's math, but I can't imagine a more gentle transition from our Bible reading. We are doing about two chapters a day and have gone from Apples to Goldfish already this year. The math is mostly review but the life lessons the author sneaks into those texts are not. After Fred, we listen to Story of the World and follow that with our Spanish lesson for the day. Finally, I might give a Montessori presentation to both kids from a cyclical subject list and then we split up. One child works on their work plan with mom while the other works on individual work. Then, we switch. All the while we accept the interruptions as they come. I will try to give you all a look at our current work plans soon. If you happened to look at any of the Charlotte Mason schedules I linked to above this should look familiar. We started the year leaning too Classical and are now instead leaning toward Charlotte Mason. For this season of our lives, this is what a Montessori homeschool looks like. What is most important to me is that it is starting to look more like Sarah Mackenzie suggested:

That writing assignment on the plan today Do it well. That math lesson that your child struggles over? Sit down next to him, and do one problem at a time slowly and carefully. Smile a lot. Lavish him with love. Because whether or not he becomes an excellent writer or a proficient mathematician is not your business to worry over. your business is that single assignment today and loving him through it.

This refocusing on God rather than academics certainly solves problem of how much of the "grand plan" we are going to cover in a day. We are going to start with God first. We are going to take the "interruptions" as they come because they are not interruptions, they are our life. However much academic material is covered during the hours we have is what we will cover. Diligently.

I'm a Martha, not a Mary

I still have a lot of learning to do. The introduction of Teaching from Rest begins by reminding the reader of the story of Mary and Martha in the Bible (see Luke 10:38-42). Mackenzie summarizes:

"Jesus was staying at their house, and Martha, anxious to please Him and make Him comfortable, was bustling about--doing and doing and doing. Her sister, Mary, was sitting at the Lord's feet, listening attentively, beholding, soaking in.

We can picture Martha in her frustration with her sister, right? 'Don't just sit there! Do something!' And yet the the Lord gently admonishes Martha's busyness. Mary, after all, has chosen the needful thing. The contemplative way. The being and becoming over the doing and the checking off. I can almost hear him inverting the message to me--turning my obsession with productivity on its head: 'Don't just do something, sit here." (Mackenzie, loc 177)

I am a Martha. For decades my gut reaction to this story has always been sympathy for Martha. I think, "How nice for Mary that she had Martha around so she could be free to sit at the Lord's feet." And Martha is chastised? Who will do the things that Martha does if Martha becomes a Mary? What I feel like I need is another Martha to come and live here so I can take a turn being a Mary. I guess that is what I hope to learn this year. How to be a Mary rather than resent Mary. I have no idea how a Mary exists without a Martha to pick up the slack.

Haiku

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 15:10:00 +0000

One of our best hours spent last week was spent writing and illustrating haiku. This was suggested as part of our Story of the World work. We are in the Middle Ages and just finished a section on China, Korea, and Japan. The methodology suggested worked REALLY well. Using their method we were each able to compose a haiku successfully in just a few minutes. The activity book gave us the rules. We needed three lines, 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and 5 syllables respectively. We had to choose a season first. Our topic had to be natural (no summer at the beach referring to plastic buckets and rocket pops). We were to choose a topic and describe a specific moment, not try to tell a story. Then, and this was the most successful suggestion, we were supposed to brainstorm words that came to mind regarding that topic and that moment. This made it really easy to write the haiku. Some of the brainstormed words clearly combined to form an idea. Also, it was easy to conform to the syllable limitations because if a word was too long or too short you could just scan your brainstormed list to choose a suitable replacement of the appropriate length.

Above is Kal-El's haiku. While Me Too and I wrote a rough draft that we later rewrote to add to our illustration, Kal-El wanted his to be "secret" and wrote it for the first time on his illustration. So, I was unable to correct his spelling before he wrote it down. It reads:

Out springs the tulips,

Where the morning dew shines bright

And bees pollinate.

-Kal-El

Above is Me Too's haiku. It helps to know that Me Too is allergic to mosquito bites. They swell up just awful. Photographic evidence:

His haiku reads:

Bats eat mosquitos.

They are fluffy and furry.

That is why I like them.

-Me Too

He means that he likes bats because they eat mosquitos. He was inspired to write about bats because he noticed I was writing about mosquitos. Just for kicks, my haiku is below.

The mosquito glides,

Creepy little legs dangling.

Sweaty skin awaits.

- Mom

I tried to draw a mosquito aloft above sweaty skin but, as Me Too points out, the sweaty skin look more like an eyeball...equally creepy.

What I am Reading

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 13:15:00 +0000

After posting last night I crawled in bed and curled up with two good books. That's what I do when I have a problem. First (hopefully) I pray about it. Then, I find a book about it. I'm taking the time to share today because while I've only gotten a few responses to yesterday's post so far (keep them coming! I am lapping up the advice and it is so nice to not feel alone in this.) I am already getting the impression that I am not alone in this boat.

Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace by Sarah Mackenzie

Honey for a Child's Heart, Gladys Hunt

My husband stayed up way too late watching television so I was able to read most of both of them. I read these really quickly on purpose so I could know right away what was in them. Consequently I will reread them both this weekend.

The Sarah Mackenzie book is about precisely what I am going through and how to deal with it from a Godly perspective. I am excited to read it again. I found myself wanting to underline practically everything in that book.

Also from a Godly perspective, the Glady's Hunt book, is about finding and using literature in the child's home. It also is, oddly, very focused on homeschooling from a state of rest. Like my perennial favorite, The Read-Aloud Handbook, there are lists of leveled read-alouds or read-alones (I'm still trying to puzzle out if it is one or the other or both). I will be glad to have both books because while the Trelease has a synopsis for each book, which I love, the Hunt has a lot of books that are not listed in the Trelease and throughout the text a lot of advice about when a certain books might be perfect to use.

How ARE We Doing?

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 02:29:00 +0000

Me Too showing off his new suit coat (hand-me-down from friends)

and the sitting wall he helped build.

I haven't been writing much about the start of our school year. I have collected a lot of moments I can hopefully share with you all. I am trying to figure out when to find time to do it. We have been very overwhelmed lately. I'm sure many of you feel the same. I have definitely reached a breaking point these past few weeks. But, even though I really don't have time to blog today two blog posts I happened to read today made me feel like today must be the day to add my voice to theirs. My post will not be anywhere near as eloquent as the others. Nor will my photographs be as beautiful. So I highly recommend you read Abbie's post today and Arianne's post today. God obviously knows that I needed to hear what they had to say at this time.

Pictures like this are helpful to remind me how much these boys love each other.

Some of the things that are putting pressure on us I do not want to give up and won't (violin and everything that goes with that: practicing, lessons, youth symphony). Some things are eating up way too much precious time but are responsibilities that can not easily be put aside (cubmaster). We are trying to focus on the blessings that come from our time in these places (the wonderful people we work with, the children's best friends, the husband's friends...) and at the same time make an exit strategy for some of leadership roles we have taken on there. It is time to pass the torch for a while. Other things just have to go. We've put a moratorium on group sports starting at the end of soccer season. Maybe a stronger person would just stop soccer now.

This little guy really looks up to his big brother.

This has been a really easy school year to begin. I had no materials to make. I knew where we were starting in every thread. I understand the lessons and scope and sequence. At the same time, this is the most pressure I've ever felt. Their work plans seem reasonable but we just can't even come close to getting to every thing on the list each day. We are barely getting to a third of the things on the list. But at the same time we are "schooling" for the most hours we ever have. For years we have been a four-days-a-week (fifth day for field trips), three-hours-a-day family in the school room. This year it has been four hours a day.

I don't like feeling pressure and I don't like going places and this year it seems like I have been spending 75% of my time feeling pressured and going places. The only part of the day I feel good are the times I spend just reading to the kids (poetry, literature, Life of Fred, Story of the World), playing games with them, or spending an hour just on one line on the work plan and then not getting to most of the rest of it. Perhaps not surprisingly, that's when the kids seem happiest too. I'm feeling that at heart I'm the type of homeschooler who would just read to them all day if I could. Maybe afterward they would spend a couple hours building electrical circuits or domino courses (what they do in their free time these days when they should be working on All About Spelling with me). But, wouldn't that play right into keeping their weaknesses their weaknesses? They don't like to write things down and Kal-El's spelling and Me Too's handwriting are proof of it.

Looking at this pictures it's hard to remember that they devolve into fighting

the instant I leave the room on every occasion.

They like homeschooling. I like homeschooling. I just don't know how to reconcile our collective desire to devour all the books and dismantle and rebuild anything that can be dismantled and rebuilt with my classical side that wants them to "Know all the Things," "Spell all the Words," and "Write all Letter 'O's' Counterclockwise Someday."

All I know is that something isn't right this year and I'm not exactly sure how to fix it.

First Day of School 2016/2017

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Fri, 02 Sep 2016 01:09:00 +0000

Everyone posted their back-to-school photos on Facebook today. This was ours. No backpacks or school bus required. Today was our first day back for the new school year. We loosely follow the public school calendar.

Predictably Me Too started his school day with some research on dogs.

In the photo above, Kal-El is working on his art lesson. Today the lesson mostly involved practicing good circles by drawing snowmen and reviewing foreground, background and perspective by adding evergreens and active snowfall. However, what is most interesting about this picture is the notebook under his elbow. Kal-El approached me this summer and gave me an elaborate presentation on "bullet journals." His best friend uses one at school and Kal-El told me all about it, had me watch some videos, and then asked politely if I would buy him a notebook so he could make one. A bullet journal is basically a Montessori elementary work journals so I couldn't say "yes" fast enough. So, under Kal-El's elbow is his "bullet journal" and he is keeping his own work journal for the very first time.

After Kal-El completed his work in our art curriculum he drew me this cartoon. It is what he remembered from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon but cracked me up nonetheless.

It was a beautiful day so we did a lot of work on the front porch. At the end of the day I gave them "back to school" gifts. Me Too received a book called "Inside the Dog." Truman is not in our back to school photos because we got to see what was "inside the dog" when he vomited shortly before these pictures. He either ate a mushroom in the lawn or didn't have enough for breakfast. We're not sure but he's fine now.

Kal-El received the first Harry Potter book. I haven't allowed him to start these until now. I feel like each book matures along with the children in the book. That worked well when they were brand new and came out once a year. The readers got to grow up with the characters. Now that they are all available at once this puts me in a bit of a pickle. I let him start because Harry turns eleven at the beginning of the first book and he will soon turn eleven as well. I haven't decided when I'll let him read the second book yet. I'll let him stew on this one and enjoy it a few times before I decide.

While we were having our first school day construction was going on in the backyard. Fortunately it wasn't as loud as I would have expected. I'll update you all on the goings on in the yard another day.

Classification of Nouns: Additional Symbols

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Thu, 12 May 2016 20:43:00 +0000

Kal-El has started work on the ETC 9-12 grammar cards. He started with a review of common, concrete, abstract, spiritual, proper and collective nouns. As a point of interest for this work we introduced the "advanced" grammar symbols. "Advanced" is a word that is often used for these because many people introduce them to the child in upper elementary. However, there is nothing "advanced" about the symbols themselves. The child learns these concepts in year one and you could certainly show the child the symbols at that time if the child were interested. For that reason the KotU terminology of "additional" symbols is perhaps better. However, I have to say that the new symbols served as a nice, sparkly, new point of interest at this stage for a topic that needed review but is being revisited for the fourth time. All of these symbols can also be made with the stencil, so having practiced them I will likely leave it up to the child to decide how specific he wants to be as he marks the parts of speech in his sentences in the future.

I anticipate getting some questions about the small gold triangle we used for the proper nouns. KotU, Grandma's Grammar, ETC, and MRD all show the small gold triangle for the proper noun. However, oddly, no one sells it anymore. I couldn't even find it through Nienhuis. When there is no small gold triangle it is recommend to use the small gold circle instead. However, our materials were already using that for spiritual nouns (a category of abstract nouns). I made my own. I cut them out of thin balsa from the craft store with a ruler and a utility knife. Then, I spray-painted them gold. It took me all of five minutes. It helps that I'm the kind of person who has balsa and gold spray paint around the house. Even though the suppliers don't actually sell the small gold triangle, the box the sell does have one extra compartment as if they intend for it to be there. This is because the basic grammar symbol sets (both solid and flat) have two sizes of light blue triangles in addition to the larger dark blue, the black and purple. I have no idea why. My set didn't have that. I would think it would have something to do with numerical adjectives but is the article color and the adjective size. Numerical adjectives are, I thought, the adjective color but the article size. Nienhuis does the same thing. I guess I'm out of date and at this point don't care to figure out what happened. I imagine it has something to do with arguing that a numerical adjective functions much like an article. Anyway, this also explains the empty spot in my grammar solids tray that has bothered me for years.

Here are some notes on shopping for grammar symbols. When the boys were in primary I bought a set of basic grammar symbols in a box (10 compartment). Then, when we reached this point I had to buy a new box that would hold the "basic" and "additional" symbols. It would have been cheaper in the long run to make (or buy, but making would be better) the 15 compartment box, a set of "basic" wood symbols, and a set of "basic additional" wood symbols. I would put the basic set in the box for primary leaving compartments empty and add the "additional" as appropriate. Montessori Outlet seems to be the only discount place that has the needed options for upper-elementary. Now, there are also paper sets (also at Montessori Outlet). This is like the paper movable alphabet meant for writing sentences. If you are labeling multiple sentences at a time you won't have enough wooden symbols in the box. However, we haven't needed to do that and the 10 symbols that come in each set has been plenty to label up to two sentences at a time. We'll see what happens as our sentences get longer. Now, the 15 compartment box that they sell is not deep enough to fit all ten of the larger symbols (noun, verb, verbals). It will only stack them 6-8 deep depending on thickness (my basic symbols are thicker than my additional symbols). So, for that reason I recommend making your own box so that they actually all fit.

The work pictured above was in response to a card that asked Kal-El to write three nouns to fit each of the categories. I erased one from his proper nouns for the sake of privacy. And, yes, it irks me that he didn't bother to capitalize one of his proper nouns. Sigh.

Review: Little Hands on Rhythm

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Mon, 09 May 2016 20:06:00 +0000

Little Hands on Music by teachingaidsformusic.com

I have always felt there was a gap in the Montessori sequence when it comes to teaching rhythm. My boys worked through an entire Montessori music album (I have three) and I noticed that they had excellent pitch experiences but that the rhythm experiences were "ho hum." Mainly the Montessori rhythm experience is to work through several sets of cards of increasing difficulty that allow the child to clap and count the rhythms on the cards. I added a point of interest by collecting some rhythm instruments they could perform the rhythms on instead. However, I noticed that in other places in the Montessori sequence that involve expression there are materials that allow the child to build it themselves such as the movable alphabet or the pitch notation materials. As Montessorians have learned from observing the child, anything they create themselves (such as a math equation) is likely to be bigger, more complex, and more compelling than anything pre-provided on a card.

But, how do we do this with rhythm? I stumbled across the solution on accident when my son started building rhythms he knew out of our Christmas ornaments:

The traditional Montessori materials certainly hint at these capabilities. However, the Nienhuis notation set is oddly inconsistent regarding what rhythm materials it includes. I had to DIY some wooden symbols to match:

I was, apparently, not the only one who noticed this gap. Laurie Oakley from Teaching Aids for Music noticed the same thing. Laurie is a 25-year music teacher and her resume includes teaching music as a specialist at a Montessori school. She developed a product for her studio teaching and her Montessori students that allows them to easily build and practice their own rhythms. It is called Little Hands on Rhythm. Laurie sent a set to our family, free of charge, for my children to use and for me to review. As always, my opinions here are my own and unfiltered.

The set is a lot like a movable alphabet box, except for building rhythms rather than words or sentences. It contains separate compartments, each containing many copies of an element one would use to build a rhythm. The set we received included everything one would need to teach and build rhythms in 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4 time. For most people this is exactly what you would need and want. If your child is a Suzuki child or already has several years experience your child may find, as mine did, that he didn't have quite all the elements he needed to build the rhythms he wanted (such as sixteenth note rhythms). However, we also received an expansion kit with single eighth notes (flagged) and dotted quarters. An expansion kit for 6/8 is nearly available and Laurie already has samples of sixteenth-note rhythms that will soon go into production.

Each of the pieces in the box are magnetic. They stick to this well-made, 36" board that folds and fits inside the box for easy storage. The boys could fit four measures in 4/4 time on the board very nicely. If you are a Montessori teacher or music teacher, one nice thing about it being magnetic instead of the loose wooden pieces used with the Nienhuis package is that you can hold or prop the rhythm up vertically to show a class without your work crashing to the floor.

Above is one of the rhythms that Kal-El built on the board. It is fun to put pieces on the board so it really encouraged him to put the counting below which is something that he might be tempted to skip otherwise. He likes to put the time signature next to the orange rectangle for it rather than on top of it so that he can see the definition given for each part of the signature. There is room to do it either way. You can use or not use the basic beat strips provided as you wish. We prefer not use them most of the time, perhaps because the boys are advanced enough to no longer need them. However, they did an excellent job of teaching the boys to space their rhythms appropriately rather than bunch them together. This was something they needed to work on so I was pleased.

Of course, us being us, it wasn't long before we were using the board in ways it wasn't intended. Above you can see some of the pieces from the dotted-quarter/single-eight expansion package in use. We replaced the basic beat with a very-useful eighth-note subdivision and built rhythms using dotted-quarters. I would love to be able to do this with sixteenth-notes someday. However, this is not exactly how this set was built to be used. Regardless, I wanted to show that you can make it work and with the sixteenth note rhythms soon to be available might be a useful extension for a lot of people.

I know a lot of my online Montessori friends LOVE LOVE LOVE having videos of presentations. Laurie has already provided those, and there is a growing collection on her website here: Tutorial Videos for Rhythm Notation.

Thank you to Laurie for letting us try this product! If you are interested in a set for your home or classroom, they are available at Teaching Aids for Music (teachingaidsformusic.com).

School Days

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 00:38:00 +0000

Today's post is an unusual "School Days" post. Rather than just show you glimpses of certain works I made a point to photograph each thing on their work plans at least once over the course of a couple weeks (I spread it out so my photographing isn't intrusive). So, in this post you get a rare look at what a whole week can look like. There are many things they do every day and I certainly didn't photograph every work they did for a week. You'll see each category on their work plans once. I last wrote about their work plans in detail in January. I change things on the work plan frequently.

Where possible, I've linked to books or materials that we are using for your convenience. So, this post does contain affiliate links, thank you for supporting our homeschool.

The boys have been working with decimals just about daily. My greater-than/less-than alligators made a reappearance. This work wasn't in the albums, but seemed like a good idea. I wanted them to practice comparing numbers with decimals carefully making sure that they understand which that on this side of the decimal point tenths are bigger than millionths. It is a good idea to do this comparing numbers with only a few places to the right of the decimal with those with lots of places to the right of the decimal. For example:

5.8 > 5.1279989

I think I mentioned our addition work with the decimal board in a previous post. The boys thought the board was very silly to use for such easy work and used it for just a few equations before moving on to just paper. If it made the process that clear from the very beginning I guess it was worth the time spent.

They have been working through the Nienhuis activity set for decimal fractions. I think they both finished all of the addition cards this week and will practice with the subtraction cards next week.

Another work they have been doing daily is the ETC Montessori 6-9 measurement task cards. They will go through this relatively quickly, I think, and then we'll do the 9-12 task cards. There is a lot of variety of work in this set. Some works are two-part cards as above, some are story problems, and some are experiments.

They have been in the section on time measurement and have each done an experiment every day for the past two weeks. They have had a blast timing themselves running laps up and down the driveway with stop watches, counting how many times they can dribble a ball standing versus walking for one minute, etc., One of Kal-El's experiments this week involved bean seeds in the light versus the dark (integrated with the Montessori biology works as you can see). The experiment called for seeds in wet paper towels. However, Kal-El's public school friends took him to their classroom window one day when they were at the playground at the school to show them how they were sprouting bean seeds taped to the window in plastic bags and water. He wanted to do his the same way they did. He also reports that his friends are also working on decimals. He thought this was all pretty exciting.

Every day we either listen to The Story of the World on audiobook, do the recommended map work, read the recommended fiction and non-fiction for each topic, or do one of the interesting activities suggested in the activity book. This week we learned the Gupta dynasty and the Ajanta Caves. We learned about Diwali and the Rangoli that many make for the entrances of their homes. We watched some YouTube videos of monks making mandala so that they could appreciate how it is done. We wanted our art to be more permanent so we did ours with white glue on paper. In the picture above the boys were sketching their designs on paper first.

We also work in Writing with Ease every day. I have said several times in the past that this is like Reading Rainbow for us, but I was completely wrong. I just watched an episode of Reading Rainbow and that is NOT the show I was thinking it was this whole time. I was thinking of the nice guy who illustrates stories as an excerpt is being read and then leaves off at a cliffhanger and tells you to read the book. I was thinking of Cover to Cover with John Robbins. We used to get to watch that once a week at the parochial school I attended for middle school. I LOVED it.

So, Writing with Ease is like Cover to Cover for us. The boys want to read every book excerpted. Recently we've read:

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

The Hundred and One Dalmatians

Little Pilgrim's Progress

Nurse Matilda: The Collected Tales

The Borrowers

Pippi Longstocking (all three books)

Of course, if a book has a sequel the boys want to read those too. We do most of these as read-alouds, but sequels are usually read individually. Right now Me Too is reading The Mouse and the Motorcycle individually and Kal-El is reading a sequel to the Rats of NIMH. This is in addition to the piles of library books we bring home each week and in addition to the SOTW individual reading and read-alouds that we do.

Me Too is currently enjoying the Vet Volunteers series and Kal-El is currently reading The 39 Clues series. We get most of our weekly reading and SOTW books from the library. It helps when your library is part of a network of libraries for SOTW. Our library often doesn't have the book but one of the other libraries in network almost always does.

I think it is also important to have good books on hand in the house. This is extra important if you have a super speedy reader in the house like Kal-El or myself. We need great books to reread lying around for when we run out between library trips. My husband calls them my "emergency books." I buy most of the WWE books because we just love them all. Bauer really curated a nice collection of literature to use in those books. I also think it makes a big difference to get a good edition with beautiful illustrations. Whether I buy or borrow the book, I like to check the blog Read Aloud Dad for recommendations on which edition to choose.

When we need further ideas for additional reading we use The Read-Aloud Handbook and Read for the Heart: Whole Books for WholeHearted Families. The boys also often choose to read the books excerpted in Vocabu-Lit: Building Vocabulary Through Literature. However, compared to the other three resources, the literature chosen just isn't as good. The books tend to be award-winning but a lot more modern and I guess our tastes just run to the older books.

They have been working on their Spanish nearly daily. Above is one of the activities we did this week. I gave each child a laminated picture of their head with some poster putty on the back. I also set out a toy bus, airplane, train, and car. Some of our recent vocabulary cards are on the table. The boys took turns sticking their head to one of the vehicles and driving it onto one of the vocabulary cards. I would ask, "A dónde vas tú" and they would then say something like "Voy a la playa en autobús" or "Voy al parque en avión." It was a little silly sometimes.

Kal-El is still working on memorizing the capitals of Europe. Me Too is still working on the capitals of Africa. They mostly do this with our Pin It! Maps. Me Too was really struggling with this particular group of capitals because he had no idea how to pronounce words like Ouagadougou, Nouakchott, N'Djamena, or Mbabane. We have already often used the map games at Sheppard Software, but their older website used to be so hard to navigate we thought that they didn't have games for Africa. It turns out they do and the game levels through this link have been very helpful. Level one lets you click on a country to hear it's capital pronounced. Level two has you matching the capital to the country but they pronounce the capital name each time which has been helpful reinforcement. We also have Montessori apps on our iPad that do this type of thing but they don't have them for Africa yet.

We are taking a short break from our simple machines work to go back and continue the work we've been doing this year on electricity. I am so impressed with the Snap Circuits SC-300 kit that Santa Clause brought the boys for Christmas. I expected that they would be able to make a variety of circuits, but there are 305 progressive projects in the accompanying booklet. The boys made more than twenty of them last week and things are lighting up, music is playing, sirens are blaring, propellers are flying into the air... They love it.

I set a goal for the boys to each finish one entire All About Spelling and one Vocabu-Lit book this year. In Me Too's case he alternated each one daily. Kal-El chose to do his entire Vocabu-Lit book and then start the spelling. If you add the number of lessons in the two books together, there are more lessons than there are weeks in our school year. So now, the race is on to try to finish what is left before summer. I have no problem carrying this into the summer, but the boys have chosen to double up each day to finish on time.

Kal-El's favorite part of his AAS book is the "Word Analysis" work at the beginning of each chapter. The book is scripted for the parent. Above is one of the words we analyzed this week and below is the accompanying script from the book.

The boys are practicing either long-multiplication or long-division daily. They both can do these abstractly with any size multiplier/multiplicand/divisor/dividend. Right now they are inventing an equation or two to complete each day. Sometimes they choose a page out of Basic Math Skills, Grade 3 or 4 instead. However, even though the Evan-Moor is more rigorous than common core, the size of the equations is still significantly smaller than what they are used to doing with the Montessori materials. We keep the Evan-Moor around for occasional use to get them used to the formats they would see on a traditional test.

We recently spent about two weeks doing one multiplication equation a day on graph paper. This is the lesson in the albums called "geometric multiplication."

Grammar is another thing the boys do daily. We are following a Frankenstein-esque sequence all our own (which I wrote about here). I want to get into verb tenses but the materials and albums we are using want to take us through some advanced work on types of nouns first. We are generally following the sequence from MRD (Kal-El is in their Language Arts, Volume 5), using ETC materials (mostly), and Keys of the Universe and Not Your Grandma's Grammar for presentations.

At any rate, above Kal-El reviewed the difference between concrete and abstract nouns and learned the advanced grammar symbol for abstract nouns. We used the presentation from NYGG and cards I made from MRD.

Me Too is mostly working on adverbial extensions with the analysis materials, but is also reviewing direct and indirect objects because he seems to have trouble with those.

Word study is also on their daily work plan.

Having completed the traditional presentations for word study in our KotU albums long ago, we are currently working on what's referred to as "further exploration." We use ETC materials for this and like them a lot. Me Too is currently working on reviewing antonyms. Kal-El is learning the Latin definitions for certain prefixes and exploring their effect on the definition of words.

The rest of our work is done on a weekly basis.

These are some of our Child-sized Masterpieces folders. These are Step 5 folders. This is beyond matching and pairing or grouping. In this step they are learning about the painting and the artist and memorizing the names of both.

Once a week the boys do a full weeks worth of Daily Word Problems. Me Too still has a set that I cut and laminated. Kal-El just prefers to do his straight out of the book.

Kal-El writes fluently in cursive rather than print by choice. He still needs practice making connections sometimes. Me Too is still learning some of the letters. We use New American Cursive. Above is some of Kal-El's work in, I think, book two.

In addition to all of their spontaneous art and art that crops up connected to our SOTW work, we do a lesson from I Can Do All Things at least once a week. Today we were practicing drawing circles properly (lightly circling 4-5 times rather than looping around once darkly and connecting the ends). The lesson went on to have us draw several things that started with a circle.

The boys are in a holding pattern on fractions right now because we are working on decimal fractions. They keep them fresh by doing a few cards from our Nienhuis fractions activity sets once a week. Above is a picture of a page from Me Too's notebook. He is practicing adding mixed numbers with unlike denominators.

The boys play the violin seriously. They have lessons with a violin teacher once a week and practice with me every day. They play piano less seriously. They have a lesson with me once a week and practice most days on their own. Kal-El also plays the cornet even less seriously and plays sometimes, on his own. He does play well enough to rehearse two or three times with his Dad's sixth grade band and play in their December concert. We finished the Montessori music albums long ago. I haven't been doing anything fancy with their music theory since that time. I teach the appropriate music theory as it comes up in their violin music. Also, once a week, they have to do a couple of pages of the music theory book that is a part of their piano series (we use Alfred's). When we run out of pages in those, they do pages out of the Schaum Note Spellers Books.

We always have some fun command cards floating around the classroom that encourage us to get our hands into the geometry materials. The boys usually pick some of these about once a week. This year they keep choosing the Cube Up! cards again and again. They are almost through all of these which will force them to move on to something else.

The boys have been very eager to bake. This is almost like a "going out" in that I help them, but they do all of the planning. They like to dig through my Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook to pick out projects. We usually wind up making something that looks like the picture in the Martha book using recipe's from my The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. Martha's recipes always seem to involve 32 steps and call for 9 sticks of butter to make the same cake as in the Test Kitchen book, but the test kitchen cakes always taste better. For the cake above, Kal-El also decided to look up cake decorating videos on YouTube and found a tutorial. He watched it and taught himself how to do some piping on his cake.

This weekend Me Too make a three-layer devil's food cake (ATK) with chocolate ganache two ways (MS, whipped cold for the inside, poured warm for the outside). Above he is learning how to trace and cut his parchment paper.

Here he is pouring and spreading the ganache. We have a lot left over but discovered we can chill it, scoop it, and roll it in stuff (cocoa powder, coconut, chopped nuts) to make truffles.

That is what a week looks like in our homeschool. Just take the daily works and multiply by four. Don't forget that Friday is our "going out" day. We only do work IN the school room on Friday's if we have weeklies to mop up. We had coop twice this month. On other Fridays we went to a play and had youth symphony auditions. Next month we are going to the symphony and to the ballet.

Simple Machines: Levers

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 15:01:00 +0000

For our simple machines work I am combining the relevant lessons from Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding and the lesson planning guides that came with my simple machines,

This post does contain affiliate links. Thank you for supporting our homeschool.

The BFSU basically says to "go big or go home" and suggests lifting the teacher's desk, while the teacher is sitting on it, with a brick and a 2x4. Very Montessori in spirit a la the big impressions left by key experiences and charts. We don't have the kind of furniture they had in mind for that so I put our full set of Power Blocks in a box. This weighs about 50 lbs. We started by trying to lift the box with just our bodies. Not surprisingly my 48 lb child could not lift the 50 lb box.

Next we tried with the recommended brick and 2x4. We have lift off! By the way, we experimented again a different day and found that a cylindrical fulcrum worked a lot better if you can find one.

We experimented with changing the position of the fulcrum thereby creating lever arms of differing lengths.

The distance that we were able to lift the load varied according to the lengths of the lever arms. The boys measured and recorded the heights we were able to achieve.

I found levers all over the house and some of them were small enough to put on a rug. Others were not.

It was hard to figure out how some of these function AS levers without a little help. I contacted my friend Jennifer at the Montessori Print Shop and she sent me her downloadable file for simple machine cards. I received this free of charge so that I could use them and tell you about them here.

We started with the cards that had the load, effort, and fulcrum labeled and matched them to the real levers we had in the house. I was able to find an example of just about everything pictured (except my bicep is not nearly that big). Eventually the boys realized that the levers could be classified according to the position of these parts and they classified them under the picture and definition cards that come with the set.

Then we moved on to using the simple machine models in our classroom. First we worked with a simple lever.

The boys used some labels I made to label the parts of the lever as well as the eventual parts of the equation they would discover (Fxd=fxD).

I'm so sorry about the quality of these pictures. The boys love to do their work in front of the window and the contrast there makes it impossible for me to take pictures that look lit.

Here Kal-El is using one of the Montessori Print Shop card sets to classify the different levers and then labeling the parts. The MPS printable has the labels as part of the file but I amped things up a little. I don't like picking up pieces of paper that tiny. I made our out of some Woodsie shapes and Foamies shapes I already had and didn't even need to cut. I wrote the letters on with a permanent marker.

Here you can see he's matched the control cards with the cards he labeled. In this post we've only use the cards from the set that have to do with levers. You can see the complete list of what is included here. For the levers we used definition cards, lever-class definition cards, unlabeled photographic cards of levers, labeled photographic cards of levers, line-drawn images of each class of lever, and a control chart for the classes of levers. As we study more simple machines we will use more card sets and eventually be identifying the levers from among mixed sets.

They used the lever-part labels to label the parts on our actual levers after labeling the photographs.

Truman likes to label levers too. #montessoridog

...but it makes him tired.

When he is not busy labeling levers, Truman likes napping and playing with the football the Easter Bunny brought him.

Next we moved on from the simple lever to the "fulcrum balance." This clever little model has sliding platforms so you can discover how to reach equilibrium by changing the distance of the platforms from the fulcrum. As per the instructions that came with the model I labelled the platforms "1" and "2" and also drew intersecting lines to mark the center of each platform.

The first day we simply explored how to balance two objects of differing weights and observed which of the two was closer to the fulcrum. We also observed that if you change the distance of one object from the fulcrum you also had to change the other.

You can't really use this particular model to learn Fxd=f=D (explanation). I tried this with brass weights and measured distances. The reason is that center of gravity has to be below the fulcrum (torque=mass x gravity x length explanation). But what you CAN do (as suggested in the BFSU) is make a hanging balance using a ruler, string, and use paperclips for weights.

The boys were able to use this hanging balance to balance differing amounts of paperclips at various distances. I labeled the different sides of the balance "A" and "B" with a dry erase marker to keep things consistent.

Instead of telling them the equation, the boys were allowed to discover it. Have I ever mentioned that BFSU is very Montessori? They recorded all of their data in their notebooks.

I recorded the same data on our whiteboard. The squares in the question mark columns were originally blank. We just recorded the weights and distances. After they were all recorded I asked the boys to multiply the weight times the distance on each side of the balance for each example. They discovered that the products were identical and wrote the equation.

Wrapping Things Up

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 19:01:00 +0000

We wrapped up a lot of work today. The timing couldn't have been better. I didn't plan for these things to work out this way, but they did. Today was our last day of school before our spring break.

Today Me Too spontaneously asked if he could do his racks and tubes equations on paper instead of with the material. He said he thought "it would be faster." Above is the first equation he did. He did it on his own, and abstractly. We celebrated HARD. I don't have to help my kids move the beads on those boards ever again! I am so happy. I am apparently past the sensitive period for helping kids move beads on boards.

Kal-El finished the last of the logical analysis cards in the ETC sentence analysis set. He found them very difficult when he started them and now finds them easy. These cards ask you to read one of Aesop's fables, find a sentence that meets their criteria, and analyze the sentence with the box of arrows. It would say things like, "Read The Fox and the Crow and find a sentence that has at least a simple subject, simple predicate, and an adverbial of degree." Now that he's finished with these we will work through the ETC 9-12 Grammar Curriculum cards. I blogged about how I am using those here. We'll be getting into verb tenses very quickly.

Kal-El also finished Vocabu-Lit: Building Vocabulary Through Literature: Book D (this link and those that follow are affiliate links) today. I mentioned a different day that he had decided that instead of alternating vocabulary and spelling throughout the year, he wanted to just get the vocabulary workbook finished and then do the spelling. He will now get back into All About Spelling after the break.

Today we finished all of the work I had planned on levers. Levers was the first and most complicated section of the simple machine work we are doing. We can move on to inclined planes after the break and that and the rest of the work should go relatively quickly. I have been working on a post about our levers work as we have been going along. I will post that after the break so that everyone doesn't miss it while enjoying some time off.

We also completed the section in the KotU albums on wind this week. I'm excited to move on to water. We'll be busy building our river model over the break.

We had a great week of school. We learned how to do the geometric multiplication work on graph paper. We also started operations with decimals. We are so close to the end of our current Spanish package I can taste it. I'm excited to move on into the next "learning system box" because I only ever used the first box when I taught school. It will be fun to travel into some new territory. We are enjoying being out of ancient history and into the Middle Ages with Story of the World. I always wish that we would go through one book a year with this but it never happens. For example, once we got to chapter three Christianity Comes to Rome we became mired for weeks. We are still working on it. This took us down a long rabbit hole with several branches. We are learning about medieval monasteries and the structure of the Catholic Church. These leads us into Gregorian chant and also medieval book making. The book making lead us into paper making and calligraphy. The boys are working on making their own books. They've made the paper, they are working on their calligraphy, and we have a kit for binding the books by hand. They also plan to "illuminate" their manuscripts. All of this, of course, led us into how the Bible came to us which lead us back to types of writing and the Rosetta stone. Next thing I knew, I was giving the Fourth Great Lesson for the second time this year. Like the levers, I have been writing a post on all of this as we go and will post it when they boys finish their books. I find it more valuable to do the work they are interested in than get through SOTW on a schedule but we may be finishing the series when they are in college.

Yet Another Failed Experiment: Ocean Currents

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 19:47:00 +0000

I don't know WHAT my issue is with these geography experiments. THIS time I practiced most of this beforehand like a proper Montessori guide should. I'm glad I did or the boys would have sat through a few failed attempts. SOME of this went very well. I have a video for each demonstration.

First we want to show the children that wind moving across water causes the water to move in the direction of the wind. We sprinkle sawdust across the surface of the water as a vehicle by which to see the movement of the water.

Next, we place an obstacle in the water so that we can see that some water will move around the obstacle and some water returns.

So far, so good. We followed up by looking at our impressionistic chart that shows the ocean currents and we observed that some currents went around obstacles and some returned. The chart was from the KotU album. The ETC chart showed so many currents and in a way that made it hard to read. The KotU chart was simpler and looks something like this without the labels that name the currents (you use that later on):

image source

We also learned that warm currents of water that move around continents and travel very far north keep ports from freezing seasonally in places such as Murmansk.

For Demonstration Two the instructions said "Place the flask in the pie tin on the heat source." I thought, "What flask?" So, I looked back at the supply list and under demonstration two it says, ""Flask of water with sawdust mixed in (can be the same flask from the first demonstration)." There was no flask in the first demonstration. What kind of flask? Anyway, it also says, "insert the saw dust in the flask before the water so it settles to the bottom."

It is a good thing I practiced. I decided to use an Erlenmeyer flask because I didn't think they meant a hip flask (I mean, the moon can cause currents but not moonshine) and it was the only other kind of flask I could think of. I dutifully put in the sawdust and then gently the water and....the sawdust floated. I thought, "maybe it will sink overnight." So, I went and checked the tray from demonstration one which had sat out overnight and, nope, the sawdust was still floating. Then I thought, "Maybe it's because we have very fine sawdust and they mean more typical flaky sawdust/shavings." So I emptied our pencil sharpener into an empty Erlenmeyer flask and slowly added some water. It floats. Hmmm. So then I tried cornflakes. They may sink in a bowl of milk at times but not in my flask of water. Then I tried Smart Bran. Floats. Finally, I tried popcorn. Sank!

Next I was wondering about this pie tin. Why would I put the Erlenmeyer flask on a pie tin instead of directly on the bunsen burner, or in our case, stove burner? So I went rogue and put the flask on the burner. We lived. Kal-El was concerned the popcorn would pop but it was fine.

Finally we show the children what happens when currents of different temperatures meet. We examined our chart of the currents and noticed that some cold currents seem to disappear when they encountered a warm current and reappear later and wondered why. What happens when a cold current meets a warm current?

I prepared a clear bowl of very hot, almost boiling, clear water. I also prepared a beaker of very cold water with ice that I tinted blue. The instructions say to add the cold water very slowly to the warm water pouring just inside the edge. The cool water is supposed to go to the bottom, and you can see in the video that it did. However, in person it just looked an awful lot like the water slowly turned blue. I think if you do this with your children you should be sure they bring their eyes down to the level of the bottom of the bowl. Fortunately we were able to watch the video afterward and see it again from the lower perspective. Also, the longer I pour the less effective the demonstration is. Just some tips.

I think they are doing a similar demonstration here at Montessori Messy, but I can't really tell from the pictures and description exactly how it worked or what happened. Apparently reading these types of experiments out of a book is my personal Kryptonite.

The blog All Things Beautiful which isn't quite a Montessori blog but borrows from a lot of Montessori activities did a seven-part series on ocean currents with different demonstrations. I highly recommend it. The boys are very interested in this so we'll probably expand this topic and do these. Also, I plan to segue here into the expeditions of Thor Heyerdahl and the book Kon-Tiki (affiliate link and one of my husband's favorite books of all time). And by "very interested" I mean Kal-El said this to me an hour ago: "Mom you totally rocked those ocean current demonstrations today. You are really good at picking what we do." Sorry Jessica, I went ahead and took full credit for this in his eyes. I didn't think you would mind.

Ocean Current demonstrations at All Things Beautiful:

I: Surface Currents
II: Salinity
III: Temperature Currents
IV: Polar versus Tropical Water
V: Ice Cubes Demonstration
VI: Layering Liquids
VII: Explorers and Ocean Currents

Decimal Fractions, Part Two

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 03:18:00 +0000

We have continued our work with decimal fractions. Some of the cubes in this box will look different than they did the last time you saw them because I spray-painted them. The two colors of blue and two colors of green provided by the manufacturer (Kid Advance) were embarrassingly similar. The cubes I sprayed are the lightest blue and the lightest green. One could, if they were ambitious, spray paint all the cubes so that the match the colors on your decimal board. I've looked at images of the Nienhuis material and it's hard to tell but it looks as though it is done that way. While I'm mentioning this type of thing, I am still not convinced that the box for the cards shouldn't be arranged more like a bank game box. I could buy an extra bank game just for the box but we'll see how I feel after using the material a while. I also had to modify our decimal board as you'll see further on.

I couldn't help including this. Truman, our dog, has learned to sit at the mat whenever it looks like Mom is going to give a presentation. #montessoridog

I gave a presentation with the Bank Game cards in which you line up the cards above the tens, hundreds, thousands, etc., and then pivot them by grabbing the left edge and pulling it in an arc over to the right. Then, you place a decimal point after the first zero. This helps demonstrate the "reflection" on either side of the decimal point. I can't STAND manipulating little pieces of card stock so instead of hole-punching the decimal points we used pony beads.

I showed them the decimal board next. We placed the category beads and cubes in their appropriate places and "crowned" the unit. This board is printed on wood. It is glossy. It works fine with the cubes but terribly with the category beads. They roll all over the place unless you are able to stand them carefully on their holes. I got my board for a few dollars when ordering other things years ago. You should really just make this out of felt. I noticed in the Eric Johnson videos that their board has a felt surface and a frame.

I love the little crown I found. It has jewels. It sparkles. Enough said. Many "ooo's" and "ahhh's" from the boys. It's single-handedly making the whole decimal work super compelling for them.

We also use this pinwheel to demonstrate that the decimal system is balanced with the unit in the middle or revolves around the unit.

My candelabra didn't turn out exactly like I wanted it but does the job. The candelabra demonstrates the relationship of categories on each side of the decimal. We also draw their attention to how the colors are darkest on the left-hand side of the board and lightest on the right-hand side of the board. We tell them that the darker the "flame" is on the candelabra, the higher the number; the lower the flame, the lower the number.

Okay, so here you can see I have felted our board. I just applied white glue with a paintbrush, added the felt and drew lines on with a permanent marker. I used black felt to put a thicker line at the decimal point and also to hide the seam between the two pieces of felt I had on hand. You could use a larger piece of felt if you felt like going to the store. There was a snowstorm here so I stayed home. The boys were very vocal about their admiration of the board with the added felt.

We started by placing quantities of nine or less in a single category, finding the matching number card, and reading the number. Then, we moved on to putting a quantity of more than nine in a single category, exchanging, finding both number cards, and reading the quantity.

Kal-El was determined to use every cube in the box. He was hoping to force the exchange from the tenths to the tens but there are only sixty cubes in the box for each category.

¿Qué llevas puesto?

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 18:02:00 +0000

"Llevo el vestido."

Last week we practiced a our Spanish vocabulary for clothing with a fun activity. I filled two bins, one for each child, with a bunch of clothes that belonged to either me or my husband that fit the target vocabulary. I intentionally wanted clothing that was too big so that they could get things on and off quickly because sometimes they were racing. We started with me handing them little vocabulary cards from our blackline masters and they raced to find the item they were handed, put it on, get back to me and answer my questions in Spanish.

"¿Qué llevas puesto?"

"Llevo la falda rosada."

"Llevo el traje de baño."

"¿De qué color es?"

"Es anaranjado."

They are working on their article and adjective agreement when they answer my questions.

"Llevo el suéter"

"Llevo la blusa morada."

The boys find putting together an outfit themselves with 30 seconds on the stopwatch to be the most fun and they describe their whole ensemble.

Truman was busy trying to steal all of the calcetines.

Decimal Fractions

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 06:40:00 +0000

We started a new thread of work this week, decimal fractions. We got through the first several presentations and then paused because I realized I needed the number cards from the bank game and I sold it. I needed some things from Alison's anyway and they are super quick. The new bank game will be here on Monday and then we can continue. You also need some hierarchically-colored beads (not bead bars) for these demonstrations. If you happen to have the box of beads that go with a small square root board like we did that would be perfect, otherwise you can cannibalize your racks and tubes.

We used the fraction circles to demonstrate that the unit divided into ten equal pieces creates "tenths" and introduced the hierarchically-colored wooden cubes.

I was super frustrated that my decimal cubes, from Kid Advance, are not really the right colors. One album I have describes the six colors of cubes as "light blue, lighter blue, pink, light pink, light green and lighter green." I would have settled for "blue, red, green, light blue, pink, and light green." Instead I have two dark blues so close in color only a Montessori primary child fresh off color box three could distinguish them. The greens aren't much better. As this is the third time in the past few weeks I've discovered that materials specifically from Kid Advance, while undamaged and passed my initial inspection, are not always made to Montessori specifications and not necessarily usable. Edited to add: I had a great customer service experience with Kid Advance today, and they didn't know I was a blogger. Everything has been rectified. I think I will break out the spray paint this weekend and lighten up one set of blue and one set of green cubes.

Eventually we reached the point where the boys could talk me through this progressing either to the left or to the right of the unit bead in the center something like as follows: a unit divided into ten equal pieces becomes tenths, one tenth divided into ten pieces becomes hundredths, one hundredth divided into ten pieces becomes thousandths, etc., OR a unit multiplied by ten creates a ten, a ten multiplied by ten becomes one hundred, one hundred multiplied by ten becomes one thousand. Next week when I have everything available I can introduce the number symbols.

Divisibility by Prime Factors and Seven

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Mon, 15 Feb 2016 20:36:00 +0000

This post will just be some of my thoughts on teaching a couple of the divisibility presentations. I am no mathematician so you may not want to do things the way I did and this may have all been obvious to you from the start. These are just some changes I made to the instructions in our albums based on my understanding of things.

After teaching (and in most cases proving, using golden beads) the divisibility rules for 2, 5, 25, 4, 8, 3, 9, 11, and 7 I wanted to revisit the lesson on "divisibility by prime factors" as discussed here because I wasn't happy with the focus of that lesson. In that presentation we recognize that a number is divisible by each its prime factors and any product thereof. My kids thought that was kind of silly because in order to create a factor tree they had to determine which prime numbers the composite numbers could be divided by. This is why I wondered if some of the advanced work on factors should be completed after divisibility. In that work, my children were unable to complete the factor trees without my assistance (or a calculator) because they didn't know the rules for divisibility. You would need either abstract long division skills (they are NOT pulling out racks and tubes to make a factor tree) or know the the divisibility rules to find the prime factors in that post. Anyway, I felt the "divisibility by prime factors" presentation focuses on revealing the reciprocal relationship between factors and divisibility. While some students may need that presented, I think that stops short. The most useful part of that tidbit of informations is that you can determine divisibility in the absence of a rule or shortcut using the prime factors.

We revisited this idea by asking if 32,352 was divisible by 24. Do we have a rule for 24? No. But we do know that a number is divisible by each its prime factors and any product thereof. We can find the prime factors of 24 (2 and 3) and if 32,352 is divisible by both of those numbers it is also divisible by 24. We do know divisibility rules for both 2 and 3 so the boys were able to determine divisibility quickly by applying those rules.

We practiced this again by asking if 151, 375 was divisible by 35. We do not have a rule for 35 but we found it's prime factors (5 and 7) and applied the rules of divisibility for both of those numbers.

The math albums I have only taught one rule for divisibility by seven but I prefer to use two rules. The rule I found in the albums was the rule that "if the difference of the sum of the odd number periods and sum of even number periods is divisible by seven then the number is divisible by seven."
That sounded like Greek to me the first time I read it not realizing that what was meant by "periods" was a family of numbers between the commas in a large number (unit family, thousand family, million family, billion family). So if you have a number like 654,076,790,241 you would add the unit and million family (076 + 241) and add the thousand family and billion family (654 +241) and find the difference between the two sums. The problem is the difference is 1127 and my youngest child didn't know if that was divisible by seven either (you could if they are proficient at abstract long division). This is where the other rule comes in handy. You can double the last digit (7*2=14) and then subtract that product from the remaining digits of the number (112-14=98). You can keep reapplying this rule as necessary until you find a number small enough to determine whether seven is a factor (see the link). 98 is divisible by seven. So I find that neither of these rules are enough on their own. Finding the difference between the odd and even number periods left us with a number still too large to determine divisibility without using abstract long division. You would have to apply the second rule ten times to determine divisibility which is just too many. So our family uses the first rule for large numbers, the second rule for smaller numbers and combine them if necessary.

So for our question that day, is 151,375 divisible by 35, we used both rules.

375-151=224
4*2=8
22-8=14

14 is divisible by 7

Violin

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 20:15:00 +0000

The boys have been preparing to play at a music festival. These are some clips from their first run-throughs with the accompanist. I already posted these on Facebook. This is for those of you who are interested but not on Facebook.

Kal-El, age 10

Me Too, age 8

Pompeii

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 19:25:00 +0000

I'll give you one guess as to what we're making.

Our The Story of the World work brought us to the time of the destruction of Pompeii. It will be no surprise that this has renewed a dormant interest in volcanoes. The First Great Lesson is actually the only Great Lesson I have not given this year (I only gave them in order the first year). Since that time certain topics keep cropping up in SotW that relate to one Great Lesson or another really well and I give them at that time. This year the boys were fortunate enough to have Ken Ham give them what certainly counted as the second and third great lessons for us.

Up until this point I have always used a baking soda and vinegar volcano for the First Great Lesson (Not how it should be done, but how we did it for a while so that the First Great Lesson happened at all.) Now that Kal-El is more of an "upper elementary" Montessori kid I though I would amp up his interest in the First Great Lesson with an amped up exploding volcano (using ammonium dichromate).

The boys read Pompeii: Lost and Found, Pompeii...Buried Alive! (Step into Reading), and Bodies From the Ash: Life and Death in Ancient Pompeii.

This all lead to some questions regarding self-preservation such as "Where is the nearest volcano from our house." (World. USA) They also recounted our time in Yellowstone this summer and asked to see the map again that shows the spread of the ash if it were to erupt. Me Too was quite pleased to see that the southernmost tip of Florida would be spared because as he said, "That exactly where I had in mind to take you to live with me when you retire." I didn't have the heart to tell him that if we retired to the Everglades National Park if the ash from Yellowstone didn't get us the alligators would. I find it humorous that if Yellowstone did erupt that God would choose the Everglades to be one of the two places spared. Brownsville is looking better and better every day.

We watched two videos about Pompeii. I definitely recommend that you preview these before showing them to your children. This first one is a shorter, less-violent option (aside from some screaming) that accurately shows the timeline of geological events only and their devastation without showing actual deaths. I don't know why that video has so many dislikes. I didn't have a problem with it.

The second was put on by BBC. It's longer and not appropriate for some families. It is alluded that the body of a female slave was found in a cheap motel with the man who owned her. The way it was presented my boys wouldn't have had any idea what was meant by that, so I allowed it. Also, I have very sensitive kids but felt they were mentally prepared for this through the books we had read through the week, and it was fine. At one point early on, after the first pyroclastic surge, Me Too aptly stated, "Mom, are about to watch everyone die in 100 different ways." Yup. The reason we watched this video was because it DID include the human elements such as who chose to remain in Pompeii and why, how we know what we know, Pliny's role that day, and the devastation of poisonous gas and high temperatures (the other video might leave one with the impression that you might make it out if you were physically protected.). I thought that the filmmakers did a brilliant job of weaving shots of recovered Pompeii today and the plaster casts of the voids left by human remains in the ash with the dramatized story.

We have a couple more days of volcano-making to be followed by the First Great Lesson and further study of volcanoes. It seems like this will be a good time to cover the "Formation of Mountains" section of the Geography album that we have never done as well.

School Days

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Fri, 29 Jan 2016 22:58:00 +0000

We've had a great couple of weeks of school. This week felt like it was all over the place. This week Monday Me Two finished his work plan around noon and started vomiting around 12:20. It was very considerate of him to wait until his school work was complete. I've never seen anyone get sick that many times in a day. He spent about twelve hours with a bucket.

One of my husband's best friends is a retired science teacher and he pulls out all kinds of neat things for our kids. He put on an hour science program for the boys' cub scout pack last week...we're talking big impact stuff like lifting three scouts at time on a hovercraft he threw together onsite with some cardboard, milk crates and a couple vacuum cleaners (!!?!). He always plans more demonstrations than he could possibly get to and when the show was over my boys were treated to a private demonstration of everything he didn't use during the show that day.

We have a "going out" once a week. This week we attended a school day concert that the symphony put on. Last week we went swimming (indoors!). The week before the boys planned our museum trip. Me Too had just completed memorizing all of the African countries so he wanted to look through the African exhibits. Our museum has four giant dioramas of different important ecosystems in Africa. They also have individual dioramas of artifacts organized by African country. They cover maybe half of the countries and Me Too really enjoyed being the expert here. Kal-El had just finished memorizing all of the European countries. He wanted to visit an extensive exhibit in which a building or shop from each of 33 different European cultures has been built to scale showing daily life, skills, and traditions from those cultures as they would have been about 100-150 years ago. He is really starting to act like an older child (and he's grown 4 inches since September). All on his own he decided to bring a notebook for the first time to record anything particularly interesting. Me Too does something similar, but using his camera.

Above is one of the games we use to practice our Spanish vocabulary. You could use this game to practice many different types of things. I built a tic tac toe board by taping 9 envelopes to one of our white boards. I fill the envelopes with pictures representing various vocabulary words. The kids take turns closing their eyes and pulling a picture out of an envelope. If they can tell me the word or phrase that goes with the picture successfully they can put their X or O on the front of the envelope (written on post-its).

Unless someone makes an error all of our games end in a tie.

We completed the divisibility section of the KotU album this week. Last week we learned the rule for elevens. Above is a photo from when we were working through the proof. This week we learned the rules (plural) for sevens. That deserves it's own post so stay tuned. The KotU album covers the rules for 2, 5, 25, 4, 8, 3, 9, 7 and 11 plus divisibility by a prime factors and products of a number's factors. Sixes aren't covered but there is an Eric Johnson video about divisibility by sixes so I might throw that in before we move on. The reason sixes are not included in the KotU album here is likely because the rule for sixes is actually just the prime factors rule. However, the prime factors presentation (in multiple albums, not just KotU) didn't really drive the correct point home. It seemed to me that the point was that a number is always divisible by its prime factors and products of its factors. The whole time I was teaching it I kept thinking "this is silly, of course a number is divisible by its factors and combinations of them." My attitude must have rubbed off of the kids or something because their attitude was very "Yeah Mom. We know." What the point should have been perhaps is that if you want to know if a number is divisible by a number that is tricky (basically any number that is not one of the numbers listed as covered) you can break that number down into its prime factors and if the dividend is divisible by each of those prime factors than it is divisible by the original divisor which is, of course, a product of those prime factors. Anyway, sorry if I'm preaching to the choir here. I felt rather daft when I realized I gave the divisibility by prime factors presentation with the wrong focus. I will use the sixes as an excuse to revisit that topic with a much more impressive trick.

This is what the boys do for fun these days. Me Too is having a good time. He is just trying to look serious.

I spent a lot of time returning materials this week. ETC Montessori must be trying out someone new and I received the wrong materials and had missing materials in a recent order. The replacement also had wrong materials in it. The third time was the charm. They have not made any errors in my past 30 orders or so and their customer service was great. I called first on Monday. I had the first replacement by Wednesday. I called Thursday late afternoon about the second mistake and a had the replacement in my hands 24 hours later. I hope I have as good of an experience with Kid Advance. I posted the photo above on my Instagram. The boys have been enjoying using the box of 250 volume cubes with the Nienhuis "Cube Up" cards. Virginia, from School en Casa, asked if my cubes were 2 cm as they should be or if they were the wrong size like hers. It hadn't occurred to me that they would be wrong but sure enough they are 2.45 cm. That size won't work with the yellow prisms for volume so I really need to call them next.

Each Cube Up card is a puzzle. The card shows you front, rear, top and left and right side views of a structure built with cubes. Interior lines indicate when cubes are not in the same plane. The answer is giving on the back using a top view again but this time indicating how many cubes are in each stack.

Kal-El used nearly every cube to create his own cube up puzzle.

He also made an answer key. He discovered when he tried to make the "view" pictures that his structure technically wouldn't be buildable because some of his interior columns are shorter than some exterior columns and the elevation would be visually blocked. It was a good effort regardless.

I had to start cutting our sentence strip paper longer and taller, longer to accomodate Kal-El's longer sentences and taller so we could start symbolizing the parts of speech above the sentence before they cut it up. I realized that the ETC materials the boys have been using have technically been calling for this but I hadn't noticed.

I have been busy prepping materials for the first time in a while. Kal-El is ready to move on to what some albums refer to as "Advanced Grammar." KotU doesn't refer to it that way, things are on a continuum not grouped by age or blocked into easy and advanced sections. However, we used MRD for a lot of our grammar because it matched some hand-me-down materials I was using. I prefer to buy materials rather than make them when I can and now all of our grammar materials are from ETC. They don't match the KotU albums but I'd rather figure out to make the pre-made materials work for us than make materials myself that match the albums. I have a friend who feels absolutely the opposite way, so to each her own. I will say that Jessica is on to my "bad attitude" when it comes to making materials. So now, if you try to avoid materials making like I do, you can buy many of the materials pre-made from her website (Edited to Add: I found the links. Here is a link to all the elementary print-yourself downloads. Here is the link to the grammar materials pre-printed and laminated.)

I have a few elementary grammar albums: KotU, Cultivating Dharma, MRD (vol. 5), Not Your Grandma's Grammar, and Mid-America. NONE of them match the ETC materials. The album that would would be the ETC grammar manual but they only sell those as part of their certification courses, so no luck for me. The topics are all the same among the albums but order of presentation is different in all of them. Also, ETC, MRD and NYGG all use the "railroad tracks" approach to verb tense rather than the KotU sliding cards. The ETC cards are divided into three different "years" and into seven different "threads." One could leave out the "years" division and just go by thread and the which thread you do when can be customized as well. However, to keep things a little easier I've decided to use the ETC order and pull the lessons out of the various albums to match. The MRD is the easiest to line up. The NYGG charts match the MRD. I tend to prefer AMI presentations to AMS presentations though. So I guess I'll be using ETC's cards in order, figuring out what concept they are teaching via MRD, using NYGG charts, and KotU and CD presentations to actually present much of the time. Oddly I find this easier than making materials.

The boys have moved on to memorizing the flags for Africa and Europe. This is going very quickly.

Here is some very incorrect work done by Kal-El. It is an ETC word study drawer for classification. Clearly he has not memorized the capitals yet. The ETC classification drawer require either advanced knowledge or some research skills.

Here is the same work after he fixed it. There is something fishy about this. All of the cities ARE capitals. The only thing he was able to leave under cities was Hong Kong. Not only is it unusual to have only one card in a category, but Hong Kong as a choice certainly evoked a long discussion. Try explaining what Hong Kong is to a 10 year old. And then, after doing so does it make sense to put it in any of these categories? Maybe that was the point. Sneaky Montessorians.

Finally, I'll share a couple of photos I just HAD to take recently. The first one, above, is a rare rare peaceful moment between two brothers who constantly argue. I took this from the warmth of my kitchen through the patio doors. They were peacefully sitting on a snow bank, swords in hand, having a long talk.

I discovered all of Me Too's animals propped on his bed like this. He often assembles them in this way to be his audience when he practices violin. When I saw this it occurred to me that any day now when he does this it may be the last time he ever does this (sniff) so I wanted to snap a picture to capture the moment.