Term 1 Progress --summary

I thought this might be the clearest way to show where we are on Year 7 compared to where I planned.

I put checks where we met or exceeded the goals, and highlighted where we didn't.

Now -- during the years of homeschooling I've often thought that these page number goals are pretty much meaningless. They are based sheerly on page numbers, not on what was retained. In theory, I could sit down today and get all this done in a few hours -- only not very thoroughly.

However, I have found that this kind of thing helps me in a limited way, to keep track and not get muddled. It was useful to me in that way last year, so I am doing it again this year.

Now a sort of Term Report. This may be repetitive to those who follow my blog regularly, but I wanted to sum it all up.



Math

MEP 7 is going great. Kieron can't believe it is really math. I supplement it with online quizzes, and with review sheets like these division ones.

Religion

I love the Creed in Slow Motion. I read it slowly, a bit a day, and we discuss. I am also having him read Bible History, and once or twice a week we pick up the Family Apostolate Catechism. He is also copying and memorizing prayers and quotes at a slow pace. We were going to read a gospel together -- for now, this has gone by the wayside. Perhaps I can have him read independently later in the year.

He has been reading through Vision saints books and has read five or six already.

Latin

We decided to use Traupman's Latin is Fun rather than Latina Christiana II. Traupman uses an inductive approach. I used this book a bit with Liam and it was successful in giving him an intellectual interest in Latin which carried through to the present day. After reading some articles about the virtues of the deductive approach, I went to LC1 for the next set of kids. However, this approach has not worked well with any of my kids -- their retention has been minimal. I am coming to realize there is a linear-sequential-learner bias to the deductive approach, and I can't see that it is necessarily more "classical" really. Liam called it "Cartesian" when I talked to him on the phone last week ;D. Anyway, all that is to say that Traupman is our friend right now. I know way more Latin now than I did when I used it with Liam (hooray for Mother's Learning) and so I can give him background grammar information and review that makes the presentation a bit more thorough. The little ones like looking through the pictures, and I think induction develops some intellectual skills that are not fostered by strict "top down" memorization of grammar and vocabulary. Whew, this turned into quite a ramble. Anyway, those are my (not expert, and not very humble either) opinions.

Now onto

New Testament Greek

We are using Basic Greek in 30 Minutes a Day. Now I don't have much Greek at all myself, so I hoped to improve my own learning by helping him with this. This book has limited goals; it's not meant to be a thorough approach like, say, Mounce's Bible Greek. It is supposed to be for familiarity and a bit of general knowledge. This is our "slow" language. We are only going to make it through the first couple of parts this year. I just found out how to download and utilize a Greek font so I can write my own reinforcement worksheets now.

Logic

Introductory Logic. We have a very old version. This is another one of the books I used with Liam. This year is all about nostalgia in the trivium, I guess! It's just meant to open up the subject of logical thinking with a year 7 student. This subject ties in with the Progym (below) but we haven't done much of the progym yet.

Literature and History:

As I mentioned I am integrating literature, history, science and religion into Humanitas. This is too big a subject to go into in what is already a long post. I will try to get that organized in my head so I can write it out some other time. It is going really well but in a free-floating Right-Brained Learner way right now. The core texts are Shakespeare's plays, and Plutarch's Lives, which we just started reading last week, so we haven't made a lot of progress. But there are tons of others and I want to keep those a bit free-flowing.

Now, for things that aren't really happening right now:

Progymnasmata.

Hmm. This comprises word analysis, grammar/syntax, oral narration and discussion, copywork, dictation and actual composition; also literary analysis. None of this is really happening except for discussion and literary analysis (in my book, a large term that basically at this age is mostly concerned with exposure to and interaction with a large variety of literature). The kid has done a bit of copywork (definite progress in neatness) and is writing on his own (cartooning, and definite progress in sentence structure and effectiveness). I always seem to end up unschooling composition and it always seems to work out pretty well in that I raise pretty good writers. Maybe I need to just face that and deal with it. But I keep dreaming progymnasmata.

Modern Language

Also, I had hoped to do some German or Spanish. One possibility is to teach Spanish orally to all three of the children -- very easy level for Kieron and just fun exposure for Paddy and Aidan. I don't really have a good accent but I know enough Spanish to get us through a primary level year. ASL is another possibility.

Others

Not much art or drawing or nature study or science..... sigh. That reminds me -- the last class in addition to my Humanitas was something I call in my head Localitas. This is another Right Brained Learner type project that was supposed to concern itself with things in our immediate area and of topical or current concern. So nature study and life skills and civics/character formation and political or natural events were supposed to fit in here, as well as community life. We have done a bit with this -- I had him read Smoke Jumpers & Fire Fighters since we live in a wildfire zone, and Seward's Folly because of my Alaskan background and because of Sarah Palin as the Republican VP pick -- and so on. We are also desultorily following the 100 Species Challenge. And of course, with Localitas things are always happening just because that's the nature of the thing. But I meant to expand more consciously on these things, and that has gone by the wayside. Now that I've written it out maybe I can plan it more intentionally ;-).

Sorry about this endless post. At least it cleared my head!

PRogress Term III

We are starting Week 26. That means that we have completed 125 days of school. Progress!

Here are the updated progress charts for the basic subjects.

YEar 6

























Year 9

Liam got all A's again. He is presently in the second semester of his junior year at Thomas Aquinas College.

This is a bit of bragging, I suppose, and I do apologize, but it fits into the "homeschooling successes" category and I'm tucking it into this small blog so it won't seem so much like, well, bragging.

I am proud of him. You know, I am not really about grades per se. But I know they do something towards reassuring and convincing various acquaintances that we didn't totally mess the kid up.

They might still worry that a great books, liberal-arts degree isn't very useful but then what is this "use" criterion anyway?

Now this is what some great men are very slow to allow; they insist that Education should be confined to some particular and narrow end, and should issue in some definite work, which can be weighed and measured. They argue as if every thing, as well as every person, had its price; and that where there has been a great outlay, they have a right to expect a return in kind. This they call making Education and Instruction "useful," and "Utility" becomes their watchword. With a fundamental principle of this nature, they very naturally go on to ask, what there is to show for the expense of a University; what is the real worth in the market of the article called "a Liberal Education," on the supposition that it does not teach us definitely how to advance our manufactures, or to improve our lands, or to better our civil economy; or again, if it does not at once make this man a lawyer, that an engineer, and that a surgeon; or at least if it does not lead to discoveries in chemistry, astronomy, geology, magnetism, and science of every kind.

Newman, Idea of a University.

So there you go. Newman goes on to add that a liberal education is useful as a byproduct of its value, because someone trained in the liberal arts is fitted to do well in almost any technical or academic branch (sometimes after post-graduate education or training, of course -- it's hard to get by without at least a master's nowadays, I understand).

I am glad he is doing well and the grades as well as his own conversation indicate to me he is thriving in this environment. I am glad he is a kind older brother and a devout Christian and a diligent worker, who also likes to write stories like his mother and design computer games like his father. I'm glad he talks about what he read in his classes and ponders it in his own time, and doesn't just do the work to get the grades. I think the Catholic Great Books education encourages the student in a lifelong habit of learning, so I am glad he is pursuing this course, though if he had chosen otherwise we would have supported him so long as the choice was an honorable one.

So there you go -- end of small bragging session.

Day 53-- Exam/Review Week Day Two

Notes:

The exam questions for both days are in gif form here.
The transcript for his answers for the second day is over here.


In the morning, Kieron and Aidan had dental appointments in town, so we left home at 8 and didn't get home till after noon. I told Kieron that we were going to continue our exams today but that we had gotten the more difficult stuff out of the way yesterday (namely, Math!) and today would be more like an interview or a discussion.

So after making a fire we sat by the fireside and I gave him this sheet as a preview -- (right brained learners and introverts usually need a bit of time to process and retrieve) and basically reassured him. He didn't seem to need reassuring though -- he liked the questions and was looking forward to answering them. In fact, for some, he wanted to answer more questions.

I also told him that if he was drawing a blank on the question, he could make up one of his own and answer it instead. (This is one of the things Charlotte Mason said was an advanced form of narration -- formulating and answering your own questions, so I wasn't being "easy" on him -- I was curious to see what questions he might come up with, but in fact he liked my questions and stuck with those, though sometimes I would rephrase or fill them out a bit).

The whole thing took 45 minutes to an hour. I took down his answers on the Palm with the keyboard attachment. I am going to format them a bit and then upload them to google docs, but I think it would take a monster post here unless I divided them up by topics, so I don't think I'm going to just post them here. Rather, I'll link to them so that if you are interested you can see.

We skipped the "draw a picture" "find on the map" and "Greek letters" questions since we both figured that he could do these some other time.... probably tomorrow. And the narrating momentum was so good, I didn't want to waste it. We were both getting a bit restless by the Literature section so since the Science questions were answered so thoroughly, I telescoped Literature and asked him to describe a character -- he described a Bionicle from one of his stories.

In general, not too bad for a first effort.

It was really fun just celebrating what he remembered and I can see the helpfulness of periodic exam/reviews like this. I know a lot of people do the same sort of thing by means of lapbooks and end of unit projects, but this was quite simple -- just me and him and the keyboard. Maybe next time we'll try something more creative like an end of term lapbook or portfolio or notebook packet. We'll see.

Year 6 and 9 Progress Charts -- Skill Subjects

I figured out how to make spreadsheets into GIFs so here are the charts in visual form if you are having trouble accessing Google Docs. You can click on the pictures to make them bigger.

I owe a hat tip to Trivium Academy: I'm doing these quite a lot like hers except sort of the opposite : )

Year 9 Progress at a Glance Charts






Year 6 Progress at a Glance Charts

Calculations

Hey! I'm 10 % through the academic year! (see sidebar). That went fast.

I made out this little chart to satisfy my OCD tendencies:

• 5 days = 1 week
• 20 days = 1 month
• 3 months = 1 semester
• 3 semesters = 1 academic year.
• 9 months = 36 weeks = 180 days = 1 academic year

I am sure most people don't spend their free time doing these rather useless little calculations, but for me, they are comforting.

The reason I did this is because I was rereading the Kolbe booklet -- Implementation of Ignatian Education in the Home -- probably my all time most thumbed through homeschool book. This year is taking a more Ignatian turn than the past couple of years. Anyway, IIEH discusses review -- this is a very important concept in Ignatian education, and not to be confused with mere kill n drill. There should be a review after each lesson introduction (covering the most crucial concepts), a review of the independent study (reading, working), a review each week, a monthly review which is sort of a "step back and look at the big picture" and then a term-end cumulative review that is associated with exams. You can see some of this in Charlotte Mason's method, too.

Again, the reviews are not meant to be just rote drills -- they are meant to broaden connections, look at the picture from a new angle, consolidate, reinforce.

So I made my little schedule because I want to eventually have a routine for these reviews -- I did this years ago but not with this same set of kids, and not with the materials I am using now. If I get one completed, I will upload it to my sidebar.

(There are some articles I wrote about the Ignatian method over here). ... there are two about repetition.

By the way, there is a nice article on Ignatian classical education here -- including some information on teaching a language arts course that is quite compatible with the progymnasmata. )

In my most recent Lesson Planner, (PDF) I have a space to jot down things that I want to remember to review -- that's something that always used to slip by).

Progress Notes -- Paddy, Aidan

Sometimes a child takes a cognitive leap, seemingly overnight, though it probably only seems that way. (Remember the Frog and Toad story about Toad planting a garden and how frustrated he got waiting for his seeds to sprout?)

In the past couple of days Paddy seems to have had a bunch of mental seeds sprout.

At Mass, he was trying to read the Responsorial Psalm -- it helped that it is one line which we sing slowly over and over -- he got to where he was following the words and whispering them on his own. He tried to follow the hymns too, but with less success because they move faster and the verse schematic is difficult to follow.

He drew several books -- he can draw a human shape, rudimentarily, now. He had me staple them together so now he has about 3 books of action scenes. We drew several together so they could "fight".

Today he made several little post-it notes with letters drawn on them, which he asked me to "read" -- then he had me staple them together, too. He's been carrying the book around asking people to "read" them.

His attention span for read-alouds seems endless -- it is a matter of me finding the time (which I need to make into a priority) rather than him getting bored.

As for Aidan -- I have been putting out the HWT letterforms daily -- which he enjoys -- and also we invented a game where he chants the months of the year and counts them off on his fingers -- he LOVES this -- loves the sounds of the words. He also can recite his whole name, where he lives, and phone number, which is a good skill for this age --at least, they always made a big push to teach this at the primary level in the older kids' parochial school years.

Progress Notes

A couple of weeks ago we got a new car, a bright red SUV which seats seven. As a consequences, Aidan has rediscovered his old fire engine, which has roughly the same shape and color as the Dodge Durango.

He found an old play house of Clare's which has been neglected for so long that I had it in the Goodwill pile.

So at first he was playing the game "driving the Durango into the garage."

A bit later he discovered that the back hatches open just like it does on the Durango. So he stuffed a couple of duplo blocks in the back, which is exactly what Kevin does when he drives to town to go shopping.

Today he discovered while washing the real Durango, that there is a spare tire under the carriage of the car. So now he has put a broken yo-yo, that is shaped like a tire, in the back of his firetruck.

All evening he has been saying, "The coolers are in the back of the car. We're going to Costco." and "Now we're going to Mass," and "It's time to go to college to see Liam." He came up pretending to hold things in his arms and said, "Where does the chicken go? Where do the eggs go?" I realized he was imitating his siblings who ask when they are unloading the groceries.

It is nice to see this....pretend play getting more and more sophisticated.