Piney Woods Homeschool

With Christmas right around the corner, I’m pondering the purpose of gift giving and how to teach that to my children.  It seems to me that as much as the gifts we give are intended to please the recipient, they are more importantly intended to convey our love and affection.  Surely that’s the primary purpose?  Without thinking it through, that’s how I’ve always approached the issue of having the kids give gifts to family members, and so the gifts have always been something the child has made or purchased with her own money.  Always the gift has been the child’s choice, although I provide suggestions.  Sometimes they’ve been ugly because the taste of small children differs greatly from mine; mostly they’ve been useful because I encourage that.  This year my two oldest (7 and 5) took it upon themselves to start Christmas shopping early in the fall, when I was thinking of Christmas shopping, and so with their own money they bought gifts for gra...

I have previously posted our plan or schedule for observing Advent and then Christmas.  This year, since our kids are older, we’re adding in a true Jesse Tree observance.  We use the devotions in The Advent Jesse Tree during breakfast each day, then sometime later in the day the kids use assorted craft supplies to make a symbol related to that day’s story to hang on their "tree".  (The trees are construction paper creations taped to the shutters in the kitchen.)  I don’t provide a lot of input into how the symbols should be constructed, although for my 3yo I do sometimes cut out a shape for him if he asks me to.  I also sometimes provide general suggestions for ways a symbol might be constructed, but mostly the project is theirs.  I’ll try to post a picture later in the season, since the "trees’ are turning out to be quite interesting. UPDATE:

[This post at the moment is something of a rough draft.  I welcome your comments as I revise it.] "A Formidable List of Attainments for a Child of Six" is described as a reprint of a curriculum outline from a CM school in the 1890′s; it was printed in the Summer 1993 Parents Review published by Karen Andreola.  Here is the list : "To recite, beautifully, six easy poems and hymns. To recite, perfectly and beautifully, a parable and a psalm. To add and subtract numbers up to ten, with dominoes or counters. To read-what, and how much, will depend on what we are told of the child; children vary much in their power of reading. To copy in print-hand from a book. To know the points of the compass with relation to their own home, where the sun rises and sets, and the way the wind blows. To describe the boundaries of their own home. To describe any lake, river, pond, island within easy reach. To tell quite accurately (however shortly) Three stories from ...

If you are new to homeschooling, you have a lot of decisions to make.  That *can* seem overwhelming.  But remember you can always change your mind later.  Of course, it’s also true that if you put in a little time up-front to think about what you are trying to accomplish and how you would like to accomplish it, you may save yourself wasted time and money!  You’ll find that homeschoolers use lots of different approaches and materials–there is no "one right way" to do things.  One option to learn more about getting started (if you live near an area where these are offered) is to attend Smoothing the Way classes.  Don’t rush to get started!  First, you’ve got some thinking to do about what your goals and priorities are.  Your choices are almost endless and very different, and you’ll need to have a good idea what you’re looking for or you’ll be completely lost. This site might be a bit helpful: Home School Curriculum Advisor (...

When we started Ambleside’s Year 1 last June (2007), I had to figure out how to take the weekly assignment list and turn it into a usable schedule.  I had seen other schedules, but none seemed to fit our way of doing things.  DD needs to feel some ownership in this process, some control over parts of it, in order not to be rebellious, so a micro-schedule with each reading assigned to a specific day would not work well for us.  Also, we had a new baby coming and two other little ones with their own needs and activities, plus the usual interruptions that life brings along.  A very specific schedule would be hard for us to stick to. I knew we would school in the afternoon during naptime when we could be relatively interruption-free and could count on being at home regularly.  That gave us approximately 2 hours each day, although once we got in the swing of things we didn’t need anywhere near that much time. In the end, I took the Ambleside wee...

This recipe is from Pillsbury.  Because of the lentils, this is another good cholesterol lowering recipe and a great way to sneak dried beans into your diet. 3 Cup Cooked Ham, Diced 2 Cup Celery, Chopped 2 Cup Carrot, Chopped 2 Cup Lentils 1 Large Onion, Chopped 2 Can Chicken Broth 4 Cup Water In 3-1/2 to 4 quart slow cooker, combine all ingredients; mix well. Cover; cook on low setting for 7 to 9 hours.

Here’s another great cholesterol-lowering recipe.  Salmon is good for cholesterol levels, and I modify this recipe to use oat bran instead of flour.  The recipe as written uses red wine, which would also be good for cholesterol, but I sub more chicken broth for the wine since we don’t like the taste.  This recipe comes from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman . 2 Tablespoon Butter 1 Tablespoon Olive Oil 4 Ea Salmon Fillets (about 6 Ounces Each), Skinned, With Pin Bones Removed Flour (For Dredging) Salt Black Pepper, Fresh Ground 1 Medium Onion, Diced 1 Teaspoon Garlic, Minced 1 Medium Carrot, Peeled And Roughly Chopped 1/2 Cup Fresh Parsley, Minced 1/4 Cup Broth (Fish, Chicken, Or Vegetable) 1 Cup Red Wine (Dry, Full-Bodied), Optional Heat a large skillet, preferably non-stick, over medium-high heat for 2 or 3 minutes.  Add the butter and oil, turn the heat to high, and wait for the butter foam to subside.  Dredge each of the fillets in...

This is a popular recipe, available all over the internet.  Mine is slightly modified, though.  When dh had high cholesterol, the doctor recommended a particular cholesterol-lowering plan that relied primarily on increasing soluble fiber intake to help lower cholesterol.  So these muffins use oat bran instead of flour, olive oil instead of butter, brown sugar or molasses instead of white sugar–I think those are the only changes.  He was supposed to eat three muffins a day in order to get the right amount of oat bran. 2 Cups Oat Bran                                                   1/2 Cup Raisins                   ...

The early years with Charlotte Mason require a bit of a different focus than most of us are used to. Instead of academic goals, we focus on the "many relations waiting to be established; relations with places far and near, with the wide universe, with the past of history, with the social economics of the present, with the earth they live on and all its delightful progeny of beast and bird, plant and tree; with the sweet human affinities they entered into at birth; with their own country and other countries, and, above all, with that most sublime of human relationships–their relation to God." (Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series, Volume 6, pp. 72-73) The rest will come! This may even sound like a huge task, but in reality we accomplish this through simple activities and interactions–no scope and sequence is necessary. The most important Year 0 goal, according to Charlotte Mason, is time spent outside. ". . .[T]he chief function of the child–his business in the...

This has been a wild month!  First we had a hen, unexpectedly, and then we had two hens, also unexpectedly.  Then we had a hen and a rooster, and then we just had a rooster.  It seemed unkind, and also useless, to keep the rooster by himself, so we’ve been looking for a couple of hens.  Hens are hard to come by these days, though.  The only place we could find that had hens, rather than just very young chicks, was about an hour away.  As it happens, Papaw found them not long after we did.  He agreed to pick up the hens from the poultry farm and deliver them to our house on Thursday evening, so once again we acquired new birds unexpectedly (since all this was worked out during the day Thursday).  DH called the farmer and placed his order for what we wanted.  The man only had two laying hens for sale at all, but he had lots of younger hens to choose from. Papaw arrived with five birds in a large dog carrier:  two young h...

The kids are crushed.  Natasha died early this afternoon.  Since we got her, she’s had a couple of spells where she seemed quite ill, but she’d always recovered.  This afternoon it seemed clear she was not going to get over it this time.  We’re not sure exactly what was wrong, but we think she might have had complications from some injuries she received when a dog attacked her awhile ago, before she came to live with us. We can’t leave Alexander by himself, so we need to get a couple of hens now.  Hopefully that won’t turn out to be a difficult project, and hopefully we’ll be able to introduce the hens without a lot of conflict.

I use the Ambleside Online curriculum, and for our daily Bible reading AO suggests we use the KJV.  In an article on the AO website , the use of the KJV is defended on literary grounds.   The argument is that since the KJV uses big words and rich language, and since it is often quoted in great literature, we are intellectually improved by reading it. I do not disagree with that argument.  Familiarity with the KJV is almost certainly useful in reading literature and in generally improving one’s intellect and grasp of language.  However, I think that this quote from early in the article is key: "Decisions about which version a) is the more correct translation or b) will most readily help your child understand the truth of God’s Word, should be approached individually, intellectually and prayerfully." Now, the article goes on to immediately add a third criterion, that of enhancing a literary education, but it is my contention that this criterion ha...

Two weeks ago my mom unexpectedly bought us a laying hen to keep our other hen company.  She got an 8-month-old Black Australorp from a flea market, and was assured that the hen had laid an egg that very day.   We had a little trouble introducing the new hen, which the kids named ‘Popo’, as she didn’t like to stay in our yard and kept escaping to the woods.  However, she eventually settled down, but she never did start laying.  The kids also noticed that she made strange sounds, different from our other hen. Well, yesterday while we were getting ready in the morning my husband informed me that our "hen" was crowing.  I poo-pooed his observation, reminding him that she always had made odd sounds.  But later that morning, with the kitchen window open, I heard a flat out, clear-as-a-bell "cock-a-doodle-doo."  I have it on good authority that hens don’t crow, so it seems clear that we have a rooster who just reached puberty (and is not...

We just acquired a chicken, one which was previously a family’s pet.  This was a boon to us because my intentions to build a henhouse and run never went anywhere due to time and money constraints, but once the chicken was here we had to build a suitable shelter immediately.  The henhouse we inherited but the run we had to create. DD age 4 will be the owner of the chicken, and as such she’ll eventually take on most of the chicken care and half of the expense.  At the moment, DH and I are helping quite a bit as we figure out what we’re doing.  Right now the kids love carrying her around or watching her scurry around the yard snatching up bugs (and at least one small toad so far, to the older DD’s dismay).  And of course the first green egg collected was a wonderment. Now I’ve got to go look through the relevant section of the Handbook of Nature Study , which as I recall suggests that bird study begin with chickens.

We don't really observe Lent in our house.  Neither of us comes from a liturgical church tradition, so my dh and I do not have any history to draw from.  We have decided to include some of the liturgical church year in our home, though, to provide a framework for some of our spiritual training.  Lent provides an excellent introduction to Easter (which is of course its intent), but we don't "do Lent" in any traditional sense. This year, starting on Ash Wednesday or shortly thereafter, we began exploring the story of the Good Shepherd .  The girls each had a set of paper figures--one shepherd and several sheep--and a shoebox sheepfold, left from last year.  DS got a tissue box sheepfold, a clothespin doll shepherd , and some cotton ball sheep.  We explored a different aspect of the story each week. Older dd needed a bit more, so we also read the Gospel reading from lectionary cycle A each week (although we missed a few weeks because I fo...

In Volume 1 (titled "Home Education") of her six-volume series, Charlotte Mason talks about the kindergarten, which at the time was a new concept.  She discusses this new approach to educating small children in terms of its educational value and then in terms of its philosophical value.  She had concerns about both.  In this post I’d like to look at her second area of concern, the philosophical underpinnings of the kindergarten. CM criticizes the "garden" concept as setting up a false analogy–children are not flowers and the sort of care effective with plants does not work well for children.  "The outcome of any thought is necessarily moulded by that thought, and to have a cultivated garden as the ground-plan of our educational thought, either means nothing at all, which it would be wronging the Master to suppose, or it means undue interference with the spontaneous development of a human being."  Vol 1, p. 189 I believe she is saying that ...

It seems like the biggest obstacle faced by parents thinking of implementing a CM homeschool is figuring out how to get started.  This is especially true if they are thinking of using Ambleside , because Ambleside doesn’t come in a nice neat package with a teacher guide.  This is magnified by the confusing array of websites and books professing to guide parents in implementing a CM education–in many cases these end up replacing CM’s method with a system . Carol H., a wise and knowledgable contributor to the Ambleside Yahoo group among others, has a website full of helps for beginning Charlotte Mason homeschoolers, particularly those using Ambleside . The various CM Yahoo groups can be helpful as well.  Many different curricula can be implemented using CM’s principles, but none will be completely successful if those principles are not understood.  You can’t just follow a teacher guide.  Reading and discussing CM’s volumes with others on one of the ...

My dh and I are taking a video course at church covering the material in the book Grace-Based Parenting .  In the book, Tim Kimmel encourages us to show the same grace to our children that God shows to us.  He explains what our children really need from us and what it looks like to show grace through our parenting.  As I’ve been thinking over my recent readings in the book, I’ve realized that I’ve had a perfect opportunity to show grace in my own home. Last fall I had a baby, baby number four.  At least two of the other three kids had sensitivities to foods I ate while nursing, but this baby had severe reactions to almost everything I ate.  In order to allow him to sleep at all, rather than screaming while doubled-up in pain, I had to restrict my diet to chicken, rice, beef, pasta, and cheerios, more or less.  All seasonings had to go.  All dairy and soy had to go.  It’s certainly been a struggle for me to nurse a baby and handle my ...

There was much to think about in this article , but one statement really stood out to me: Miss Mason devises time-tables which cover such reasonable hours as to leave time over for this solitude, but parents are often very culpable in thinking that Tango or some other new thing must be learned as well, and the much needed time for solitude is used for plans which necessitate hurried journeys, always in the company of a responsible person, who feels it her duty to talk in an instructive way, and the thinking time, the growing time, the time in which the mind is to find food is diminished, and the child becomes restless, tiresome, irritable, disobedient, everything that a child who is reputed to be difficult can be. Wow! Isn’t that exactly what we homeschoolers are terrible about doing? When the children should have free time, we instead schedule all kinds of extra activities that we just know they *have* to have, and so their lives pass away without this valuable time fo...

Here are three very different articles addressing this subject: Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills Taking Play Seriously A game called suicide

Defining our Sundays has been a nagging issue for me.  What do I want the children to get from Sunday?  What is it about for our family?  How can we best achieve that? This Parents’ Review article nicely analyzes the issues and provides suggestions to help families come up with a plan that helps them define and achieve their goals. I am always unimpressed with one-size-fits-all edicts, especially since one size doesn’t even fit my own family at different life seasons or circumstances.  This article makes no edicts but instead helped me clarify the real issues to be addressed.

This year for Lent, just like last year, we’re exploring the story of the Good Shepherd to prepare the children for the ideas embodied in Easter.   Our activities are coming from Celebrating the Church Year with Young Children , a book I’ve found very helpful even though it’s written from a Catholic perspective and I’m not Catholic (or even in a liturgical church).  Last year, I photocopied a sheet with a shepherd and sheep to cut out and made one set for each of the girls, along with a shoebox sheepfold for each.  This year the oldest boy needed a set, and I forgot to photocopy the page.  Plus, I didn’t think a paper set would survive his play for long.  We just happened to be making clothespin dolls anyway, so I made him a clothespin shepherd with cotton ball sheep (they really are just cotton balls!) and a tissue box sheepfold.  This was a perfect solution! UPDATE:  The sheep in the picture is not a cotton ball, of course.  ...

Tim Kimmel’s Grace Based Parenting details an approach to parenting that meshes nicely with Charlotte Mason’s philosophy.  Kimmel’s approach, like CM’s, holds out high expectations for children but expects parents to help children meet those expectations with graceful guidance rather than brute force.  I see no indication that Mr. Kimmel has ever read CM’s works, but their thinking follows along the same lines.  Kimmel outlines the primary needs children have, then shows how parents can meet those needs by showing children the same grace that God has already shown us.  He recommends that parents examine their children’s strengths and weaknesses, looking for ways to hone the strengths and help the child overcome the weaknesses, in the same way that Charlotte Mason encourages us to use habit training not only to avoid the child’s natural flaws but also to avoid the pitfalls in their virtues.  He suggests that parents follow the child’s natural ben...

DD, age 7, has a few regular responsibilities in our home, such as making her bed and clearing her place at the table after each meal.  She’s big enough to do more than that, and so for at least a year she’s had extra chores to do each school day.  We started with cleaning her toilet (on the outside) and mopping the kitchen floor.  However, she got tired of doing the same chores over and over, so after seeing someone else’s comments about negotiating for chores I started letting her contract for her work for a month at a time.  At the end of each month, I get out a file box in which I keep 3×5 cards, one card for each household task.  (My list is extremely incomplete, but I add to it as I think of new tasks.)  Cards without a point value are not for her.  Cards for her have either 5 or 10 points marked.  She must select a total of 10 points each day, Monday through Friday.  When the chores are selected and I’ve agreed to them, w...

From How to Cook Everything. 1 1/2 Cup Lentils, Washed And Picked Over 2 Carrots, Peeled And Minced 1 Medium Onion, Minced 1 Cup Tomato (Canned Is Fine; drain First), Cored And Chopped Salt Black Pepper 1 Teaspoon Dried Oregano (or Marjoram;1 Tbsp Fresh) 2 Tablespoon Olive Oil 1 Medium Onion, Sliced 1 Teaspoon Garlic, Minced 1 Pounds Pasta (Elbows, Shells, Or Similar) Combine the lentils, carrots, minced onion, and water to cover in a large pot over medium heat.  Simmer until the lentils are tender but not at all mushy, 20 to 30 minutes (some lentils may take even longer, but check frequently to avoid overcooking).  Add the tomato, salt, pepper, and half the oregano, stir, and keep warm over low heat.(This sauce may be made up to this point and covered and refrigerated for a day or two ahead, or put in a closed container and frozen for several weeks.)Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a medium skillet over medium-high heat for 1 minutes.  Add the slic...

From Pillsbury Soup and Crockpot Recipes. 3 Cup Cooked Ham, Diced 1 Large Onion, Chopped 2 Cup Celery, Chopped 2 Can Chicken Broth 2 Cup Carrot, Chopped 4 Cup Water 2 Cup Lentils  In 3-1/2 to 4 quart slow cooker, combine all ingredients; mix well.Cover; cook on low setting for 7 to 9 hours.

We are using Ray’s Arithmetic for math, but modifying it to fit the plan laid out by CM in Volume 1 .  We are now almost finished with Term 2 of Year 1, so we’ve been schooling for almost 24 weeks, approximately.  We’ve finished the addition and subtraction lessons, although I think we need some review to cement the information.  I suspect that I discontinued the use of counters sooner than I should have, mostly because I was on bedrest and using the counters was inconvenient.  We have done the first three multiplication/division lessons, and so far they have gone very well.  This seems to be because dd has already grasped the concepts without the lessons, though. I do think I’m going to add in some addition/subtraction review activities, probably games, so that we don’t lose those facts and to help improve her grasp of them.  But yes, so far I’m pleased with the way these lessons have worked out.