Hope you follow me over there. I’ll be back here someday, but it’s too buggy for now and Sean hasn’t got the time to fix it for me this semester.
Recently in kids Category
Abby’s fic, To Be Human, is in the Phineas and Ferb fandom, and answers these burning questions: What if Perry the Platypus was human? Does Ferb own any other clothing? And, most important of all, what are Phineas and Ferb going to do today?
Chapters 1-9 are here.
Faith’s Warriors fic, Stars of Gray, is also at their blog, but not neatly next-chapter-formatted yet. It features Graystripe, Faith’s favorite Warrior cat of that era. Prologue Chapter 1 2 3 4 5
Another hot one. I hung four loads of laundry. Halfway through I soaked my head in the pool. Here’s what I looked like when I came in.
LOVELY! It made me think of
Bede took my picture. I then spent quite a long time flat on my stomach on the nice cool livingroom floor like a basset hound. They don’t call ‘em the dog days for nothing.
Bede also wanted me to take his picture, so here it is.
He’s missing three teeth on top. Poor guy! All he wants for Labor Day is his two, er, three front teeth. And a cold front.
Goodness what a time. We put up the easy-set pool finally, and have been in it every day since. Except for one day when the actual air temperature was 105 and the pool was 97.
It gets quite hot here.
I am, I hope, ready for school this year. Tentatively. I think.
Religion:
Once upon a Time Saints
More Once upon a Time Saints
Around the Year Once upon a Time Saints
A Life of Our Lord for Children
My Catholic Faith
Whew. That seems like a lot. But what all of these theology books have in common is utter charm. They are delightful books. I know many Catholic homeschoolers who use the Faith and Life series from Ignatius. I have the second grade catechism, Jesus Our Life, and I was unimpressed with the layout and writing. They are very much textbooks, which are a distant fourth choice on my list of educational materials. The above books are nothing like that. The saint stories are amazing, written like once-upon-a-time, just as the title says. Life of Our Lord is a biography of Jesus, which I hope will segue quite nicely into reading the Gospels after we finish it. My Catholic Faith is the best teaching catechism I have ever read - it was the book I read as a catechumen. It’s like an expanded Baltimore Catechism. (The Baltimore Catechism is written like an FAQ for Catholics, for those among my readers who are unfamilliar with the work.)
Mathematics:
Kickin’ it old school here. We’re going to use the Ray’s Arithmetic series. You can get them for free from Google Books or purchase a bound box set (Ray’s Arithmetic Series 8 Volume Set
Science:
The Everything Kids’ Science Experiments Book: Boil Ice, Float Water, Measure Gravity-Challenge the World Around You! (Everything Kids Series)
Nature Study every Friday afternoon
Literature:
The Random House Book of Poetry for Children
A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys
I think I’ve overposted again. Best be off to bed. I’ll stop being Johnny-One-Note on the schoolbooks soon, I think!
Our friends:
Ben Hatke and
Ted Schluenderfritz.
Bede loves the PBS logo. He draws endless comics of the PBS P-head on adventures with his fellow television and film logo pals, Viacom and Screen Gems. The DiC logo is usually the villain in the stories. I don’t know why. I myself find the Viacom V of Doom very creepy.
I have some of these to scan in. His volume is incredible. He produces about fifty drawings a day and it’s difficult for me to select the ones to show you. But that’s not why I’m blogging.
Last week, I ordered this for him from the PBS shop.
It came today.
I opened the box and peeked in. It was what I thought it was. I took it out of the packing materials. Bede was sitting next to me on the sofa, mildly interested in the boxes in my lap, but also watching Alice in Wonderland, backwards, in French.
“Hey, Bede. Look what I have!” I said.
He glanced my way, then did a double-take. His eyes widened and an enormous grin split his face. “Ho ho ho!” he chortled. He stood up and hopped in place.
“It’s for you. I got it for you, Bede.” I held it out towards him.
He moaned and ran across the room, hopped, then ran back. He was still smiling hugely. He whispered, so softly I could just hear him, “It’s PBS. On your shirt.”
“Do you want to put it on, Bede?” I asked.
“YEAH!”
So he did. I guided his head and arms to the correct spots and he looked down at his chest blissfully. He was near exploding from joy at this point. He ran to a window to see his reflection, then ran back to me.
“Do you like the shirt, Bede?” I asked, redundantly.
He flung himself into my lap and hugged me, smiling that incredible smile.
I’ll take that as a yes. I love you too, little boy.
Still gently planning the homeschool year. In fact, I nodded to Luke Holtzmann on Twitter about it: I can see why buying a year’s worth of scheduled readings, with open-ended discussion questions included, all for great, REAL books that are a joy to read… is a heck of a lot easier than doing it all yourself, from scratch.
I didn’t go with Sonlight again for several reasons.
Sonlight is Christian but not Catholic. Sonlight’s religious materials are Evangelical Protestant in tone and mission, which can be fine - or intolerable. This year, I am focusing on teaching Roman Catholicism to our kids, and I need the materials to support that. In our last Core I used Sonlight’s books and stressed the commonalities that all Trinitarian Christians share. This year, I need more than that. I could have gotten a Core but not the Bible, but the EP overtones are present in many of the other subjects too, notably History, Literature and Science.
Sonlight doesn’t have a Middle Ages Core. The Middle Ages are covered in Sonlight’s World History Cores, but we wanted more detail. Winter Promise makes a full-year Middle Ages program but they also have the same trouble as reason 1 above.
Sonlight is 36 weeks, and we wanted 45. We’ll be doing four days a week for 45 weeks. Sonlight has a great four-day option that’s included with every Core but it’s still only 36 weeks.
Sonlight is slightly more expensive. Honestly, this isn’t much of a reason. I doubt I’ve saved much money. I’ve been able to buy a few things used, and I don’t have the expense of the Instructor’s Guide. Sonlight isn’t raking in the dough. Their Cores are expensive but you get real value for your money.
That’s about it. We will likely return to Sonlight in the future. Their High School Cores are very intriguing, and having everything just In A Box and DONE is worth a lot, let me tell you.
I’ll publish our schedule and booklist when I finish. I’m doing the first 15 weeks, so if we just hate it I won’t have wasted as much time.
Just a quick note to say…
Bede brushed his own teeth tonight, the whole shebang!
We’ll slowly work toward putting the paste on by himself, but for now I say skill attained: CHECK! Woohoo Bede!
My previous posts on this:
I’m trying to plan the year for our homeschool. We school pretty much year round, which lends us great flexibility. Legally I am required to have 180 days of attendance for all of my children between the ages of five and 18 years, equivalent to about 1000 attended hours in a year. Going all year means we do four hours a day, five days a week. These are not like hour-hours, but are attendance hours, and are better thought of as “lessons.” (In other words, I don’t teach them all for four hours every day. That counts the time they read to themselves or work alone and the time they discuss what they have read or worked on with me.)
It is MUCH easier for me to take attendance with Charlotte Mason than it was when we were unschooling. It always felt like unschooling took so much explaining, especially to the governmental types. For such a simple concept it can be remarkably difficult to understand, if you think children only learn when they are taught.. When we were investigated by DHS, Faith was the only child of school age, and she was five - it’s not difficult to demonstrate unschooled learning in a five-year old. But with older kids, it’s trickier, or it can be.
Since we’re studying the Middle Ages, we’ll be covering about a thousand years, approximately 500 to 1500 AD. Conveniently, Our Island Story and A Child’s History of the World both finish up the Middle Ages at chapter 61! This would be even more convenient if they both started at the same chapter. But… no. A Child’s History of the World starts the Dark Ages at chapter 40, and Our Island Story starts them around chapter 8.
(That’s if you consider the Dark Ages to have started at a different time on the continent than in Britain, which I do. If you don’t think that, then OIS starts it at chapter 12. But I digress.)
259 pages for OIS, 93 for CHOW. So what we’ll do is read two or three chapters of OIS for every one of CHOW. There’s several read-alouds in there too. I think they’ll be for another post, as will our math plan…
