A Quote and a History of a Scientist

"The object of my school is to is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing."

-- G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles


Nice quote, huh? I stole it from Dr Thursday's blogg.

Also, Dr Thursday blogged about Antoine Lavoisier and the importance of his discovery that respiration is a burning process. (If I am getting that correct).

We just got past Lavoisier in the Boy Scientist so I'm bookmarking this as a connection.

Another quote:

Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, went to the guillotine, crucifix in hand, a fervent child of the Church, at the bidding of ... the friends of "Reason" who declared, "Nous n'avons plus besoin de chimistes."

Or, "we no longer have need of chemists".

Nice, huh? more, here, if you can read French (mine is rusty)

Year 7 -- last lap

Year 7 Term III (word 2007)

Kieron and I have been dealing with fuzziness. It used to work for him to have me do a few things along with him and then jot down the rest on a piece of paper. Recently, though, that hasn't been enough. He gets lost in the day.... and so do I.

I decided to write out all that I want him to cover before summer break (subject to minor revisions). I gave him the whole thing on a clipboard and last week it seemed to be helpful. He still has his weekly Timetable (pictured on the sidebar) to refer to.

So over on the left side in gif form is this week's work. I have a section to "Carry Over" whatever he didn't get to the week before.

Above is linked the doc for the whole 9 weeks. If he keeps up he will finish in the first month of June. We'll see how it goes.

Next year he is going to do some type of Pre-Year 7.

Day 108 -- dice, Little House,

A few things going on recently:

Paddy loves Little House in the Big Woods. He's actually the first child I've read this aloud to. I think I started to read it to Clare but it went too slowly. With Paddy, I don't know if he's listening to every word but he keeps begging for another chapter. We are already on chapter 10. It is fun for me to read the detailed descriptions of elegant, effective pioneering.

It might have helped that we had the "first Little House" picture books around the house and have read them over and over through the years, so he already knew the general outline of the situation and liked the characters.

Kieron seems to have spring in the blood.... on the bright side, he has been taking the little ones outside to sled for hours (yes, we still have lots of very mushy snow). And he just zipped through three collections of Grimm's and Jacob's folk tales, and telling me about them spontaneously. On the down side, he isn't keeping up with his Ambleside reading, saying he doesn't mind reading through the summer if he doesn't stick on schedule.... hmmm...

Yesterday I decided to start Aidan on dice addition. He likes rolling dice a lot and we have dice all over the house. And I've been trying to figure out a way to illustrate addition that isn't quite as static as worksheets. He likes worksheets but he likes the ones with the BIG numbers, not boring 3 + 3. So I got two dice and rolled them and showed him how you can count the dots to get the sum. Eventually I will start writing down addition sums so he can see in symbols what I am now telling him verbally. Well, he liked the game and even did it spontaneously so that seems to be going well.

A bonus: Paddy liked the game too. He has no trouble adding any two dice quickly and so it's just practice for him. But this afternoon he was trying to stump me with six dice and that gave me a chance to show him how I group tens and therefore can find the sums quickly. Then I helped him do it and he thought that was neat. Dice can be beginning multiplicands too. Lots of possibilities. Something simple that we already have around seems to work much better for us than something elaborate and costly that is difficult to use.

Aidan regularly asks me for a "reading lesson" after dinner. Usually he tells me something about the day and I write it down. Then he practices writing words from my model. The third component is a review of the Spell to Read and Write cards (I use the Wise Spelling program because I have it, but any phonics program could be used in a similar way. What I like about this one is that it is high frequency words that have immediate impact -- not like the weird words he has never heard, like you find in some basic phonics programs -- he just doesn't have the verbal context to have any interest in deciphering long strings of odd CVC words).

The weather has been very springlike, and right now the three older kids are outside talking -- Sean came home early today.

Beginning Narration Notes

I haven't really tried to have Paddy narrate yet. When we pick up one of the stories from Ambleside that we haven't read for a while, I try to jostle his memory a bit... "remember how Paddle was in the beaver pond..." and then he fills in with whatever he wants to say. Then I keep reading. I am trying to focus on reading as a more contemplative thing with a beginning, middle and end, and try to let that develop into a narration and then discussion pattern naturally. I don't want to embarrass him as I am afraid I did when I experimented clumsily with narration when my older kids are younger.

So today, I said something like, "So what happened there?" I've done this a couple of times and he says something about the last thing that happened. In future I may slow down even more and ask him between short episodes or passages.

I've been narrating myself and it's not easy. There is something in my mind that balks at it, at being forced into the track of "what comes next". In "Blink" I read that there are two kinds of memory -- a huge visual-associative "right brained" bank and then the verbal/linguistic/sequential side. In the book, he says that the verbal memory can actually override the associative side and so some witnesses to crimes, for example, are LESS able to visually identify a suspect, say in a lineup, AFTER they have given a point by point description than BEFORE. Very interesting and may explain why the silent pond in my right brain resists being filtered through.

I find though that when I DO narrate or make that effort, it is easier to dredge the actual thing out of my mental pond later on. Charlotte Mason compares it to links in a chain. You make verbal associations with the visual, intuitional memories and that allows you to access them instead of having them lurk down underneath forever.

Some people have their beginners draw a picture about a story and then ask them to explain what is happening in the picture. Another method in Laura Berquist's book is for ME to draw the picture at his direction. That gives me an idea of what he sees.

Another thing I am considering, now that Aidan is in the habit of dictating journals for me to write down, is to ask Paddy to dictate journals and stories and then narrations. He would probably enjoy this since he sees me doing it with Aidan.

Some Early Learning Things

These are a couple of things suggested in Aidan's OT consult yesterday.

Cornmeal tray -- I made this a long time ago but just found it in the pantry today so I brought it out and put it with their word cards from Spell to Read and Write.

I wrote a word in the cornmeal and then Aidan and Paddy both traced over it. This was easier for them than handling a pen.






Later, in the evening, Aidan read one of the journals that we had written together a couple of weeks earlier. He did really well, actually, is recognizing far more words. Then he wanted to make another journal. I wrote it and we read it back.

Then he asked to write some words himself. Below is what the OT recommended because he tends to lose control of his pen and sprawl his letters all over the page. She thought his pencil grip, control and everything were fairly good and that he was ready to work on writing smaller and within spaces. So she made boxes and this seemed really helpful for him.

The words here are his choices. These are some of his favorite words:

























After we had written them out in the book, he wanted to cut them out.

























Here is a game he made for himself with a lid and marbles. He loves to roll them back and forth and this is actually good bilateral control because he is hemiplegic (his left side doesn't work so well after a stroke in infancy).
























Brendan brought the beautiful wooden USA puzzle out of his room and Aidan tried to do it today. Of course it was too difficult for him but he did all right. Please pay no attention to the crumbs all over the rug. That is life around here!

Day 105, and Week 25

I am a bit bored with just listing what we did on a given day, especially since it's just duplicating what I type out in a Word document. It seems to me that it would be better to save this space for actual notes, though.

If you look at the gif you can see what we got to this week and what we didn't get to. Or you can look at it in doc form.

What we didn't get to on Friday, we usually carry over to Monday which is a light day if everything else is up to date.

Day 104

Kieron

• Bible & Creed Creed in Slow Motion, started chapter 11
• Poetry: Tennyson
• Math chapter 15.1 – negative numbers
• Language Arts Latin p 58
• Artist study wanderer above the mists
• History: This Country of Ours chapter 54 – war in Canada -- narrated and discussed
  
• Exercise or play with guys
• Johny Tremain -- didn't do that because I had phone calls to make, he read GWW and narrated instead
• 2-15 min clean
• Literature: Robinson Crusoe chapter 5 -- narrated
• outdoors went out for a few minutes with siblings

Didn't get to:

• Science: Lab or Research
• recorder

(the day was already feeling a bit packed -- and he did science stuff earlier in the week when he did some magnet projects Brendan decluttered from his closet).

He did quite well on the narrations today and seems to accept the value... so far... I have been having him compare his retention of the readings he DOES narrate, compared with the ones he doesn't.

The first Art Study went well -- I like this artist's mountain pictures, they remind me of Albert Bierstadt's. We looked at it for a bit and he commented spontaneously. He seems to have the kind of mind that does well "dwelling" on something. A more contemplative mindset? I have been trying to narrate after readings myself and I have trouble, so I understand why he finds it difficult.

Paddy

• We are reading Lightfoot the Deer now, having finished Jimmy Skunk.
• I had him draw BIG S's tracing over mine, on construction paper with markers -- this he did much better.

Aidan

• typed and printed out some numbers
• worked on word cards a bit.
• He's going to a PT/OT eval later today.

Day 103

Kieron

• Bible & Creed --remainder of chapter 10 -- discussed
• Poetry: Tennyson --
• Math --Chapter 14.4
• Language Arts --Latin -- adjectives
• Science:The Boy Scientist --did lab instead – magnets
• Ways of the Wood Folk---Merganser Duck -- narrated a portion
• George Washington's World -- Phillis Wheatley, and George and Mary Washington
• Exercised while listening to Johny Tremain
• 2-15 min clean
• Literature: Robinson Crusoe -- chapter 4 -- narrated a portion
• In addition, we read chapter 53 of This Country of Ours, on Bunker Hill, and discussed and narrated.

What we didn't get to (I'm going to start mentioning that because it seems to help me think):

• Outdoors -- didn't get outside -- icy and miserable out there. Maybe I should have us just go out for 10 minutes -- start small just to breathe the air and get a feeling for the weather? (but that will mean I can't be a wimp!)
  
• piano -- didn't get to that

He narrated George Washington's World but not very well. On the other hand his narration of Bunker Hill was pretty good. Obviously we're still adjusting. We talked a bit about retention strategies, like making a visual image in the mind, and also reflecting a bit while reading to check one's attention status (these are things I got from reading that book about the Right Brained Learner -- I don't remember the exact title -- and also there is a list of reading strategies here, and these in PDF and a list of others). He has been very agreeable, not arguing, but sometimes making excuses for not paying much attention. I have become more aware of the natural noise level around here -- it's true, it is challenging for him to focus with everything going on around him.

Paddy --

I read him Cincinnatus from 50 Famous Stories. I asked him to tell what it was about and he said, "He was a king for 16 days" (which was the last sentence of the story). Other than that, he was fairly vague. That was a tough choice for a beginner narration though, since it was 3 or 4 pages long.

We finished reading Jimmy Skunk. He certainly loves to listen to stories and brings a book every time I sit down.

I read a couple of poems from A Child's Garden of Verses. I found a more general anthology of poetry for young children and am going to use that sometimes since I have to admit I am not particularly fond of RLS's Child's Garden. I am very sure it is me and not him, but it's hard for me to read them to Paddy when I don't really care much for reading them. Right now I've started just skipping through the book and having him look at the pictures and then listen to the ones I prefer of the lot.

We worked a bit on math. He can add two 2-digit numbers in his head. And he likes picture stories with his math.

We tried to do "S's" in HWT but he had a lot of trouble. If anything he seems to be worse than he used to be.

Aidan

We worked a bit on adding and recognizing larger numbers. He listened in to some of Jimmy Skunk. Maybe by the time we get to Year 1 with him it will already have a bit of familiarity -- that would be nice.

Day 102

We didn't get to history or religion today. I was talking to the older kids and the younger boys were enraptured by all the things Brendan brought out of his closet and handed off to them (every Lent he goes through his old treasures and discards what he can bear to part with, and this year it was some old Star Wars lego sets and some Lord of the Ring figurines). So I had Kieron do his independent work -- Math, Latin, Poetry, Science, Bulfinch's Mythology.

He took photos of Brendan's old treasures so I could have them as a keepsake (seeing the old things makes me feel sad remembering the days when he was that young) and also kept the little ones entertained while I worked on decluttering.

Paddy and I finished reading Old Man Coyote and started reading Jimmy Skunk together.

Day 101

If you look on the sidebar you can see Kieron's weekly schedule. Monday's a light day -- we save it for catch-up and for errand running and housecleaning. So besides cleaning and going to the library, he did most everything on there.

• Chores (dishwasher, room)
• Poetry: Tennyson --In Memoriam (part), and one other
• Math (computer) ---That Quiz -- place value
• Language Arts --talked about narration; copywork
• Nature Study --listened to coyote, loon and fox on youtube
• History: GWW --Frederick the Great, George III -- narrated
• Weekly House --Pick up, wipe
• Library and market

With Paddy, over the weekend I read How the Whale Got His Throat (from the Just So Stories), plus a bunch of stories from the Collier Junior Classics. We finished Mrs Peter Rabbit and are now started on Old Man Coyote.

Aidan did a few more "reading lessons" with his Spell to Read and Write cards and with me writing down a story he told. Aidan also did a bit of math from a first grade workbook.

I forgot to mention last week that we played a lot of card games -- UNO and Go Fish and a few hands of poker. ... the three younger boys and me.

The main habits we've been working on are using nice voices and picking up/cleaning up after selves. Still a ways to go.

Week 24 in Review

This is how Week 24 went for Kieron. You can click on the jpg to make it larger if you want, or view it in doc form (Microsoft 2007)

We're still working on getting up to full speed -- the ones that don't have checkmarks are things we didn't get to this week.

There are some posts detailing Week 24 over at Schola et Studium. With Paddy I pretty much kept up a light version of Ambleside Year 1. It has been working very well for us so far. With Aidan, the big thing this week was that I wrote out the first 30 words from Spell to Read and Write. He loves arranging these and trying to read them and has done it several times a day during the week. We also worked a bit on math with both the little ones.

This weekend, I want to focus on what narration is about particularly for older children, so I printed out these documents:

• Ambleside Narration Discussion
• Some THoughts on Narration
• The PNEU Method in Sunday Schools
• Some Notes on Narration
• Concerning Repeated Narration
• Thoughts on Narration (by Helen Wix)
• "We Narrate and Then We Know"
• A Liberal Education in Secondary Schools

Day 99 -- time with Paddy

I didn't log yesterday but Kieron completed pretty much everything on his list. Paddy didn't do any academics yesterday -- but today we had a nice little learning time together.

First he did a bit of handwriting and read some of the pages (from Handwriting without Tears). Then he asked to do math. We worked on several pages -- he chose the 100's. He made up a game to do with the robots illustrating the page -- the numbers were their scores so he rated them from weakest to strongest. Basically he is pretty much able to do anything in the MCP Math A book so when we take it out it's just a matter of choosing the ones he wants to do and talking about what it is about.

Then I brought out the Parables from Nature -- a Lesson of Faith. I had been dreading reading this. I first printed out the Parables several years ago during one of my earlier essays into Ambleside, but I'd always skimmed through it and been put off by the rather feminine and Victorian tone of the writing. I thought it would put my bionicle- and -Sonic- aficianado boys off and that it would be embarrassing to read aloud. But I read it and he got that hush that he gets when he is deeply interested. So my skills at predicting what will absorb my kids are not that great -- which is one of my weaknesses when I am trying to unschool. (but on the other hand, it was unschooling that taught me to try things and not be overly invested in whether they "took" or not).

He didn't narrate, but we were talking as we read and I realized he didn't know much about the caterpillar to butterfly process. Then I remembered that I had a caterpillar book in the Stopwatch series I have been reading to him. Butterfly and Caterpillar. To my delight, it is about the exact same cabbage butterfly that was in the parable. So we read it and made comparisons between the facts in the parable and the science in the actual book. Later I found the book beside his empty plate which means he was rereading it while he ate. I thought that was cool -- a natural little mini-unit. And I'm delighted that he was so interested in the little parable.

This is what I'm finding nice about Ambleside. It suits the way we tend to approach things around here. When I do a unit it takes a lot of planning, which I'm not that good at because of my difficulty in decision-making and frameworking, and sometimes I lose interest along the way, or the kids do. And I usually overdo it by gathering too much and then get stressed about deciding between them. But these spontaneous connections and the minimum of good quality readings are just delightful. So, a nice day. I am sure they won't all be like that but when there are some it usually means we are doing someething right!

Day 97

Kieron

• Another page of Plutarch -- Romulus
• 1 chapter of Johny Tremain while exercising
• George Washington's World
• Tennyson -- Sea Fairies
• Tales from Shakespeare -- Winter's Tale
• Math on Computer (Algebra)
• Weekly Jobs
• We discussed Romulus, and he narrated GWW and AWT

Paddy

• Reading (Henry and Mudge go to the Sea, other incidental reading)
• MCP Math A -- I was going to have him do a page of addition but instead he did a whole bunch of pages through the book -- I'm not really sure if there's much in there he doesn't know.
• Computer Addition -- a fishing game -- he made it through all three levels with only a bit of help from Kieron.
• Island Story -- chapter 2, Coming of the Romans -- he was a bit distracted.
• Bible Story -- Tower of Babel -- read and discussed.
• Paddle to the Sea -- 3 chapters since we were at an exciting part
• 2 more Aesop's Fables

Aidan

• all this weekend and today he has been working on the SWR flash cards I made for him and has actually mastered several of them. He really enjoys doing these.
• He worked on the orange Miquon Math book
• He had a "reading lesson" where I wrote out a story and we read it.
• Aidan and Paddy both worked on typing in all the words from the VTech phonics board and I printed out their accomplishment.

Today we went to the library and got "Babe". I was telling Paddy about it after we read about Moses the Kitten and how he was brought up by pigs. So Kieron said our little library had it and he had never watched it, so they are watching it now since it is rainy and slushy outside.

Also, I did a lot of reading aloud to Paddy this weekend:

• Toads and Diamonds by Charles Perrault
• The Swan Maiden by Howard Pyle
• Snow White and Rose Red by the Grimm Brothers
• Adventures of Pinocchio (an excerpt)
• A Bird Came Downt he Walk (by Emily Dickinson)
• Bingo has an Enemy (a short poem)
• The Blind Men and the Elephant (the version in rhyme)
• The Thief of Cathay
• A child's book of Old Testaments stories
• Nursery rhymes
• Sylvester and the Magic Pebbles
• Let's Talk About.... Disobeying (I've read this to him several times).

Day 96

Kieron

• Tennyson poem
• George Washington's World -- pages 30 -45
• Robinson Crusoe chapter 2
• He is going to do math
• He drew a bird for nature study.
• He made cookies
  

He has been riding on the stationary bike for exercise so I am going to read Johny Tremain and another page of Plutarch to him then.

Paddy

• First half of Tale of Prickly Porky -- about 12 chapters
• a couple of Henry and Mudge books from the library
• a book called Chicken and Egg -- photos and simple descriptions. Not very glitzy but he has asked me to read it several times -- he's seen chickens at his friends' house and I told him they are getting some more chicks soon so I think that raised his interest level.
• He tried to write his name
  
• He read the first 20 words in SWR -- but he couldn't really spell them.

Aidan

• I wrote out the first 20 SWR words on cards and we have gone through them a few times. I thought maybe I can have him memorize them and then go on to the next set, etc, until he has a few more words basically memorized. He seems to enjoy this.
• He wrote QUIET (with my hand guidance).

Day 95

Kieron

• Creed in Slow Motion -- we finished Chapter VIII , reviewed and discussed
• Math -- MEP Year 7 13.2 -- he got 3 wrong and corrected
• Boy Scientist -- finished chapter on Newton's Three Laws
• This Country of Ours -- The Rebellion of Pontiac, narrated
• Johny Tremain -- finished Chapter 2 and started Chapter 3
• Robinson Crusoe -- started this today and read chapter 1

Paddy

Some of this is from Wednesday.

Wednesday

• 2 Aesop's Tales (easy reader version) -- we "round robin" read them.
• 2 more Aesop's Tales from Milo Winter -- I read them to him.
• A storybook of parables.
• My Father's Dragon (we read the whole book again at bedtime)

Thursday

• 2 poems from Child's Garden of Verses
• James Herriot Treasury -- Moses the Kitten
• Fifty Famous Stories -- King Alfred and the Beggar

Aidan

• Went to clinic and was quiet but responsive with the "team"
• Went to labs -- coped great as usual.
• Helped with fire
• listened to stories I was reading to other people, a bit.
• I wrote another story with him while we were waiting for labs.
• He spelled "cooler" with a little phonetic prompting from me.
  

Day 94

Kieron

• Johny Tremain.
• Creed in Slow Motion "conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary" -- first half of chapter.
• George Washington's World, up to page 28, narrated
• Ways of the Wood Folk, first half of Fox-Ways, commented.
• The Boy Scientist, first 6 pages of Newton's Laws of Motion (chapter 4), commented. This book may run into next year.
• Tennyson, poem #3.
• I'm setting up his math now.

Paddy

• Golden Bible, Noah -- the ark, and the flood
• Paddle to the Sea, chapters 3 and 4.
• 3 poems from Child's Garden of Verses
• He told me about a birthday toy and I wrote it down and had him read it back.

Aidan

• He talked about his Dad going off to town and I wrote it down (3 sentences) and then we went over it a couple of times using phonetic principles.
• He's in a mood -- doesn't like Daddy being gone.

Music (background)

• Mick Malone and Robbie O'Connell -- Irish folk songs.

Year 1 schedule modified from one in the Ambleside files.
Year 1 Schedule (MS Word 2007)

Day 93

Kieron

• This Country of Ours chapter 49
• Johny Tremain
• weekly chores
• The rest of Midsummer Night's Dream from Tales of Shakespear
• The Eagle by Tennyson

Aidan and Paddy

• Literature Primer (trying to read bits of it with Aidan, and then Paddy read some of it for himself)
  
• Worked with occupational therapist -- she brought a concentration game with faces of children from different countries and Paddy and I discussed what countries they were from.

Sometime during the past few days I read Dragons of Blueland to Paddy, The Story of Ferdinand, and The Drinking Gourd. Drinking Gourd bothered him a bit because he didn't find out if the slaves had escaped or not.

We went to the library and market, and Clare found the lost box of old photos so all the kids have been looking through them.

Weekend Focus -- Spelling

This weekend, I am focusing on the Spell to Write and Read program. It takes some looking at in order to get it in one's head enough to actually use it. On the other hand, I like the approach. It totally makes sense to me. Not so much the details of how to do it as simply the approach.

Most teachers a century or so ago recommended SHORT phonics drills once or more a day and this is the approach I tend to take -- "stealth drills".

The other thing many teachers recommended in the past was using letter and word blocks or cards rather than waiting till the child is able to write well in order to teach reading. Most of my children were ready to read far before they could control a pencil well so it makes sense to me.

I think I'm going to start working slowly through the book with Paddy and Aidan (separately, I think) about twice a week. The rest of the time I will continue to have Aidan compose and reread journals, but I may try to incorporate some of the words he is learning from SWR into what I write for him to read.

Paddy -- hmm, he is reading quite a bit though silently. I think he really only needs the occasional spelling/phonics reinforcement in order to have more diversity in his word attack skills.

I usually have Aidan write several times a week (he actually ASKS to do that, so it's more of a matter of me being open to letting him write in my notebook). Paddy doesn't do much writing. Well, actually, he does write. He types. Hmm, have to think about whether drawing would serve the purpose better than handwriting right now.

Charlotte Mason talks about spelling in the context of learning to read for younger children.
For older children (who can already read) she thinks that dictation should largely take the place of formal spelling lessons.

Day 92, and schedule for next week for Year 7

I made a weekly schedule for Kieron -- based loosely on a sample schedule in the Ambleside group files.

I uploaded it in 2 doc forms:

Microsoft 2007
Microsoft 1997 -2003

• Today Kieron read up to page 14 in George Washington's World.
• He also read several pages of the Introduction to Bulfinch.
• He read a Tennyson poem.
• He did math (angles -- he had surprising difficulty -- usually everything is easy for him).
• I read him another page of Romulus.

Still light days as you see but next week we'll be close to full schedule (the jpg shows the details).


Paddy:

• Sleeping Beauty
• The Elephant's Child
• Gingham Dog and Calico Cat
• Macavity
• The Fairy Who Didn't Believe in Children

(all from some sort of anthology of good childrens' stories -- we also read a section of My Father's Dragon which inspired Paddy to go dig out the complete versions by Ruth Gannet that we have around here -- so now he wants me to read those).

Paddy knows how to "add ten" --- and I had him do a bit of spelling from SWR.

Aidan

• Wrote numbers with my help.
• A "together story" -- at the doctor's office -- write and reread.

Day 91

Kieron had the inspiration to do his (still minimal) schoolwork last night instead of this morning. So he did computer math, then read and narrated chapter 48 in This Country of Ours, then read the rest of the first chapter of Johny Tremain. He is also reading The Lost World on his own. This is still very light but it's going to be hard to be on a full schedule while Sean's still home. It feels like the holidays.

Kieron has a habit of narrating by making a general statement then supporting it. Like "Hey, X was really brave" then listing the details. I remember Sean doing precisely that at this age. So I am wondering if it is a natural tendency for kids, when they get to that more analytical age, to start narrating that way. .... more in the form of topic sentence, then support.

I played chess with Sean this morning. He was on the defensive for almost the whole game and then when my spatial sense got too overloaded by all the positions, he checkmated me in a single move. Sigh.

Sean played the Brain Game and Word Challenge and GeoChallenge at Facebook. While he's on vacation he is trying to move in on other family members' high scores in the various games. But I guess all those have a learning component too, so I'm noting it down.

(Yesterday I told him that he didn't have to worry about his mental ability since he can beat almost everyone in the family in chess. He said, "Why did you say that?" and I said, "Just in case you ever doubted." and he said, "I'm not the kind of person who has much doubt about my abilities." Just thought it was funny).

I finished reading Reddy Fox to Paddy. He will be good at chess someday, I think.... he suddenly asked me, "What happened to the chicken that Reddy stole from Farmer Brown's boy? Did he get to eat it before he got shot?" That took place near the beginning of the book, which we started reading several days ago.... and he stumped me. Actually now that I think of it I believe the chicken-stealing episode took place a bit before the shooting episode, but still, I am always surprised when a child is following so closely with a story and trying to solve plot difficulties. Maybe I am raising a little English Literature scholar LOL.

I'm trying to pace out the Thornton Burgess books at a rate of about one per week for him. We're waiting for the Burgess Bird Book which is recommended for Ambleside Year 1. I thought it would be more delightful if he already was acquainted with the characters of the Green Forest and Green Meadow before we started. All my kids have loved Burgess's books. I love them too.

Aidan has the coolers playing chess. He keeps asking me who will win. I vote for the little cooler. His money is on the big one.



Now I wanted to write out the way Kieron and I decided to do narration yesterday so I can remember it.

• We talked a bit beforehand "placing" the next reading in context of the last one.
  
• He read and commented aloud to me as he read..... this is really entertaining for me, hearing about US history from a 13 year old perspective.
  
• Then I told him to try to give the whole picture and he did.
• Then we discussed it a bit.

I am trying to make a habit of spending a bit of time talking about the last reading before starting a new reading, with Paddy. I haven't started asking for narration with Paddy yet -- I want to work into it gradually. I think he will like it though, because he is more extroverted than my older kids and his thoughts don't sink deep down into his brain where it is a real struggle and almost a trespass to try to dredge them back up.