Day 36

Morning Time:

• The Shakespeare Stealer -- almost 4 chapters today.
• Christ the King -- finished the chapter on Renaissance and Reformation.

Kieron:

• Math -- MEP chapter 6.1, and most of 6.2. About different ways to multiply, which Kieron seemed to think was quite interesting.
• Latin -- a Conversatio (Kieron said the substance of it was boring -- just "how's it going" type stuff) and a grammar review.
• A skimming/fact-finding exercise where I took the first assignment from Redwood Game's Core Knowledge geography worksheets, and read them to Kieron, and he looked up the answers in the book, and told them to me, and I wrote them down. This is sort of a distant cousin to narration and composition, or that's how it works here.
• Review questions on the science chapter on matter.
  

On his Own:

• Handwriting -- Italics G.
• Math practice on multiplication
• Reading: Shakespeare from The Latch Key to My Book House.

Notes/Resources:

• Found this study guide (pdf) for the play version of The Shakespeare Stealer. Sort of cute and lightweight, with a few context readings and the like.
• A "have you really read this" type study guide (doc) for summer Honors English. Might have some questions that would be useful for discussion.

While I was trolling for study guides, I found this blog post. It is about schoolkids googling for helps -- cliff notes and summaries -- for elementary-level books. Not really related to Shakespeare Stealer, except for the question of trying to slide by on someone else's work, but quite interesting in respect to the modern approach to literature study. You might like the blog, Jo, if you're reading here. The blogger writes about children's literature from a feminist perspective.

Here's the post referring to The Shakespeare Stealer that brought me there on Google, I suppose -- Smug presentist science and historical fiction. Actually, that post also relates to one of the themes I'm trying to address with Kieron during this Renaissance study:

Science is perceived as the marker of modernity as well as the thing that makes modernity superior to whatever came before it.

and this:

Why is it that in historical novels for children, the main characters always magically transcend the scientific paradigms of their times and intuit the tenets of today's science?
........
It always goes something like this: everybody says disease is caused by foul air, but Spunky Protagonist feels, just feels in her or his heart, that it is transmitted by "tiny seeds" that get passed along by rats and insects. It's just a feeling!