To a one year old, water pouring off a huge cliff is a mesmerizing sight. "It's rainin'-in'," he kept telling me. My heart melts as I watch the relationship taking shape before my eyes. Mothers understand this. To his three year old cousin, it was equally awe inspiring. And to the six year old, pretending to be a bear, cleaning out the den in preparation for hibernation is the fun part. And climbing up in the high places. The backdrop had us feeling a little bit Swiss Family Robinson-ish. I do SO enjoy these nature hikes with the little boys in my life. This one was particularly glorious under the drippy wet sky. “If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years...” “If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.” “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that
will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” Quotes above by Rachel Carson There's a preciousness about it.
Other than the eager faces waiting back home, you don't completely want it to be over. You drive away, stop at the gas station and you're back- back to reality where the atmosphere is not. You just want to linger a moment longer amongst 'your people,' the ones who you may not know well, but can have an instant conversation with because we have this commonality of background a focused purpose for being here. Here where we are all alive in the same room Together at once. Praise God for the unity! Then again, here we are in the same world together every day. Distance doesn't need to separate souls, kindred spirits strving toward a common goal. All things are sacred. ALL no secular. not even this gas station. The atmosphere comes with me, really. "This is not a bewildering programme , because, in all these and more directions, children have affinities; and a human being does not fill his place in the universe without putting out tendrils of attachment in the direction proper to him." "We must get rid of the notion that to learn the 'three R's' or the Latin grammar well, a child should learn these and nothing else. It is as true for children as for ourselves that, the wider the range of interests, the more intelligent is the apprehension of each." Mason History is one of those areas of interest, and our summer book study touched on it recently. Summer is also a great time for vacations and day trips to places that might bring history to life for a young child. I see these kinds of first experiences as the hooks in my child's mind that the facts and information will hang on as he reads and learns more later in his schooling. "Perhaps the gravest defect in school curricula is that they fail to give a comprehensive, intelligent and interesting introduction to history." "It is a great thing to possess a pagent of history in the background of one's thoughts. We may not be able to recall this or that circumstance, but, the 'imagination is warmed;'" "The present becomes enriched for us with the wealth of all that has gone before." -quotes from C. Mason In these early years of preschool and kindergarten we have not formally begun a history thread in our school time. We have done lots of gentle introduction of the ideas that will lead into Year 1 when we start more formal history. I took a peek through the books we will begin with. My 'peek' turned into me being sucked in and when I looked up most of an hour had passed. A well written tale of history really comes alive and I'm looking forward to reading them with my son. So during kindergarten and preschool, what have we done for introducing history? The first thing is our daily Bible reading which gives a child a sense of time from the beginning and lots of lovely stories of the men of old and the tests to their character. Another big thing was the Century Chart introducing a child to the idea of his own place in the scheme of time and history. (Did I mention that I found some great $2 calendar frames at our local hobby/arts store that fit my 12x12 scrapbook paper perfectly!) Also we have tried to give our son(s) hands-on, life experiences whenever possible. We cook meals over the campfire occasionally; he rode on horseback, looked through Grandpa's military photo album. We went to History fest reinactments and our town's Mennonite heritage celebration. He canoed on the lake with dad, and is currently caring for a flock of chickens. We hike historic trails and see names and dates carved in the rocks, we walk where indians have walked, visit antique stores, stargaze, float boats in the stream, collect wildflowers, read poetry and stories and watch rabbits and deer nibble in the backyard. All of these things can be related to the lives of people in the past in one way or another and enrich future reading/learning. I'm leaving the relating/tendril/attachment thing up to the Holy Spirit and not lecturing him on the botanical collection of Lewis and Clark or anything like that. Our summer reading offered us a few points to remember when teaching history:
- Our aim is honesty and knowledge of the truth - Choose as accurate, well-written books as possible; read them to him and when old enough, have him retell the story - Give the young child leisure to explore an age in detail - Let him react himself - Take children to the places where things happened whenever possible (though to be educated by living history, it is not solely dependent on such a visit to make the event live and breathe) -The curriculum should be planned as a consecutive whole, so that as the child moves along, he gains a sense of the broad sweep (of history) We have begun reading The Childhood of Famous Americans series of history biographies. Grandma and Grandpa took a trip to The Alamo and so we read the one on Davy Crockett (a huge hit here!!) They also took a trip up the cable cars in the Swiss Alps and we looked at their photos, heard their stories and read The Magic Meadow and The Apple and the Arrow. Another aspect of history that I am excited to begin when he is older, is the Book of Centuries, a timeline mixed with a personal narration of the 'pagent' as we go through it little by little. I hope to purchase this lovely book to hold ours. I look forward to re-learning some of this alongside him. I can already see these ideas twining out and taking hold like those tendrils, and once we begin to sweep through our more planned and consecutive whole of history, I believe it will just get that much richer in that vivid imagination of his. “Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are all, quite naturally, impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new, and yet it is the law of all progress that is made by passing through some stages of instability – and that it may take a very long time."
A quote from this blog post which has given me lovely thoughts about natural rhythms, and unhurried days. "...Aladdin with his wonderful lamp had no more power than the modern woman in her kitchen." -Laura Ingalls Wilder, West From Home I will be doing a series of posts this spring/summer that are re-posts from an old blog a few years ago. It's fun to go back and see what we did when we were younger and how we've grown since then! Ever feel like there's just not enough hours in a day? Yep, it's true. I'm not perfect. Shocking! (I know) Sometimes it takes all my will power to attack the mess.
We may offer to children two guides to moral and intellectual self-management which we may call 'the Way of the Will' and 'the Way of the Reason.' The Way of the Will: Children should be taught (a) to distinguish between 'I want' and 'I will.' (b) That the way to will effectively is to turn our thoughts away from that which we desire but do not will. (c) That the best way to turn our thoughts is to think of, or do some quite different thing, entertaining or interesting. (d) That after a little rest in this way, the will returns to its work with new vigour. (This adjunct of the will is familiar to us as diversion, whose office it is to ease us for a time from will effort that we may 'will' again with added power. The use of suggestion as an aid to the will is to be deprecated, as lending to stultify and stereotype character. It would seem that spontaneity is a condition of development, and that human nature needs the discipline of failure as well as of success.) -CM 6 /128 It is so good to hear these words, a deeper understanding of why we are the way we are and how to get to where we need to be. And if we teach these things to our children, oh, how much farther ahead in life they will be. But the one achievement possible and necessary for every man is character; and character is as finely wrought metal beaten into shape and beauty by the repeated and accustomed action of will. We who teach should make it clear to ourselves that our aim in education is less conduct than character; conduct may be arrived at, as we have seen, by indirect routes, but it is of value to the world only as it has its source in character. -CM 6 /129 It's that simple and that hard at the same time. CHANGE YOUR THOUGHTS. And now I wish I had taken a picture of the clean kitchen, Hmmmm... We had a garage sale 2 weekends last month. It's nice to visit with friends, neighbors and strangers who stop by, especially in a small town like ours.
I keep thinking about something that an elderly gentleman said to me as he was reminiscing about raising his 3 kids with his wife. He told me, "Don't worry or get too mad when they throw tantrums and do dumb stuff. Just handle it and move on. And remember that all the time and energy you put into them when they are growing up, you get it all back! You get it all back." Another side note from the garage sale, I had lots of fun giving away a copy of Tom Sawyer to one little boy who couldn't decide how to spend the dollar his Grandma gave him, and giving a little girl a Laura Ingalls Wilder double I had. I hope they are both deeply engrossed in their books by now. Does not wisdom call out? Does not understanding raise her voice? At the highest point along the way, where the paths meet, she takes her stand; beside the gate leading into the city, at the entrance, she cries aloud “To you, O people, I call out; I raise my voice to all mankind. You who are simple, gain prudence; you who are foolish, set your hearts on it. Listen, for I have trustworthy things to say; I open my lips to speak what is right. Prov. 8: 1-6 You know how when you’re out somewhere and someone asks you a question and you kind of fumble through your answer, then when you get home you can think of all the things you could have said? (Why is that, by the way? )That was me a few weekends ago. I went to an all-day workshop to keep my teaching license current. Someday I may end up back in a classroom, you never know. I love that I get to keep in touch with what is going on in the teaching world outside the walls of my home school ‘classroom’ in this way. Our state’s board of education has a research group that puts together information based on what is happening in our public schools. They put together these workshops based on that information in an effort to present teachers with what they see as the most critical for them to know and address in their classrooms. That alone is interesting to hear, as is sitting in a room full of teachers hearing them discuss their needs and opinions, as much or little as the trainer allows. This one was held in a local high school building that is pretty new, a large brick structure with hardly a window in it. They scheduled us with no breaks between sessions, and after a long day under fluorescent lights, I was craving some fresh air and sunshine! Many things from the day struck me. During lunch we listened to a presentation on Math. I have been pondering this book on math via Mason's philosophy for a while now. In the session teachers at every level were urged to not skip the word problems at the bottom of the page, and to work on students’ deeper understanding of number relationships first before the formulas given in the book. Though it wasn’t expressed this way directly, it was obvious that even the state’s studies are showing that oral language is how our brains were made to learn, yes, even math! One of our other 5 sessions was labeled Positive Behavior Strategies a.k.a. classroom management. We talked about rules and consequences, how each teacher needs to establish clearly and re-teach the rules as often as necessary to manage the behavior outbursts in their classroom. The example given of 4 rules in a class was “Be Prompt. Be Polite. Be Positive. And Be P… “ (something else, I forget.) The presenter told us how every behavior a child does can fit into one of these categories which the child can then be held accountable for. I understand that there has to be some kind of a system in place when you gather that many children in one building all day and expect things to run smoothly. Yet, I kept sensing that somehow this whole approach is not treating a child as a person. I wanted to ask, “If someone kept repeating those things in your ear, how would you respond?” Don't worry, I didn't. What I should have brought up when she asked us if anyone had a good example to share of a set of rules they saw in a classroom, is the PNEU’s student motto: I am, I can, I ought, I will. Just the way it is phrased is in such that the ownership of the behavior is on the child. This phrase can help replace negative thoughts and overcome difficulties. It leaves me feeling way more empowered than having someone remind me every day to ‘Be Polite.’ I wonder at what age Mason introduced this and how it was taught in an inspiring and not derogatory way. The attendees in the “Behavior” session gave numerous examples of even kindergartners they had heard saying “I can’t do that. I’m not good at ____” a certain subject. Heads nodded in agreement that it’s too young to already be carrying that load! What I see in Mason’s motto is that it speaks truth. ‘We are God’s workmanship’ and ‘For God so loved the world’ are phrases come to mind. We need to train children from little on to embrace who they are as children of God so that they can have strength through trials. We need to tell them that struggles will come, but that they have a choice of what to make of those hard times. I’m still curious how that room full of teachers would have responded to this twist on the traditional set of rules and procedures in a classroom setting. One more thing about my day in teacher training: Have you heard of the ‘flipped classroom?’
Take 4 minutes and watch this: Goomoodleikiog 4 Students Our last session of the day was with a trainer from ISTE , who is also an elementary teacher. It was about integrating technology into the classroom. We were given ‘tools’ for using technology in classrooms whenever possible, with the idea being that, kids are on their ipads or cell phones etc. all day anyhow, so why not show them the educational side of those things in hopes that they will opt for that over games when they are at home too. Our trainer said he was not allowed to field questions about why teachers and schools are being pushed to flip their classrooms, because the training time was for the 'tools'. His point was, “Kids love it;” technology IS coming, so embrace it. He used his classroom as the example while handing us all the links we needed to follow suit. He has his students watch the pre-recorded lesson as many times as they need to. They then submit their assignments as Google documents, visible to all other students for peer critiquing. Assignments are posted on the class blog and when completed are linked there so that all parents, and the administrator etc. can see how children are doing. For the weekly video assignments, kids take home the class cameras and tape themselves. These are put on the site too. At this rate, he said, a child’s entire education will be documented and accessible online, so college entrance exams won’t be necessary. We will just hand over our kid’s file and password to whichever college they wish to attend. Imagine a pencil and paperless classroom... (enter twilight zone music here.) Check this out: 21 Things That Will Be Obsolete By 2020. I just have a few questions: Where do home schools fit into this? Will we to try to measure our child’s learning against what a certain school or state education system is doing? How does our God-given role as the parental authority figure over our children come into play in all this? Yep, my day as a ‘teacher’ with the state’s education system left me much to ponder… |
Welcome!
"I am recording this so that future generations will also praise the Lord for all He has done." -Psalm 102:18 I am a mama to 2 sweet brothers who aspires to a "thinking love" toward my children.
Take a peek into our journey towards a living education inspired by the writings of Charlotte Mason. Be sure to leave me a comment if you're inspired! I prefer to keep my text and images right here. Please don't copy without permission. Thanks! Categories
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August 2018
I Participate"In this field small efforts are honoured with great rewards, and we perceive that
the education we are giving exceeds all that we intended or imagined.”
- Mason “It may be that the souls of all children are waiting for the call of knowledge to awaken them to delightful living.”
- Mason |