First Day Year 9

While Arwen was watching the clock in Maths - she enjoyed it, she said, because she felt like she was in a movie - Lucy and I got a day's work done by lunchtime. Not that I'm smirking over the superior efficiency of home education. Of course not.

By nine she was reacquainting herself with percentages. There's something so right about scheduling maths as the first subject of the day every day, unlike school, where it is sometimes scheduled for the last period of the day. The one where your students are hot, tired and longing for home as opposed to fresh, motivated and ready to go...

Lucy read the first few chapters of The Scarlet Letter, our first book club selection of the year. I'm also reading bits and pieces from How To Read A Book by Mortimer J Adler, so we talked a little about analytical reading and what Hawthorne was doing for the reader in those first few chapters.

Then she moved on to The History of the Medieval World by Susan Wise Bauer, which, in a grand money-saving innovation, she is reading on my Kindle. I love to see a girl sprawled on my bed reading history on my Kindle! I'm reading a day ahead of Lucy and taking my own notes, which she can use as a model or comparison as she begins the more analytical note taking she'll be doing this year.

After a discussion of Bauer's assertions about the political use Constantine made of Christianity, Lucy moved on to some Art History. An Annotated Mona Lisa was recommended to me and it's a brilliantly readable introduction to the sweep of art history.

Psychology is scheduled for Mondays but her text book, Simply Psychology, hasn't arrived yet, so Lucy practiced recorder on her lovely new wooden German instrument, whose tone is most pleasing.

After lunch we exercised - a walking DVD in the lounge room because outside was blistering - and talked about entering a fundraising walk later in the year. And after that, I read aloud a chapter from A Girl of 
The Limberlost.

OK, I admit I'm smirking a little. School has lots of things we don't. Efficiency isn't one of them.

School Girl

First days with 12 year olds are better than first days with 5 year olds. Less teary on both sides. That's all I can say so far.

This is obviously not my daughter. It is, however, my daughter's role model. And it gives a whole lot less away about the school she's at than a real picture would...

Book Tale, Or Why I Am Too Tired to Format This Properly

Once upon a time, there was a mother. And there was a pile of school books waiting to be covered in shiny pink and purple and blue contact. And from the kitchen the children could hear the mother throwing a rather large tantrum and the sound of books being ripped away from contact paper which was crooked, bubbly or otherwise awry. Also unsuitable language.

The mother did not like this job at all. Even when she threw all the rolls of contact on the floor and covered the books the old-fashioned way, with brown paper and sticky tape, she did not like it. She did not like finding pictures on the internet of Alex Pettyfer and Lea Michele to make into labels.

All this things she did, with bad grace, it must be admitted, but did nevertheless, out of love for a daughter who needed those books covered by Monday. Next time she is hiring someone to do the job for her, for even the love of a daughter cannot replace her sanity. School is already an education!

Now I Get It - Melinda Tankard Reist and the 'F' Word

I move through some pretty conservative circles - home educating will do that to you - but it isn't just conservative or religious women from whom I hear this: I'm not a feminist.

I grew up in the 70's and 80's. To hear smart, thinking women declaring themselves not to be a feminist, whatever their politics or religion, is a little shocking.

However.

And this is where Melinda comes in, Melinda Tankard Reist. And the drama in the blogosphere over the legal action she has taken against a blogger who declared her to be a Baptist ( shocking, I know ) and deceptive and duplicitous about it to boot. It's all here.

So I waded in, but mostly because a friend rang me to tell me I had a commenting double on a feminist blog, who not only shared my name but my outlook on these things. I expected a discussion in the comments. Perhaps a sort of civil disagreement. Whilst I'm not keen on the suing of bloggers and generally in favour of revealing one's influences and ambivalent on MTR's stance on reproductive rights, when she speaks in the media about the damage done to our society by porn and about the sexualisation of girls and young women, she does speak for me.

From that first dismissal of bourgeois feminism - you know you're a bourgeois feminist if you are white, educated and middle-class - or as one fem-blogger put it - a woman who listens to the ABC  ( that's like NPR if you're American ) - I realised a civil discussion wasn't on the agenda.

There's a line, don't you know, and you cross it at your peril. Bourgeois women, it's best not to try lest you get a theoretically sound slap on the hand and demotion to Feminism 101. There is no grey.

There appears to be a vested interest in ridiculing and dismissing MTR's girl-respecting activism. 'Sex-hating' is how one male 'feminist' blogger described her. And I notice her 'high profile supporters' mentioned in the SMH article aren't exactly known for their commitment to the kind of feminism that sees the sexploitation of children for commercial purposes as a problem. 'Wowser' is a word they use a lot. We're in trouble if the 'theoretically pure' can't work out the difference between sex-hating and the exploitation of girls, and cast it as a second order issue, of concern only to a certain type of (privileged) mother.

So now I get it. Those not-a-feminist-women aren't anti-women at all. They just don't see themselves as part of a gated community.  I get that. If the discussion I had today was a feminist discussion, I guess I'm not that kind of feminist either.

I'm more the Rebecca West type. And the next time someone says to me "I don't see myself as a feminist" I guess I'll understand why.

If you do see the exploitation of girls and their sexuality for commercial purposes as a first order, women's and mothering issue, you might like to sign up at the The Collective Shout. They don't mind a typo or two. And they won't ask you for your credentials on the way in.

Beginnings of a Book List for Third Grade

Medieval: Working so much on Lucy's booklist and I suddenly remembered that on our shelves were a number of picture books on the Middle Ages. Keeps it neat if Snowy reads some too...

Anno's Medieval World by Mitsumasa Anno
A Medieval Feast by Aliki
Medieval Life by John Guy
Warfare in the Middle Ages by Fiona MacDonald
Joan of Arc by Diane Stanley
Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Janet Gray
A Door in the Wall by Margeurite de Angeli

Sadly, the library doesn't have David Macauley's Castle, so I might just need to buy a copy, but it does have two books that might be worth borrowing - Medieval Adventure Castle Crafts and Why Castles are Castle Shaped.


Read-alouds:


Ludo and the Star Horse by Mary Stewart
A Dog on Barkham Street by Mary Stolz
Eagle's Egg by Rosemary Sutcliff
Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson ( I love this book!)
Tom's Midnight Garden by Phillipa Pearce ( Snowy's favourite read-aloud from 2011 was A Dog So Small by this same author.)
The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins
Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan
The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander   ( this was on last year's list and we never got around to it. If I leave it much later, he'll have outgrown them.)
The Family Under the Bridge by Natalie Savage Carlson
And I haven't given up on getting him to listen to the Children of Green Knowe! by Lucy M Boston.

2012 Read Alouds for the Girls - 7th and 9th Grade

We're still making our way through A Girl of the Limberlost.

Once we're finally done with Elnora, we're reading The Penderwicks at Point Mouette. The girls are probably a little too old for this third book in the Penderwicks series, but we are very fond of them and something light and non-demanding might be a good choice for Arwen's first weeks of school.

Then I have plans for some Wodehouse. Keeping things light and amusing...I could almost simply pick a Wodehouse book at random and have it meet that criteria but I do have in mind Carry on Jeeves.

Winter will present a second opportunity for the girls to learn to love Dickens. I've no idea what book we'll be listening to, but I do know it will be an audio book we're listening to, not me, and that Chris plans to listen along with us. It won't be Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities - the first was loathed and the second has already been read and - loved is not the word - liked, by Lucy.

Dickens must be balanced by something contemporary, so I thought Beauty Queens by Libba Bray, which has been recommended to me by several people.

We've always read together after lunch but as Arwen won't be at home after lunch ( sob! ), read alouds this year will be after dinner. Some things change but there will always be read alouds in this house as long as there are children to listen.

Science is Sorted

This never happens. But it has! Science is sorted for 2012.

Snowy will be using Intellego science units in Terms 2 and 4. He can choose which ones, depending on what interests him most.

Lucy, having expressed an interest in exploring physics, will be using The Physics Classroom, a free online resource that - fingers crossed - seems student ( and mama! ) friendly. I really did stumble on this and had vague thoughts of getting someone sciencey to check it out for me. However, I don't think I could bear it if they reported back rather sniffily on this treasure, so I will trust my own judgement and see how Lucy goes with it.

History Resources 2012

Lucy is studying both Medieval and Modern history this year. For Medieval history she is using the following:

History of the Medieval World by Susan Wise Bauer. I'd like to find a second text to be a counterpoint to this one. I'm considering The Axe and the Oath but really, I have to do some more research. Does anyone have an opinion on Norman Cantor ?

Women in World History curriculum including The Garnet Eyed Brooch - a unit study exploring early feudal England.

Selected texts - Beowulf
The Mabinogion
Dr Faustus
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Fairie Queen


I'll be kind and give her some lovely historical fiction to go along with her studies. That list is still under construction, although I think there will be another few Donna Jo Napoli books on it. Any other  suggestions are welcome :) There's a nice list here I need to make my way through as well.

Our rather hopeless library has a few titles that look promising, Bayeaux Tapestry: Story of a Masterpiece by Carola Hicks and Terry Jones' Medieval Lives.

I'm 82% of the way through Doomsday Book by Connie Willis ( yes, it's on my beloved Kindle ) and I may give it to Lucy to read as well. Lots of gory plague descriptions.


For Modern History Lucy will continue using:

A History of the Modern World by Richard Poulton.
Key Features of Modern History by Bruce Dennet and Stephen Dixon.

Snowy is doing some World History in Terms 1 and 3, courtesy of Intellego Unit Studies.
And many more Horrible Histories will feature in our educational future...

I still need to go through the bookshelves and dig out the historical fiction I read to the girls around Snowy's age.  I'm not too concerned that it match up with what he's learning with Intellego; it's more a case of wanting to sneak one or two of the genre into his read-aloud list for the year.

And poor Arwen. It'll be a case of whatever school throws at her; I hope, for her sake, she doesn't have a year of Australian history coming up...because that might be too much to handle for both of us!

Our Words for 2012

Focus and Joy