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

Linking to Weekly Wrap-Up

Preparing Homeschoolers for University/College Writing

It's been interesting to see how my children have coped with learning at a tertiary level when they've had no experience of institutional schooling. One of the first questions we were asked when people knew we were going to teach our children ourselves was, 'What about university?' Someone quizzed me about this when my eldest was only 2 years of age. We had no idea at the time what we'd do when we got to that stage and I was more concerned about how we would get them entry into university than how they would cope once they were there. I wrote about how we went about that here.
I thought that to gain entry into university you would obviously have to possess the skills needed to do the work required in a particular course. I found out that isn't necessarily the case.

Our daughter Zana is in her fourth year of a double degree - Bachelor of Education/Bachelor of Arts, majoring in English - and is employed by her university to tutor first and second year university students. Much of her time is taken up with helping them with basic things that should have been covered before they left school.
I asked her to share some thoughts on writing essays. Some of what she's written here might not apply to students in other degrees such as science related areas, but there are some general areas such as grammar, structuring an argument, punctuation, spelling, apostrophes and run on sentences that were issues for many of the students she worked with, regardless of the degree they were studying.

"Essentially you need to understand the structure of an essay (thesis statement, introduction, body, conclusion) & how to create an argument that clearly answers the question & stays on topic while incorporating research & secondary sources.

Be aware that academic writing very rarely uses first person, so don't get used to writing essays with "I think" etc in them. That's generally saved for reflection type assessment tasks.

Having an understanding of paraphrasing, referencing & some experience of a referencing style (eg Harvard or APA) would be very useful as this is an area most first year uni students really struggle with. In my first semester of face-to-face university, I had to use 4 different referencing styles. The fact that I'd done two  online units with Open University Australia & therefore knew how to reference using two of the main styles already was really helpful. Referencing guides are readily available by searching on google.

I tutor 1st & 2nd year uni students & I've found that even the students who are good writers will often fall down in these areas.

In relation to exam essays, timed writing is also useful, as often you could have anywhere from 2-12 essays within an exam, depending on the subject. Being able to write at a rate of 10 minutes a page will set you up very well for uni exams. The faster you can interpret a question, brainstorm & write, the better you will perform under exam conditions.

Some Ideas on Preparing for University Writing

--Analyse the question: what exactly are they asking for?

--Brainstorm/research.

--Outline: short sentences or bullet points. Means that you have a logical sequenced argument that you can then follow while writing to ensure that you stay focused & on topic.
--Writing
--Editing
--Proofreading
--Practice

Teach each of these areas specifically & gradually combine them together; keep a lookout for grammar & punctuation mistakes.

Get them to write using a variety of different topics. An essay on a factual topic will require different language & a different type of argument etc to that of an essay on literature"

SAT practice essays are great (even if you don't plan to do the SAT) because they make you think but require more general knowledge & logic than they do specific content knowledge. They're also timed (25min) which is good practice for writing concisely (we also used them un-timed, especially at first).
These are some examples from my daughter and son who were 14 & 17 years old at the time they did them.

 

 

 

I taught them to outline and they practiced taking notes eg. while listening to a sermon at church and then outlining it properly later.

A book like Writers Inc. or some other writing reference book and a grammar rules book is also helpful.

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