I Taught Her To Print but I Didn't Need To Teach Her to Write

HOBBITS

Hobbits are, to be precise, small  people – hard working people too.  Normally they don’t like fighting or anything like that, with  the exception of Bilbo Baggins who, if he didn’t like the sound of all the rings and war and stuff, he shouldered it expertly.

Most Hobbit’s families are quite ancient, especially ones like the Tooks and Bagginses.  The ‘old Took” is the oldest Took mentioned.  Hobbits can live till they are over 100 years old.  Hobbits live in hobbit holes which are not slimy dark places or dry and sandy but very comfortable.  Some holes are very big but some are quite small, all are very nice.

Another thing you must know about Hobbits is that however big or small their house, hobbits nearly always have a full larder.  Hobbits love to have visitors because they love to talk.  Plus it’s an excuse to bring out something sticky and yummy and eat it!  Hobbits like to be comfortable and don’t really like things like hiking and running and (they especially don’t like this ) going on long journeys and running into Orcs and realising you have to fight in wars and that such.  Although slightly pompous, Hobbits make excellent friends and companions.

Even though there hardly ever is danger Hobbits are prepared for it.  They have danger cries like this one:  Fear fire foe! Fire fear foe!  Hobbits can do and have done great deeds and indeed will do more. 

Hobbits are a little smaller than dwarfes.  Hobbits have fairly large proportioned bellies and wear waistcoats.  The tallest Hobbit grows to about 4 feet.  Hobbits are nice, respectable people.  The end.


Because Arwen asked :) She wrote this for her Grandad in 4th grade.

Narrations - A Fifth Grade Example

Lucy narrated this when she was just 10; it was the end of term and the purpose of her narration was to show what she had learnt and retained from the biography of George Washington Carver we'd read. again, she dictated, I typed.

The Life and Times of George Washington Carver


George Washington Carver was born a slave but his mother Mary was taken away by slave traders so he was brought up by his mother’s master and mistress who he called Uncle  and Aunty.  George used to sit outside of the church and listen to the singing in the village but he wasn’t allowed to go in the church because he was black.  He also wanted to go to school and learn about botany and plants but he couldn’t go to school in his village because the school was only for white people.  He heard about a school in another town that black people could go to. He really wanted to go there so he decided because Uncle has set George free, George knew he would be allowed to go if he wanted to.  He told Uncle and Aunty that he wanted to go to the school and that he would go there by himself.  So Aunty baked him some corn dodgers which were George's’favourite food and George started out. 


After a while he began to wish he hadn’t already eaten the corn dodgers but he kept going because he really wanted to go to the school for black children.  He got to the town.  He met a lady called Aunt Maria and she said that George could stay with her if he wanted to.  George did want to but after a while he saw that at the school there wasn’t exactly the things he wanted to learn.  He wanted to learn about botany and plants but the teacher didn’t teach those kind of things.  Eventually George decided to leave that town..


George walked to another town where he stayed with a lady he called Aunt Lucy.  She owned a laundry and sometimes George helped her with her work. 


When George was older he thought he would like to go to a college so he started to send letters to colleges asking them if they would have him as a student.  The problem was even thought sometimes letters got delivered to him, there was another George Carver in the town so the letters were really for the other George Carver.  That was when George decided he’d better put a letter between George and Carver so people knew he was a different George Carver.  So he chose the letter W and some of his friends thought it should stand for a name. One of his friends joked and said, why didn’t he say ‘Washington’ and George thought that was quite a good name, so now his name was George Washington Carver. 


Still, not many colleges wanted to enrol someone who was black.  But someone told him about a college that had once had a black student and that they might have him too.  They did and George went to that college. 
One of George’s favourite studies was agriculture.  He thought he would like to be a teacher of that.  Another college wanted someone to teach agriculture and told George that he could be the teacher but before they could start the school they had to build the agriculture building first!  Which means that the students had to build their classroom before there could be students in it. 


When that part of the school was actually finished they didn’t even have a laboratory or anything to use to help with their studies but George said that they could use things around them and they did.  George also did experiments himself. Lots of people grew cotton but George knew that cotton was bad for the soil.  He tried to find ways to make the soil better soil to use. He thought of two ways – the sweet potato and the peanut.  He found lots of ways that those two crops could be used as well as just helping the soil.  The reason they could help the soil was because they had lots of nitrogen in them and they didn’t use much, so they would give nitrogen to the soil and not use it up. 


Once he even made a whole meal with just peanuts and the people he served it to didn’t even know that everything was made out of peanuts!
He gave speeches about how to do farming and make the soil better for the crops.  He also wrote a handbook called  ‘300 ways to use the peanut.’


He used to take long walks in the wood every day. When he got much older a museum was made in honour of him and the President gave him a medal. 


He died when he was 79 years old. 

Narrations: A Second Grade Example

Rather than using a writing program, I am much happier following Charlotte Mason's idea of narrations - oral for the under 10's, gradually progressing to written narrations. Here's an example of a narration by Snowy, dictated by him and typed by me. It was completed over a period of a few days and was a narration of  the 'mammals' section in The Adventure Of Life by Jean-Benoit Durand.

Mammals

The mammals took over when the dinosaurs died out.

They didn’t die out because they had little heaters in their body that kept them warm and they needed small amounts of food because they were small animals but the dinosaurs needed lots of food.

Mammals are different from other animals because they give birth to their babies and feed them with milk.

Primates are mammals who can can walk on two feet and pick things up with their hands and feet. They have smart brains.

Humans and monkeys shared the same family tree so some people said that humans developed from monkeys but it isn’t true. We do have a common ancestor.

Our direct ancestor is Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens created art and they were the first to use speech. For a while they lived with the Neanderthals but the Neanderthals died out. When they died out, humans  ( the Homo sapiens ) had a clear path to come in. People who lived in the hot places developed darker skin to protect them and people who lived in the cold developed lighter skin.

Animals, including mammals can be endangered by people cutting down forests, people throwing waste into the river and  introducing animals that don’t belong into a habitat ( like angry red eared turtles.)


We edited some of this narration together after Snowy had finished, taking out a lot of 'and then the writer says'. I would also give him words if he forgot them; he needed a reminder of Homo sapiens and ancestor.


As you can see, the information in his narration isn't as comprehensive as it could be. It is, however, a good, clear expression of what he did retain from the reading and now knows. It was great practice in ordering a narrative, following the professional narrative modelled by the author. And most importantly, this 13 sentence 'report' on mammals wasn't a cause of conflict or stress, making it an efficient use of our time. It only required a book and a mother to type; pretty simple and inexpensive. 

Narration: it's easy and it works.

The Tourist Drive

Helena's post, with the lovely title between moons, and some even lovelier photos of a place by the sea I love so much and pictures that make me homesick for mist over the escarpment, put me in mind of this poem. And yes, whereas Helena's moon and her sea are light and blessed, mine are dark and somewhat on the cursed side. We all have our strengths.

the tourist drive

picadilly neon  was never more enticing
than this; the coast road and a full moon

bald tyres hastening , as mercury,
each new corner an invitation to speed

ninety pushing a hundred: FALLING ROCKS
DO NOT STOP an easy justification

of the suicidal evening
pale as an egg, the moon sings

from its sphere - unlovely siren,
the night's grim lorelei

who winks its one eye as if to say:
i know where you're headed

stilled, as a dead man's cries, the sea
casts its silver like a shroud -

acceleration: the taste, briefly, of air,
then salt, then salt -

A Cake; Or the Problem with Doing Lots of Homeschooly Things

The problem being that "Activities" are "Exhausting" and make me want to "Hide Under the Covers" for at least a week or so to "Recover".

Thankfully, this weekend held nothing more taxing than an hour's worth of tutoring and a Sunday afternoon tea. Leaving me free to do non-homeschooly things like laundry, of which I am rather fond, and pottering around in my kitchen, making pumpkin soup, cornmeal and blueberry muffins, stewed fruit, coconut cake and copious cups of tea. Which is more like it, homeschooly things being neccessary but not like it for me at all.

When I say 'things' I don't mean the things that involve books or pencils or lessons or books or...well, books. I mean the things that involve Other People, who are perfectly nice, just people who don't yet belong to the select group ( more than one hand but less than two ) of Those who do not Exhaust. I think one of the Other People might belong someday, but we have so much conversation to make before we get there that it's enough to make an introvert like me cry into her tea. Luckily I am fortified by cake.

Not my actual cake but a much better photo of a cake that looks identical to mine

The Masked One or When I Was Good

Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a mother who was less utilitarian about her homeschooling than she is now. And this mother, who was reading her children the fabulous The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper, thought it might be a nice idea to plan a craft activity related to the books. When reading aloud she came to a chapter where Will, the main character, is sent a West Indian carnival mask and her brain began to plan. She gathered clay and plaster soaked bandages and cling wrap and paints of many colours and, gathering the children to her in the kitchen, explained the craft.

The children sculpted a head of clay and let it dry outside in the sun. They covered it with cling wrap and soaked the plaster bandages till soft. Then they complained that this was too messy and could the mother do this bit ? But the mother gently insisted that they do it themselves, and having heard this tone before, the children wisely gave up on their complaints and plastered the clay head, being especially careful to smoodge it into the crevices around his nose. And when it was dry they painted it gaily in colours approximating a West Indian carnival mask and the mother was proud.

Despite carefully teaching her daughters the art of decluttering, the mother was so proud - mostly of the fact that she actually got her act together to buy the plaster bandages - that she let the mask linger. For years. And when she finally made the decision to toss the mask, whose edges were beginning to crumble and fray, she took a photo to remember it by. Then she took a deep breath and stuffed it into the back of the hall cupboard, because - as she explained to her bemused daughters - she wasn't quite ready to let go of it yet.

Literary Analysis as a Conversational Art

Lucy and I both read Jennifer Donnelly's Revolution this week, and that's the key right there. Read the same book. As she was reading, I asked her how she was finding it.

"The beginning's a little stiff, but she seems to ease into the story about a quarter of the way through."

When I'd finished reading, she asked me how I found it.

"Well, I see what you mean by stiff. I agree, once the story shifted to Paris, it started to flow a lot better. It fell apart for me, though, in the time travel bit."

"Mmm. it wasn't as convincing as when she used the diary form."

" I know, and I'm not sure why. Maybe the characters weren't as well drawn."

"Maybe it was just too abrupt, suddenly being back in the past so late in the book ?"

"Mmm. I thought she handled the darkness in the book pretty well."

"Yeah, it was realistic but it didn't overwhelm me when I was reading it. And the ending was good. A bit sad, but real. "

"I know a whole heap more about the French Revolution than I did before I read it."

"Maybe too much!"

Not word for word, and I've never kidded myself that I have an ear for dialogue, but you get the gist of it, yes ? Merely through conversation, we've begun to analyse the book, to discuss what works, what doesn't, to begin to wonder why.

And we didn't need to lay it out for dissection first. Anaethesise your text. Cut into chapters. Discover the theme. We just talked, explored our responses - in a way that art of any form deserves to be explored - as a subject worthy of our conversation and our thought.

It might take some time for us to think further, to look back at the text and come up with ideas about technique. Why do the opening chapters lack flow ? Did the author spend too much time setting up her story? Why does the dark remain at bay ? Is there imagery used - of light and of song - that drags us back from the fall in the way the protagonist is saved by empathy and friendship ?

This is the way to study a book;  to think about it, talk about it, ponder it. Too often students move directly from reading to explanation, missing the conversation about response.

I might talk more with Lucy about thoughts I had today, on the train with Snowy,  asking her whether she thinks there is a parallel between the fallen King of France and fallen father.  She may or may not agree. This parallel may or may not be there in the book, in the author's intent.



It will definitely take some time to turn these thought into text, fitting neatly into its 5 paragraph format. But the essay is simply the end of the process, thoughts plated up for the diner.

The real essay begins in conversation, not a workbook or study guide in sight.

On the Book List

Almost done with Knight's Castle and A Dog so Small. I've got another book lined up for Snowy, Odo Hirsch's Bartlett and the Ice Voyage. The girls had this on CD when they were little and listened - laughing, chortling, chuckling -  to it so much the CD wore out! So now we have the book, a story of an impatient Queen and the ingenious explorer who brings her Majesty her heart's desire; something exotic, fragile and delicious. I've deviated somewhat from my original second grade booklist, but for those who are interested, it's here.

The girls and I have finished Heist Society.  Light enough to be a fun read, with enough of a background story ( art theft by the Nazis ) to be intriguing. A touch of romance and a feisty, clever heroine.

Trying to find new books for the girls took a while. Both are middle graders age wise, and young adults reading wise, and the dark and gloomy themes of many a YA novel seem to be less Gothic, more Emo. No thanks. We want adventure and girls with spark.

With the help of kindly recommendations and booklists online, we've a few books lined up that sound interesting.

The Explosionist had me at 'alternate Scotland, 1938'. Ooh, Scotland! Ooh, alternate history! The protagonist's name is Sophie. Lovely! I'm not entirely sure the girls will go for this one, but I want to read it.

Between Shades of Grey is one for Lucy. She's been interested in the experience of young girls and women during WWII for a long time now, and has read widely in this area. This sounds like a book she'll read in a day. I know it sounds gloomy, but her tolerance for gloom is greatly increased when in a historical context.

If I can get hold of it, 10 Miles Past Normal by Frances O'Roark Dowell will be our next read-aloud. It sounds as if it's a quirky, coming of age tale, with a heroine who is ready to move on from being 'the girl from the goat farm with the mother who blogs.' Sounds charming and a little left of centre.

Also on the list are the Wolves, Boys and Other Things that Might Kill Me and Sorta Like a Rock Star, both of which I found here.

Of course, we are also impatiently waiting for the for latest Penderwicks novel to arrive at the bookshop and for a new Montmaray book.

Should keep us going till August!