Education is the Science of Relations...Connections

We started learning the hymn St. Patrick's Breastplate last week. I usually make up my own schedule for hymns & folksongs but the hymn suggestion on the Ambleside Online rotation for September contains these beautiful words taken from a prayer of St. Patrick and I decided it was too good to miss:

I bind unto myself today

The strong Name of the Trinity

By invocation of the same

The three in one and one in three

 I bind unto myself today

the power of God to hold and lead,

God’s eye to watch, God’s might to stay,

God’s ear to hearken to my need,

the wisdom of my God to teach,

God’s hand to guide, God’s shield to ward,

the word of God to give me speech,

God’s heavenly host to be my guard.

The version I've posted here is different to the traditional tune and is used by the Celtic monks.
The complete words of this hymn and some explanations of its meaning are on this site also.
The hymn starts properly at about the 2 minute mark.

The words to this hymn have been running through my mind all week. I've been using Dawn's free study of Charlotte Mason's motto with Moozle - I am a child of God, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me...and it ties in beautifully with this prayer of St Patrick's.





Recently I've seen more and more eidence that a child naturally connects with many things. Charlotte Mason called it the 'Science of Relations.' I looked up the definiton of 'relations' and found some words that I could substitute in its place which helps to make sense of her idea. Words such as: connections, links, bonds, associations.
I always feel quite excited when these connections or relations happen without me having anticipated  or planned them.
We were reading Age of Fable the other day and came to the story of Hero & Leander. This was Moozle's short synopsis of the story:

 'There lived in the town of Abydos, a youth by the name of Leander, who loved a maiden who lived across the other side of the Hellespont (Dardanelles), in the town of Sestos. Her name was Hero and he used to swim across to visit her. One day he was swimming across, when a storm arose, and it was so violent that he drowned. When Hero heard about it she threw herself into the sea.
Swimming across the Hellespont was thought impossible, until Lord Byron did it.'

The Hellespont had come up somewhere else and immediately she was able to associate some previously separate ideas and learn also that Lord Byron, the writer of The Destruction of Sennacherib, a poem we have used for memory work, was a pretty good swimmer as well as a famous poet.

In fact, on the 30th August each year, a traditional swim is held to commemorate Lord Byron's swim from Europe to Asia in 1810 which he did in honour of Leander. He wrote a poem about it afterwards.

This was Lord Byron's account, although I think the modern swim is more like 3 km and contestants are given one and a half hours to complete it:

 This morning I swam from Sestos to Abydos. The immediate distance is not above a mile, but the
current renders it hazardous...I attempted it a week ago, and failed, - owing to the north wind, and the wonderful rapidity of the tide, - though I have been from my childhood a strong swimmer. But, this morning being calmer, I succeeded, and crossed the 'broad Hellespont' in an hour and ten minutes. 

And another neat little connection for us was finding that the current artist we're studing (J.M.W. Turner) painted The Parting of Hero and Leander in 1837:

A highlight from Macbeth:

We've probably enjoyed Shakespeare's comedies more than his tragedies but this week we hit some fun when we read from Act 5: Scene 3. Some good insults were stored up for future use...

'Thou cream-faced loon!'

'Where got'st thou that goose-look?

'Thou lily-livered boy!'

A Philosophy of Education, Pg xxx:

"Education is the Science of Relations"; that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books...

Family lunch extravaganza ie. everyone turns up so there's quite a crowd. Benj & Moozle cooked & prepared all the food with help from their Aunty D & Donna Hay...

Nothing fancy yet, but Moozle can cast on & off by herself & knows the basic stitches...

Connecting maths with science...

Nature lore...

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Weekly Review: A Fly on the Wall

This year has been a very different one to previous years. Up until last year I had five children who were all home at different times throughout the week, studying or working part time and for the few years before that there were seven filling up the house. It's been a very a different dynamic this year with only the two youngest at home during the day.
I've always had a flexible approach to home schooling and whilst I can't see myself getting rigid, I think I do need to be more structured. When I had lots of kids to teach, I naturally fell into a routine. I had to or I never would have got anything done. Now that I don't have the same pressure of circumstances, it's easier to let the time leak.

Sometimes I find it helpful to write down what we're doing as we go, to get a better idea of where the leaks are occurring and to see where I need to be more intentional.

This is a fly on the wall's view of a couple of days of this past week.

Wednesday

Got up at 7am.

Zana (22) first year of teaching (Year 6); Nougat (18) apprentice plumber, have already left for work

Benj, Moozle & I do our individual Bible reading 

8am - Dad leaves for work 

Benj (15)- Maths & Science; Jensen's Format Writing

Hoggy (20) goes for a run, and then heads off to TAFE - he's in his 3rd year of a 4 year cadetship & studying electrical engineering technology.

Moozle (10) - Cello practice. I do some patchwork and keep an eye on her practice to make sure she's doing what she should. She has an exam in about three weeks.

Copy work; listens to times tables & does her drawing practice using Mark Kistler's Draw Squad:

Singapore maths with me

Age of Fable - I've been reading this aloud to her; oral narration

Drawing pactice while listening to Dvorak's Largo:

Benj - piano practice

Moozle - Dictation, Grammar using the dictation passage (colour the proper nouns blue, underline nouns in purple, circle the verbs green.

'Europe was at peace, and Napoleons in exile on the Isle of Elba. Matthew hardly knew of this, for he had been in bed sixteen weeks, steadily becoming weaker.'

Maths speed drill

Poetry review while continuing with drawing 

Lunch - free reading 

Together time

Devotions: Bible, memory work, prayer time

Poetry - William Wordsworth. I've used The Harp & Laurel Wreath by Laura Berquist to delve a little deeper with poetry with the older children. She has some commentary on various poems & a good selection.
Read aloud: A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey - an Australia classic set in the outback of Western Australia. It's good.

Hoggy comes home - takes Benj to work at 3.30pm

Moozle and I go to Orchestra rehearsal

Home around 5.30pm

I pick up Benj from work. He's doing some training for the part-time job he's starting which has thrown a spanner in the works a few days this week.

Dinner

Zana and I have a quick trip to the Library

Come home and spend some time with that man of mine.

Thursday

6am - Dad has a conference call at home for work

7am - I head off to the markets on my own to do a quick shop

8am - I get home; cook breakfast & dh and I have some time together before he goes to work

Benj - Maths, Reading, oral narration, piano practice

Moozle - Maths, Cello practice, Latin 

I read aloud Old Man River and Monarch of the Western Skies to Moozle while she 

does her drawing practice (she likes drawing, in case you didn't realise)

French & copy work

We take Benj to work at 12pm

Lunch

Listen to Folksong:

Washing & other domestics

We leave home around 3pm to pick Benj up from work and go to swimming lessons.

5.30pm - I head home with Moozle & make dinner.
Thursday evenings are generally erratic at our place with swimming, soccer, and everyone arriving home at all different times.
Usually I go back to the pool to get Benj but not tonight. Dad is running late so he goes straight to the pool so I can start:

7pm - Book Club at my place. We're working through Start Here by Brandy at Afterthoughts.
I've really enjoyed reading through For the Children's Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay yet again. Brandy's study links the chapters in Schaeffer's book to Charlotte Mason's Philosophy of Education:

The rest of the family go to bed before we finish our study...

11.30pm - winding down & off  to bed at midnight.

Some things are worth losing a bit of sleep over...now & again.



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Weekly Wrap-Up...I wish!

Handiwork/Manual Skills

Last Saturday we started renovating our laundry after discovering a hot water leak below the concrete slab (why anyone would run water pipes underneath a slab is a mystery to me). We were eventually going to re-do this room - but not right now.

The idea was that we'd re-run the pipes & join them up with the new pipes we'd put in when we did the kitchen a few years ago. This would mean I still could use the washing machine. Well, that didn't happen because while jack-hammering the tiles off the wall, a pipe was punctured, spraying cold water everywhere.

So there was no water on Saturday.
That night Zana, my 22 yr old and I escaped from the scene of domestic disaster to see Shakespeare Abridged with four friends, something we'd arranged a few weeks before & thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. We arrived home late that night to find everything cleaned up & the water reconnected to most of the house.

On Sunday night we discovered our water cylinder wasn't heating.
No hot water for 4 days.
It was cold showers for everyone. I boiled the kettle and had a bath in about 2 cm of warm water at one stage - it is still winter here.

No washing machine until the laundry pipes are complete so we had a few trips around to various family members to use theirs.
I was hoping this would be all wrapped up by tonight...

Nougat contemplating where the pipe is going...

This was all after hours work but today my husband took the day of work to cut the brickwork for the pipes so Nougat (apprentice plumber) could do that on his day off.

* Benj finished Algebra 2 at the end of last week & has had this week maths free, except when he helped his younger sister with working out how to find the area of some shapes.

* His free reading included finishing up C.S. Lewis's Cosmic/Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra & That Hideous Strength and Ten Fingers for God by Dorothy Clarke Wilson.

* Moozle's free reading has been mostly re-reading this series of biographies written by Janet & Geoff Benge and published by YWAM. Cameron Townsend, George Muller & Harriet Tubman were three that she enjoyed most:

I saw this post last week and shared it with a group I belong to & thought I'd post it here also. It's something most of us know but it's always good to be reminded of the importance of taking your children outside. Here's Why!

This was written in November 2014 but I only saw it this week. The Ethics of Egg Freezing

...just because we can use technology to do an end run around nature does not mean that we are necessarily wise in doing so. 

I've finished reading: The Spartan by Caroline Dale Snedeker & Trustee From the Toolroom by Nevil Shute.

Artist Study

The Fighting Temeraire by Joseph Mallord Turner, 1839

The Fighting Temeraire was voted as Britain's favourite painting in a poll conducted by the BBC in 2005. The story behind the painting is here.
Khan Academy also has some very interesting commentary about this painting.

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A Peek at a Week - Year 4 Ambleside Online

These are some selections from a week of Ambleside Online Year 4, tweaked & poked to suit an Australian setting. Our remodelled version which we've been using is here and we're in Term 3.

I must admit that when I looked at some of the books on the Year 4 list I doubted that Moozle would understand some of them, let alone enjoy them, but I was willing to try them out and make the decision whether to continue with a couple of the books after that.

...there is no education but self-education, and as soon as a young child begins his education he does so as a student. Our business is to give him mind-stuff, and both quality and quantity are essential. Naturally, each of us possesses this mind-stuff only in limited measure, but we know where to procure it; for the best thought the world possesses is stored in books; we must open books to children, the best books; our own concern is abundant provision and orderly serving.

Philosophy of Education, pg 26 

The two books that I thought would go down like lead balloons were Age of Fable and Rip van Winkle. Before we started Age of Fable, I gave Moozle the D'Aulaire's version of the Greek Myths, which is a lovely book, to read for herself. I thought it might make Age of Fable make more sense but it actually created a problem at first. One book uses the Greek names for the gods and goddesses and the other the Roman names and she'd interrupt me and say things like, "That should be Hera, not Juno!"
Once she got used to who was who, it was fine. The hardest part of Age of Fable is the Preface! It also wasn't included in the online version I was reading so I found it on Librivox and we listened to that together and since then I've been reading the book aloud to her and she is enjoying it. This is a narration she wrote on the last chapter we read:

 


Now Rip van Winkle, despite my doomsday prophecy, is a book she took to right away. How true of Charlotte Mason's observation,

No one can tell what particular morsel a child will select for his sustenance...

Philosophy of Education, pg 59

 I know that going from Year 3 to Year 4 in the Ambleside Online curriculum is considered quite a jump. Year 4 adds the original Shakespeare plays and Plutarch (some other things as well, but those two seem to be the major hurdles for many people). Moozle has been listening in to Shakespeare & Plutarch for four years along with her older siblings, and understanding quite a bit, so that wasn't a hurdle but some other things were. She's been doing AO all along, and each year after an initial "I don't understand that," with one or two of the scheduled readings, she has grown into the books each time. I just have to remember that's normal.


Hymn Study

We do this together a few times a week and add a new hymn every month or two. Sometimes we stay longer on a hymn we enjoy and sometimes we listen to previous hymns we've learnt.





These are narrations from one of our Australian History books, The History of Australia, which is a well-written and nicely illustrated narrative, first published in 1988. There have been a few editions of this book & the illustrations differ in some. This is the 1995 edition we have:

Our folksong for the month:




We've been listening to the music of Dvorak. We have a set of CD's on various composers I bought a few years ago after listening to one we'd borrowed from the library. We've used the Classical Kids Collection in the past but they don't cover many composers and are more suited to younger children. Introduction to the Classics is suitable for all ages - they are a little old fashioned as they've been around a long time but that doesn't bother us.

Each CD contains a narration of the composer's life interspersed with their music and we've been listening to this as well as focussing on a piece of his music each week. Humoresque is our latest piece. Moozle watches this one below because it features a cello, the instrument she plays, but Benj prefers another version...we usually spend some time comparing different instruments and conductors when we do composer study. It's fascinating to hear the variety of interpretation that a piece of music lends itself to.





Free reading

The Bushboys by James Tierney - a series of books; rereads
Biggles Defies the Swastika by Captain W.E Johns - reread
Pocohontas & Son of Pocohontas by Mari Hanes
Prudence & the Millers by Mildred A. Martin - a reread. Covers health, safety & courtesy from a Biblical perspective.

      

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Snippets of a Week Of Ambleside Online Year 8 with a 15 Year old

*  History readings as per Ambleside Online schedule. Benj plans his own readings from the weekly list. With Churchill's books, he has always preferred to read a whole chapter per week rather than how it is scheduled (the chapters are divided as they are fairly long) so he has just finished the book this week.

*  Shakespeare's Macbeth - we've just started this play using the Arkangel BBC recording.

*  We're not doing a Plutarch Life this term as our days are full enough at present. I'm happy if we do at least two Shakespeare and two lives per year but sometimes we do more.

*  The Holy War by John Bunyan - each week Benj adds to his poetic saga narration.

*  Francis Bacon Essays - a re-writing of the essay Of Studies.
There were a few Latin phrases such as, Abeunt studia in mores and cymini sectores, which we were unsure of until we found this site which helps explain them.

*  Maths - continues with Saxon Algebra II which he's almost finished. We were talking this week about what he'd like to study at University so we can plan towards that. We've used the SAT and units from Open University as a means of providing 'formal' documentation for university entry and as he has a mathematical bent, we'll probably get him to do some subjects related to that starting either this year or the beginning of next.

He watched this video this week:




Science

Understanding Physics by Isaac Asimov - Volume 1: Motion, Sound & Heat.
Science Notebook & experiments
Apologia Exploring Creation With Biology - selected modules only

Combining two loves, mathematics & soccer:




Art & Poetry

 La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John William Waterhouse (1893)

 The painting above is based on John Keats' 1819 poem of the same name.

I really liked the sound of this book when I saw it on Janice Campbells's Excellence in Literature site and thought it would be good for me to work through myself as a devotional. So I am, but Benj is also now using it to read through the poems of George Herbert, which are unique & beautiful. Working it Out: Growing Spiritually with the Poetry of George Herbert by Joseph L. Womack.

There is a sample of the book here.
At the beginning of the book is a short section in which Janice Campbell gives suggestions on using the book in the writing process.


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Weekly Review - interrupted & unfinished, but good

A weekend away at a Mum Heart Conference gave me a refreshing start to this week. And a wedding at the end of the week on the Friday was a lovely finish.

The downside was getting some stitches on my nose in the middle of the week. A couple of anaesthetic needles shoved into your nose is not fun and neither is walking around with a pressure dressing on the centre of your face.

The Mum Heart Conference is based on Sally Clarkson's Mom's Heart in the USA but the Aussie version focuses on homeschooling mothers.

 I'd forgotten how encouraging it is to be around other people who share a similar vision on the heart of education - discipling our children, teaching them virtue, nurturing their souls.

I didn't realise how thirsty I was for fellow travellers and it did me good to see so many young women just beginning this journey with their children and to meet up again unexpectedly with friends I hadn't seen for years, not to mention making new ones.

Not everything got done this week but when that happens I take note of what was missed and make it a priority the next week.
Here are some things we did do:
 
Plutarch's Life of Timoleon - we completed this and Moozle wrote a funeral speech for him because of course he died at the end:

Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well -we also finished this play. Benj did a written narration after we listened and read along with the audio each week. I didn't see it until the play was finished but it was around 13 pages - so I won't post it here.

Moozle's Reading

We have one more week of Term 2 using my modified version of Ambleside Online Year 4 which is going well. I've added How Did We Find Out About Vitamins? by Isaac Asimov to our Science reading this term. There is quite detailed information in this book but Asimov's writing is very accessible and he brings the subject alive. It's out of print but I've picked up his books at library sales, ebay & Abebooks.

She has been going through some of the Jungle Doctor books by Australian author Paul White this past week. A few of my children really loved his medical missionary stories based in Africa.

Helping Dad put new locks on the windows...

Benj's Reading

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fennimore Cooper - a great classic; starts slowly and is a bit of a challenge reading-wise but very worthwhile.

The Four Feathers by A.E.W. Mason - my friend, Kathy, is an old movie officiando. I'm not, but she tells me about these obscure movies she loves and then I try to find the book they were based on. This book has been filmed several times but it's taken me a long time to find a copy and then it was only online. The University of Adelaide is an old book lover's paradise and they keep adding new titles to their website. Their Kindle versions are so well done and I found the book there. Written in 1902, The Four Feathers is the story of a young man redeeming his character from the charge of cowardice. Benj's comment - "It's good. You should read it." I haven't yet.

Jensen's Format Writing is a book I've used with one Benj's older brothers and it seems a good fit for Benj. Well, I gave him a choice between this, the AO Year 10 selections and Wordsmith Craftsman, which I also have. He liked the look of Jensen's best, plus he preferred to use a book rather than an online programme.

He's done a fair bit of Grammar in the past and is covering that in Latin also but I wanted to keep it fresh in his mind. One of my girls tutored first and second year students at university and a major problem for many of them was their lack of grammar skills. This series of books is good for an  overview or for picking up problem areas and they only take a few minutes. Benj is only doing a page a week. The answer key is in the back.

 

I'll end with a quote that was read at the wedding we attended that I thought was a wonderful choice.

Love as distinct from ‘being in love’ is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by the grace which both partners receive from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: the quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it. 

C.S. Lewis

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