Piney Woods Homeschool

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...