Bessie's Pillow {Crew Review}

Bessie's Pillow, written by Linda Bress Silbert, is a historical novel, based on the true story of the author's grandmother and her immigration from Lithuania's Jewish ghetto to escape persecution, which we were given to reveiw. After reading the excerpt on the publisher, Strong Learning, Inc., website, I was hooked, and when it arrived (finally!) I sat down and started it.

By the end of the day, I'd read half the book.

If I hadn't been trying to get over the flu, I would have been seriously tempted to stay up late and finish it. Instead, I finished the story before noon the next day. It was a beautiful story and a page-turner. I added this excerpt to my commonplace book, from an exchange Bessie has with her father early in the book:

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"No, Tateh, I am afraid," I say, and begin to cry.
"Boshka," he replies, "There will come many times in your life when you are afraid. In these moments, you must surrender your fear and go wherever [the moment] takes you, and trust that you have the strength to do what you must to survive." 
-Bessie's Pillow, p36

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I think this piece of timeless wisdom, all the more poignant for having come from a rabbi in a ghetto who, knowing he will never see her again, sends his daughter away to safety, encapsulates the message of the book. The story is the story of how she lives this counsel, over and over and over again throughout her life.

Once I had read the book myself, I knew that it wasn't suitable for a family read-aloud, which is what I had first planned for it: my younger two are not ready for all of the challenges Bessie faces. Bessie is fortunate to be able to travel first class, and to have well-off friends and family to assist her when she arrives in America as a refugee. But she comes from the Jewish ghetto, where the pogroms -mobs that attacked the Jews- go on violent rampages with torches and weapons, where parents try to protect their daughters from rape at the hands of the pogroms, and  and where the Russians conscript Jews and send them, poorly clothed and often unarmed, to the front lines of the war. Most of the Jewish conscripts do not come home. It's a harsh life, and the author does her readers the favor of showing the reality of it. At one point after coming to America Bessie takes a job for a few days in a sweatshop sewing factory, where she is locked in with all the rest of the women who are sewing, and treated very poorly, before she is unjustly fired. Bessie also sees the harsh realities of tenement living. And the author remains faithful to her family history when scarlet fever takes the two of Bessie's children, only a day apart. All this is done tastefully, and it's particularly good and timely to have this kind of story when there are so many refugees in the world right now, and immigration is such a hot topic. It's good to have stories of why people become refugees and immigrants, even if it's only part of the book. But I think it's a little much for Dragon(6) and Peanut(4). However, Hero(10) is old enough and mature enough to begin to see the hard realities of the world, and this book did nicely as his next lesson on that point, both in the lessons of seeing the things that Bessie saw, and also in terms of Bessie's own reaction to these things, which was uniformly compassionate and caring. She really was a remarkable woman.

At that point, having read it myself, it was time to give it to my son. I talked to him after he'd started it, to make sure that he understood why it was worth it to Bessie's family to send her away like they did: he hadn't. Although he knows something about our Church's history, and the mobs that our people faced even here in America, I don't think that it's terribly real to him yet, and he didn't understand this either. So we had a conversation about that. And he kept going back to the story. I'd asked him to read the first three chapters (they're short; that was about 15 pages), and he just kept going: he was hooked. It didn't take him a lot longer to read it than what it took me. I know that he kept thinking about it, though, because a week or two after he'd finished the book, he was sweeping the kitchen and commented on a part of the story where Bessie chases someone with a broom. I like a book that keeps us thinking, even after it's done. That's one of the marks of good literature.

Because we got sick (and that was so fun we did it again), we didn't really dig into the extras that the author has collected on her site, as we've spent a lot of this winter just trying to keep our heads above water on the basics while we caught Every Cold Invented. But there are some really fun-looking resources on there: radio shows, dance steps, recipes, all kinds of things to help you place Bessie in her historical context in a more visceral way. There are also other resources for looking through Ellis Island immigration records, and information about the ships that Bessie and her brothers traveled on, the Hamburg-American line, including fun things like diagrams of the ships and menus for what they ate on board. I think that, if you get a chance to read other reviews (click the banner below for a list of all the Review Crew members who are reviewing this book), that some members of the Review Crew even found that they had ancestors who came through Ellis Island!

Day in the Life

A pretty typical day in our life. We have a 4th grader, a kindergartener, and a toddler. 

9:00AM - Alarm goes off. I snuggle Tigress(2) as she asks me repeatedly, "Are awake, Mama?" and chat with the Daddy for a couple minutes.

9:15 - Getting up and out of bed. Dragon(5) pops in to say good morning, and the Daddy wakes up Hero(8). We're meeting some friends for Nature Study at "our" preserve this morning, plus I need to stop at the church to let someone in to do some cleaning. I head to the shower, and the Daddy chases people into day clothes and starts getting breakfasts.

9:55 - My person calls me to let me know he's at the church and ready. I thought we were meeting at 10:10...

10:12 - We pull into the parking lot at the chapel. I start to think that I've timed this too tight and underestimated the chatty nature of the person I'm letting in. Oops.

10:30 - Still at the church. My friend is at the preserve, and texts to find out if we're almost there. I call her and explain. We take off.

10:45 - Arrive at the nature preserve. I love it here. I've been reading Biology in a Day, and I'm excited to look at the plants. I've read about a couple of families so far: mints and parsley families, and I know a bit about the Asteraceae family from work in my Herb First Aid class that I'm still slowly working through. We've been doing swim lessons all summer, and lots of travel, and this will be my first chance in a long time to do nature study with the kids. I'm excited.

We find this gorgeous thistle. The kids don't care today - they're running and shouting and having a great time. I can tell it's been a while since we've done this. But they'll settle down after a few minutes. My friend and I admire the thistle anyway.

I'm extra interested in the Queen Anne's Lace, since it's one of the umbral flowers in the parsley family. I can tell it's not the Yarrow I'm hoping to see, because the leaves aren't Yarrow leaves, so I post to the Plant ID group I found on Facebook, checking to make sure it actually is Queen Anne's and not something else.   

There's a lot of it, and I wonder if it spreads underground like Yarrow and Pando, and if it does, does that mean that all the Queen Anne's Lace in a given clump actually counts as a single plant? I don't know, and I'm not sure where to find out, but there's still plenty of botany to study. I shelve the question for later. Meanwhile, one of the toddlers pulls up a plant. I had been wanting to, because I want to draw it, so we tell him not to do that (it's a preserve, after all), and I quietly tuck the plant in my Nature Journal. 

At the pond, we watch turtles, speculate on why the water is so low, and try to identify a new bird the kids find. Virginia Rail, maybe? I'm really wishing for my big camera with the telephoto, but all I have with me is the phone. It can't see that far. Some of the kids adopt a caterpillar and carry it around. When they loose the first, they find another, bigger one. We catch minnows in our net, inspect them, and turn them loose real quick. The littlest kids are pretty interested in the minnows. Even more fun, after we catch and show, they learn to see them in the water, and the toddlers are both pretty excited about that. 

On the way to the "Stick Shack" we find this and wonder if it's a spent Milkweed pod. The Facebook plant people say it could also be a butterfly weed, and to look at the sap's color... but we've moved away into another section of the park. Maybe next week. Either way, it's pretty.

While the kids play in the dirt under the odd little roof/shed thingy they call the "Stick Shack" I hear bits from various of play building on some of the stories we've been reading (which I love), and I spend the next few minutes chatting with my friend while we stay out of the way of their game. We lament the absence of a bench, and I decide to sit down on the ground and start drawing the underside of the piece of Queen Anne's Lace. It's a delightful realization to think the kids are big enough now that I don't need to hover to keep them safe, so I can draw in my book! I get about 1/2 done while they play, before they want to go to the Tower and play hide-and-seek. We move, and while they play their game, I finish off my drawing. I'm surprised at how fast the flower is wilting, and have to kind of fudge the end of the drawing, because the flower has changed enough that it doesn't look like it did. It's starting to curl up and get limp. The pen in my pocket can't do justice to this work - I can't really do all the fine details on the little bitty flowers. But I'm happy with how it turned out, just the same. Dots suggest the little tiny flowers, even if they're not super detailed. I'm not sure that my drawing skills are up to any better than this, especially not in the time that I have: I don't want to take the plant off the preserve's property.

12:00 - Realize that we have my husband's car, and he needs it to go to work. Drat. I have to put an end to the good things going on in the park. We stop by the nature center for drinks and I ask the guy some questions about why the pond is so low (it hasn't rained much) and if they get very many Virginia Rails. They don't (he's never seen one at the preserve) so that's likely not the bird we saw, but he suggests that it might have been a Green Heron, which they get all the time. We look it up, and it looks like a probable match for what we saw at the pond.


12:30 - We're home again, and everyone seems to be famished. Frozen blueberries in yogurt I made yesterday, plus leftover pancakes, egg salad for the Daddy, and some apples. I guess this is lunch. We have our Japanese songs playlist going, and the kids are singing along part of the time.

1:40 - The Daddy leaves for work. The kids are playing with legos, and I am messing with my blog and reading some stuff on Ambeleside's Facebook page.

2:00 - We do our hymn (I Believe in Christ) followed by our folk song (Barbara Allen). I think that we can change folk songs as planned next week, but we're probably going to need another week to do justice to all the verses of our hymn. It's extremely pleasant: I love being gathered around the piano with the kids.

2:30 - Hero is reading a comic book, and I do some work with a number line with Dragon, counting backwards. I'm surprised by how hard it is for him. Guess we'll practice that some more. Then, more legos. And some play with our hiragana (Japanese alphabet) toy. Best talking toy, ever: it's helping build exposure to their second alphabet, which will (eventually) help build literacy in the second language. 

3:30 - The kids want to finish off their lists on the markerboard, so that school will be finished. Hero vacuums the living room and the stairs. I set up to do calendar time. Dragon does his vacuuming - and with no tantrums today. Progress. Yay. I try to load the dishwasher, but get distracted.

4:00 - We're finally just about ready for calendar time. While they wait, Hero and Tigress play with Legos. It's just that kind of day. Then we do our calendar. It's a lovely section of the day that we do almost entirely in Japanese. We counted out the days of the month, added another straw to the pouch and practice counting and adding, and then sing the "Go-shu-shu Song." Loudly.




4:30 - We can't find Hero's memory work binder, so we substitute our Book of Centuries. He adds the Reign of Terror from yesterday's history work, and also Lexington and Concord from a little while ago. We're just picking back up with doing the timeline work, now that he's a bit bigger and can take care of it. We also get sidetracked with watching some of the videos in our Japanese playlist. Dragon brings me a cool Lego robot he built, then asks if he can play with our disassemblable body. 

5:00 - I'm thinking that if we'd done less legos we'd be done. But we're not. Hero asks me to practice violins with him. I'm using the 1/4 size one, which looks comical, and at least today, sounds hideous. Not sure why I can't make a decent sound. But Hero sounds pretty ok. I get out the littlest one for Tigress. 

5:30 - I ask Dragon about his lego creation and he tells me "Ka-BOOF!!" Tigress comes through with the body, "Bobby!" And starts riding it like a horse. I tell Dragon that it'll be his turn for violin momentarily. He grumbles. 

After a few minutes, the grumbles turn into a full-out tantrum. He looses his legos, and I switch to story time with Tigress. Pretty soon, stories are more interesting than tantrums. By the end, Dragon is still grumpy, but he's snuggling and listening, not throwing a fit. I call it a win, check Hero's grammar work, and go work on the half-done dishes -- and dinner. Hero plays Minecraft for a while. 

6:15 - The dishwasher is running and dinner's on the table. I read a few pages of Fellowship of the Ring while we eat; the Company of the Ring is about to be attacked by Wargs and flee to Moria. Very exciting! After dinner, Dragon takes a do-over, and practices beautifully. He asks me to play, too, so no pictures. He even asks me to help him practice every single day so that "when I am an old man  I can play better than Lindsey Sterling!" Sure. Daily practice I can help with. 

7:30 - Last thing on Dragon's list: phonics practice. He chooses to do it on the spelling tiles, and he does great. Hero's time on the computer is done, and he's looking for his book (The Empire Strikes Back). Dragon wants some Minecraft. Tigress wants a turn too, so I introduce her to the joys of Starfall. She's a happy camper. She loves the tiger. 

8:15 - Tigress is dismayed to discover that it's her turn for the bath. She was pretty sad, until she noticed that I'd tossed in some Duplos (because there's not a enough legos in this day, yet). Then a bath was acceptable.

8:45 - Tigress is clean, Hero's headed in for his shower. I'm not sure what I've done with my Botany in a Day book (really, the "in a day" part is a misnomer, but I like the book anyway), so I decide to attempt to draw a Queen Anne's Lace seed pod in my nature book - they look really cool. Tigress is getting grumpy and clingy, though, so who knows how well this idea will work right now. I also spend a couple minutes trying to figure out if "seed pod" is actually the correct term for the thing I am drawing. So. Much. Vocabulary. I'm glad there's not a strict timetable or test for this stuff. That would not be very enjoyable, and I'm liking learning this stuff in my slow way. I read about seeds, but still don't know if I should be calling my thing a pod. I search some more, find little, and decide to try drawing instead.

9:00 - Dragon got off the computer and into the bath -- without throwing a fit. Give that boy a star; those are tough spots in his day. I haven't drawing anything in my book, yet, but I did learn that Queen Anne's Lace looks a lot like some poisonous cousins. That's useful to know. Maybe I'll look at them next. But, if you can tell them all apart, apparently you can make jelly. I'm pretty curious about that. But not so much so that I'd try it. Yet.

9:06 - The Daddy walks in the door. Yay!

9:20 - I've started drawing, but I think I should have done it in pencil. The pen I'm using today just isn't doing it for me. My seeds look painfully similar to ticks in a clump. But Dragon is just about ready to get out of the shower, and Tigress is melting down about ... I'm not sure what. It's definitely getting close to bedtime. 

9:45 - Drinks for the kids, family scripture reading (we're in Mormon 2, and the story is getting so sad), and family prayers. Tigress passes out on my lap, and I snuggle her while the boys brush their teeth. At that point, she's far enough gone that I can park her on her bed. 

10:10 - Upstairs for the rest of bedtime. Hugs, kisses, and prayers. Then, I read the boys' personal scriptures to them. Hero is in Numbers 32, reading about the entry into Caanan. Dragon is in Luke, and we discuss a couple of the parables of the Lord, and some of the tricky vocabulary. Both boys want extra tonight, and I happily comply until my voice is tired. Then they quickly fall asleep. Now I have to decide what I'm going to do with the rest of my evening. Study? Minecraft? Hmmm...

10:40 - Downstairs with the Daddy again. I like that. I grab a big glass of water and a little piece of toast, and work on my blog for a few minutes. Then, I look up Asclepias incarnata and
Asclepias tuberosa and see what I can learn about that seed pod we saw this morning. Then, some Minecraft while I listen to some of my herb class, I'm thinking. Allergies and a big Creeper fountain.

12:00 - I'm so done. (Except for re-checking Facebook and posting the link I said I'd find before that conversation is irreversibly lost.) But then, sleep.

Poetic Narrations

I came to it late, but I'm learning to enjoy poetry, and more than just Shel Silverstein or Jack Prelutsky. I've read poems to my boys on and off for our read alouds, and they like it too. But I'd never really made a study of poetry, or looked at any particular author. I want to have favorite poems, but I don't. At least, not yet. That may change.

Tonight I ran across this: Poetic Narration, posted over at Charlotte Mason Help. Here's the heart of the idea:

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Once you have exposed your child to a wide variety of good poetry and they have learned to enjoy it, then they are old enough to begin poetic narrations. For us, that was around 11 or 12 years of age. My children really enjoy these. I simply ask them to write a narration about a specific passage, but it must be written as a poem. When they become comfortable with this, I add another requirement- copy the style of a recent poet they have studied or are currently studying.

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Hero's not ready for this just yet. I'm tempted to try it out myself, though I'll have to start by assigning us some poetry to read. I'm taking suggestions.

Weekly Wrap-up: After the Holidays

We welcomed the new year with something of a yawn: two members of the family went to the doctor on New Year's Eve, and the only reason anyone at all was up at midnight is the Daddy and I usually tuck the boys in between 10 and 11 and then head to dreamland ourselves shortly after midnight. Happily, everyone but the Daddy is feeling much better; hopefully we can get the Daddy back to full strength quickly because although the baby is due at the very beginning of February, the doctor today said she thought we were more likely looking at a January birthday! I'm feeling big as a barn, and every bit as awkward as that implies, and sooner is OK with me... after my regular doctor comes back from his holiday on Monday.

Probably the biggest excitement this week was taking the tree down. This happened a bit precipitously, after Dragon tried to hide in it and the base gave way. However, no boys were injured (though the tree did die- the base was destroyed), and I didn't freak out on anyone, so I felt like we handled it pretty well. Even the ornaments survived: only one plain ball ornament broke, and I'm pretty sure that it broke as a result of rough handling, not the tree falling.

As far as actual educational stuff this week, we're still taking it a little easy, what with the whole family getting over the nasty grunge that we've had. But I got some studying done for myself. My sister and her husband found this amazing course which they gave us for Christmas, and I'm having a blast listening to it and doing the reading it suggests. The booklet for the class is in the middle, and the other two are some of the recommended reading. It's not light, and it's not easy; this kind of reading is work, no doubt about that. But I've already learned a ton and I haven't even finished off the first lesson yet! The Federalist Papers were already on my list of books for the year, but this is actually making it easier to do that, because it's breaking it down into bite-size chunks for me, and also the instructor points out things that I would otherwise very likely have missed. Both of those are awesome. This is my third attempt at the Federalist; maybe with a bit of a guide, this time I'll make it all the way through. It may take me all year to finish the course, but I'm loving working on it!

As for the boys, we took it pretty easy on them for school this week. Hero was one of the sickies that started the week at the doctor's office, but we did do a little. We finished off our read-aloud, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which the boys both loved. Hero practiced his reading a little, and we learned just a little bit about medieval life.

We also read "You Wouldn't Want to Live in a Medieval Castle" and watched a couple of videos to clarify things that they mentioned. The little girl that worked in the castle was working with a distaff, so we had to find out what that is.







And then the castle was attacked by Prince John who use 5 trebuchets during the seige. Off to YouTube again! We found this really cool clip, and when it was done Hero asked me an awesome question: "Can we build one in our backyard?" Sadly, no, we can't. But maybe we can look for a little model kit. It's not the same, but it's still pretty cool.

Weekly Wrap-up: illuminated

We started out the week pretty sick, particularly Dragon and me. As a result, on Monday and Tuesday there was a lot of sitting around doing not much! But by Tuesday afternoon I was starting to feel somewhat better, and we started to be a little productive again. Hero practiced his math facts, did a little writing, and some reading that evening. Wednesday was much more normal. Thursday, winter finally arrived. About time, too!

After the snow play was done we started a big history/art project. Last week, we read about illuminated manuscripts in Story of the World 2. This week, we looked at some scans of real ones, at this cool site I found from the British Library. Primarily, we looked at the Luttrell Psalter, but we also had a look at a few pages from the Lindsifame Gospels before Hero's attention for the site was used up. We each picked out a few pages to do screen captures from, and those we talked about what we liked, then printed them out for reference in our art project.

 

Next, we had a look at the directions from our art project. I showed him the various fonts they suggest, and he picked out what he wanted. He's still learning to do regular letters, so I did the outline letters for him. He did all the rest, and I'm so pleased with what he did!

 

 

I love the way that the decorations on his letters are so similar to the detail work on the models we looked at. It's always fun to see that sort of comprehension. I'm hoping that by doing a big art project like this he'll remember the real illuminations better. He's already wanted to go back and look at the British Library site again, which is a good sign. The idea with our project had been to do crayon resist, but I didn't explain it very well and I told him about the painting part too soon, so he didn't put enough crayon on the picture for it to actually resist when we painted. Next time, I'll have him do the crayon part, and then I'll tell him about the paint.

This was Hero's first experience with water colors, I believe, and nearly my first as well. Dragon lost interest with the project and went to "help" the Daddy long before we got to the paints, so he doesn't have one to show. Hero tells me that he's not done, which is fine with me; the real illuminations were big projects and often art takes more than one sitting to do well. But this is a sample of what he has so far.

 

Once I got him going, I was able to do one too. I didn't get to the painting part, and the crayons were too dull to do what I had in mind when I started, but it's still a fun project. When Hero does his painting next I'm hoping to do a little as well.

I'm getting a bit of historical whiplash, switching from Ancient Rome to Medieval Europe like this, but when I looked at the dates, they aren't that far distant in time. I always thought that togas and knights were further distant from each other, but it turns out that's not so much the case. Studying history chronologically makes so much more sense than the piecemeal way that I got what little I did learn about history. It's pretty amazing how much I'm learning, even though we're really only using the most basic of resources since Hero is still so young. So this Friday afternoon Hero and Dragon got their first exposure to King Arthur and his knights with our new read-aloud. This version has some amazing illustrations, which they both love, and when we started it my voice gave out just as the Green Knight burst in on the New Years' Feast at Camelot-- cliffhanger!! The boys and I are all anxious to read some more of this one.



Now that Hero is reading better, I tried stepping back a little bit with our map work, and helping him less. Instead of pointing to the map and telling him what he's looking at, I stood back and told him what he was looking for, as well as some clues as to where he should find it. This is one place where I struggle not to be a bit of a helicopter, so it worked well that we did this while I was getting dinner and I kept having to cross the kitchen to check on the food. Physical distance. Makes it hard to hover. Then, he did the coloring (except that I helped a little with the water). It went really well, and we'll be doing more like this. I was, however, pleasantly surprised at how easily he found Rome. I hadn't been at all sure how much of the other style of map work he was remembering, and apparently it's at least some.

That's the highlights! We did some other stuff; he's made good progress on filling in the Book It! chart, and will probably be ready for his next coupon by the end of the month. Dragon loves to practice reading his CVC words, and comes flying across the room if I ask him if he wants to do it, all little kid excitement. It's so much fun to see him so excited. I hadn't really intended to start him this early, but he's been showing signs of starting to remember some sight words, and he's so excited about it, so we'll do it a bit and see where it goes. It's awful cute to hear his little toddler voice work on making the blends. I love teaching my kids!

To see what other folks are doing this week, head on over to Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and check 'em out!

Pre-K/K at Home

A couple of friends have been asking me about doing preschool at home: what do I do? How do I know what to teach? This sort of thing. I thought that I'd write down what we did in doing pre-K and Kindergarten at home.

The first thing to do, in my opinion, is seek the Lord's blessing. The prophets have spoken very clearly about the critical importance of a mother's influence on her children, throughout childhood, but especially in those critical young years. President Benson was especially blunt about the importance of mothers for their preschool age children:

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"It is a fundamental truth that the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be successfully delegated. No, not to day-care centers, not to schools, not to nurseries, not to babysitters. We become enamored with men's theories such as the idea of preschool training outside the home for young children. Not only does this put added pressure on the budget, but it places young children in an environment away from mother's influence. ... It is mother's influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child's basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother's loving example to choose righteousness. How vital are mother's influence and teaching in the home-and how apparent when neglected!"
-Ezra Taft Benson (Ensign, Nov. 1981, p. 104)

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In teaching Hero, I found the distinction between  preschool and Kindergarten to be relatively artificial. The primary difference was the amount of time we spent doing school in a week: as he got older, I expected more. But for the most part, we did the same stuff all along and it worked beautifully. I used preschool as a time to practice the skills that I need to do "real" school successfully, and so it was win-win all around. Here is what we did:

Talking

I do my best to speak to my children using adult language. If I don't think they understand a word, I stop and explain. I often talk my way through the day, explaining what I'm doing as we go.

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"Turn off the television - half an hour of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood per day is plenty for any child under five. Talk, talk, talk - adult talk, not baby talk. Talk to her while you're walking in the park, while you're tiding in the car, while you're fixing dinner. Tell her what you're doing and why you're doing it. ('Now I'm going to send a fax. I put the paper face down and punch in the telephone number I'm calling... and then the paper starts to feed through like this.' 'I spilled flour on the floor. I'm going to get out the vacuum cleaner and plug it in. I think I'll use this brush. It's a furniture brush, but the flour's down in the cracks, so it will work better than the floor brush.') This sort of constant chatter lays a verbal foundation in your child's mind. She's learning that words are used to plan, to think, to explain; she's figuring out how the English language organizes words into phrases, clauses, and complete sentences."

The Well-Trained Mind, page 27

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Read-Alouds

From the time he was a munchkin, I read out-loud to Hero, and now to Dragon. The first thing I recommend reading is the scriptures. I used this chart to track our progress - and it went in the scrapbooks when we were done. It took more than 3 years to go through the Book of Mormon with Hero for the first time. After that he wanted to read the stories of Christ's life, so we read the Four Gospels. Although it takes a long time to complete the project, I think it's well worth it. I also started him on a scripture box as soon as he could talk well enough. That has been one of the best parenting decisions I ever made. I can't recommend it enough!

In addition to scripture, I try to read picture books to the boys every day. Sometimes I choose, mostly they choose. We snuggle and read on the couch, the floor, in their beds, and wherever. We read at the doctor's office, and I read to them over lunch. They get books as gifts at their birthday and Christmas and as rewards for good behavior. We let them choose books they want to bring home at the book store and the thrift shop, and I write their names in books that are theirs. I try to keep the picture books high quality books, but some twaddle has slipped in from time to time, and a few times it's even become a favorite. We've had a few books destroyed by pudgy baby fingers. We've had a couple books loved to death. We have several books that have been mended with packing tape, sometimes more than once.

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"A torn book or two is a small price to pay for literacy." -Susan Wise Bauer

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I also read chapter books to the boys. We are reading Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator right now. We don't do the chapter book every day, but I do try to get it in three or four times in a week. It has always worked best for us to do this reading while eating lunch or getting ready for nap time. We often snuggle under the covers and enjoy a chapter or two. I don't hesitate to drop a book that isn't a good fit; Hero loved "The Secret Garden" but we dropped "An Incredible Journey" after only one chapter. When he was a baby, I read "Treasure Island" to him... but only the first half. Once I realized that the pirates were going to kill a bunch of people we set that one aside for a while. I love the 1000 Good Books list, and have found many old friends on there, and the new titles we've tried have been wonderful. If I can't think of anything to read, that's where I go.

When we read, I occasionally will stop and ask, "What's happening? Why did he do that? What do you think will happen next?" These questions check to see if Hero understands, and they helped him to get ready to narrate when we started moving into late Kindergarten and early first grade work. I stop and explain any difficult vocabulary as we go along.

Nature Study

Charlotte Mason, an 18th century educator, was a huge proponent of nature study - going outside and observing and learning about the world, first hand. We do that, and I love it. In practice, this has been walks in the park, looking for "cool stuff." We've played around with magnifying glasses and binoculars, but mostly we just go look and see what we can see. My plan is for this to grow into a more focused thing, and to use a sketch book to record the "cool stuff" we find, but at the preschool level it's just getting outside. When we do this we often finish our walk at a playground.

Phonics

Both my boys learned their letters and sounds on Starfall.com. Once they know that, w use Happy Phonics and I keep one eye on The Ordinary Parents' Guide to Teaching Reading. I keep the stuff the kids do looking like games, and we keep the lessons very short: 10 minutes is probably about average, 20 minutes if they're really into the game that we're playing.

Math

I initially used Math Expressions with Hero, but later discovered Miquan, and we ME is a good program, I really like Miquan, so we use that now. It goes to about 3rd grade math, so it's got plenty of stuff for the pre-k/K years. We start with counting. Counting trucks and toys and forwards and backwards. This post talks more about counting, and links to an article with some great insights to how to lay a foundation. We play with Cuisinaire Rods, both formally, and informally, where the kids basically use them like blocks. We are learning Japanese as a family, so a lot of the math we do now Dragon is doing in both English and Japanese, and I've been really amazed at how readily he takes to doing it in both! I'm having Hero participate in some of the "easy math" but in Japanese to shore up his number literacy in both languages - I've learned a few things since we did it the first time!


For the first couple years, this was pretty much it, along with some finger painting and field trips. I don't stress about writing with my littles; we color, and do other things to develop the fine motor skills. We start doing the letters more intently towards the end of the kindergarten phase and into 1st grade.

Weekly Wrap-up

Early in the week, we tried to get the last of our garden chores done before the snow came. It's been unseasonably warm, and it makes it feel like early fall, rather than late fall. I even briefly contemplated moving some strawberry plants, but decided that it's too late. Good thing I left them where they are: now we have snow on the ground. But it was a balmy 50F the day we worked in the garden.

Our Little Golden Dragon is struggling to get over a relapse of his bronchitis that he had a while back, but he's a trooper and is mostly cheerful most of the time. He and Monkey enjoyed an art project this week. They painted egg cartons, and Monkey has ambitions to turn his into a caterpillar. This is one of several crafts that Monkey thought up this week. It's fun to see him gaining enough confidence to think up his own crafts and then get them started! These caterpillars, being a painting craft, he had to ask for help. But one day this week I finished putting Dragon down for a nap and found him hard at work on a new folder game for us to use in phonics. We worked together to finish it off, then played with it right away. I need to find my contact paper and cover it, so that it will last through many games.

Speaking of phonics, it's going so well! We introduced the silent e this week, and Monkey had no problems with it. There for a while I felt like we were going sooo slowly, and wondered if we would ever get to the long vowel sounds, and now here we are! OPGTR actually breaks the silent e words into several lessons, but we covered a couple of them this week, in spite of not doing anything with it on Monday and Tuesday. We used a "magic e machine" (a cardstock frame we put the CVC words into to change the vowel sound) and his new folder game to practice. I just love hiding our phonics drill in games. We'd have fights over it every day if it wasn't for Happy Phonics and the other games we play!

In History, we covered Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as well as Joseph in Egypt. We also had a look at the royal burials in Ur, since that's where Abraham came from. We were working with the Scripture Storybooks the Church puts out, since SOTW doesn't quite match up. Ur is pretty interesting. We spent some time exploring Queen Pu-Abi's tomb. Monkey didn't know what a lyre is, so I found a youtube clip to show him. It's Anglo-Saxon, not Sumerian, but it's the same general idea, and was enough that the picture made sense to him. We talked about the cylinder seals they used, and a little of what they used them for, then we used the clay that was leftover from making our cuneiform tablets to make a cylinder for Monkey and put a little cuneiform on it. Unfortunately, it was a short night last night, and so when I was putting Dragon down for his nap I passed out too... and the cylinder was burned black. We may make another one. Which would be OK. Turns out they had holes in them to string them onto pins and wore them. So if we do it again we'll try to make a hole through the middle (a needle maybe?) to make it more accurate. He had a great time working the clay and made quite the collection of little balls and even a turret while he was "getting it soft." The Sculpey being hard didn't seem to bother him much! In any case, we had a good time looking at pictures of cylinders, checking out Queen Pu-Abi's cylinder, and later I did some reading about them too. Interesting stuff.

 Here's his narration of the story of Joseph in Egypt. I'm thinking that we may look to see if Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is still on YouTube. A while back we watched it, since someone had helpfully put it all into a playlist.

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Joseph was a righteous man. He taught his brothers about his dream, and then they sold him some Ishmaelites. They took him to Egypt. Potiphar bought Joseph. He was happy that he had Joseph and he put him in charge of his whole house. Potifer’s wife tried to make him kiss her, but Joseph didn’t, and he ran away from her. Then Potiphar’s wife told Potiphar that he kissed her. He put Joseph in jail.


He got out of jail when the king put him in charge of his whole land. Joseph was supposed to give them food for the seven years of no food. His brothers came to buy food. He told them that he was Joseph because they didn’t know it at first. He told them to come to Egypt. They did it.

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Math is going awesome as well. Monkey's fine motor skills are starting to catch up a bit, so I started teaching him his numbers this week. Not too shabby, for the first official instruction. He decided that he likes the other kind of 4 - the one that's open on top - better than the one in the font, and I'm fine with that. In addition to learning to write the numbers, we continued to work on addition with sums to about 15. We also bumped into multiplication, played with some inequalities, and did some dot-to-dots. The choose-your-own adventure style math that Miquan suggests is working out beautifully! He's requesting certain types of sheets, which makes me happy since he's practicing his facts happily, and it makes him happy because he gets to choose what he wants. His choices are based on the decorations, which makes this very easy right now! We even discussed negative numbers just a little bit, courtesy of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, our current read-aloud: If Grandma Georgina is 78, and she eats 4 pills that each take 20 years from her life, how old is she? Why did she disappear? We used a number line, and it took 2 tries to explain it, but I think he followed the logic of the negative numbers. He wasn't that interested, which is fine, but I think he got the concept. I like that.

Other than that, the main excitement in my week was getting nominated for the Homeschool Blog Awards - super exciting! (I'm under Variety and Methods.)  How was your week?

Classical Homeschooling Carnival #18

Here it is again - another Classical HS Carnival! We've got quite a few entries this time, so settle in and enjoy!

A lot of families mark the start of their school calendar at this time of year. Cellista, of La Scuola d'Argento shares an intimate glimpse of a day in the life with her post, The First Day of School.

Paula ran unto a new idea late in her planning, and is reworking her schedule in Planning 201: Retreat and Regroup at Wakefield Academy.

Other folks are steaming along, full speed ahead. Nadene, of Practical Pages, shares how read-alouds have become the glue that holds their homeschool together through good days, bad days, and everything between, in Read-Alouds: the Homeschooling Glue.

Paige shares her new writing program with A Week with Classical Writing Aesop: Day 1. It's the first of a 5 part series on Elemental Blogging.

At Delightful Children's Books, Amy has made a great list of 11 Children's Books About Stars and Space.

If your student is a further along in their educational journey, try Regina's Ninth Grade Biology Notes at Green Apple's Blush.

Here on Baby Steps we have finally begun our study of Ancient History, and we kicked it off by building a Shaduf.

Last, but certainly not least, MissMOE has a lovely review, History Portfolio Review, posted at Homeschooling While Living the Life of Easier. She has many pictures, both before and after the pages were used, giving a nice feel for the portfolios.


That concludes this edition; I hope you enjoyed it! Submit your blog article to the next edition of Classical Homeschooling Carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.