Completed: first reading of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen
Eagerly anticipating the second reading.
It took all my effort to NOT underline choice passages during this reading!

In looking for a picture of the book I came upon an interesting-looking study of the book. I’m linking it here so I can go back to it after I’ve done my own thinking.
And of course there’s the Wiki-Notes too!

Charlotte Mason writes with a snippet of information here and another related one there, but not necesarilly together. As I read through her chapter about The Out-of-Door Life For Children, I just had to take notes and rearrange her ideas. Here’s what I came up with:

“Never be within doors when you can rightly be without.“ page 42

WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO DO OUT THERE? (method)

1. “Our wise mother, arrived, first sends the children to let off their spirits in a wild scamper, with cry, halloo and hullaballoo, and any extravagance that comes into their young heads. There is no distinction between big and little; the latter love to follow in the wake of their elders….and do according to their little might.”
2. “By and by the others come back to their mother, and, while wits are fresh and eyes keen, she sends them off on an exploring expedition” In the book follows a delightful description of what *might* occur. Obviously we will write our own stories, depending on where we are. The essence is that the children observe a scene and relate as much information as they can. “This is an exercise that delights children, and may be endlessly varied, carried on in the spirit of a game, and yet with the exactness and carefulness of a lesson.”
   Another similar technique, which should be employed less frequently due to the fatiguing strain of attention it requires is “picture-painting”. The children look attentively at a landscape, and then shut their eyes and describe what they see. If anything is blurred, they can look again (before they start telling).
3. Just Being  - the children should be left to themselves, to make acquaintance with creation. “This is, truly, a delightful thing to watch: the mother reads her book or knits her sock, checking all attempts to make talk; the child stares up into a tree, or down into a flower - doing nothing, thinking of nothing; or leads a bird’s life among the branches, or capers about in aimless ecstasy; - quite foolish, irrational doings, but, all the time, a fashioning is going on” 
   HOWEVER….”There is one thing the mother will allow herself to do as interpreter between Nature and the child, but that not oftener thanonce a week or once a month, and with look and gesture of delight rather than with flow of improving words - she will point out to the child some touch of especial loveliness in the colouring or grouping in the landscape or in the heavens. One other thing she will do, but very rarely, and with tender filial reverence…..she will point to some lovely flower or gracious tree,not only as beautiful work, but a beautiful thought of God, in which we may believe He finds continual pleasure, and which He is pleased to see His human children rejoice in. Such a seed of sympathy with the Divine thought sown in the heart of the child is worth many of the sermons the man may listen to hereafter, much of the “divinity” he may read.”)
4. Luncheon - wholesome nourishing fare. 
5. Naps for littlies, noisy games for big kids. Miss Mason suggests dancing and singing, chasing and racing, skipping, swimming, boating, badminton, climbing, tennis, cricket, rounders (the latter games and activities for older children). 
6. Other possibilities:
   *scouting (sounds like a grown-up version of hide-n-seek)
   * bird stalking (there needs to be no greed of collecting - the eye must be satisfied with seeing)
7. Writing
   * calendar (note discoveries so they can be looked for again a year later)
   * creation journal (just keep one! When you are out-of-doors on a daily basis, it is no trouble at all to add a page a day.)

WHAT IN THE WORLD FOR? (reason)

• for health’s sake - children need unvitiated unimpoverished country air!!
• to use the five senses, which is just how a child learns, storing up concrete experiences from which to be able to make abstractions later on.
• as mental training (It is “all play to the children, but the mother is doing invaluable work; she is training their powers of observation and expression, increasing their vocabulary and their range of ideas by giving them the name and the uses of an object at the right moment, - when they ask “What is it?” and “What is it for?”, And she is training her children in truthful habits, by making them careful to see the fact and to state it exactly, without omission or exaggeration.”)
• to learn a reverence for life
• to make for personal well-being (”a love of Nature, implanted as early that it will seem to them hereafter to have been born in them, will enrich their lives with pure interests, absorbing pursuits, health and good humour. “I have seen,” says the same writer, “the young man of fierce passions and uncontrollable daring expend healthily that energy which threatened daily to plunge him into recklessness, if not into sin, upon hunting out and collecting, through rock and bog, snow and tempest, every bird and egg of the neighbouring forest….I have seen the young London beauty, amid all the excitement and temptation of luxury and flattery, with her heart pure, and her mind occupied in a boudoir full of shells and fossils, flowers and seaweeds, keeping herself unspotted from the world, by considering the lilies of the field, how they grow.”)
• as a store of memories for old age (”think what a delightful possession for old age and middle life is a series of piuctures imaged, feature by feature, in the sunny glow of a child’s mind! The miserable thing about the childish recollections of most persons is that they are blurred, distorted, incomplete….and the reason is, not that the old scenes are forgotten, but that they were never fully seen. At the time, there was no more than a hazy impression that such and such objects were present, and naturally, after a lapse of years, those features can rarely be recalled of which the child was not cognisant when he saw them before him.”)

WHAT LITTLE THINGS COULD A MAMA POINT OUT? (content)

“Mothers and teachers should know about Nature. The mother cannot devote herself too much to this kind of reading, not only that she may read tit-bits to her children about matters they have come across, but that she may be able to answer their queries and direct their observation. And not only the mother, but any woman, who is likely ever to spend an hour or two in the society of children should make herself mistress of this sort of information; the children will adore her for knowing what they want to know, and who knows but she may give its bent for life to some young mind destined to do great things for the world.”

• flowers
• trees
• seasons
• living creatures
• rough classification of all the above (”For convenience in describing they should be able to name and distinguish petals, sepals and so on; and they should be encouraged to make such rough classifications as they can with their slight knowledge of both animal and vegetable forms. Plants with heart-shaped or spoon-shaped leaves, with whole or divided leaves; leaves with criss-cross veins and leaves with straight veins; bell-shaped flowers and cross-shaped flowers; flowers with three petals, with four, with five; trees which keep their leaves all the year, and trees which lose them in the autumn; creatures with a backbone and creatures without; creatures that eat grass and creatures that eat flesh, and so on. To make collections of leaves and flowers, pressed and mounted, and arranged according to their form, affords much pleasure, and, what is better, valuable training in the noticing of differences and resemblances.”)
• geography (a duck-pond can spark discussion on lakes; a brook can lead to rivers of the world; a hillock grows into a mountain; a reedy swamp, the rice paddies of China….)
• position of the sun
• distance
• direction
• maps (can be drawn in the sand or on paper)

I like these ideas and want to embrace them fully for my little ones as well as the older ones who missed out on this kind of early-years-experience. We’re going to do it all together, and while the time may come that the older ones need to knuckle down and apply themselves more fully to their books, there is nothing to be lost by developing this love of creation for a time now.

I’ve just started reading Charlotte Mason’s “The Original Home Schooling Series“ (the link will take you to an online version).
From the moment I met CM, I was fond of her. She greatly influenced us as we moved away from a “schooly” education to a more organic real life education for our children and ourselves.
But I had only ever read what others said she said.
 
Karen Andreola’s “A Charlotte Mason Companion: Reflections of the Gentle Art of Learning” is my favourite and after borrowing it from a friend every couple of years for an inspirational boost, I purchased my own copy this year!
I had also read Catherine Levison’s books and other books that mentioned the “Charlotte Mason Approach” - “For the Children’s Sake” by Susan Schaeffer MacAulay and Clay and Sally Clarkson’s excellent book, “Educating the Whole-Hearted Child”.
But I had not read Charlotte Mason.

I picked up Volume 1 and decided the time had come.
To be honest, it was a bit…..hmmmmm….hard to describe…..not difficult or dry or wordy or complicated (although in a way it is all those things)….I just didn’t click with her. But I didn’t want to give up and I’m so glad I didn’t. Before too many pages had been turned I found myself underlining phrases, sentences, whole paragraphs.

And it didn’t take too much longer before I was feeling quite comfortable with her conversational-but-old-fashioned style. Given that she started writing in 1880, it’s no wonder her books have a delightfully *old* feel to them. Although, at the same time I can’t help but observe that some of the “modern problems” she discusses are just the same today.
“For instance, according to the former code, a mother might use her slipper now and then, to good effect and without blame; but now, the person of the child is, whether rightly or wrongly, held sacred, and the infliction of pain for moral purposes is pretty generally disallowed.”
Our generation has taken this even further and in New Zealand, at least, it is now a criminal offence for a mother to “use her slipper”.
“That children should do as they are bid, mind their books, and take pleasure as it offers when nothing stands in the way, sumus up the old theory; now, the pleasures of the children are apt to be made of more account than their duties.” Is this not the case today?

She has some plain good common-sense.
“The parent’s chief care is, that that which they supply shall be wholesome and nourishing, whether in the way of picture-books, lessons, play-mates, bread and milk, or mother’s love.” p5

 And she says herself the very things I have come to believe regarding self-motivated learners: “Would not the application of a few hours in later life effect more than a year’s drudgery at any one subject in childhoood?” p99
In addition to this, her method for getting to a self-motivated stage follows along in principle with what we have been doing: “In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mother’s first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it spent for the most part out in the fresh air.” p43 Actually, we have not had a massive focus on the outdoors, although rare is the day that the children do not spend hours outside. However, my focus has changed. Only yesterday I read the section about Out-of-Door Life for Children and I am convinced it is something to add to our family culture. I see the journey we have taken to get me from a chick with no interest whatsoever in nature to where I am today, ready to embrace an outdoors life from our spot in the suburbs. Having a child who liked creepy-crawlies spurred me on to purchase field guides and books that held little interest to me. Watching my children interact with nature without me doing anything has been an education for me. Joining them has been a fabulous journey and I am looking forward to more of it, and to consciously intentionally guiding through long days outside. Just two days ago the children started an online creation journal…between that and their paper journals, we are ready to jump into The Outside with full enthusiasm.

One thing that has held me back from really embracing Charlotte Mason has been that it still seems very “schooly” and  I was trying to get away from that. However, after just a little ORIGINAL reading, I’m convinced she wouldn’t hyper-schedule a six-year-old.  “A great deal has been said lately about the danger of overpressure, of requiring too much mental work from a child of tender years. The danger exists; but lies, not in giving the child too much, but in giving him the wrong thing to do, the sort of work for which the present state of his mental development does not fit him.” p66 It will be interesting to watch how this idea plays out over the course of the six book series. What exactly does she mean by “the wrong thing”? I’m wondering where she sits in relation to ATJEd phases.

To finish today, two little thoughts gave me great inspiration and encouragement and strengthened my resolve to mother well:
“they should have the best of their mother, her freshest, brightest hours” p18
“mothers work wonders once they are convinced wonders are demanded of them.” p44

To know that someone really thinks you CAN work wonders is a great motivator!

Our little M5 is buzzing with numbers at the moment (actually, it’s been a very long moment lasting a few weeks now). Whenever we see numbers - on car number plates, on letter boxes, on packaging, on book pages, on clocks, or road signs…..everywhere….he’s reading them out and/or asking questions about them.
Yesterday he wanted to know if you could do one more number past infinity. And was that even bigger than “a hundred thousands”?, said with great emphasis, because that is a very big number, you know. 

So he’s inspired me to pull together some of the resources I have been accumulating about mathematics. An article would have been really good, but it’s just going to be a list of links that I have found to be helpful.

There’s a fantastic living mathematics website, with al sorts of articles and ideas and book lists and more than I could ever think of, much of which has a strong literature base and even ATJEd gets a mention.

Then there’s a big list of books taken from a Charlotte Mason-ish perspective, (ie inspirational books, which could be classified as *living* books).

There’s another shorter list, also with a CM flavour, and understandably, quite a few double-ups with the previous list.

Another little list I have found interesting in its own right is a list of mathematicians.

And just in case anyone is interested, here’s a long-winded account of a decade of maths in our family, and a little *time* story.

To update: Our eldest two (currently aged 13 and so-close-to-12-you-can-barely-call-him-11-any-more) have just spent a year with their first textbook. I have not had to tell them to “do maths”…….self-motivation is evident. In fact, I got a surprise last week when I saw just how far through the book they are. When they are done with the current book, we will have a nosey through the books we have on our bookshelf to see what they would like to move on to next. In the maths department we have: 

• an old musty 50c copy of “The How and Why Wonder Book of Mathematics by Esther and Harold Highland….ancient, but fascinating…..and do the principles change?
• Challenge Math by Edward Zaccaro
• Mathematics A Human Endeavour by Harold Jacobs (which they have already begun)
• The Amazing Mathematical Amusement Arcade by Brian Bolt (the title of which annoys me, but the book is a lot of fun!)
• Math Olympiad Contest Problems by Dr. George Lenchner
• The 10 Things All Future Mathematicians and Scientists Must Know (But Are Rarely Taught) also by Edward Zaccaro
• All The Math You’ll Ever Need by Steve Slavin

If they want to “teach” their younger siblings, they might pick up Family Math and do a little activity from that with them.

And in addition to those books, they now have this post to take a squizz at if they would like!

I feel like this blog got off with a whiz and a bang and has now fizzled to nothing. Actually, it’s not quite like that. I’ve been spending many a moment working on “behind the scenes” stuff. Sorting our bookshelves, compiling lists of various bits and bobs, tidying up a few pages, even doing a spot of reading. We’ve read a whole bunch of Reformation books aloud in the past few weeks and rather than writing individual reviews I’m going to do one Big Post when we’re done for now. But we just found another three we want to read! 
Additionally, I’ve churned through a few other books that are not worth mentioning, and I’m currently reading Julie of the Wolves, which is definitely review-material.

I realised why my next TJEd books hadn’t arrived - I hadn’t ordered them. How blonde is that? So in spite of telling Father Bear there were no more purchases to be made this year, I had to do it. Three cheers for GoodBooks again. I’ll get that momentum back soon. Though where I’ll find a copy of the Declaration of Independence in New Zealand I don’t know. We  are very politically-correct down here and all things American seem to be sniffed upon. I’m sure Mr Google will be able to help me.  

In our recipe books we have a star-rating system.
One star is *make this again only if you have no ingredients for anything else*
Two stars is *this is perfectly adequate, but doesn’t have the zingy WOW factor*
Three stars has it and is made over and over again!

And here beginneth our story-book star-rating system.

One star = read this again only if there is nothing else to read

Two stars = there’s nothing wrong with reading this book, but it’s not brilliant

Three stars = not quite a classic, but I’d read it aloud again

Five stars = classic to be reread over and over

(I’ve reposted this in a separate post to have it more accessible and to be able to link to it)

Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark.

In this gentle yet courageous account of an Inca boy’s transition to from childhood to manhood are wonderful insights into a different culture, a different place, a different people, a different mindset altogether. My, they don’t point with their fingers, they point with their lips! They boy doesn’t call the hut on his meadow his home - that’s just a shelter for food and wool; the mountain is his home. Men wear ponchos. There are day winds and night winds, llamas and burros. Children grind potatoes, spin wool and make ropes. Sandals are made especially for travelling.
It’s a book that asks big questions, carries you along on a journey and adventure and even inspires. I especially like the idea of “all things in their time” that runs through the book. The waiting for the right time. The resulting eagerness to apply yourself to the hard work of learning.
“The boy knew that his mind was thirsty. He knew, too, that muddied water is unfit to drink.”
The one (perhaps very pernickety) factor stopping it getting five star status is the fact that too often it has short sentences. I found myself changing them as I read aloud ”to make it sound better”. For example, instead of: The llamas stopped humming. Chuto was coming among them. He was greeting them in the Indian way. He was telling them that new day was with them, that they must be up to graze the ychu grass, I found myself skipping words: The llamas stopped humming. Chuto was coming among them, greeting them in the Indian way, telling them that new day was with them, that they must be up to graze…….

However, these short sentences make it an ideal book for beginning readers to increase their reading fluency.

Three stars

I’ve just started reading “A Landscape With Dragons”. Mostly it sits well with me, but there is something I can’t put my finger on that is bugging me about the book. I need to read further and see if I can work it out. Anyway, one of the things he mentions is the use of symbol and its recession from modern-day literature on the whole, and in particular, the changing meanings being attributed to long-accepted symbols.

Having visited the video store on Sunday night to pick up a John Grisham movie-from-the-book that father-in-law had mentioned (by the way, he advises you to just read the book - it’s far better than the movie - “Skipping Christmas”, if you’re interested), I ended up getting *five* DVDs…five for ten dollars, you know! A bargain.

Robin Hood was one of them. The 1938 movie version, to be precise. And what’s more, there was an additional DVD with documentaries about the making of and glorious technicolor and Robind Hood through history etc etc. We previewed them and decided the movie would be fine for the children to watch and the docos would be somewhat lacking in interest-factor, being not much more than interviews with rather stuffy old knowledgeable people.

As I told the children about the documentaries, they seemed Entirely Interested and so I turned my misgivings out with the rain that had been falling steadily all week, and let them watch. This was one time I was going to allow the use of the word *boring*. But I can just say, “I was wrong.” Over the course of two evenings, they watched all the interviews, not fast-forwarding through any!

Today they were rewarded with The Movie.

In one of the near-the-beginning scenes, a cup of red wine was spilled, and stays in the picture for some times dripping to the floor. My mind raced to “A Landscape With Dragons” SYMBOLS We paused the DVD and chatted about red liquid, foreshadowing,  symbols. Could they remember any such instances in the recent television series they watched a lot of? No.

On we watched……until the point at which a candle was extinguished as someone died. We paused and discussed again.

Then we just enjoyed the rest of the movie, with occasional doco-inspired-comments:
*they brought those rocks in from afar*
*those leaves are sprayed green*
*the colours really are amazing, aren’t they*
*that’s not really him climbing that rope*
*there’s that famous horse*

And one heartfelt response from L7:
“This is waaaaaaaaay better than the tv one”

It was certainly more faithful to the story, less sophisticated, legend-ish rather than realistic, with better castle scenes (although the painted backdrops appear fake to the modern eye!), less gruesome and much more funny.

“So what did you think of that?” I enquired as the screening of “The Diary of Anne Frank” drew to a close.
“It was,” J11 began, and then hesitated. He turned to look at me, a sheepish look flickering on his face. “Good,” he concluded. I was just pleased he was actually connecting with The Lesson.
We have mostly steered clear of the Modern Wars with our children so far, but when then-K9 decorated a notebook with swastikas a few months back, we tiptoed into a few gentle conversations with the older ones. J13 and J11 have also started reading a few novels…..I Am David, Carrie’s War, Twenty and Ten, The Silver Sword, The Endless Steppe, *Biggles*…and The Gulag Archipelego is waiting on the shelf for when they are ready. Two excellent picture books have added visual atmosphere; “Anne Frank” by Josephine Poole and Angela Barrett, and “Rose Blanche” by Roberto Innocenti and Ian McEwan. Books we bought at Auschwitz and other various non-fiction have been pored over together and snuggled up on the couch with Grandpa-who-lived-through-it-and-lost-a-father-and-brother-during-it.

Then a chance sighting of “The Diary of Anne Frank” at the video store prompted me to add yet another dimension. Three hours long, we had to watch it in two sittings while the little children slept. It’s not necessarilly *ordinary* viewing for kids, but they sat entranced….and contributed to the conversation afterwards.

I’m linking here to a post I just wrote on another blog about the 2004 movie, The Blue Butterfly. It’s not so much about *my* education, but it does show the kind of thinking I throw at things we read and watch.

The Blue Butterfly (2004)