02.27.08
questions from a friend….and answers from today
What step of TJEd are YOU up to?
I’m not sure I’m ever going to get to real scholar phase! Finding the time is just so hard. But I might make it to Slow Scholar;-) Right now (still) I’m at Love of Learning for poetry – absolutely enjoying reading poetry, which I never have before. Time constraints are probably what prevent me from digging in deeper, but I feel my confidence with it rising by the week, so maybe it’s a good thing to take your time. With art, I’m in a Love of Learning stage too and tipping into scholar-ish with the reading I’m doing about it all – but really need to be doing more practising. Actually, to be honest, I’m still probably in a getting-over-a-school-teacher-telling-me-I-needed-more-confidence-stage. Definitely lacking. Time issues again too. Actually, I feel like I’m dipping into lots of things and not giving any of them the attention they deserve (although my learn-to-knit year was pretty intense and has continued to prove to be highly productive knowledge!!!!)
How are you finding it?
I struggle between do I read my Bible OR a classic OR knit OR sew – and when on earth am I going to get to embroider?
What classics have you read?
Anne Of Green Gables, Little Britches, Laddie, The Chosen and I’m on The Lonesome Gods. Plus the books we give five stars to I count as classics (and obviously must have read).
Have you found yourself a mentor?
No. And I’m very aware that we’re about to go away for a year so I’m not too worried about it.
A group to discuss the books with?
If we weren’t taking off I’d be asking R*** if she would like to, and another friend has registered interest.
I’ve got ar eady-made group at home – in fact, I’ve put up on the calendar four “book discussion nights” that I intend to do with at least my older two this year. Just to get going with it. To be that little bit formalish perhaps. Though I imagine we’ll sit round with hot chocolates and just chat! And ideally I would love for it to involve other people too.
I wonder if it would be possible to *chat* online….even on this here blog…..or if it would be too tiresome. Talking beats typing! What do you (you, whoever might be reading this) think?
01.31.08
Aesop The Wise
Aesop & Company
Prepared by Barbara Bader
Pictured by Arthur Geisert
This book is wonderful on many levels. Black pen drawings are eminently “copiable”, lessons told are memorable, the introduction is informative, the fables are fantastic for narrating and are also inspirational.
After reading The Crow and the Pitcher (misunderstood by M5 and narrated, as he tried to make sense of the word “pitcher” along the lines of “in the picture – may I see the picture? - a bird tries to get water out of a jug……”) M5 was amazed at the wisdom of the crow and just had to try for himself with a glass half full of water and pile of pebbles. “It worked,” he cried out, almost as excitedly as Archimedes himself…..and he was noticing the same thing; “When I took my hand out of the water it went down as well as when I took the pebbles out. And when I put the pebbles in it went nearly to the very top even though it was only half full.”
Use your head, not just your muscle.
Aesop has given us a new motto for problem-solving!
And not just one, but two; the second for family feuds.
In “The Bundle of Sticks” we are reminded In union is strength.
Knowing that I would turn again to this saying in the days and months to come, I wanted it to be firmly planted in the children’s minds. So I sent them all outside to fetch a stick, just as in the story. Even ER jumped up from the potty and, bare-bottomed, collected the biggest one!
I could see in some of the bigger boys’ eyes that they thought *they* would be able to break the bundle. Fortunately they couldn’t! M5 gave it his best shot:
But it could not be done.
Individually, though, the sticks snapped easily, except for one.
This added a dimension missing in the fable: yes, one or two of us might be stronger than the others and be able to hold our own, but at what expense?
In union is strength. When I see the children quarrelling, I’m hoping I’ll only need to mention the pile of sticks……”If you stay together, no one will be able to do you any harm – but if you quarrel, your enemies will destroy you.”
11.08.07
Robin Hood Returns
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.
11.07.07
The Blue Butterfly
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)
10.28.07
a child learns…
I’ve been in a wee bit of discussion about <prepare yourself> UNSCHOOLING <gasp><recover> on an online forum. A few months ago I would have written the same ideas as I typed this week, but without the little phrases that come from A Thomas Jefferson Education. In recognition of the influence of A TJEd, I decided to copy-n-paste my scribblings in here too – I did write it, when all is said and done. (Please excue the disjointedness; it picks up on a few different ideas that had come up in the online covnersation.)
I don’t think you can *make* a child learn anything.
I see my responsiblity (as an educator if you like) is to *inspire* my kids/students to want to learn for themselves. The responsibility for their learning is THEIRS. That doesn’t mean I ignore them. No way! Inspiring is hard work! It means you have to be learning stuff yourself, you have to be discovering things and have a love of learning yourself to pass on.
But if you have that, it really does seem that it is contagious. Do you notice your kids copying you? Even when they are really little? Well, the same thing just happens as they get bigger and bigger. They copy the sounds you make and before you know it, you can’t stop them talking. They pull themselves up on furniture and before you know it, they are doing their first triathlon (and in that case, they are exceeding the example I set!) They see you reading books and at some stage they are both ready and desiring to know what the squiggles say (they may want to know before they are ready, and in that case you end up teaching them about having patience!)….and they learn to read. They see you writing and they want to use a pencil too. At first they eat the pen or pull the paper off the crayons, but eventually they scribble and you frame it if it’s your first child’s work. Then they make recognisable shapes and give them names and put in backgrounds and patterns and words and before you know it you are finding love notes in the strangest of places (and you file them away even if they are from your fifth child, because the novelty of them never wears off)……in short, they learn to write and draw.That’s my basic premise. If you set the example, your kids will follow at their pace. On top of that I build a foundation that looks something like this: in the first few years (it seems to be around 8-ish years) we focus on learning to get on with other family members, learning what is right and wrong, learning mum and dad are there to help you, learning to serve.
Around 8-ish they tend to be reading and starting to create things (not the kindergarten activity where everyone makes identical flowers out of paper plates and pipecleaners – things they actually make up out of their own imaginations usually fuelled by some game they are playing). Then I notice the child is moving on from that “Very Foundational Core Phase” and into something, which more than one person has called Love of Learning Phase (actually, three people that I’ve come across, including me). This is not a set time – it’s not a consecutive thing. They don’t stop the Core Phase values when they move into LOL (not like if they move into Year Two they are no longer Year one students). They become LOLers and still have the Core values firmly planted in them. Likewise the Love of Learning will continue hopefully for the rest of their lives. But at this stage, it is the thing that is majorly focussed on. Our focus is not writing. But that they learn to love to write. Our focus is not maths, but that they learn to love mathematical concepts yada yada. When they are ready (and it is unlikely to be before the age of 12, and could well be later) they will move into a Scholar Phase – that’s when they’ll really get their education. And I won’t have to cajole them into it – they will be self-motivated. And why wouldn’t they be if they love learning? If we have focussed on them enjoying life, why wouldn’t they want to know more?
Taking this approach allows me to use each of the children’s interests to teach them the “tools of learning”. I don’t have to write unit studies for them to learn by – we just live life and they learn what they need at any given time. That may sound wishy-washy, but did you have a programme for teaching your child to roll over? No, you watched them do it, you maybe encouraged them when they did, you helped them back when they got stuck, you shared their delight. It need not be any different with any other skill. What could be better than a personalised education appropriate to the individual?
Before you think my kids run riot every day, we do have structure – we structure our time, rather than the content. The kids know that after breakfast we will revise memory verses and sing some songs before we do our chores. They know that the baby will then go down for a nap and we’ll read together for a couple of hours. What we read depends on what I feel like on any given day – I am sharing my learning with the children and so it depends what I’ve been doing. At the moment we are enjoying poetry by Tennyson and reading about some Famous Men from the Rennaissance as well as some novels set in that time period. “Bugs in a Jar” is waiting in the wings to be read and we’ve just finished “The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew”. After our reading time (when the kids can also do handwork or play with quiet toys if they like), we sit up at the table (or I might send them to run round the house a few times if they’re fidgetty). “Tabletime” is structured in that the time is provided for them to do something. WHAT they choose to do is up to them. Copying a poem or recipe they made the day before, writing a thank you letter, playing a board game, drawing…..the older two CHOOSE to do their maths (this is the first year they have used a text book and I have not needed to tell them to do it once – they are self-motivated so my romantic-sounding goal above is actually coming to fruition). My eldest has also been teaching herself Latin and is now teaching the next two down because they are interested. But for over a decade we had no textbooky learning happening at all.
10.06.07
conversation overheard
Actually, I didn’t hear much of it, but I heard enough to make me think.
It’s Saturday afternoon, the children are scattered around our section eagerly slurping the first homemade iceblocks of summer spring. The eldest three (13, 11, 10) are perched atop the swing set.
“The book I’m reading…”
My heart has tuned in even before my ears have registered the sound, but sadly, the voice drops in seriousness and volume preventing my auditory apparatus from capturing the dialogue…..until in a burst of excitement and needful clarification (brother WILL understand better if she speaks louder, right?) she booms, “two *leagues*, two *leagues* they moved.”
I still don’t know if he had thought two legs had moved or two fleas or two something elses. I do know now why J13 didn’t ask “what’s a league?” when we read Charge of the Light Brigade the other day. And judging by the understanding on the faces of the boys sharing the sunny literary moment with her, they also had had little need of a motherly explanation.
I love that it’s not all up to me. I constantly ask God to lead us in This Thing Called Education, and occasionally I get little glimpses like this one into how He is weaving the threads together more intricately than I could design.
Half a league, half a league,
half a league onward…..
10.05.07
blue domes, green grass, men on horseback and an eagle
We’ve had a very on-again-off-again relationship with poetry in our family.
Today I worked out *why*
I have always tried to *do poetry* with the kids, because I thought it was something we should do. Never mind that I was a little scared of it and still allowed such words as “boring” to be placed in close proximity to “poetry”, yea, even in the same sentence.
That said, we have been *doing* poetry this year, and it’s been remarkably on-again, rather than off-again. We’ve delighted in childhood rhymes from “Lavender’s Blue”, giggled with Edward Lear’s hilarity, wandered country lanes with Emily Dickinson and William Wordsworth.
But this week poetry changed for us, because it changed for me.
This week we met Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Ordinarilly, his title alone would have been enough to give me the jitters, but, well, maybe I’m growing up. I enquired of the gentleman (for surely such he is, with a name like that), “Sir, what have you to teach us?”
The first poem on the page may well have been wonderful, but the second one was SHORT. Six lines. Thoughts of methodically working through the forty poems were abandoned instantly. Six lines it was to be.
I read them out, feeling a little like I was cheating, because it happened to be the very poem mentioned in one of the booklets I had read earlier this week. I omitted the title, and didn’t even get to ask the children what they thought it was about when one of them cried out “It’s an eagle!” *connection * success * thrill *
We re-read the poem and worked out how they knew, what clues had given it away. That was for my benefit, not the children’s;-)
Yesterday I flicked through the pages wondering if there was another short one.
There wasn’t, but Number Eight was “Charge of the Light Brigade”
I’ve heard of that! It’s famous. How about we read that one.
Half a league, half a league,
half a league onward…..
The rhythm grabbed us.
Then the story.
The tragedy.
We HAD to read it again.
We had to discuss the lines
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to question why,
Their’s but to do and die:
What a powerful piece.
I now loved poetry and I was sharing a new-found love with the children.
Not that I realised this yesterday.
Today we didn’t *do poetry*
But I read Early Spring to the children. It’s spring here and it seemed an appropriate piece. I’m sure there are many things to be learnt from this poem, but we just talked about the ones we loved this time.
Once more the Heavenly Power
Makes all things new,
And domes the red-plow’d hills
With loving blue;
We talked about the changing sky.
We talked about using a noun as a verb and decided if the boys were writing a poem about their shaghais, they just might say they “rubber-banded the stone across the garden” 
And speaking of interesting ways of using words, how about this line?
blah-de-blah-de something falls
on greening grass,
Can’t you just see the snow melting away and the new grass pushing up, making the ground so green the adjective should be turned into a verb, a “doing word”?
At that moment it struck me.
I was talking with the children about something I was loving myself. And that is oh so right when they are in the Love of Learning stage. Poetry isn’t something we just do, because we should. It is so much richer if I am sharing something I am newly-excited about. And this morning I was.
That is not to say some day I will not grapple with poetry. I expect to. I’m getting my Scholar Education and so it *can* be hard, it’s supposed to be, I will dedicate myself to struggling with ideas and learning…but just before I start that, before I jump into the Scholar Phase of Poetry, I’m having my own little Love Of Learning phase, setting the scene for the work that is to come, and the children are tagging along.
09.12.07
In the Shadow of Andersen
T3 and M5 were building with blocks at my feet as I typed. Their conversation entered my stream of consciousness! Here’s where I picked it up and joined in. I started to type as fast as my fingers would allow me, and left out the “please may you pass me the red one” and “shall we put this here?” comments.
M5: Are you being a copy cat?
T3: Yes I want to.
M5: Well ask Jesus and he could make you into a cat coz he’s the only one that’s magic.
T3: Is Jesus magic?
M5: Yes
Me: How do you know that?
M5: Well I know that He is. I just know. When I read the Bible it reminds me of that. Because when I was only 3 or 4 we read a book about Jesus died on the cross and rising from the dead.
Me: Is that magic?
M5: Yep.
Me: Could it be anything else?
M5: Yes
Me: What else could it be?
M5: Jesus makes the wind. Jesus makes people.
T3: Jesus - making - God (her words didn’t run together as a sentence!)
M5: Jesus IS God and God is Jesus.
T3: But sometimes he isn’t.
M5: Every time he, (somewhat distracted) all times He is…
T3: Why is He?
M5: Coz all times he is T3.
Me: Do you think magic is the same as God’s power?
M5: No.
Me: What’s the difference?
M5: Jesus. (pause) I don’t know.
Three minutes of building while I edited the quickly poorly-typed conversation above and then it erupted again!
M5: I just started to know that Jesus is magic and that he could make things lay. Do cicadas? Like chickens lay eggs.
L6 entered.
Me: Is magic God?
L6: I’m not sure.
M5: When you were three did you go to preschool and read books about God, coz I did?
L6: There weren’t many books about God, but when I was four there were some books about God and Jesus. God and magic isn’t the same thing. I don’t really know what the difference is though.
Me: Is magic a person?
M5: Yes, it is, yes.
L6: It’s Jesus. Kind of. Yes and no.
Me: So, is God a person?
L6: No.
M5: Well God is Jesus.
L6: Well God isn’t a person. He doesn’t have a body like men (aha, quoting straight from the catchism we memorise!) But he did live on earth and was a human being. But now He’s invisible you can’t see Him.
M5: Sometimes He isn’t invisible.
L6: Am I allowed to go and play now?
Me: Sure.
M5: Well you CAN see Him, He’s the sky eh Mama?
Me: No! He MADE the sky.
L6: (who obviously didn’t go out to play!) It’s hard to believe He’s everywhere.
M5: It’s hard to believe that He’s in the sky and He’s all around the world eh. It’s hard to believe, eh Mama?
Me: It’s hard for me to understand. That’s for sure. But I can believe it, because God is so much bigger than me and He knows more so He knows how to make that happen.
L6: Are you writing it down?
Me: Yes!
L6: giggle *big grin*
Me: What do you think?
L6: Very funny!
Me: Why?
L6: Coz I was just reading what you were writing and I thought, “I must ask her!” grin. giggle. chuckle. uncontrollable giggle
M5: L6, please may you stop laughing like that; it’s a sort of silly laugh.
When our older kids were younger, we didn’t read them ANY books about ghosts or witches or magic. I deleted it from the odd book that was (IMHO) otherwise fine…..I even changed the rhyme in one book. Other books we avoided altogether until later. Later arrived these past couple of weeks with our Hans Christian Andersen read-alouds.
Today’s conversation with the littlies reminded me *why* it is better to leave magic till later.
We’ll have an explicit chat about it sometime soon (the above conversation was just teasing out what they’re thinking) and then put away the magic until they are more mature in their understanding of reality.
And that’s how far I got before K10 came in. His entrance seemed to be an opportnity presenting itself to me, so I just had to enquire:
Me: Is magic God?
K10: What do you mean? He can do miracles, but I wouldn’t call it magic.
Me: What’s magic then?
K10: Hmmm? Not really sure. There is magic in stories. Real people can’t make magic. But in stories it can do all sorts of things.
Me: Is magic a person?
K10: It isn’t a person, but some people think they can do magic. Why do you want to know?
And so I read out all the above.
Enter K8 stage right.
I had to know. Would she be closer in her understanding to the six year old or the ten year old? She’s the one who only just recently realised that Thunderbirds are puppets (“You can actually see their mouths move” SHOCK!!!!) and she’s the one who had to ask if Anderesen’s The Darning Needle was true or not….so needless to say, I had my suspicions which way the dice was going to fall!
Me: Is magic God?
K8: No. Well, He can do anything, but that’s not really magic. God is different to a person, because he’s not really like anybody. But magic isn’t a person either.
Me: What is magic?
K8: It’s really like a circussy thing. Where they can hold poles on their hand with a person on it. It’s really all that I’ve seen. The other things that I saw at the circus were like shows more than magic stuff.
Me: What makes something magic stuff?
K8: It’s…most people can’t hold a pole on one hand with a person on the top.
Me: Is it being strong?
K8: Yes. It’s like when um when the clowns open up a book and fire comes out. And when the clown can open the drawer and the balls – you can’t see the balls and when he opens it another time you can see them. Or when the clown can hold a stick firm and when he gives it to someone else it all breaks.
There you have it.
09.08.07
The Little Mermaid
No cartoons. No comics. No garish colours. No Disney. No Happy Meal with that.
Just the real thing (well, translated from the original Danish into English by Stephen Corrin, but he did an awfully good job!)
No spontaneous discussion either though. Perhaps because everyone was eager to get Outside Into The Sunshine.
So at lunchtime I asked what words they would use to describe the mermaid.
*fishy (Father Bear’s contribution!!!!)*sad*swift*beautiful*
(at which point, M5 pointed out that made him think of a hymn we sing
“take my feet and let them be swift and beautiful for thee”)
*not afraid*brave*thoughtful*daring*courageous*caring*
09.07.07
The Ugly Duckling
Without me even saying anything, this morning’s read got a comparison from the children with The Tinder-box ~ and from the daughter who wasn’t even here for yesterday’s discussion about friendship.
I sat there thinking
this is education
Reading TJEd has made me more aware of what *just happens* in our reading times and how natural it is and how beneficial. I didn’t need to preach a sermon, but the children worked out for themsleves that the way the duckling was treated was unkind and would make him feel sad and unwanted. They told me you shouldn’t judge people by how they look or how much money they have or what they can give you. They noticed the duckling couldn’t purr or cluck, because God didn’t make it to. I resisted the urge to talk about waiting for God’s timing ~ even though it would have been a perfectly appropriate thing to discuss, I was more than happy to say nothing and see where *they* took the conversation. When I first came across it, I loved Charlotte Mason’s idea about letting children make their own connections, establish their own relationships with ideas and I have let this philosophy guide me alot. Today was no exception.
But tucked away in the back of my mind is the thought that now my children have met the Ugly Duckling I will be able to use it some other time when one of our “God’s timing” discussions occurs!
Today they followed the path of “the duckling was different to the others, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong or bad. Everyone isn’t the same. He should do what he was made for. They should help him do what he was created for and not try to make him into something else.”
A valuable lesson, don’t you think?
