Balance Part Three...

A poster on the homeschooling board I frequent most often asked about living books for science, then another for history and math. As a result, I went through all my bookmarks, which are chock full of links to great book lists, lists that I daydream about but fail to really use. All of this naturally got me thinking about Charlotte Mason education again, and I remembered I had purchased and downloaded, but never actually read, the secular version of Penny Gardner's Charlotte Mason Study Guide. I would highly recommend this - it is only $5 and I wish I had read through it sooner!

Just some quick background as to what constitutes a living book: "...living books contain living ideas from great minds. Instead of presenting dry facts, these books are written in conversational, literary language." (Penny Gardner)

So, in seeking balance in my homeschooling efforts (see Balance and Balance Part Two), I thought I would look at science, history, and even some math from a living books point of view. And, because it is an approach that works with my children, a hands-on point of view. What does this change? Well, for example... science. Instead of spending $x on a "curriculum", I can put together a thoughtful list of books we will all enjoy together, and then compliment those books with hands-on experiments. Currently, we're interested in insects. This is what I have come up with so far:

Books:
Creepy Crawlies & the Scientific Method
Insect Life (an old classic)
The Insect Folk (another old classic)
The Snail's Spell
Where Butterflies Grow
A Girl of the Limberlost (one of my personal all-time favorites)
Simon and Schuster Children's Guide to Insects and Spiders
Peterson's First Field Guide to Insects (Cyrus loves field guides)
Insect Soup: Bug Poems

Hands-On:
LadyBug Land
Praying Mantis Pagoda
An ant farm
the compost heap (loads of worms)
How to Draw Insects
Insects: Make it Work
The kids have pet snails (apparently they are "racing" snails)
And of course, magnifying glasses and nature journals!

We also may watch (for the zillionth time) Microcosmos, which is an excellent film. I am also doing research on living books for chemistry and physics, to start reading aloud in the fall. Biographies will work, and I am reading through The Wonder Book of Chemistry over at the Baldwin Project to see if it might work. Any suggestions? I am also skimming through The Storybook of Science, also on the Baldwin Project, to see if it might work as general science for us.

So, back to the balance bit... I have catalogs from quite a few homeschool curriculum companies, and while I gather many ideas from these sources, I notice that they tend to fall into one of three categories: a) lots of reading and not much else, b) lots of hands-on, or c) more schoolish than not. I need something in between these, which is where Charlotte Mason comes into the picture. Good books, plenty of activity, handicrafts, outdoor time, nature studies... this all sounds pretty ideal to me.

It is funny - we have "officially" been homeschooling for 5 years now, and I still feel like I am just learning how to do it! I was talking to another mom at our Indian potluck yesterday, a mom who is newer to homeschooling, yet I find we have many of the same frustrations and feelings despite the amount of time put in so far. I think we're finding our own pace now that we're not associated with the charter school anymore. I find we're getting more work done on a more regular basis than we did when I had to report each month, and turn in work samples. I think this year so far has been a chance for us to find our footing and our learning path.

Now I want to do more research on living books for math and other approaches there. I am toying with the idea of having Wednesdays as free math days, with games and good books rather than math pages. And I think Life of Fred will fit the bill nicely when Cyrus is ready. I still really like Math Mammoth, and in fact just purchased the entire Blue series from the Homeschool Buyers Co-op, but I'd like that balanced (that magical word again) with more hands-on and varied approaches. In history, I plan to keep using Homeschool in the Wood's Time Travelers as the bare bones, but will shift our reading to more books and less of the text.

Balance is, according to dictionary dot com, "to arrange, adjust, or proportion the parts of symmetrically; composition or placement of elements [of design] in such a manner as to produce an aesthetically pleasing or harmoniously integrated whole." I love the idea of a "harmoniously integrated whole"!