Introducing Classic Literature? Beat It To Death.

I returned from the library yesterday with media selections. Well, I also picked up some books but the media drew all of the attention. Our local library has a great media room featuring a wide assortment of educational as well as entertainment DVDs and audio books. So, my son was thrilled when I came home with a special treat, grabbed it from my hands and ran up to his room to play it.

Dora?

Transformers?

Sponge Bob?

Nope, an Ivanhoe audiobook.

I’ve written before that the absence of television in our house leaves room for great literature. And so we buy him children’s version of classic novels, plays and operas – on CD, in print and yes, also on DVD.

Great Illustrated Classics

Barefoot Books

Jim Weiss CDs

All designed for kids age 3 or 4 and up…much more interesting for parents to discuss than the latest adventures of Dora. Introducing kids to classics serves several purposes. Educating them and, at least in my case, educating me too!

We generally pick one classic to concentrate on at a time. Then beat it to death. Children, it seems, prefer this method, as any parent who has read Good Night Moon 25 times can tell you. We often work our way up to a performance, the adult kind.

Right now we’re gearing up for a performance of The Magic Flute, an opera by Mozart. Since I’ve never been an opera fan; this is a new one for me too. I suspect I'm not an opera fan because my first exposure to it was a performance. In contrast, we've taken several months to prepare.

First we bought this CD

A few months later, we bought this book and CD

Then recently, we bought this book and CD too.

Then I hunted and hunted and hunted until I found a full performance of the opera where tickets weren’t $275 a seat. In January we’ll go to see it – the “student preview” (which I think means dress rehearsal). At $30 per seat, if we find ourselves leaving halfway through, that will be OK. Which may be because we are thrown out, since the opera is in German with English subtitles we’re still trying to figure out how to read the subtitles to the kids without disturbing the rest of the audience.

In the meantime, my son is engrossed in Ivanhoe.

This isn’t actually on our after schooling list right now. We do however have an abridged version with lots of pictures which my other half picked up one day to read to our son…and read to him and read to him. Since I got sucked in and then a bit tired of reading the same 200 plus pages over and over, I picked up the audio book at the library.

Cop out. Oh well.

When he finishes the 4 cassette abridged version he’s eager to rent the 14 cassette adult version. We’ll see about that as I suspect the abridged version cuts out some of the violence.

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Dinosaured out! An Update on Our Afterschooling Adventure

It’s probably time for me to give an update on our afterschooling adventure. If you’ve been reading my posts on this subject you know we started back in August with a plan to afterschool to supplement what we felt were weaknesses in elementary subjects particularly world history and, to some extent, science.

Using an 8 week model we set forth to do the following:

July 15 – September 15

Science: Rocks

History: The Paleozoic period

September 15- November 15

Science: Weather

History: The Mesozoic period

November 15 – January 15

History: The Cenozoic period

Science: Volcanoes and Earthquake

The first 8 week period went great. We finished reading the books, we did some experiments and projects in each subject and the kids extended the learning with their own ideas.

The second 8 weeks were a little rocky. We switched history (or in this case prehistory) books halfway through deciding to use the Barrons Prehistoric World series of books.

We managed to cover the water cycle and make a weather station for science but, much of what we wanted to cover was a little much for the parents to actually understand let alone the children. And I was a little lame preparing science experiments.

During the third 8 week session everything…um…sort of fell apart.

First, my son was petrified by both volcanoes and earthquakes (even though a few weeks early he was enthused) and refused to study them. Then Crystal bogged down with holidays, birthdays and such never quite got around to writing up the planning grid for history for that session. (We decided to write up objectives, resources and activities for each 8 week session in advance. I wrote mine up for this session but….due to the “fear factor’ never followed it.)

We decided we’re trying to do too much…duh!

So, for this session we’re winging it. My son seems to have gotten over his volcano fear so we’ll gingerly start doing a bit on that subject. I have a great science experiment for it!

We’ll also read as much of the two history books that cover this period as we can. Crystal says both she and her boys are “dinosaured out!”. We are a bit too!

So, we’ll regroup. Starting in January we plan to start following The Well Trained Mind’s History curriculum, which consists of reading perhaps 10 pages of The Story of The World each 8 week period rather than a whole book or two. For science I’m considering using the Kingfisher Encyclopedia of animals and doing a few pages each session.

We’ll meet and brainstorm and try again. Don’t they say you should learn from your mistakes?

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Teaching Weather When You Only Have Climate

Recently we have been focusing on weather at our house. Since out goal, in both science and history has been to start at the very beginning (insert music notes merrily across the top of the previous words), we began with the big bang. We then moved on to the sun and seasons, the differences in Northern and Southern hemispheres and, since we were in the neighborhood, a discussion of day and night.

Our school globe, a dark room and a flashlight turned out to be the perfect tools to show how the sun hits the earth at different times of the day and during different seasons. Kids can’t resist dark rooms and flashlights now, can they? By actually “tilting’ one of our crew, and having another one hold the flashlight, we were able to emphasize the impact that the earth’s tilt has on the seasons. This of course, elicited giggles from all assembled.

However, after this auspicious start, we’ve started to stumble. September through December should be one of the best times to teach weather, with the variety of it we see at that time of year…unless you live in Southern California. I like to say we have climate here but, no weather - a bit of an exaggeration perhaps but, then I grew up in a place were we had WEATHER, lots of it!




And, I’ve been rather surprised by the variety of things that are, umm abstract in this climate.

Let’s take clouds. There are basically three types, right? Well, we don’t tend to have many clouds here and we certainly have very few, cumulous, since we have such low humidity. Speaking of which…it’s a bit hard to describe humidity, when the children have never felt it. Let’s not even talk about the heat index. I made an attempt to explain this, how it “feels” hotter when it’s more humid. Guess we’ll have to wait for a trip to Florida. And then we have barometers and also thermometers, neither of which show a great variance over the course of a week or a month for that matter.

Since we live by the coast, this is of course exacerbated. We did learn though that it’s because water holds heat better than air our temperature stays more nearly the same day and night. Since they’ve all traveled one hour inland to the desert, this concept was not met with blank stares.

We’ve done the best that we can with the climate we have been dealt. We’ve put out slim glass jars to measure rain. Slim jars, since we get so little rain, we can record bigger numbers. We put up a thermometer and a wind vane. We’re tackling the weather, such as it is. We will however, have to come back to this throughout the years as we travel to different places...unless you all have any ideas?

Next up is earthquakes…now that’s something to which they can relate!


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Afterschooling Accoutrements- Teaching Prehistory with Safari Hats

Crystal, once again joyfully shared our afterschooling plan with a group of moms and met the usual blank stares. We’re not progressing much in that department . Where we are finding success is in our children’s interest in the subjects we are covering.

As little of our afterschooling adventures including sitting at a desk we’ve found following a set curriculum not quite our speed. Actually, that may not be true. We haven’t been following a home school curriculum perhaps because our after schooling goals are not so rigorous. Hmmm…in reality maybe it’s just I think I’m so smart I don’t have to follow a curriculum…something to take up with a therapist.

Whatever. The point is, we’ve been stumbling around a bit this session (August through December we are covering the 3 periods of prehistory prior to jumping into TWTM, Story of the World.) We’ve used a variety of books and a number of approaches and find we’re…all over the ancient (Pangaea) map. A quick planning meeting helped us reassess our expectations and our children’s abilities and interests.

First, we found we CAN cover the origins of the earth, how life appeared and the way things evolve. The kids will “Get It”. However, their main interest is in what ferocious, ugly and interesting species were living at the time and how they might find some of those wonderful things to take home and live in our backyards.


Given that, in the context of one of our major goals in tackling this whole afterschooling thing….putting their learning in context as opposed to learning history and science, out of order, and in bits and pieces …as it tends to be taught in school, we’ve had to regroup.

Rather than check out a variety of books on the topic we are studying, we’ve narrowed it down to buying the whole Barrons, Prehistoric World Series . Six books at less than $5.00 each, they cover each of the major periods in pre-history: Early Life, Triassic Life, Jurassic Life, Cretaceous Life, The Age of Mammals and the Ice Age. Each book features 10-12 different animals that lived in the time period and tells a little about their habitat, food and size. Each book also includes a timeline of the whole series, easy for the kids to follow and review at the start of each book.

On the kinesthetic learning front, though we’d love to seek out interesting crafts and experiments to complement our readings, since the kids’ major interest is finding fossils or hopefully a live prehistoric beast, we’ve instead geared them up for fossil hunting. Safari Hats, toothbrushes, paintbrushes, tweezers, shovels and nets have all found their place on plastic tools belts. Empty egg cartons act as specimen boxes and wooden hammers, a plastic syringe and the launcher for a spinning top all apparently also have a place…for what, I’m not exactly sure. They have all come into use though in the yards, empty lots and parks in which we dig and hunt.

This endless digging, a developmentally appropriate activity anyway, has led to some great discoveries, though no live beasts and keeps them interested in the topic and running back and forth to the PreHistoric World books to verify that, indeed they have found an Iguanodon bone. No reason to dissuade them.

It’s also led to actual drawing and writing on the 3 foot timeline taped up on our playroom wall. It’s been there for two months with nary a glance despite Crystals’ excellent artwork and carefully labeled time periods. Maybe we’re getting the hang of this afterschooling thing after all.

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Does Your Kid Sounds Like He’s 30

This summer, my friend Crystal and I took our kids to the free Shakespeare performances in the local park. Prior to each of the two plays (we say 1 play twice and the other 3 times), we read the kids’ the children’s versions of the plays from this book. After, we continued to read several more kids’ version and bits and pieces of the “real thing”. So, they are, at 5 and even the younger one at 3, fairly conversant with the plots of these two plays.

At a recent play date though, Crystal told me, her son incorporated a few lines from Shakespeare into his play with the other 5-year-old. This drew a quizzical; if somewhat pained look from the other Mom and the comment, “Your kid sounds like he’s 30”.
Well yes, and I guess many home schooled and classically schooled kids do, when compared to the average kid. I’ve also been told my DS knows more than many college students and that he must be very bright, to which I nod and smile. But, the truth is, he is not necessarily brighter, it’s just his range of knowledge is different than the average kid’s.

I actually know a fair number of very bright kids, of all ages who can’t find the US on a map. (Actually, I didn’t need to tell you that – you’ve heard about the dismal showing that the US makes in international testing.)

So, let me go out on a limb here. Why do my kid and kids like him know more than many kids of comparable age? Why are there perfectly average kids who can discuss literature and history and science and very bright kids who can only discuss Transformers or Disney princesses or Dora The Explorer… or National Sports teams or video games or, gulp, My Space?

None of these things are necessarily bad (well, OK- maybe some video games) but neither are they “good” in the doses in which kids take them these days. I’m not sure it’s the school system that is to blame for our scary showing in national testing. While educators bemoan our scores and push our kids harder and harder in school at ever younger ages, no one stops to think…hey, maybe it’s not that they don’t learn enough at school, maybe it’s that they don’t learn enough at home. Parents, who want, really want, the best for their kids are caught up in the current culture that revolves around TV and TV inspired toys, books, clothes and home life often revolves around these things.

Home life has changed in the last 25 years. I can’t cite any study here but I have a sneaky suspicion that you might be able to correlate the rise in cable TV homes to the drop in test scores. Add in the distraction of video games and a toy box full of character based toys then…well, what are kids going to talk about? What they see on TV and the games they play with their toys. Take away the TV and away go the characters. Kids then have time to focus on something else…often in addition to sports that’s learning about things that matter.


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Let’s Start at the Very Beginning….Our After Schooling Plan

Though most people consider me an optimist, I have a fairly wide cynical streak. So, as we finish up our first set of after schooling units, I’m cautiously optimistic. Do you detect my nervousness at starting this grand plan? One niggling little part of me expects it to be a crashing failure, one about which friends and family will tease me years down the road:

“Remember the time you decided to ‘after school’ and after two months The Hamster threw the books at you and said he wasn’t going to ‘do that stupid “home schooling stuff” anymore’?

I await the day in fear and pray for it to pass quickly. Until then, we soldier on.

Since I’ve noticed that though I’ve discussed our plans, I haven’t actually discussed our curriculum and schedule in any detail, I thought I’d do that today, in case anyone cares to tag along. (Please contact me if you do; misery afterschooling loves company)

We are doing 8 week units in two subjects, history and science. (We may add in music, art and literature in some sort of structured way in the future.) Eight weeks seems to be about right what with regular school and other activities, including unstructured free time. We’ve just completed out first units in each subject and I’d say we spend about an hour or two a week on each.

Since our approach is unstructured the hour or two means we read some of the books on each topic on and off throughout the week, do some projects and maybe watch a video. Our kids though incorporate the topics into their play time sometimes too but, that’s part of the point.

Since Crystal is a bottom up learner and I am a top down learner, her instinct is to pick one topic and develop a detailed plan for the next eight weeks. Mine is to outline the topics for the next two years first, then work out the detail. We’ve compromised (after a few heated conversations) by selecting on our topics for the next 4 months and writing out a detailed plan for each unit a week or so before. Crystal is better at the detailed plan than I am…but I’m improving.

So far we’ve decided on 3 units in each subject, which will take us 24 weeks to complete or roughly 6 months:

Paleozoic Era
Mesozoic Era
Cenozoic Era

Rocks and Minerals
Weather and Climate
Oceans

Our original plan was to follow the guidelines in The Well Trained Mind but Crystal wanted to start with prehistory, unlike in WTM, which starts right in with early CIVILIZATIONS. So, we’re winging these first 6 months, and then will pick up on the first grade curriculum found in WTM.

Our fairly detailed plans (nicely laid out in tables) include objectives, book resources (mostly from our local libraries) and planned field trips and projects. We’ve started “review notes” after each unit too and are keeping a notebook of our adventures as recommended by experienced homeschoolers.

What’s somewhat (actually not really) surprising is how much fun we are all having. The kids are latching on to different topics. The Hamster found rocks fascinating. Crystal kids less so. While her kids were very interested in The Paleozoic era, mine can’t wait to get to Cenozoic. Since we’re “afterschooling” not homeschooling” there’s less pressure on us to ensure they “really know” each topic. And that makes it even more fun for us adults.


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