We have been at the seaside for one long round of exhausting fun. Pool twice a day, long walks along the beach and far too much food of all kinds. This is the first year that Antonia has been old enough not to nap for much of the afternoon, and consequently we are all quite tired.
She has completely mastered the art of doing division from her multiplication tables, though.
We live in an area that’s rural in the wild sense whereas my parents live in what I have sometimes cruelly described as an agricultural wasteland. It is the sort of place where, when you’re hiking, you tend to stick to the hedgerows and copses and be glad they’re there. But it also offers some educational opportunities. Antonia had never seen wheat growing before, let alone, barley, beets, corn and rape. She learned about crop rotation and its purposes, and my mum found her some primitive horse tail plants growing in a freshly ploughed field. Apparently these grow on impoverished soil, so that would seem to be a bad sign.
We also did some identifying of butterflies and flowers, got herded through a field by a flock of sheep that seemed unduly interested in us, and taught her the proper way of feeding a colt with your hand flat so it doesn’t accidentally bite you.
This was my little bit of contact with the homeschooling world for today! Some benighted homeschool football team whose priorities include ‘acedemics’ and ‘atheletics’, somewhere after God and family. I resisted the temptation to comment. They don’t like homeschoolers at Science Blogs and probably nothing will convert them. Besides, its no skin off my nose if some random homeschoolers want to make idiots of themselves, just as, if I were a practicing scientist, I wouldn’t consider the whole enterprise invalidated because some jerk falsified some results.
Anyway, after a while I began to think that, spelling and religious worldview aside, the list is not terrible in principle. Homeschooling parents are parents as well as educators and probably should put a child’s physical and psychological health before academics, and way before any ridiculous competitive sports (I will get into how I am doing this in practice in a minute). If they send their kids to school they should still ensure that those are the priorities. Not that I think intellectual development or education is unimportant. Just slightly less important. And for another thing an all round healthy lifestyle is a pre-requisite for successful academics in the first place. As I find out every time Little Miss doesn’t get enough sleep for any reason.
Right now, we are on holiday which means that academics consist of me asking her maths puzzles and tickling her when she gets them right, her reading comic books and a chapter of history every day, and….tadaaa… family and spiritual development!
This takes the form of my father’s Special Curriculum for Raising Skeptical Children in which the child learns that any utterance by an adult is just as likely to be BS as not. The successful student should come up with some suitably pertinent and witty answer that avoids overstepping some invisible line that they have to discover themselves. My brother and I are graduates of this particular course, but so far my daughter is in rather over her head. Perhaps understandably, I had grown up in the belief that talking tripe with bells on is a man’s job whereas dh, being of the American persuasion, is apt to verge on the literal. All in all, she hasn’t had much practice, and her responses have been a mixture of moments of pure genius, interspersed with exhaustion.
My favourite moment so far was when she stunned the old boy into silence for a while with a pun on the word ‘arse’. It was a good pun, but unfortunately based on her sincere belief that an arse is a kind of donkey. This morning we reduced her to exhaustion by 11.00 by explaining to her that you could easily understand the nature of the square root if you considered the carrot, which is a conical root.
She rallied round by lunchtime to nearly finish me off at hangman with the word ‘raze’. When I asked her if she knew what it meant she said “yes, you ‘raze’ a child”. I see her point, though I’m not sure if she did.
Fortunately it’s not all cruelty to children. Grandad does get down on the floor with the blocks and stuffed animals for precisely one hour per day in which he does exactly what she tells him. After that, we have to rally round to lift him up again with levers and pulleys and he goes off to tinker with his dvd player until it works so she can watch some ghastly film. And he makes her whatever flavour of ice cream she desires with his own hands.
Grandma tends to stick to natural history and gardening. This can be a little bit morbid because it tends to revolve around pest species and the things you can do to them. Still, it’s an education.
And me? I had a lovely nap this afternoon.
What to do on a travel day? Luckily we are ‘only’ going to the UK, leaving at 15:20 and probably reaching my parents’ house about 23:00. It should still be light by then. In the meantime Antonia did maths while I packed, read some Horrid Henry, and we found time to look at this butterfly wing under the microscope. The butterfly died on our terrace, so we seized our chance.
Antonia is still recovering from seeing Coraline, although I suspect she is playing it a bit for sympathy at this point!
I quite liked this film, Mike didn’t, but she was curled up in her chair with her eyes closed before it was halfway through. A shame, because she had looked forward to seeing it. And this, mind you, is the child who sat through Pirates of the Carribean 1, 2, and 3 at a friend’s house without blenching. Coraline just pressed all her fear buttons.
It might be that we bear an unfortunate resemblance to Coraline’s parents. I hope we are not so inattentive, but we are closely associated with computers. Then there’s the division of labour – Mike does the cooking, I do the cleaning, which is the same. And then, I suppose there is just the whole temptation of ‘better than life’ parents that many kids can maybe relate to and that turns sour in the film. Or the fear of a door in your own house with a horrid witch behind it. Whatever it was it genuinely, seriously upset her for a bit. And to think that some people I know stake their faith on animations as opposed to movies with human actors for not scaring children.
I might be back blogging. I have been too busy/jetlagged/under-the-weather-due-to-overbusyness, etc… Still homeschooling though, so here is today’s best incident.
We were doing maths, when Antonia suddenly said “who wrote this book anyway?”. So I turned to the front and read her the names of the authors. “Humph!”, she said, “all men! I suppose that’s why there’s so many boys in it”.
I was quite surprised. I hadn’t noticed any such bias. But she is more sensitive to that sort of thing than me, and there certainly were no girls on that particular page. I decided to do a people count to see if she had formed a false impression. The book is divided into five sections, and after counting the first two, I though she was mistaken. The proportion of girls to boys was so close, it showed every sign of having been carefully engineered. Then I got to the third section, the one we are just finishing, and saw that she was very right indeed.
Perhaps the worst thing was that I then started noticing the ratio of adult women to men throughout the book, which is very poor. And whilst many of the men were professionals of various kinds, almost all of the few women were somebody’s mother or a customer. Here are my results.
Section 1 2 3 4 5 ________________________________ Girls 42 28 27 23 20 Boys 41 26 43 28 24 Women 1 9 5 4 5 Men 4 12 16 19 15
I won’t name and shame the maths book. For one thing, I’m otherwise very pleased with it. For another, it’s a French one, so I don’t imagine many people who happen here would be using it. I just thought it was very interesting that some children actually notice these things. So yes, it probably is worth making the effort to be ‘politically correct’.
Now I suppose I should get my act together and write a letter to the publisher, saying how much I like their book, but…
We’ve been doing Charlotte Mason style narrations based on readings for over a year, but now we are branching out a little bit. Sometimes I ask Antonia to tell me back a story from the perspective of a particular character, possibly not a major one. She’s also been doing a little translating of easier passages from French into English. This is not an easy task, and implies a pretty high level of comprehension. I wouldn’t actually have asked her to do this for more than a few sentences, put I got a whole chapter of a book! Most of her narration is still completely undirected.
I am supposed to record Antonia’s picture narration of Turner’s Dido Building Carthage:
“On the side of the picture there are some people that look like they are going to bathe or they might be washing their clothes. And it looks like the sun is setting and some of the light is reflecting off the river. There’s a line of white water but all of it is in shade after that. There is mostly shade because of the arches and the tree. You can see that the tree is on a mountain and on the top of the mountain, there’s a little arch. I found it very refreshing to look at. On the left side of the picture, I can see a flag next to an arch. The building on the right side is next to the sun.”
She seems to be building up a descriptive style. The one thing that really inspired her today was writing a review of CS Lewis‘ Voyage of the Dawn Treader which we have just finished:
The Dawn Treader
The Dawn Treader is an interesting book. There are three characters called Edmund, Lucy and Eustace. They are very, very brave. And they are king and queen except Eustace who got turned into a dragon and he could not talk. The Dawn Treader had a mouse with them. The mouse talked his head off, but he was very nice and adorable.
This comes with an ancient ship illustration, one of her current specialities, and a date in which all the numbers have arms, legs and faces to the point where you can’t tell what they say.
Yesterday, she wrote this little story, so I guess I can also cross off that ‘composes on a model’ entry in the grade 2 checklist! I think we must have a couple of picture books that follow this theme:
In a very dark wood, there’s a very dark house.
In the very dark house there is a very dark mouse,
And that mouse had a very small house.
Yesterday, we spent a beautiful afternoon at the Cirque de St Meme, a place up in the mountains, that’s picturesque enough to be terribly crowded except on a school day. We took a little hike, a picnic gouter, paddled and sunbathed. I am usually good at estimating the time from the daylight, but this time the air and light were so pristine that I was a whole hour out of my reckoning and we got home pretty late.
I am glad for the nice things in our homeschooling just now, because we seem to be having the extreme ups and downs at the moment. I would prefer not to talk about maths (other than multiplication tables) or French writing! Maybe later, I will talk about Just So Stories. I am really amazed at how much Antonia loves reading those.
In theory, Antonia finished learning her multiplication tables today. I say in theory, because it’s quite possible that in the process of getting those last few 12x under her belt he forgot some of the earlier ones. We will be having periodic revisions just to make sure they all really stick.
Apart from that, she is still very tired. In fact she is now asleep again at 11.30 am. I thought it best to put her back to bed as a large number of people are coming over for a barbecue in about an hour. I’m declaring next week a ‘quiet’ week, which means no more social plans than have already been made, and a focus on getting enough sleep, and some peaceful time outdoors.
We spent the whole day at the lake. How fun can you get! It was still warm enough to paddle, and nobody was there except us two homeschooling families – oh and a sleepy swan, but it stormed off in a huff shortly after we arrived. The girls had a lovely time together while we mothers chatted and kept an eye on them from a distance. They did all kinds of stuff, beachcombing, boat building… One funny thing is that they both have noticeably big vocabularies, but not quite the same big vocabularies! And they’re both a little young to be able to define words that they know how to use for other people. At least that’s what Antonia gave me to understand just now when I was putting her to bed. They don’t quite understand each other all the time!