Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part fifteen)

The next segment of Sayers' essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning", is about science and mathematics:

Science, in the Poll-Parrot period, arranges itself naturally and easily around collections--the identifying and naming of specimens and, in general, the kind of thing that used to be called "natural philosophy." To know the name and properties of things is, at this age, a satisfaction in itself; to recognize a devil's coach-horse at sight, and assure one's foolish elders, that, in spite of its appearance, it does not sting; to be able to pick out Cassiopeia and the Pleiades, and perhaps even to know who Cassiopeia and the Pleiades were; to be aware that a whale is not a fish, and a bat not a bird--all these things give a pleasant sensation of superiority; while to know a ring snake from an adder or a poisonous from an edible toadstool is a kind of knowledge that also has practical value.
The grammar of Mathematics begins, of course, with the multiplication table, which, if not learnt now, will never be learnt with pleasure; and with the recognition of geometrical shapes and the grouping of numbers. These exercises lead naturally to the doing of simple sums in arithmetic. More complicated mathematical processes may, and perhaps should, be postponed, for the reasons which will presently appear.

I have four children now, and because I don't want big messes, I rather discourage physical collections. Blame the four months I spent as an au pair/housekeeper in Germany back in my college years, but clutter depresses me. However, I think my science practices are basically in line with Sayers' educational philosophy because I encourage my children to read nonfiction books about science all the time. Do they really need to have pinned butterflies on cards to learn about the natural world? I think it's adequate to have a supply of engaging science books ready at hand and read them to my children on occasion. They get hooked and before you know it, they are reading DK's Big Book of Knowledge in bed at night instead of fairy tales. Besides providing science books, I also show my children science videos (they love Bill Nye and the National Geographic videos starring Dustin Hoffman as a globe named "Spin"), and when the weather is nice we go to the zoo and nature centers.

Math. Amen, Dorothy. Help them memorize those math facts as young as possible. Dd8 is still struggling to get to automaticity with her addition facts, while dd6 consistently outdoes her in addition drills on their daily Xtra Math practice sessions. Dd8 can memorize poems, no problem, but I think I waited too long to get serious about requiring her to memorize the addition facts and contributed to her developing a math facts mental block.

I wish I could buy a Barney or Dora DVD that helped children sing and memorize the basic addition facts. Computer math games haven't worked because my children want to have fun when they play on the computer, and math fact recall is not yet easy enough to be "fun" for them. Besides games and flashcards, I could find only lame math fact song collections or number "appreciation" cartoon DVDs.  I'm positive my children would appreciate numbers more if they could use them with greater facility! If someone from Nick Jr. is reading this, I beg you to produce a good addition fact memorization DVD using Diego and exotic animals; the same goes for PBS and the Dinosaur Train characters. 

Some random fun

Even when there are holidays and snow days for the local schools, I have my children do their home school work. That meant that last week they had five days of learning while their friends had just three. Dd8 was starting to give off a "put-upon" vibe, and I was getting weary of the taskmaster role, so yesterday afternoon, I made them a little "clue-chase" for no reason except to show them I love them and I'm not "all work and no play". These were the clues:

Clue #1:

To find where Number 2 is hid

Look under a bear that is pallid.   

[This led to dd6's favorite teddy bear.]

Clue #2:

Tigers have stripes just like the wall

By the drawer in which Clue 3 did fall.

Clue #3:

Number 4 is not in the land down under,

But Sydney says it is resting beside her.   

[Sydney is dd6's betta fish that she got for her birthday recently.]

Clue #4:

The globe downstairs points to the hiding place

Of the next-to-last clue in this clever word race.

Clue #5:

Now up, up stairs to your parents’ closet

Is a teeny-weeny present for you red-headed set.  

[Oops, should have double-checked that one for grammar....]

Treasure:

[A little travel chess game that I'd been keeping for them when they got bigger. I guess they're "bigger" now.]

On a side note, I made sure that my clues rhyme. I don't think much of poetry that doesn't even try to rhyme.  Rhymes simply flow better and are easier to remember, while "modern", non-rhymed poetry (esp. that created in school) seems the product of wanna-be visionaries seeking shortcuts to the imagination via awkwardly disjointed prose.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Because we all just love math, here's an update on the math portion of our home education endeavor:

Dd8 is finally starting multiplication and division in earnest. She finds it conceptually easy. We haven't started drilling multiplication and division facts yet because she is still doing the addition practices on the Xtra Math website. Xtra Math is a great resource for kids who need daily repetition and practice of math facts but balk at long sessions. It costs nothing, keeps track of individual children's progress, and makes math drills relatively pleasant without a lot of screen clutter.

Yesterday dd8 surprised me by asking whether I would give her a test of only word problems. It turns out she likes word problems because she feels as though she's actually doing something. I'm a little gobsmacked to hear a child request more word problems, for I don't recall that being a common occurrence in elementary school. Or else maybe she just really, really dislikes plain calculation exercises.

Dd5 finished her kindergarten math book a while back (we use the Bob Jones worktexts because they cover the basics in a fun, convenient way), and I've been putting off ordering her the first grade book while we do Xtra Math and some Singapore math. Yesterday I looked over the first grade worktext table of contents and tested dd5 on some of the more advanced concepts listed, and she grasped them immediately. So now I'll be ordering the second grade worktext for her. That saved us $22, and our little girl is pleased with herself for being able to skip a grade in math.

Dd3 is starting to learn to recognize numbers. We finally taught her how to show her age with her fingers. She loves to play on Starfall.com.

Dd1 is just cute. She turned one this week. Her life is still quite binary. She's either allowed to do something, or Mommy says "no, no, no" and takes her off the table, chair, high chair tray, or bathtub edge. Oh, rats, she was just tearing the curtain liner. Time to finish this post and get on with other things.

Just because they live in the boonies...

...doesn't mean that they are going to be nice to you. I just saw this account of a horrid experience that three North American tourist underwent at the hands of around 30 villagers in Peru.

Jennifer Wolfrom, her brother Jed and her sister-in-law Meghan Doherty were hiking in a village close to the southern Peruvian city of Cuzco when they were attacked by around 30 angry villagers.
The group were reportedly bound, beaten and robbed by the villagers during a two-day ordeal, beginning on New Year’s Day, which left the group physically and mentally traumatised.
But Ms Wolfrom alleges that staff at the US embassy failed to help the family until media began covering their story.

As a former consular officer, I have a reaction to their statement that they felt the U.S. Consulate didn't help them. The U.S. Consulate in Cuzco apparently didn't know about their ordeal until they had already escaped from it. Having been in the situation of dealing with U.S. citizens after they've suffered some sort of injury abroad, I can only say that there is often almost nothing that U.S. consular officers can do in situations where the host country police won't take action. Consular officers work to ensure that the host country--in this case Peru--gives U.S. citizens the same treatment that citizens of the host country would get; if at possible, they typically do try to cajole the host country into providing even better treatment, but there's no law that forces the host country to give it. Where the host country suffers from deep-rooted corruption and habits of indolence in the local police force, the police "service" rendered its citizens is often far below what we expect coming from the USA.

Getting their story out to the media was probably the most effective thing Ms. Wolfrom could have done in order to have their attackers suffer some sort of punishment. The villagers' action have embarrassed their country internationally and probably hurt tourism in a tourism-dependent area. I don't imagine their neighbors will thank them for it.

If you're planning a trip abroad, please read the consular travel information for your destination(s) and pay attention to the warnings.

Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part fourteen)

Time for another installment from "The Lost Tools of Learning" by Dorothy Sayers:

The grammar of History should consist, I think, of dates, events, anecdotes, and personalities. A set of dates to which one can peg all later historical knowledge is of enormous help later on in establishing the perspective of history. It does not greatly matter which dates: those of the Kings of England will do very nicely, provided that they are accompanied by pictures of costumes, architecture, and other everyday things, so that the mere mention of a date calls up a very strong visual presentment of the whole period.
Geography will similarly be presented in its factual aspect, with maps, natural features, and visual presentment of customs, costumes, flora, fauna, and so on; and I believe myself that the discredited and old-fashioned memorizing of a few capitol cities, rivers, mountain ranges, etc., does no harm. Stamp collecting may be encouraged.

I want a world history timeline. I really do. I just can't decide where in our new house to put it. Also, I can't decide how exactly I want to do it. I'm leaning towards stringing up multiple colors of yarn to signify different parts of the world. Maybe Pinterest can help me in the quest for an aesthetically acceptable (but doable for a mom who doesn't do crafts well) timeline. Whatever we end up doing, it needs to be where the children frequently see it yet out of reach of the destructive fingers of the smaller ones.

My mother bought my children a great flannel world map for Christmas. It has country names, labels for major rivers and geographical features, and flannel animals such as camels and polar bears for them to put in the proper regions. We already put it up in one of the bedrooms on a prominent wall, so hopefully the children will learn all the information on it over the product's lifetime.

Thoughts on Humility

Yesterday evening a phone conversation with an emotionally-volatile family member turned into a fight. Even staying home at Christmas doesn't mean that one escapes these conflicts completely. My peace-loving husband helped me step away from the argument (because, of course, I was in the right, and the other person was bound to recognize it eventually!) and end the call (rather abruptly, it must be told).

My husband later mentioned to me that when he was younger, he and his family had obtained some family counseling. He said that it didn't seem to have made any difference. But his parents, particularly his father, really do seem to have changed over the years; they are kind, loving, and supportive of their children, even while not agreeing with everything done by said children. My in-laws can also calmly discuss parenting mistakes they made in the past. My father and mother, on the other hand, would never have taken us for family counseling; to my mother, counseling was something other people (especially my dad) needed, and to my father, counseling was a waste of time and money. Time has not made it easier to be my parents' child. (Although distance certainly has.)

Is it the counseling that made the difference? I doubt it. I think this is one of those correlation-causation confusions. Rather than counseling helping many parents, I think it is likely that those who are humble enough to seek help from outsiders are the same parents who eventually listen to their children as though they are people with their own valid thoughts and experiences and allow themselves to learn from their children.

Not that I'm against counseling per se. But it might be a tad oversold. How much good can a counselor do someone who is not teachable? Someone who thinks that they know best and no other viewpoint can be admitted as more correct?

I value humility. Great accomplishments require a certain balance of confidence and humility, else one will never start a task nor change direction when falling into error.

The greatest responsiblity of my life is to raise my children well. In undertaking to teach them, I am fairly confident that I am doing the best thing for them, given our situation, talents, and temperaments. However, I must also constantly re-evaluate whether what we are doing is optimal or a mistake. That's not easy. Pessimistic second-guessing can be debilitating, but arrogant mulishness on a given path might lead to even worse consequences. What to do?

At present, I read. A lot. Education books, blogs, and news. Fortunately, I like to read. :) I regularly ask for divine help to be a good mother and teacher to my children. I run my ideas by my husband and others who know my children. I put them in a public charter school setting part-time, which allows me to get feedback from professional teachers. And this year, as required by Colorado law, I will have dd8 take a "nationally standardized achievement test". (I know some homeschoolers are vocal in their dislike for testing, but I see such testing as necessary to know whether I'm doing as good a job as I think I am relative to public schools. If my teaching methods are better for my child than full-time public education, then the results of the test should be gratifying.)

By striving to always exercise humility in my parenting, I hope to give my children the best start in life that I can. If, in turn, I manage to teach some humility to them through a good example, perhaps in twenty years we'll all be able to enjoy holiday phone calls that don't end in harsh words and an abrupt disconnection.

"True humility is not an abject, groveling, self-despising spirit; it is but a right estimate of ourselves as God sees us."

— Tryon Edwards

Middle things

I love homeschooling. I love being able to efficiently teach the basics and have time for Latin, German, scripture study, and music lessons. But I also love that my children get to go to a charter school part-time and involve our family in fun things like the medieval feast that my dd8 had yesterday afternoon. Her three-year-old sister dressed up like a princess and banged on a drum as accompaniment to my amateur renditions of old English and French tunes on the recorder and violin for her schoolmates. I simply can't recreate that sort of event at home because a) I am not particularly good at party logistics, and b) where would I find 60 children wanting to dress up for a private event that didn't include generous (i.e., costly) goody bags at the end?

So we continue in the middle, with one foot in homeschooling and the other in public school. Rather than feeling like a conflicted fence-sitter who is torn between two pastures, I feel like I have a great view of both pastures' green and brown spots and freedom to visit either pasture at will. I am very grateful for the supportive teachers and staff at my children's charter school, and I wish that more parents had the option of part-time enrollment at a school like theirs.

Thanksgiving

Local schools were off all last week, so it was a bit of a struggle doing schoolwork. But the distractions were worth it: my children have good friends, and I enjoy seeing them play happily with them.

We had relatives over for the holiday. They are relatives with whom we get along well, so we had a great time. However, at this time of year, I am reminded that not everyone is fortunate enough to enjoy occasions where they are forced to spend time with their relatives. This last week was horrible for a family member of mine; from what I hear, it included suicide threats and public criticisms of a spouse in connection with recent serious threats to divorce.

Families need kindness all year round. Holidays aren't a magic fix for long-running problems, contrary to Hollywood portrayals.

Almost done moving in

Just one box left to unpack in the house! It's so nice to be mostly moved in. I love being able to spend more time thinking about my family and its needs than about stuff that's in the way. Sometimes I watch the show "Hoarders", and it makes me so sad to see how the people on the show have let papers and things become obstacles in their relationships with their loved ones. I hope that never happens to me.

Moving

It turns out that even an in-town move is a big project. With four growing children (their clothes take up more room as they grow, especially the jeans!), it was time to consider moving out of our easy-to-clean 1000 sq. foot home. A house in a desirable location became available, and it was in our price range, provided we purchase it via lawyers (it never got listed, so we were able to take 6% in real estate agent commissions off the price) and accept it "as is".

Well, the "as is" part has been challenging (no bathing facilities are functional at present), but the location really is worth the hassle of moving all our stuff. Stuff. To quote Helen Parr, "Why do we have so much junk?" We don't like having had to move all these things that we haven't used for years. Why spend time cleaning around and storing things we never use and don't enjoy? Maybe someone else will want them. Now that we actually have a garage, we are seriously thinking of having a garage sale.

Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part thirteen)

Although I very much like the classical philosophy of education, I have been scared of requiring memorization from my daughter (age 8) because I didn't want her to fail at it or hate me for making her do it. I recall having been good at memorization myself when I was younger, but now I think of memorization as a difficult, unpleasant chore. I regularly slaughter song lyrics unless I'm singing along with someone else who knows the correct words, and I am not interested enough in memorizing anything to do the necessary repetition work. Frankly, I've been lazy about memorizing anything in English for the past 20 years. Yet I'm always grateful when a long-ago memorized quote or poetry snippet comes to mind at an opportune moment. I think I deny my daughter a blessing when I don't require her to learn anything by heart.

Dorothy Sayers is clear on the need to do some memorization during the Grammar stage. Here is the next excerpt from her essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning":

During this age we must, of course, exercise the mind on other things besides Latin grammar. Observation and memory are the faculties most lively at this period; and if we are to learn a contemporary foreign language we should begin now, before the facial and mental muscles become rebellious to strange intonations. Spoken French or German can be practiced alongside the grammatical discipline of the Latin.
In English, meanwhile, verse and prose can be learned by heart, and the pupil's memory should be stored with stories of every kind--classical myth, European legend, and so forth. I do not think that the classical stories and masterpieces of ancient literature should be made the vile bodies on which to practice the techniques of Grammar--that was a fault of mediaeval education which we need not perpetuate. The stories can be enjoyed and remembered in English, and related to their origin at a subsequent stage. Recitation aloud should be practiced, individually or in chorus; for we must not forget that we are laying the groundwork for Disputation and Rhetoric.

Thanks to Susan Wise Bauer's First Language Lessons curriculum, I finally started doing serious memorization work with my daughter. She has memorized two poems so far and seems to enjoy the process of memorizing almost as much as her feeling of accomplishment from having successfully learned the poems. Bauer makes memorizing almost easy in her First Language Lessons. She introduces the poem, does a little dictation exercise from it, and has the teacher read it aloud 3 times a day or so for a couple of weeks, eventually having the student recite longer and longer portions of the poem together with the teacher. My daughter does well with this method, and my fears about imposing detested memorization work on my daughter have been put to rest. Clearly I am the one with the issues about memorization, not she.

As to the other things mentioned in this excerpt, we are raising our children to be bilingual in English and German, and we surround them with all sorts of enticing library books full of "stories of every kind". One of the best parts of homeschooling for us is that the children have so much time to read and love those books.

Media Bias this Election Year

Never in my adult life has the media been more obvious in choosing the outcome of a presidential election. How did our country get to a point where a centrist who has spent much of his life doing unpaid service in his church and community (e.g., he donated his entire fee from managing the Salt Lake City Olympics to charity and donated $1 million of his own money to the Olympics), when not working hard at his own job and raising five children, gets successfully portrayed as out-of-touch elitist? How did we get to a point where voting against the sitting president is "racist" even though his policies are not perfect, he has little experience in running anything, and he displays more enthusiasm for candidacy than for actually performing the jobs he's elected to? US media is clearly heavily biased towards the Democratic presidential candidate. See this from the New York Times:

All the major media companies, driven largely by their Hollywood film and television businesses, have made larger contributions to President Obama than to his rival, former Gov. Mitt Romney, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Washington-based research group that publishes the Open Secrets Web site.
The center’s numbers represent donations by a company’s PAC and any employees who listed that company as their employer.
Even companies whose news outlets are often perceived as having a conservative bias have given significantly more money to Mr. Obama. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, for example, has contributed $58,825 to Mr. Obama’s campaign, compared with $2,750 to Mr. Romney. The conglomerate, which owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and the 20th Century Fox studios, gave roughly the same amount to Mr. Romney’s Republican primary competitors Rick Perry and Ron Paul as it did to Mr. Romney.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/donations-by-media-companies-tilt-heavily-to-obama/

In the runup to this election, Obama has seen very little criticism despite a struggling economy and very high gas prices. Remember the brouhaha over these issues four years ago? The media is giving very little attention to things that could cause people to think, "Hmmm, maybe huge bailouts to political cronies, massive debt, class warfare, and increased government regulation aren't getting the economy going again...."

I don't watch FOX (I don't even have a TV), I'm not a "dittohead", and I don't expect perfect neutrality from anyone. BUT THIS????? We're supposed to ignore that on 9/11's anniversary, the first Tweet from President Obama was something about getting him re-elected. We're supposed to think that President Romney is some sort of Bush-esque cowboy for criticizing our U.S. Embassy in Cairo's statement deploring a private citizen's YouTube video for being disrespectful of a religion? (As a member of the LDS church who has been reading way too much foul criticism of my religious clothing and values on the internet this year, I can only cry at the double standards our media and political class exhibit towards harmless Mormons and murdering Islamists.) A statement which the Obama administration ended up disavowing later anyway? We're supposed to ignore $3.60 gasoline? We're supposed to ignore rising food prices, high un- and under-employment, and hardworking friends losing their homes and just give the current President's policies "more time"? We're supposed to be OK with restrictions on religious freedom just so women don't have to buy their own contraception (as if they're not paying for it anyway via higher premiums)? We're supposed to be OK with expanding the perverse incentives of our social security net, the ones that give little credit to the efforts of hard workers and business creators yet force them to pay for programs that deal with situations too often brought on by the bad choices made by others (food stamps, prisons, TANF, health care needs brought on by our neighbor's private vices, etc.)?

The current President is probably a nice enough guy to those he likes, but his policies stink. The results stink. If he weren't a Democrat, we'd hear more about that and less in the way of excuses; our vaunted "fourth estate" is mostly a public relations firm for the Democratic party right now. If journalists are going to cover for their own party members in place of covering the real world, they deserve little revenue and even less respect.

Speaking of Latin...

My kids crack me up! A while back I joked in a family newsletter that I'd taught them enough Latin to not get shanghaied in Vatican City ("Non sum nauta." = "I'm not a sailor."). Just now, I was explaining how languages change over time and pointed out that Latin is a dead language which is only learned in school but not spoken by any groups of people. Dd5 piped up that Latin is spoken in that place where they kidnap people to work on ships. Ah, the cute misunderstandings of a kindergartner.

Dorothy Sayers and TLTOL (part twelve)

Today I examine this segment of Dorothy Sayer's essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning":

Let us begin, then, with Grammar. This, in practice, means the grammar of some language in particular; and it must be an inflected language. The grammatical structure of an uninflected language is far too analytical to be tackled by any one without previous practice in Dialectic. Moreover, the inflected languages interpret the uninflected, whereas the uninflected are of little use in interpreting the inflected. I will say at once, quite firmly, that the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar. I say this, not because Latin is traditional and mediaeval, but simply because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least fifty percent. It is the key to the vocabulary and structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences and to the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilization, together with all its historical documents.
Those whose pedantic preference for a living language persuades them to deprive their pupils of all these advantages might substitute Russian, whose grammar is still more primitive. Russian is, of course, helpful with the other Slav dialects. There is something also to be said for Classical Greek. But my own choice is Latin. Having thus pleased the Classicists among you, I will proceed to horrify them by adding that I do not think it either wise or necessary to cramp the ordinary pupil upon the Procrustean bed of the Augustan Age, with its highly elaborate and artificial verse forms and oratory. Post-classical and mediaeval Latin, which was a living language right down to the end of the Renaissance, is easier and in some ways livelier; a study of it helps to dispel the widespread notion that learning and literature came to a full stop when Christ was born and only woke up again at the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Latin should be begun as early as possible--at a time when inflected speech seems no more astonishing than any other phenomenon in an astonishing world; and when the chanting of "Amo, amas, amat" is as ritually agreeable to the feelings as the chanting of "eeny, meeny, miney, moe." 

Hurrah! We have actually started doing Latin in our home school. We are approaching it with a very beginner-oriented text, William Linney's Getting Started with Latin. It's made up of tiny, sequential lessons, but after just three weeks of occasional Latin study, we can now say sum (I am), es (you are), est (he/she is), et (and), non (not), nauta (sailor), agricola (farmer), and poeta (poet). We throw in other words that we think are Latin (or not necessarily Latin) when we want to say something outside of what those few words allow. It's great fun. For example, thanks to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou, we can all say to Daddy, "Es pater familias." This morning, we were telling each other we were dinosaurs like this: "Es dee-no-sore-us." I'm sure there's a good Latin word for dinosaur; in fact, isn't the word dinosaur from the Latin for "terrible lizard" or something? Time to go Google.

Update: Silly me. Dinosaur comes from the Greek words for terrible ("deino") lizard ("sauros"). Dead Latin doesn't have a term for dinosaur, but apparently we can use the word "dinosaurum" if we must, according to Google Translate.

In which I understand the Tiger Mother

A year or two ago, I read The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and participated in a great discussion of it with a book club. I remember being fairly appalled at her description of the time she forced her daughter to practice a difficult piano piece until she got it right, making her stay at the piano and threatening to do all sorts of things if the child didn't get the piece down, including burning her stuffed animals. Thought I, that would never happen in our home, for I don't value musical achievement that highly. Ah, foolish woman, thought the universe...there is something that you value quite a bit: mathematics.

Yesterday was one of the those days that make a mother wonder if she's entered an alternate reality. The day started with the usual happenings, and then we began our math page for the day. Horrors! This one had sixty-four subtraction facts to accomplish. Never mind that they were all simple ones where the highest minuend was ten. No, the whole assignment page was numbers. Not a story problem about candy on the entire page! Dd7 (almost 8 years old now) hit a mental roadblock at the sight of that appalling exercise page. And I, tormented by visions of a daughter unable to subtract 2 from another number and sentenced to a life of English editing (not that there's anything wrong with that, but dd7 absolutely loves science), proceeded to force her to do it, making her start the page over every time she got a glazed look indicating that she was no longer doing math in her head and had instead turned her thoughts to her mother's meanness, the difficulty of the task, and the weave of her pants. Meltdowns, drama, tears, pouts, and occasional voice raising ensued--I think I was only guilty of the last, but I can't be sure. I found myself thinking of Amy Chua's threats to burn stuffed animals and understood where the threats came from. I'm happy to say my thoughts about threatening destruction to stuffed animals were never uttered aloud to dd7...but it could have easily come to that. What seemed to snap her out her stubbornness about the math page, after nearly two hours of Theater (a useful German word describing interpersonal drama, especially from tantrum-throwing children), was asking dd5 to do the subtraction facts aloud in front of dd7, which dd5 did in about five minutes.

After a lunch break, dd7 finally did her math facts in just a few minutes and her face wore a relieved smile. I was too exhausted to smile normally for hours afterward.

Back to School

We were slowed down in our start of the new school year by an unpleasant respiratory illness (which hit this nursing mom hard enough that she got prescribed antibiotics for possible pneumonia), but today we finally did a regular, whole day of school!

Dd5 did a 15-minute block of reading (using an old Lippincott I got from my mother's textbook collection), writing (Handwriting Without Tears), and math (BJU's Math K5 worktext). Then she played and overheard dd7's academic instruction for the rest of the morning. In the afternoon, she went to a charter school for recess, playtime, and music with her kindergarten class. She is delighted to be in a formal school setting for part of the day.

Dd7 has a lot more academic work now that she is in third grade. We do schoolwork for about 2.5 hours each morning: reading (from both scriptures and a secular textbook), spelling (an Evan-Moor workbook), math (an old A Beka grade 3 book until I get the BJU grade 3 math worktext), First Language Lessons (for grade 3), Latin (using Linney's Getting Started With Latin), music (piano and recorder on alternating days), history (Story of the World, in which we are still finishing up volume 2), and German/science (reading short segments of a German book about the earth). I often put on videos relating to anything we've been studying in any of the subjects; today it was a DVD on Portugese explorers. Dd7 loves her time at the charter school in the afternoon, where she is making new friends in a new class.

Dd2 likes being the "oldest kid" at home in the afternoons when her older sisters are at school. She seems to really enjoy getting to have the computer to herself to play on www.starfall.com.

Summer vacation

Family reunion last week, ongoing floor tiling in the kitchen for the past month....we could use a vacation from our vacations!

Denver Museum of Nature and Science

Yesterday, I took my children to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. We visited 4 exhibitions:

1) Gems & Minerals - We all love rhodochrosite, the beautiful rose-colored state mineral of Colorado.

2) Space Odyssey - One child's favorite part was making her own star, and the other child was fascinated with the huge globe showing Earth's continents drift over millions of years. Mom liked it when the little ones dressed up in space jumpsuits and pretended them were a spaceship crew.

3) Prehistoric Journey - Extinct animal skeletons...what's not to "oooh" over?

4) Expedition Health - BEST part was a lab experience (complete with lab coat, goggles, and gloves) where we looked at our own epithelial cells (taken from inside the mouth) under a microscope and saw daphnia (tiny crustaceans, of which ours happened to be pregnant) be affected by caffeine and alcohol. The smaller kids enjoyed a tot area with a little slide and toys.

What a great museum!

Firefighters

The end of June was hot, dry, and windy in Colorado. We had some very bad fires here. In case anyone related to one of the many firefighters (civilian and military) from across the country who helped fight these fires should happen across this blog, I want to say "thank you". Your efforts in protecting lives and property are greatly appreciated. The next time someone bemoans the lack of heroism and leadership in today's materialistic, soft US culture, I'll remember that there are still brave, hard-working firefighters like you.

Homeschooling Carnival

This week's Carnival of Homeschooling (the theme is Flag Day in honor of today) is up at Consent of the Governed. It's so nice of bloggers like her to put together these carnivals, so that homeschoolers have a quick, enjoyable way to get ideas from each other.

Sum, sum, sum-mertime...

Dd7 just finished her Math 2 worktext on Friday, and we celebrated by going out to Sonic for shakes. When her charter school's year begins in the first part of August (yes, August - summer is awfully short these days), she'll start working on Math 3 (I should probably order that....). In the meantime, I will only be assigning her short practice worksheets on sums and differences. It took so much work to help her memorize her math facts in the first place. I'm certainly not going to let her forget them over the summer!

Dd5 does a page or two in her Math K5 worktext when she feels like it. She knows most of her sums already, having overheard back when I was teaching them to her older sister.

Our summer learning schedule is very light:

8:15 a.m. - Scripture reading
8:30 a.m. - Math practice worksheets
8:45 a.m. - Story of the World Volume 2 lesson read-aloud (we're due to start Vol. 3 in the fall, and we're only halfway through Vol. 2)
9:00 a.m. - garden/park/hiking time
11:30 (ish) a.m. - lunch/picnic lunch
12:00 p.m. - quiet time indoors reading/playing/Netflix/educational movies and/or shopping/errands
4:00 p.m. - work/play in garden (depending on the weather)
5:30 p.m. - dinner
6:00 p.m. - 5 minutes or so of piano/recorder practice

And even that schedule is flexible. It's working out well so far. Here's hoping that the Colorado hail doesn't destroy our gardening efforts, though. We have already had some destructive weather this season, but our garden has only been lightly damaged so far.

WHO Has the Flu?

I recall April 31, 2012, and I feel a wave of relief that the evacuation is finally over.
Little did I know when I went out that morning that exposure to the elements was to be the least of my worries that trip. Fitting myself and my full suitcases under my umbrella put was a bit of a strain, but I didn't mind, for I was looking forward to a scenic train ride from Colorado to the East Coast to visit my friend, Emma Colinson, who worked at the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
After I got settled in my seat, I went to the dining car and bought a pork sandwich and a chocolate milk. I didn't feel well afterward, so I closed my eyes for a catnap.

Outbreak
Contamination
Virus
Evacuation
Bacteria
Ebola
Food Poisoning
Foot and Mouth (FMD)
H5N1
Avian
Salmonella
Small Pox
Plague
Human to human
Human to Animal
Influenza
Drug Administration (FDA)
Public Health
Toxic
Agro Terror
Tuberculosis (TB)
Agriculture
Listeria
Symptoms
Mutation
Resistant
Antiviral
Pandemic
Infection
Water/air borne
Sick
Swine
Quarantine
H1N1
Vaccine
Tamiflu
Norvo Virus
Epidemic
Viral Hemorrhagic Fever
E. Coli

http://epic.org/foia/epic-v-dhs-media-monitoring/Analyst-Desktop-Binder-REDACTED.pdf

Side Effects

Warning: Constantly getting animal books from the library and showing your children nature videos can result in comments like this from five-year-old daughters:

"If I didn't have any hair, a mate would not be attracted to me."

Plumage, bangs, it's all for a good cause...eventually....don't grow up too fast, dear.

Plants

I live in Colorado, and we have crazy weather here as well as high altitude and low rainfall this year. Last year I had a horrible yard and garden, but this year I'm not pregnant and I am ambitious to make some of the yard productive.

Yesterday, we planted grapes. Three grape varieties - Concord, Edelweiss, and Himrod grapes. By faithful watering this year, I hope to harvest yummy grapes for years to come. 

Besides sunflowers and marigolds for attractiveness and bug concerns, we're going to plant pumpkin, squash, basil, and some other vegetables. Unless tomorrow is bad weather for it, I'll let the children plant their seeds in their individual garden beds tomorrow afternoon. 

Here's hoping our gardening efforts pay off this year. There is nothing like growing one's one garden in problematic soil and Colorado weather to make one appreciate modern agriculture and the trucks that bring its products to nearby supermarkets. A locavore in Colorado would have a hard time.

Evolution

No, not that kind. I'm not going to get into natural selection or anything like that. I want to talk about evolution of one's views.

My mother had a terrible marriage. As a child and teenager, I was convinced (because she said so) that everything that went wrong in her marriage was my father's fault. As the years went by and I began to see my parents with more experienced eyes, I realized that there were occasionally some extenuating circumstances and that my father wasn't the sole person at fault for everything that happened. I doubt I'm the only child of divorced parents to have eventually come to that realization.

As a teenager, I often heard from my mother that women were naturally better than men. I protested, but she insisted that it was so. Then my mother, who began practicing family law in her 60s (she spent many years fighting in court with my dad, so it was a natural choice of legal field), changed her mind. She says that in working with broken families, she saw just as many "bad" women as "bad" men and is now sorry for all those years she badmouthed men.

I worked one summer in Germany for a woman whose father had begun to exercise faith and practice his Catholic religion in his old age. She seemed rather disdainful of his elderly religiosity. I wonder, though, if she will follow in his footsteps when she grows older herself.

Part of going through life is learning new facts and experiencing new emotions and feelings, at least for anyone who pays attention. A result of this learning is sometimes a change of stance on bigger issues such as religiosity and convictions about specific political issues. It's normal and healthy to occasionally change one's mind when there is a good reason for it.

In a book club group a while back, we were discussing how Mitt Romney has been negatively labelled as a "flip-flopper" for changing his views. I can understand disagreeing with his current views, but to dismiss him outright as a dishonest person for changing a few convictions worries me. Do we really want a president who will never change his mind about something? Who doesn't let newly-discovered facts alter his opinions? I don't think most Americans want that. (Not that I'm promoting Romney--he's just an example here.)

How do I prepare my children to adjust opinions when appropriate without weakening their dedication to eternal principles like faith, hope, and charity? Something to mull over for a while. I'm guessing the answer has a lot to do with humility and never being complacent about one's knowledge level thus far in life.