Quote of the Day: Teaching Literature?

"Ultimately, works of literature are not things to be contemplated but powers to be absorbed."
-Northrop Frye, The Stubborn Structure: Essays On Criticism and Society

Quote of the Day: On Failing Forward

"If we think [homeschooling] is really worthwhile and we have [the opportunity and the resources], and it’s never been done before [by any of our friends/family] but we believe in it, it’s O.K. to take a chance. It’s O.K. to try, and if it doesn’t work, learn from it, adjust and keep failing forward. And if you just fail forward all the time — learn, fail, learn, fail, learn, fail — but every single time you’re making it better and better, before you know it you’re [in] great company."

Adapted from this article in the NY Times, which interviews the president and chief executive of Nvidia, a graphic chips company.

Photo Update

Long Beach





Cookie sales

Learning about birds at the local nature center, including making our own bird call device. We also met this friendly snake.

EveryBody's Doing It

My Olympians

We continued our studies of ancient Greece this week with the alphabet, Homer, and the Olympic games. We discovered that although the barbaric Dorians and Sea Peoples (Philistines) destroyed the developing culture of the Mycenaeans, which led to the Greek Dark Ages, over the period of a few hundred years these same barbarians developed their own culture; a culture which looked very much like that which they had decimated on arrival. They learned to read and write, built homes then cities then a government, and pretty much became the Greeks we know and love to read about today.
We've been reading various books and watching some cool videos about the Trojan War, the Illiad, and Odysseus's struggle trying to get home to Penelope and Telemachus. Today we tried translating our names into Greek (hard to do when you have Ss and Ls!) and even held our own little Olympic Games, complete with a torch to announce the date and contests in javelin-throwing, long-jumping, and, of course, a foot race (stade). The girls made their own wreaths from our tree out back and proudly placed them on their heads.

Lizzy D. Lizard

Told ya. It's an absolute menagerie 'round here. Life science isn't a subject as much as an exercise in tolerance (at least on the part of this teacher!)

Monkey Rainforest and The Carcass Barrens

A little bit My Father's Dragon, a little bit Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor. I love my two home scholars.
---Illustration by Shelby, age 9

Put this in your "assessment" file, Lady! [well, not in the Spelling one ]

One Guess: What is it?

We bid adieu (good riddance, whatever) to the 2nd Ipod and replaced him with another, shall we say quieter, easier, friendlier, more useful animal for the family menagerie: Red Wigglers!!! Stay tuned in the next few weeks for photos of the happy decomposers that live in a bucket under our kitchen island... ;)

Recent Earworm

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to [learn/sing about].*



We've covered three of the four so far: Sargon, Hammurabi, and Gilgamesh.
UPDATE: We've learned about Ashurnapal now, too. Another of the meanie Assyrians. At least he loved stories enough to create the very first library.

Speaking of history, here is a recent illustration by my 6 year old home scholar. Both of my girls are really loving the story of history.
*Adapted from a quote by David McCullough

Quote of the Day: There Is No Alternative

"Education is about developing human beings, and human development is not mechanical or linear. It is organic and dynamic. Like all living forms, we flourish in certain conditions and shrivel in others. Great teachers, great parents and great leaders understand those conditions intuitively; poor ones don’t. The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There is no alternative. There never was.”
~~~Sir Ken Robinson

From the Science Files

Today we attended a fair put on by the Science and Technology Education Partnership. Considering the fact that we are doing the Animal Kingdom and not physics at the moment, I went with the intention of simply instilling the whole science-is-cool/fun/exciting attitude in my girls. It was a decent (not great) event but we all had a fair amount of fun. It helped that we were with friends and we had a great meal (from Simple Simon's) in our bellies. There were alot of schools there though so we had to fight the crowd, which is never fun.

Who Says Homeschoolers Don't Have Friends???

W E - G R O W - O U R - O W N ! ! !Click HERE to join The Friends of The Friendless.
Brought to you by The Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago.

Kid Tested, Socrates Approved

"[Socrates once said,] `I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.'
My fear is that... we will know everything except the fact of our own ignorance. Google has given us the world at our fingertips, but speed and ubiquity are not the same as actually knowing something"
**From an article in Educational Leadership (Sept 2009)**
(emphasis my own)

The author goes on to support what I believe to be the way many homeschoolers are already operating: "Learning would take place both in and out of school. Teachers ... would learn alongside their students, creatively adapting curriculum to their students' needs. Like any creative effort, this collective journey would include errors, lack of good information, and false starts—a process of which Socrates would approve. Because teachers are knowledgeable about the learning process, they could serve as capable guides for their students, all the while promoting the requisite 21st century thinking skills of critical reflection, empirical reasoning, collective intelligence, and metacognition."

I especially like the positive recognition of learning with your students and the granting of creative license to adapt the curriculum. These things are very present in my own homeschooling style but can sometimes be a source of stress when I view them as indicators of my shortcomings as a teacher (both in not being a certified expert at everything and not having been trained to implement the curriculum in the prescribed way). The author proposes that these things are actually strengths ~ and that Socrates would approve (Hooray for Me!)

The author concludes by encouraging us all to "embrace the new learning era of today to move beyond the false dichotomies and empty arguments of our tired education disagreements and to joyously engage with the future." Amen, Brutha.
And thanks to my mom, The Elementary School Principal, for noting this article for me.

What We've Been Up To Lately

I've been a bad blogger but I have a really good excuse: My less-than-2-year-old computer --- you know, the one connected to the $1200 monitor, the $600 printer? The one that is the life-blood of my very connection with the world??? --- Well, it's good as dead. I got a virus. A really, really BAD one. And so now I'm stuck with a borrowed laptop that has none of the capabilities of the old that I was so fond of :(
Today I managed to upload & edit some photos so here's an update of some of our recent activities.

We set up the pool in the front yard in this 100+ degree weather. The girls vacillate between jumping on their boogieboards in the 2 ft deep water and riding up and down the empty street on their skateboards.

We're continuing our studies about the ancient Egyptians, mummifying Barbies and making pyramids out of sugarcubes. I also built this most-awesome model from a book in this series by Iain Ashman/Usborne. (We also have the skeleton and Trojan Horse ones for science and later history studies!)

Finally, we joined a community garden effort near our home. Thus far, we've only toured the grounds and spent a few hours harvesting sunflower seeds, but we are all looking forward to how we can schedule gardening days into of our learning-thru-living lives.

The 1st Writing

We have been exploring the people of the Nile and the Fertile Crescent in History these first few weeks of 1st and 4th grades. I gave the girls a choice of whether to write in heiroglyphs or cuneiform and they decided that pictures were more interesting than wedges.
I am happily surprised how much Ella can retain after reading our section in The Story of The World. And Shelby told me this week that History is her very favorite subject this year :)

Mission San Luis Rey: Oceanside, CA

Yesterday.

Fun With Math: Tangrams

WANNA PLAY?

The SAT: How Long Has It Been For You?

Interesting... I got 2 of the 4 math problems wrong. No surprise.
CLICK HERE to take this short quiz (just 12 questions).

Talk about promoting their test-prep classes! Check this out (from the website):
"Do you remember taking the SAT? Well it's changed—a lot—and the days of just showing-up and taking it without any preparation are long gone."

Fortunately for this family, we have taken to preparing ourselves to test our knowledge of these things waaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy ahead of time, avoiding the need for The High School Cram.

Fattening my Little Calves

A new report has been released by Common Core that suggests that the reason we are behind the high performing nations of the world is our lack of a comprehensive, content-rich education in the liberal arts and sciences; the absence of the dedication to educating our children deeply in a wide range of subjects.
The Core Knowledge folks put it best: What do we have that better performing nations lack? Data, perhaps. If you want to fatten the calf, surely we can do better than our present steady diet of thin gruel in between all those weighings.
No wonder it feels so natural for me to homeschool. It's simply another take on the age-old motherly instinct to feed our children well: stomach. heart. mind. soul.

REASON #498: To Cut Out the Middle Man

From the KitchenTableMath blog:
There is a phenomenal amount of tutoring going on in affluent school districts. Phenomenal. One of the tutors working in my town told a friend of mine that she estimates half of the kids in Scarsdale are tutored.

I've come to think it was inevitable that matters would develop in this way.

First of all, public schools are built to provide inputs, not outputs: instruction, not achievement.

That may not have been so deadly when schools grouped kids homogeneously. With homogeneous grouping the classroom teacher probably had a decent chance of knowing where the kids were and of being able to teach to their level.

Along comes the de-tracking movement, and now you've got heterogeneously grouped classrooms with kids all over the map in terms of readiness. The inputs model hasn't changed, so teachers are told to teach to the middle, or they're told to differentiate instruction, and when teaching to the middle or differentiating instruction work for some of the kids but not all of the kids, you assume the problem is the kid, not the school. After all, the school's job is to provide opportunities to learn, and as long as you've put PowerPoints on the SMARTBoard, you've done that.

Then add to this set-up school districts in which the vast majority of parents are college-educated and affluent enough to hire tutors, and what do you get?

You get "high-performing" schools where the kids are being retaught by parents and tutored by tutors.