Shakespeare in Art

February 7, 2010 at 10:14 pm · Filed under Art, Books, Drama, For Children, Home Education, Language, Reading

Later this year, we’ll be reading Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare. Our copy is unillustrated (I believe the Baldwin Project has images in their version). I thought that it might be nice to find some art to look at as we read them (each one is only about three pages long). Thinking this might well take me a while (and being interested to see what was out there!) I started looking. In a remarkably short space of time, I came across this site. The creator has done a fabulous job of collecting and organising images associated with the plays—it will be a simple matter for me to choose two or three for each play covered in the book to look at as we read!

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Reading the Classics

January 19, 2010 at 12:47 am · Filed under Books, For Adults, Home Education, Language, Self-Education

A couple of things have come up in the last little while, and I’m feeling spurred to movement:-)

I want to start reading through the Classics. I have tried starting the Fiction list (from The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, which is what I plan to use as my guide), but I found Don Quixote rather impenetrable:-( I’ve kind of started the biographies, with Augustine’s Confessions… but lacked oomph and dedication.

I think I need to do this with people, so I can talk about it as I read it. So I’ve started a mailing list (Crawling Through the Classics) and invited a few people with whom I’ve previously discussed the idea. If you’re interested though, feel free to join, and point it out to anyone who might be interested (I’ve said homeschooling mums in Perth, but I’ve included a number of question marks, because I don’t feel it has to be limited to that… I don’t necessarily want lots of people, but a reasonable sized group would be good, so there might be some different impression–and so if someone hasn’t read the ‘assignment’ the discussion doesn’t get de-railed for lack of participants).

My plan is that we choose something, and read through at a (CM-approved:-) ) pace (maybe a chapter a week?) and we can talk about it via email as we go (although, I realise a chapter a week is going to take us a long time to get through! Maybe two books, a chapter of each a week? Still slow, but not overloading on any one?). I’d quite like to add a face-to-face gathering in every now and again (monthly? bi-monthly? quarterly?) to discuss in person:-) We’ll sort out the details once there’s a group on the mailing list.

I’ve also discovered that Librivox has a number of the works. So I’m willing to give Don Quixote another go—but I’ll listen to it:-)

I don’t have my copy with me (I’ve just leant it to a friend:-) ), but basically there are 5 lists, Fiction (starts with Don Quixote), Biography (or Autobiography… can’t remember which… but starts with Augustine’s Confessions), History, Drama and Poetry (I’m not especially keen to do that!) I’d like to choose one (or two if people are feeling keen) list(s), and read through from the start. (From memory, this looks pretty accurate, it starts with Fiction, then Autobiography, History, Drama… there are about 30 books in each list)

I haven’t really thought about how to discuss (I’m bad at finding anything to talk about, other than ‘I like/don’t like it’:-) )… but there are plenty of things online we can perhaps look at using to help guide discussion, or take it in turns to ask questions, or something

If you’re interested, join the list, and any discussion as to which books, can take place there:-)

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Options for Early Childhood Latin

October 9, 2009 at 2:54 pm · Filed under Books, Classical, For Children, Home Education, LCC, Language, Latin

(Thanks to Amber for her question! I’ve finally finished this post—about 10 months after starting it! Except that, it just keeps on growing! I’m going to post it, although I will come back to edit it when new programmes come to light—or when I remember them!)

So, the plan is that we will (have!) start(ed!) Latin more formally next (this!) year. We’ll take it slowly, but we’ll start. Of course, given that I haven’t done much Latin, I will definitely need a curriculum. That means I need to choose one.

So, what are the options?

There are a lot more than a few years ago when I started thinking about this:-) Then, there was pretty much one choice aimed at K-3.

We started our Latin journey with a term of lessons with a local teacher. Although Puggle enjoyed them, I wasn’t really happy with them, as it seemed to me the teacher wasn’t familiar with ‘kindy’ type kids and their capabilities. We did start doing nursery rhymes there, and we spent another year doing a new nursery rhyme every fortnight (all the rhymes are in the sidebar under Songs We Sing: Latin. I haven’t yet done the next step though, which is to record them all as podcasts. But, Latin pronunciation is easy! Each letter makes one sound only!)

It seemed foolish to stop latin, and so I wanted to move on a bit, but I didn’t want to get into things too heavily. After doing a pile of research, I found that there were basically three programmes aimed at about 5-8 year olds. (There’s possibly a fourth, which is even Australian, but the info on it is pretty sketchy—and from memory it may involve audio cassettes. It may also (from memory!) be very Christian, which wouldn’t work for our family… so I discounted it.)

Of those three, Elementary Latin didn’t have many reviews, and while the content makes it directed towards younger students, the little I can see suggests it’s fairly reading/writing centred. It consists of Student Workbook, a Teacher’s Edition and an audio CD.

Prima Latina had been my original choice (partly because when I began looking it was the only obvious one around). However… it seemed to be fairly workbook reliant (although I know of a number of people who have used it orally with young children—which I would have done if I chose it for Puggle this year). It is also fairly heavy religious content, which isn’t so good for us. On the other hand, I believe it’s a pretty reasonable intro to some of the grammar elements (basically, it’s the first half or so of Latina Christiana I, just slowed down). It consists of a Student Book and a Teacher’s Manual. There is also a Pronunciation CD available, and a set of Instructional DVDs.

Song School Latin only had a fraction of the reviews of Prima Latina, but it is quite new. Most reviews seemed positive, and I liked the idea of basing it around songs. I didn’t worry about getting the Teacher’s Edition, and I haven’t felt the need for an answer key (and I don’t think that’s because I have an interest in language, it is pretty obvious what the answers are). It is pretty light on the grammar side of things (it talks a little about nouns and verbs, but that’s pretty much it it), which is a weakness, but given I’m using it for Puggle when he’s so young, I’m happy enough with that. It does have the Christmas chapter in the middle of the book (and uses that vocabulary to build on, so you can’t really reposition it), and is US-centric (you know, ‘fall’, and snow in winter, motto of the US… that kind of thing)… but that’s pretty liveable. But the songs are great, and they love to sing them just for fun:-) (Bilby regularly sings the Vale song:-) And I had to make a point of teaching her the English alphabet, when I realised she was singing the Latin song so reliably:-) ) The Student Book is self-contained (it includes the CD with all the songs in both Ecclesiastical and Classical pronunciations, and I really like the range of instrumentation and styles of the songs!)

For slightly older children, there are a few more choices.

Minimus is aimed at 7-10 year olds. It gets a lot of rave reviews, although it’s apparently much more complete with the Teacher’s Resource Book—which is horribly expensive (about $100 Australian!) It seems to be often used as a supplementary text, because it’s supposed to be a fun programme. I’ve certainly seen the Pupil’s Book, and it looks to be high interest (it’s done in a cartoon form). It is structured similarly to a modern language programme, and covers a lot of day-to-day stuff (food/family/home etc). There’s also an Audio CD available.
Minimus have also published some early readers in support.

For 8-10 year olds, there are several choices. I haven’t looked closely at them all (I keep finding new ones! Here is a collection of reviews which covers more courses.)

Lively Latin has been getting rave reviews. I’ve been leaning away from it mostly because it combines History (and English?) in with the Latin (although you can apparently skip them with no dramas, it seems a bit of a waste to pay for a programme if I plan to skip 2/3 of it!) However, a friend of mine has recently begun it with her 8 year old, and they are rather enjoying it. I’m looking forward to having a look at her copy—I haven’t completely ruled it out. It’s available as an online version (download and print), CD, or in hard copy and CD.

Latin for Children probably would have been my first choice. It has got a lot of positive reviews, and looking at the sample info (which included some YouTube type footage) Puggle was very excited. I’m now a little wary though, because of some comments on one of my lists that suggest the grammar is not all it could be (as in, it contains some errors). This worries me a bit, because the comments were also applied to SSL (which is published by the same people), and I can see (well, hear) the errors in that (there are two ways of pronouncing Latin… SSL includes both versions on their CD… but they make some errors in the Ecclesiastical versions of some songs. Not an issue for me because we use the other form—and I’m confident that I could sing over the top [as I do for the alphabet song, they pronounce 'zed' rather than 'zee':-)],) it makes the charges plausible. And I’d rather go for something that will be accurate! It is also more overtly religious than SSL (which is basically just the Christmas chapter).

Latina Christiana consists of a Student Book, Teacher Manual and a Pronunciation CD.

After that? There’s about a dozen options—although I haven’t separated out which ones are ‘continuing’ programmes, and which are for beginners (although, possibly it doesn’t matter much, if they’re beginners ones, we can scoot through the early stages as a revision). I’m not looking too closely, as they are probably three years at least away from us—and who knows what else may be around by that stage?!

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Adventures in Tandem Nursing

February 11, 2009 at 1:56 pm · Filed under Bilby, Books, Cygnet, Family, For Adults, Motherhood

A couple of weeks before Cygnet was born, it suddenly struck me that Bilby would still be nursing… (I had never intended to wean her, she was still less than two—too young for me to be prepared to wean her… but I’d always anticipated that she would self-wean). It occurred to me that I might need to do some preparing!

So I asked a couple of friends (being in the fortunate position of knowing a couple of people who have/do tandem feed) for advice. Specifically, I was after suggestions for preparing Bilby, and also ideas about the logistics of it… Nursing a toddler (with their long legs!) can already be a challenge adding a baby…

One of them (as well as answering my questions) lent me a book.

Adventures in Tandem Nursing: Breastfeeding During Pregnancy and Beyond was a really helpful read! I wished that I had got hold of it when I was pregnant with Bilby herself! I’d ended up weaning Puggle, and angsted about it quite a bit—I probably would have made the same decision after having read this book, but I suspect I would have felt more at ease about it.

It gave me lots of useful information… both about feeding while pregnant, and what I might expect once Cygnet actually arrived (breastfed toddler poo!). There was a good mix of ‘technical’ information and personal stories, and a fabulous collection of photos. I hadn’t considered how Puggle might view things… but that was no problem—he caught sight of one particular photo and started telling me how I would need to hold Bilby and the baby to nurse them:-)

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is currently nursing and might be expecting another baby—or might be considering getting pregnant! I wouldn’t wait until the tail end of the pregnancy… tandem nursing starts before then!

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Planning for 2009

January 11, 2009 at 4:02 pm · Filed under Art, Bilby, Books, Domestic Life, Family, For Adults, For Children, For the Future, French, History/Geography, Home Education, Language, Latin, Maths, Montessori, Music, Narration, Nature Study, Organisation, Plans, Puggle, Reading, Reflection, Science, Singing, Writing

General stuff:-)
This probably seems like a fairly full on year, for what is essentially Puggle’s pre-school year (most of this is for Puggle, although I do have some plans for Bilby included). My plan though, is that we’ll start with this, and it will take as long as it takes. We’ll stick with the three term year, each being made up of three blocks of 4 weeks on, one week break (plus the Christmas block/term).

Language (Including Memorisation and Copywork)
For Puggle, I’m planning a second run through The Writing Road to Reading, actually beginning to focus on writing the letters. I’ll combine this with the sandpaper letter/phonograms, but he seems fairly interested in writing at the moment. This (and his name) will probably be all the copywork we do for the year. I anticipate using a timer (for somewhere in the order of three to five minutes), because he’s very keen on quantity—and in copywork time I’ll be more interested in quality:-) I’m hoping the second run will sort out the phonemes he hasn’t really grasped. We still have the Fitzroy readers, and I anticipate them being used fairly regularly:-)
We’ll be reading Complete Nonsense Poems by Edward Lear, and this year, I’ll be trying to encourage Puggle more in the direction of memorisation. We’ll be focussing on the same piece for a fortnight, which may help:-)
We’ll continue with the Latin nursery rhymes, but this year we are going to begin Song School Latin. It includes a number of songs, and some day-to-day phrases, so I’m not going to worry so much about using my own:-) We will attempt to continue with the French comptines, and I suspect that Puggle will listen in with Bilby’s French:-)
Over the year, we’ll be reading from The Gods and Goddesses of Olympus by Aliki, The Orchard Book of Roman Myths by Geraldine McCaughrean and Egyptian Myths by Jacqueline Morley.
Bilby isn’t at quite the same stage as Puggle was two years ago (she’s effectively 6 months younger), so I don’t think she’s ready for everything I did with him:-) We’ll still do the Nursery Rhymes, and read the poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses.
She’ll join us in the Latin and French nursery rhymes, but this year, we’re going to try reading a number of (generally familiar) picturebooks in French:-) La Chenille Qui Fait Des Trous, Devine Combien Je t’Aime and Ours Brun, Dis-Moi for starters:-)

Maths
We’ve finally made the decision to go with RightStart. It’s a very hands on programme, which should appeal to Puggle (basically I think the manipulatives approach is a good idea for the early stages of maths).

English Studies (including Narration)
We’ll continue the Aesop’s Fables for Children with Puggle, and later in the year we’ll begin Fifty Famous Stories Retold. These will be where we begin paying attention to Narration. I might actually try some with him this year:-) We’ll also be reading The House At Pooh Corner, The Muddle-headed Wombat and The Loaded Dog, along with the Orange, Green and Brown Fairy Books. I plan to try Bilby out with Beatrix Potter The Complete Tales and the Blue, Red and Yellow Fairy Books, but these are where I think we’ll probably skip bits.
Obviously, we’ll be including other read-alouds as they occur to us, but they will include The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio, Doctor Doolittle, The Favorite Uncle Remus and The Wind in the Willows.

Health and Phys. Ed
We’re continuing with Waterbabies (swimming) this year:-) Or at least we’ll continue with Puggle for now. His class will probably collapse soon (they only take them until they are five), so then we’ll be looking at other swimming classes.

History and Geography
I’m looking forward to this a lot:-) We’re going to begin The Story of the World: Ancient Times. I’ve ordered the Activity Book as well, so we should be doing lots of stuff—I keep hearing good things about it:-)
We’ll also be reading Geography from A to Z: A Picture Glossary . I figure we’ll do a page or so each week, and I’ll print some colouring in pages for each word.

Science
Unless Puggle has particular things that he wants to immerse himself in, I think we’ll be doing most of our science through the garden:-) I do hope to do Nature Walks more regularly (well, once the weather settles down a little), and I think this would be a good year to start recording the weather, but otherwise we’ll try and do a lot of planting and feeding and watering and seeing what happens. I’ve ordered The Tiny Seed and Une Si Petite Graine (one of the French picturebooks for Bilby:-) ) and I thought they should tie in nicely:-) I might pull out some of the How Things Work and Backyard/Kitchen Science books though, and leave them lying about, in case something appeals:-) (Edited to add: I’m also hoping that Keeping a Nature Journal will help inspire our nature observations!)

Art and Music
I’m going to try and be more regular about having family music nights:-) This year we’ll begin recorder (Bilby as well—because I don’t like my chances of doing it with Puggle and leaving her out:-) ). Our composers this year are Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Liszt and Gustav Mahler/Anton Bruckner. And of course, we’ll sing:-)

I think I’ll probably repeat my art plans from last year… we didn’t really do much of them, mostly because I ended up putting the stuff away:-( I’m working on keeping art materials in a more accessible way. Our artists this year are Sandro Botticelli, Caspar David Fredrich and Vincent Van Gogh.

Technology and Enterprise
Cooking. By the end of the year, I’d like Puggle to feel confident about preparing one dinner:-) When he’s (quite) a bit more independent in his reading, I thought I might start letting him choose recipes to try:-)

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Blogging Advent 3—December 16

December 16, 2008 at 8:27 pm · Filed under Advent, Blogging, Books, Christmas, Domestic Life, For Children, Picture Books, Season

Read Hettie’s Christmas Gift (doesn’t seem to be available through Amazon—I guess, because it’s Australian.)

We did this. This is another book to which I really enjoy returning. I love the fact that it provides a link between the northern hemisphere traditions that we read about, and our southern hemisphere reality.

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Blogging Advent 3—December 15

December 15, 2008 at 10:08 pm · Filed under Advent, Bilby, Blogging, Books, Christmas, Family, For Children, Picture Books, Season

Read Is That You, Father Christmas?. Bilby became very excited when she recognised the Christmas tree in the book as being like the Christmas tree in the corner of the room:-)

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Blogging Advent 3—December 11

December 11, 2008 at 10:29 pm · Filed under Blogging, Books, Domestic Life, For Children, Picture Books

Read Wombat Divine.
This is a family favourite:-) We read it a couple of times today, and I am sure we will read it many more times until it is put away:-)

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Blogging Advent 3—December 9

December 9, 2008 at 8:06 pm · Filed under Advent, Bilby, Books, Christmas, Family, For Children, Picture Books, Puggle, Season

Read Is It Christmas?.

This is a book we got from the library last year, and it was so sweet that it was a family Christmas present on Christmas Day:-)

This year Puggle is still enjoying it, and Bilby is starting to point out features of it… she’s especially keen on the baby bear hanging from the Christmas tree:-)

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Blogging Advent 3—December 7

December 7, 2008 at 9:30 pm · Filed under Advent, Baking, Bilby, Books, Domestic Life, Family, Food, For Children, Picture Books, Puggle, Season

Today we read Room for a Little One. We enjoyed it last year, and we’re enjoying it again this year… it’s so peaceful:-)
Puggle and Bilby also made the rest of the gingerbread up… I’ve really enjoyed Bilby requesting that we ‘woll, woll!’

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Blogging Advent 3—Feast of Saint Nicholas

December 6, 2008 at 10:00 pm · Filed under Advent, Baking, Bilby, Blogging, Books, Cygnet, Domestic Life, Family, Food, For Children, Paddington, Picture Books, Puggle, Season

Today the task was to read The Secret of Saint Nicholas. This was one of the books we had from the library last year, and Puggle recognised it when we got it out again:-)
This gave us a chance to catch up on our cooking:-) So while I put Bilby down for her nap, the boys baked:-)

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Moonface

December 1, 2008 at 11:43 pm · Filed under Books, Domestic Life, Family, For Children, Photography

We’ve just been reading The Magic Faraway Tree (with Moonface:-) ) too:-) I took the opportunity to play with my new camera and a tripod:-)

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“Cuddle Time”

November 30, 2008 at 3:34 pm · Filed under Art, Books, For Children, Home Education, Picture Books

When I chose Julie Vivas as our Picturebook Artist for this year, I requested a number of her books (that we didn’t have) from the library. Cuddle Time is one of those.

I have to say, I’m delighted by it (enough that I’m thinking about getting it for one of the kids for Christmas!) Very simply, it’s the story of two children getting up in the morning. It makes use of a little repetition, and some gentle rhymes (in fact, gentle is probably a good description of it as a whole). The greatest joy for me thoguh, is that Julie Vivas’ beautiful illustrations show the two children as being very similar in size to my big kids:-) So it depicts waking up as being very like our house (on a good morning:-) )

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Puppet Theatre

October 24, 2008 at 11:32 pm · Filed under Bilby, Birthdays, Books, Craft, Domestic Life, Family, Season, Sewing

For Bilby’s birthday present, I made her this puppt theatre. Earlier in the year, I borrowed Bend-the-Rules Sewing from the library (I’ve been reading the Angry Chicken blog for some time, so I had to check out her book:-) ). I enjoyed it, and found it inspiring… but the only project I really thought I might make was something like her puppet theatre. So I kept it in the back of my mind—I thought Bilby’s birthday might be a fine excuse (we have a number of puppets:-) )
I fudged it a bit, but I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out (more drama than I expected with the hanging rail… but it does work now…). Now for them to realise they can play with it:-)

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Food and Children’s Books

July 21, 2008 at 2:34 pm · Filed under Books, Food, For Children

This post is one that I thought would appeal to a number of my friends-list:-)

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