Odd Bits: Free Homeschooling Resources

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I've been enjoying listening to a number of podcasts lately. They're great for while I'm working on laundry, dishes, or other similar tasks where my hands are busy but my mind is not. And they're free. Gotta love when some of the great minds in Classical Education will share their wisdom and learning for free!

• Schole Sisters: Poetic Bible Lessons
•  Your Morning Basket: Furnishing the Mind -- A Conversation on Recitation with Andrew Pudewa
• A Delectable Education: Recitation
• A Delectable Education: Drawing 

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There's actually a lot of Charlotte Mason/Classical Homeschooling how-tos available for free. Ambleside Online (which I love) has a whole free curricula for K-12 education, and there is so much of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True in what they're suggesting. So many good books. The more that I use from their recommendations, the more I am grateful for their generosity. Plus, they have Miss Mason's volumes online for searching, reading, and studying, and a host of other articles and resources. You could get lost in there. If you want to give your children something different, then you have to spend time educating yourself, too. AO does a great job of supporting that process. I use a lot of their stuff.

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But if you want something that's taking a specifically LDS approach to a Classical Education, then you might have a look at By Study and Faith: A Modern Charlotte Mason. They have a hymn rotation that focuses on both LDS hymns and also includes some less familiar ones from the larger Christian tradition; that are so many beautiful hymns out there to choose from. Each month, about mid-month, they post an article giving some of the background and history of the current hymn. Oh Say What is Truth was the hymn for October. The next thing they're working on is a scripture reading rotation that takes in, not only the Bible, but the full LDS canon, which will be pretty excited when it's ready to share! In the mean time, there's a number of other resources for how to implement Miss Mason's suggestions for gospel study within the LDS understanding of Christian theology. They've also got a growing collection of materials for studying various languages -- including some of the more obscure languages that our returned missionaries sometimes know, to assist in teaching those languages to our children, which is pretty cool. And that's all free, too.

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Our main math spine is MEP (Mathematics Enhancement Programe), which is a full math curricula developed in the UK, also available for free. We started using it because it's free, but I'm really liking it (except that it's complected to switch into from Mequon, since the scope and sequence are very different). But it's really very good at teaching real mathematical thinking: in addition to helping kids get competent at working problems, it also trains them to think like mathematicians. Our first activity in MEP is a great example of some of the fun stuff, and the way that they emphasize patterns throughout. It remains my favorite thing we've done with MEP so far.

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Librivox is a treasure trove of classic literature: free audio books, read by volunteers. And nearly all of the recordings we've listened to have been very nice. I love the variety of exotic accents that you hear, listening to different titles! We've listened to Pollyanna, Just David, a couple of Shakespeare plays, The Burgess Bird Book for Children, Children of Odin, By Pike and Dyke, quite a few retellings of Greek and Roman myths, the Declaration of Independence, Bastiat's essays, Pride and Prejudice... I don't even remember them all. The kids routinely ask me if they can use my old phone (Librivox has a mobile app) so they can re-listen to some of the great literature while they play. Uh... YES! Use my phone!

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These are my favorite free resources, but they're hardly the only free things out there. You can click the button for more of the Homeschool Review Crew's favorite free links:

Odd Bits: Planning, Latin, and Burdens

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We started doing Latin a while back, and I started wondering: once we've learned some stuff, what is there that we can read? I'm sure that I'll find some other, more traditional things, but there's this fun list of classic children's books that have been translated into Latin. Some of them are even picture books, which should make a good starting place for building a collection of Latin works. I think that, when you are serious about learning a language, collecting materials in that language should be a priority: literacy follows books, not the other way around, so I don't like to wait until we are already good at it before we start finding materials that are enjoyable to look at.

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I love this story about the guy that got the Constitution amended -- who pushed and pushed until one of the Amendments that James Madison authored, one considered for inclusion in the Bill of Rights, but never actually ratified, was passed in 1992. Just as good is the way that the process affected the teacher that gave the poor grade that started it all.

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It's time to make some lesson plans, if I can ever get my life to settle down and figure out how to get some uninterrupted time at my desk! This season isn't very good for that kind of thing. So here's a couple of homeschool links:

• narration for older students
• be frugal -- but mind copyright, too
• method vs system in planning: don't forget to think
• recitation is an art; learn it 

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Odd Bits: December

A grab-bag of things that caught my eye the past little while.

Something For Mom:

The American tradition of self-education has gone so far underground that most people find "get an education" and "go to school" to be synonymous, and that which is self-taught often feels like it doesn't "count" -- but it wasn't always that way, and not everybody's forgotten. Mom doesn't need to loose herself in her Mothering. But it takes some mindful effort, and probably learning some new skills, to work on educating yourself: we don't typically leave home armed with the tools of self-education! The good news is, we don't have to make it all up from scratch. For instance. This lovely bit from Afterthoughts Blog is actually an introduction to a whole series on the topic of Mom's self-education. And they're working on a Mothers' course at Ambleside Online! It's going to be a while before it's ready to go, but there's enough there to give some good ideas for starting now. She touches on reading (audio books while you get dinner count!), on listening to lectures (we often call those podcasts, now), on getting in touch with nature, and a number of other things. And many of them can be squeezed in the cracks of daily life, even if we have minimal time to carve out for it.

Something Current: 

I'm a big fan of the Bill of Rights. I love that the Constitution is written, more or less, in plain English: you don't need a law degree to understand what it was they had in mind.  The Bill of Rights just had its 225th birthday, mostly without any fanfare. But Rand Paul wrote a great piece about it, and then The Blaze had a pretty good article about Paul's work. Here's my favorite bit from Paul:

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Not all of these 225 years have been kind to the Bill of Rights, though.  It’s been challenged, debated, and far too often just ignored. Don’t be fooled into thinking this would have surprised the Founders. We have the Bill of Rights precisely because the Founding Fathers knew government can’t resist stretching its limits. When some in government say “of course we can,” you and I are supposed to use the Bill of Rights to say, “No, you can’t.” Some believe government has grown too large to hold down with these chains, that it’s too late to rein it back in.  If the Bill of Rights were mere words on paper, perhaps we could afford to indulge that feeling. But they are not mere words.  They are principles fundamental to who we are as a people and what we represent as a nation.

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Something Seasonal:

It's a Wonderful Life has been my favorite Christmas movie for as long as I can remember (rivaled only by White Christmas). I'd never given much thought to the actors; it's all about the story for me. But this year, when I watch it, I'm going to be looking at Jimmy Stewart, as well as at George Bailey. Turns out that this great movie also has a great story.

Something Educational: 

I came across this, from Memoria Press, about how a Classical approach to phonics works. I don't know tons about the history of phonics instruction, but what they describe about how a "classic" approach (a structured, orderly approach, with plenty of well-timed practice) works makes a great deal of sense to me, and has been very successful with my kids: Hero reads well, and Dragon is coming along beautifully. I particularly liked this bit:

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The traditional phonics sequence is effective because it is systematic, not random. It reveals the underlying order of the great variety of English spelling patterns, one pattern at a time. This orderly presentation is an aid to memory and is the very heart of phonics. Without it, many students are unable to recognize, master, and read English words fluently, for the English language has the most irregular spelling of any of the modern languages.

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I've seen some say that, because there are a large number of irregulars in English, we shouldn't bother burdening kids with phonics. However, English is something more than 90% regular, and it seems absurd to ignore that fact. Your average educated native speaker of English knows about 35,000 words (about 20% of the current contents of the language), which makes 32,500+ of those words rule-following words. Teaching the rules -and in a rational order- seems pretty sensible, when compared with the daunting task of trying to memorize all 35,000 words individually! For the chronically curious, there's a follow-up article. And a pretty interesting discussion of how many words there are in various languages, and how many of those words are typically used by natives and non-natives of various stripes.

Something About History:

Way back when, a guy named Roger Williams had these radical ideas about how the law ought to stay out of dictating convictions and faith -- what we now call Freedom of Religion, or Freedom of Conscience. He left England shortly after the Puritans founded Massachusetts, but found that though they enjoyed being able to worship their own way, they hadn't learned to allow the same to others -- he ended up getting banished from their colony, so he set up his own: the Providence Plantation. Which became famous for its religious toleration. And he wrote The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, which came highly recommended after a recent Facebook conversation. I'm looking forward to digging into it.