Catch-up

Jonathan finished his udjat eye.

We finished Jabberwocky and now he's starting to copy the first verses of The Berry-Queen from Flower Fairies of the Autumn by Cicely Mary Barker. After he finished them today, we put them in his notebook and he was looking through the first verses of Jabberwocky that he had copied. He suddenly threw his arms around me and thanked me for teaching him how to write so much better. He had seen those first attempts he had made in the beginning and was overcome with pride in how far he's come, I think. I told him that he had done all of the practicing and that I was happy that he liked the results of his practice.

Jonathan also wrote two poems of his own today. They're nonsense poems a la Lewis Carroll.

Benjamen is on lesson 10 in 100 Easy Lessons.

It's time for bed. Yawn.

Egypt, Math Magic, and Butterflies

We've been studying Egypt for the past week or so. We use lots of different resources for history, including The Kingfisher History Encyclopedia, The Usborne Book of World History, and The Story of the World. We've had the books for 3 years, now, and Jonathan has read over them during that time, so much of what we do is review and more detailed study using books from the library. When we're starting a new topic, I get online and find 10 or so books and a video and put them on hold at the library in the town where Dan works (our local libraries are just sad, sad, sad). He picks them up on his lunch break and brings them home for us. Many of the books on Egypt have activities and crafts to do, so we've done a few this last week that Jonathan picked out. Yesterday we finished his double crown of Egypt, and last evening he started making an udjat eye with Papa. They used self-drying clay to form it, and when it dries, we'll sand it and paint it.

We do a few math pages every morning, usually first thing in the morning after breakfast. We're using Miquon Math and he's been doing the Red Book. He's also reading Math Magic For Your Kids on his own and is enjoying it, if the giggles are any indication. We're using Saxon Math as well, though I haven't formed an opinion about it, yet.

Also in the morning, we copy a few verses of Jabberwocky, and file it under handwriting. He loves the nonsense poems and is on the last stanza today. A bonus with Jonathan is that he remembers everything he hears and writing it down just cements it in his brain somehow. He can recite everything he's written down. After five years of living with his powers of memorization, I still have a hard time not marveling at him. I was remembering last night an episode when he was two years old. I walked down the hallway to hear him in his playroom, reciting The Big Red Barn verbatim, all the way down to the author/book description that was written on the back cover of the board book. I'm just as amazed by him today when I hear him swinging under the deck, chirping, "'Twas brillig and the slithy toves...."

Whenever he gets restless from the hand-writing, we put it aside and he goes outside to play or builds Bionicles in the playroom or picks up a book to read. He's been exploring Dr. Drake's Dragonology an awful lot this week. There's dragon code and riddles in that book, and he's in love. I think I'm going to use the riddles from this book for his next writing practices. "Once on my way to Saint Ives..."

At some point mid-morning, usually after our 10:30 snack, he'll wander back into the guest room (where I keep all of his "school" books), which is my cue to initiate something new. The first spelling book I had bought for him (Spelling Workout) is below his spelling level, but it has several exercises that introduce peripheral concepts like alphabetical order, correction marks, etc, so we skip the spelling words (if I'm iffy, I'll ask him to spell a few of the words, and when he spells them correctly, we skip the spelling lessons; we're on chapter 12 and he hasn't had to do any of the spelling lessons, yet), and just do the peripheral exercises to make sure he understands those concepts. Leafing through the second grade edition, it looks like we'll be skipping most of it, as well. I was bummed about the expense until I realized I would be able to use them for Benjamen.

Speaking of Benjamen, he's bummed himself about all of the time I spend in the guest room with Jonathan, and has been itching to have some study time of his own. He's been memorizing books and pretending to read them, pointing to letters and asking about them, etc, so I decided to try a few lessons from 100 Easy Lessons. He's eating it up and sounded out his first word last week. I usually work with Benajamen while Jonathan is working on something he can do on his own or while he's outside playing. We just do one lesson a day and he seems satisfied with that and the reading that we always do. I've been reading him stories from James Herriot's Treasury for Children and we're both enjoying it immensely. They're stories about animals from a country vet and the language is so appealing, the stories very simple but full of emotion. I think I may actually be enjoying them even more than Benjamen.

For science we use the Usborne Illustrated Encyclopedia and this DK Nature Encyclopedia. I do the same with these topics as I do with history ones. I order 10 or so extra books on the topic from the library and Jonathan usually plows through them on his own. If I leave books laying around, they're sure to be read. We just finished about three weeks on worms and are starting butterflies and moths today. For worms we built a worm house and wrote up out observations, but I don't know of any butterfly experiments we can do in this very cool autumn weather we've been having. We have a butterfly house, but I don't want to hatch some out only to have to release them into cold weather.

Jonathan pulled down my college Latin books when he was four or five and has been hooked ever since. I bought him Minimus and then Learning Latin through Mythology (which he loooves) and he mostly went over those on his own, asking me for help here and there. We're going over them again more formerly this year and I introduced Latin for Beginners which has more conversational Latin and a more extensive vocabulary. We usually do a lesson every other day, alternating the books.

We use three different grammar books, I think, alternating between them. The First Language Lessons are below Jonathan's ability, so we mostly skim those, just writing out the definitions of certain grammatical terms and filling in the gaps, where I find them. He seems to like English for the Thoughtful Child and Simply Grammar much better. They're more open-ended, and he gets to make up his own sentences, which tend toward the goofy. Jonathan thinks there's nothing funnier than mixing up a sentence like so: The transparent ladybug lives in a red jar. I don't get it, which, I think, makes me an official Old Person. I can just see him in a school room, though, where he would most likely be corrected for being imaginative...and goofy.

My artistic outlet is usually in the form of photography. I don't know the first thing about drawing, so I bought this book and am amazed at the results displayed in the book (the cover art was drawn by a 5 year old). We haven't started it, yet, but I'm going to try a first lesson this week. I'm a little nervous because it's the first time we can't just lay on the bed and talk about stuff and learn that way. I have to prepare ahead of time and wrap my head around the material first. So it should be interesting.

It sounds like we're doing tons of work, but we're really not. We usually do 20 minutes or half an hour at a time, several times during the day. Joanathan regulates it with his wandering in and out of the guest room, in between playing and reading and going on our walks. There are times when he lays on the bed in there reading Harry Potter for an hour or more straight. And there are times when he does half a page of Miquon math and doesn't want to do anymore. So we put whatever it is away and bring it out next time. Overall, I'm amazed at how consistent he is on his own steam. He has figured out his own rhythm with all of this and is thriving on it, I think.

Here's a list of the books he's read the last few months. If I see him with a book, I type it in my list (I know I've missed a lot), which doesn't mean he's finished the whole book, in some cases, but more often than not, he has, especially with the topic books (and usually not with the text-type books and encyclopediae). Also, I feel the need to point out that we're not a religious family, but Jonathan is very interested in the concept of God, obviously. And we support him in that, as in all things.

JONATHAN’S 1ST GRADE READING

August

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Lemony Snicket series (7 & 8)
Emeril’s There’s a Chef in my Soup
History of the World, Volume 1 (Ancient Times)
The Usborne Book of World History
The Kingfisher History Encyclopedia
Cool Facts about The Ancient World
Awesome Ancient Ancestors
Nasty Nature
Top 10 Shakespeare Stories
Top 10 Greek Legends
D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths
Shadow translated and illustrated by Marcia Brown from the French of Blaise Cendrars
Arthur’s New Puppy by Marc Brown
Arthur’s Science Fair Trouble by Marc Brown
Jack and the Whoopee Wind by Mary Calhoun
Goosebumps Series
Lessons From The Great Teacher
The Bible
My Book of Bible Stories
Children’s Illustrated Bible by Selina Hastings
First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind
Tales from Shakespeare by Lamb, et al.
The Incredible Hulk’s Book of Strength
DNA Is Here To Stay
Measly Middle Ages
Lift the Lid on Pirates
Cricket magazine
Ranger Rick magazine
Animorphs series
Encyclopedia Brown
Ted by Tony DiTerlizzi
Eek! Creak! Snicker, sneak! By Rhonda Gowler Greene
Clean Your Room, Harvey Moon by Pat Cummings
Wishbone series
The Very Lonely Firefly by Eric Carle
English for the Thoughtful Child
Science in Ancient Mesopotamia by Carol Moss
Who Are You Calling a Woolly Mammoth? by Elizabeth Levy
Mesopotamia by Pamela Service
Greek Myths by Geraldine McCaughrean
Theseus and the Minotaur by Leonard Everett Fisher
The Trojan Horse by Warwick Hutton
The Olympians by Leonard Everett Fisher
Jason and the Golden Fleece by Leonard Everett Fisher
Nature Encyclopedia (DK Books)
The Usborne Illustrated Encyclopedia
History of Genetics by Robert Snedden
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Monsters: The World’s Most Incredible Animals by Beatrice Fontanel
To Bathe A Boa by C. Imbior Kudrna
The Odyssey by Homer, retold by Geraldine McCaughrean
Gilgamesh retold by Geraldine McCaughrean
Scientists of the Ancient World by Margaret J. Anderson and Karen F. Stephenson
The Pomegranate Seeds by Laura Geringer
Roman Myths retold by Geraldine McCaughrean
Cyclops by Leonard Everett Fisher
Perseus retold by Warwick Hutton
Persephone retold by Warwick Hutton
Gods and Godesses of Ancient Egypt by Leonard Everett Fisher
Theseus and the Minotaur retold by Warwick Hutton
Bedhead by Margie Palatini
Light (a DK Eyewitness Book)

September

Superfudge by Judy Blume
Goosebumps series
Miss Spider’s ABC by David Kirk
Encyclopedia Brown series
Lemony Snicket series
The Gods and Goddesses of Ancient China by Leonard Everett Fisher
Emeril’s There’s a Chef in My Family
History of the World, Volume 1 (Ancient Times)
The Bible
First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind
English for the Thoughtful Child
The Red Book (Miquon Math)
Nature Encyclopedia (DK Books)
The Usborne Illustrated Encyclopedia
The Kingfisher History Encyclopedia
The Usborne Book of World History
The Magic Tree House series
Worms by Graham Coleman
Wonderful Worms by Linda Glaser
Discovering Worms by Jennifer Coldrey
Worms by Jen Green
Wiggling Worms at Work by Wendy Pfeffer
Mummies, Pyramids and Phaorohs by Gail Gibbons
Who Built the Pyramid by Meredith Hooper
The Atlas of Ancient Egypt by Neil Morris
Tutankhamun by David Murdoch
Pyramid by James Putnam
Hatshepsut, His Majesty, Herself by Catherine M. Andronik
Egyptian Mummies by Delia Pemberton
Step Into Ancient Egypt by Philip Steele
The Three Billy Goats Gruff by Paul Galdone
Who Are You Calling a Woolly Mammoth? by Elizabeth Levy
Kingfisher First Animals Encyclopedia
Dr. Drake’s Dragonology
Math Magic for Your Kids by Scott Flansburg

Child-led Learning?

I thought we were unschoolers, but I was obviously mistaken.

We're doing Latin almost daily. We're memorizing poems. We're studying the Mesopotamians and now the Egyptians. We just finished reading the Epic of Gilgamesh. We're memorizing grammar definitions and rules. We're practicing our handwriting by copying two lines of Jabberwocky every day. And memorizing it as we go. We're doing Miquon math and Saxon math. We've got five science books stacked up and do something from them every other day or so. I think we just did a unit on worms, fercryin'outloud. Jonathan has his nose buried in Greek myths and Shakespeare's plays half the day. And he's thriving.

On a steady diet of classical education.

He wanted a backpack and a pencil box to put in it. When Benjamen and Nicholas saw this, they, of course, had to have their own, as well. So now all of my boys have backpacks. And pencil boxes.

This is not unschooling, is it?

Much of this is Jonathan nosing through my college books. Much of this is me buying or renting him kid versions of what he finds interesting in my grown-up books, only to see that he often prefers the grown-up books. Much of this is me having to collect a portfolio that has to be evaluated at the end of the year in an attempt to avoid the evil that is standardized testing. Much of this is my own classical education influencing Jonathan, both consciously and unconsciously, I'm sure. And much of this is Jonathan and his amazing ability to memorize practically everything he reads or hears. (I tried to do one of those narrations, where the child makes the story his own by retelling it in his own words, only to realize after the first couple sentences that he was giving the story back to me verbatim.)

I don't know what to think about it all. I love the classics and have experienced first-hand the value of a classical education, so I obviously lean that way, have those materials around, etc. But I never thought I'd have a kid who wanted to do Latin before he ever started Kindergarten. On the other hand, I love the principles and premises of unschooling. It feels right to me and I'll always leaned that way with the boys. When Jonathan taught himself to read when he was two and was memorizing cars, then dinosaurs, then states, then everything, I saw my role as facilitator and get-out-of-his-way-er. I just followed along and was an enthusiastic spectator. Ironically, the kid who's been paving his own way all of these years, has built a road that leads right to the city of The Well-Trained Mind.

I'm living two towns over in Cognitive Dissonance.