Narration...

image courtesy of hearinghealthmatters.org

One of my favorite Charlotte Mason "tools" is the art of narration. Simply put, narration is "narration is retelling in your own words", allowing a child to tell you what they have learned. Narrations can be verbal, written, acted out, drawn/painted... so many options!

Narration is something I have used all along, and still use, even with teenagers. For example, I leave the kids notes every morning that I work. Today's note asked them to each read or watch something to do with science, and that I will expect them to tell me something about it later. That's a very simplistic approach to narration, one of the most basic. It is certainly easy to implement!

Sometimes I ask for more involved narrations, usually written. They can write a story, or a summary. The Girl writes a lot of short stories, and illustrates them. She's spontaneously made art projects that go with what she learned, such as a 3D frog life cycle collage. The Boy tends to be more straightforward in his approach—he'll write a summary, or an outline of facts. Sometimes though, he'll render an image of something he studied in Blender, and he has notebooks full of diagrams, conversion charts, and things of that nature.

Why use narration?

First of all, it naturally teaches the kids to summarize... at least a little, though as anyone who has listened to kids talk about their interests know, they can really give a lot of detail!

Secondly, telling back what they have learned cements it more firmly in their minds.

Thirdly, it is a form of feedback that can be expressed in so many ways. Tests don't generally allow as many creative approaches! And narration lets kids add in more of what they do know, even from ideas/readings/other things that may at first seem unrelated. Tests don't have that flexibility.

I'm eager to hear about what my kids learned this morning!

Monday, Monday...

And a busy one at that! I got up early this morning (yes, even earlier than normal on a work day) to prep chili ingredients for the crockpot. I put the beans in to cook, browned the meat and onions and put them in the fridge for later...then realized today is the day PG&E is slated to turn the power off from 9 am until 2:30 this afternoon for line repairs.

Sigh.

I left the beans in the crockpot on high, and am just hoping for the best.

Outside My Window...
We're still having cool, gray mornings, and warm, sunny afternoons. I am actually thankful for the cooler weather so I can start cooking more things like chili, soup, etc. on our busy Mondays. Our yard truthfully looks terrible at this point (thank you, drought), so I am planning on redoing the front yard. I have mostly bushes like rosemary and lavender out there now, in the borders, with a smaller area of what was supposed to be lawn, but is now some brown, dry, crackling ghost of grass. I want to rearrange some of the plants during the winter, add in some great grasses, and put in some gravel (think this, not this) where the lawn once resided. Low maintenance is what I am going for, kind of like this.

In the Kitchen...
The kids have a new favorite -- peanut butter chocolate chip muffins. I actually followed the recipe, except I added a 1/4 cup crunchy peanut butter to the half cup smooth, and threw in a quarter cup of ground flaxseed. And I really want to try this salmon recipe this week, though I am tempted to use coconut milk in place of cream. Hmmmm....

In Our Homeschooling...
Today will be a very minimalistic day. Math, writing/reading, maybe some history, definitely another chapter from our current read-aloud, maybe poetry. During the rest of the week, I hope to add in the few things we didn't get in last week--hands on science, our geography read aloud, grammar, and our nature read aloud. The Boy may add Forces & Motion to Conceptual Physics this week, for the hands-on part.

I decided, since The Girl doesn't quite know all her times tables yet, and The Boy still stumbles over the sevens table, that I would take advantage of the large, blank wall in their bathroom, right across from the toilet. I printed out each table on a full sheet of paper, and taped them all to the bathroom wall. I have to admit this was inspired by the methods used by Frank Gilbreth in Cheaper By The Dozen, when he painted the Morse Code on that bathroom walls!

Our Reading and Watching...
The Girl will probably continue with Blue Planet this week, and The Boy with Into the Unknown. We watched a couple of very brief documentaries on ancient Crete yesterday. We'll finish The Twenty-One Balloons in the next few days, and then our school-time read aloud will be Black Ships Before Troy, which we've started maybe half a dozen times and never finished, but of course that was before the all devouring interest in ancient Greece sprung up! We're continuing The Marvelous Land of the Snergs at bedtime.

On the Agenda...
M is working nearly full-time this week, two days of which were the weekend, so we are learning to juggle multiple schedules, with my classes, fencing, derby, and so on, and on, and on. Nothing special on this week's agenda though! We're considering homeschooling both days of the weekend, if he keeps working them, and dropping Mondays, but this remains to be decided.

And Our Art of the Week...
We tackled monochromatic watercolor landscapes this week, from Art School: A Complete Painter's Course. The step-by-step instructions in this book are very clear, though our "clouds" didn't spread the same way as the demonstrated ones... perhaps our paper wasn't wet enough, or I didn't make the wash thin enough... Anyhow, here they are!

This is The Boy's painting. I love the rainy clouds and the sense of distance he created with the hills and trees.

And this is The Girl's. Her trees to me are fantastic, with a lot of dimension. She thought she could have done much better, but I think it is a great painting!

And mine. I am moderately happy with it!

Hope you all have a good week, and that ours goes more smoothly than I anticipate!

Art Projects...

We finally got back to art! I chose a simple project from the New Augsburg Drawing Book, using warm tones for one version of the picture, and cool for the other. The kids (and I) really enjoyed this project, and will be doing more from these books (free on Google!)

Here is The Girl's piece - sorry it is a little blurry!

As you can see, The Boy decided to combine the color drawing with some work in perspective!

 And yes, I made one too. I had fun layering the crayon!

There are plenty more projects in the book I linked above. The author describes the exercises as "painting with crayons", and you only use eight colors, ever... black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple --- the basic 8-pack of Crayola. We used art paper for this, with a heavier texture than regular paper.

The First Cut is the Deepest...

Okay, not really, but we dissected worms at last! And the first cut is pretty shallow...

They had a lot of fun doing this, and managed to find all the important parts: the ganglia, the crop, the pharyx, etc. And they made labeled drawings which I'll scan in later! We sure know a lot more about worms now!

Books & Bubbles...

Another weekly report at last! And a good week it was, overall. There are some areas I want to continue working on improving, and I have a couple of ideas to keep things going well.

Cassia's Nature Art

 We, as always, did a lot  of reading this week. Here's a small sampling of books we read...

We also read about Mozart and his sister (incredible artwork in this one, by the way); Franklin Roosevelt; and the Super Bowl. Oh, and Groundhog Day, Gilgamesh, and some reading just for fun. The Girl and I are about halfway through Dancing Shoes, and as a bedtime story, we're still reading The Magician's Elephant. The Boy spent all week bouncing back and forth between The Mark of Athena and The Bad Beginning, as well as Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction.

While we are very much enjoying Life of Fred, I do worry that The Boy especially will lose track of some of the ideas in the books, so I think I am going to have him start keeping a math journal type of thing. A simple composition book, where he can write down mathematical terms, definitions, and so forth. Other than that, all is well in math-land. The Boy worked on borrowing, sets, unions of sets, and more, while The Girl worked on telling time, addition and subtraction facts, and geometry this week.

And here's where I admit I had a moment of panic this week - is Life of Fred really enough? I started hunting out copies of Saxon Math books... truthfully, I still have a [used] copy of Saxon 6/5 in my Amazon cart for The Boy. The author of LOF says it is enough, so I am trying to believe that, to breathe, and to relax about this, before I hit the buy button on Amazon.

The Girl has been using primarily Explode the Code and Beyond the Code for the last couple of weeks, with some Now I'm Reading and Frog & Toad books thrown in. However, while she is making progress, it has definitely slowed down a little. I've decided to bring back in Reading Pathways. While she does not love this program, it works. I did give her a test on phoenomic awareness over at Reading Horizons, and I am super pleased to announce she scored 84 out of 84!!!

The Boy is still working with Soaring with Spelling, and Word Roots, but I am not overly thrilled with his spelling progress. My sister has offered to lend me her copy of Words Their Way (she's a teacher), which she says is an excellent tool. I may try it with both kids!

Science was so much fun this week (in fact, the kids are continuing their bubble explorations outside as I type this)! We worked through two projects in Bubble-Ology... one involving the Bernoulli effect (or keeping a bubble afloat by waving your hand, a piece of paper, or a card above the bubble), and one in predicting when a bubble will pop.

We also had a lot of fun with art. I highly recommend the book Using Color in Your Art - we discussed primary colors this week, and did a hands-on project (The Boy's is still a work in progress, so I'll share it later). Here is The Girl's piece...

And mine. I had a lot of fun - it's been too long since I've done any art!

Let's see, what else did we do? Watched Diary of a Wimpy Kid 3, and How to Eat Fried Worms. Watched some Top Chef re-runs (season 2). The kids played a lot of a game that combines frisbee tossing with foam weaponry and a football! They've done most of their chores this week. I finished reading Coriolanus, and plan to watch the movie tomorrow. I think we're doing Hamlet next. I'm really enjoying this class! I got in touch with the professor I read/grade papers for, and she's got a colleague that wants to hire me as well!

I'm feeling really organized at the moment because I've got all of our books for the next couple of weeks either on hand, or coming in on hold at the library. We'll be finishing up our trip through ancient Sumer this week, I think, and then we'll spend some time in ancient Egypt. I'd like to finish that part off with a trip here. We went once, back in 2008, but I think we'd love to go again!

Hope your upcoming week is a good one!

Art Project: Shades & Tints...

Yesterday we did activity #1 in the National Art Gallery Activity Book. We studied Henri Rousseau's painting titled "Tropical Forest with Monkeys"...

What we were asked to pay special attention to were the shades and tints of green. The book also gave us definitions for shade and tint, then suggested an art project, finding shades and tints of favorite colors, and using them to create a piece of art. The Boy chose red, and The Girl blue. We were supposed to look through magazines, and fabric scraps, etc., for our art materials, but instead I headed off to the hardware store to pick up paint chips (in blues and reds of course)...

The kids spent maybe an hour on this project, flipping through their colors, cutting, gluing, rearranging, and so on, until we had these, with which I am very happy...

The Boy's work in reds

And The Girl's work in blues

This was such a fun project, and I absolutely love the results!

Work Sample - Book Reports

We had our first experience this week with book reports. A local bookstore is highlighting book reviews written by homeschoolers, so of course we had to give it a go! I had them narrate the reviews to me while I typed, and then we went over them a couple of times before either child was quite satisfied.

So, without further ado, here is their work....

A Review of

Ballet Shoes

by The Girl .......

          Recently I read “Ballet Shoes” by Noel Streatfield. It is the story of three girls whose names are Pauline, Petrova, and Posy Fossil. They live in England, during the early 1900's. They are all adopted by Great Uncle Matthew, but he gets shipwrecked and goes missing for a long, long time. So the babies are left with Sylvia, who is their guardian, and their Nana. They become very poor, even though they sell their Great Uncle's fossils to museums and collectors. So they take in boarders, and even with the boarders, they still didn't have enough money. During all of that, the girls have to go off to school, but they can't afford it either. Sylvia tries to teach them at home, but she's not good at arithmetic. Two of the boarders are doctors of education, and they offer to teach the girls for free. Another boarder is a dance instructor, and she decides to train the girls in dancing so they can make money.

          Pauline is the oldest out of the three girls, and she's really talented at acting. Petrova is the middle girl, and she is not happy about being in ballet or acting, because she is not good at it. Instead she loves working on cars and flying airplanes. Posy is the youngest out of the three girls, and she loves ballet, because she is wonderful at it. The story follows their adventures in dancing and acting.

          I like the book a lot. Posy is my favorite character, but I like the other girls too. I think it is an exciting book because they get to be on the stage. I think that you should read this book so you can find out the ending!

 A Review of

 The Mark of Athena

by The Boy .......

          The “Mark of Athena” was written by Rick Riordan. It is the third book in the Heroes of Olympus series, which follows the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. It is told from the viewpoints of four different characters: Annabeth, Percy, Leo, and Piper. Annabeth is on a quest from her mother, Athena, to find a statue, which no other daughter of Athena has ever succeeded in finding. Locating the statue may help end an ongoing feud between the Greek and Roman training camps. Annabeth has to brave Arachna's underground lair to look for the statue.

          The others—Percy, Leo, Piper, and their friends Frank, Hazel, and Jason—are trying meanwhile to rescue a demigod who is trapped in a bronze jar after trying to close the doors of death. First however, they must defeat two giants who are trying to destroy Rome and reawaken Gaea to reclaim the world for herself, which will destroy the world as we know it. Spirits, called eidolons, take over machinery and people, trying to capture both a boy and a girl demigod to help Gaea awaken fully, which creates danger for the kids on the quest, who need to maintain a magical number of participants to complete their quest.

          I enjoyed this book because it is both humorous and extremely exciting. I had a hard time putting it down—every chapter ends in suspense since the viewpoints change frequently, and there is a lot of action all going on at once. I recommend this book to anyone who has read the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.

Not bad for their first book review attempt! Well, at least I think they're pretty good!

A Cowboy Story by The Boy...

I handed The Boy the book Unjournaling earlier this week, and asked him to choose a writing prompt, and to write for at least 10 minutes. He ended up writing for almost 20 minutes, so that he could finish his story. I have corrected the spelling errors to make it more readable, but the words are all his!

First, the prompt:
A bad dude in a cowboy hat is walking into a saloon in a bad Western movie. He's looking mad and dangerous. Tell what happens, creating a happy ending. (note: I'm not sure The Boy's ending is exactly happy, but hey, he wrote a story!)

The Story
A thief called The Hat Smuggler walked into a saloon one day, hoping to get some new hats, and he pulled out his gun and said "Stick 'em up and gimme your hats!" Everyone stuck up their hands, not wanting to get shot. "Gimme your hat!" he said, pointing to an old man with a handlebar moustache. The old man, named Bert, said "How can I get me hat off my head if me hands are above me head?" The Hat Smuggler, named Daveed, ripped Bert's hat off, crumpled it, and threw it at the old man. Daveed pulled out his gun and shot. But it backfired, and killed the Hat Smuggler, and so everybody got to keep their hats. The end.

Weekly Report... 1/30-2/3...

Language Arts

Cricket worked through another few lessons in ClickN'Read Phonics, specifically lessons 21-24. She's doing well with this. Supposedly this program teaches phonics up to a 3rd grade level, so if I can get her that far, I'll be quite satisfied! After that, if she needs additional phonics work, I downloaded Funnix 2 this week, since it is free through the 16th. She read 4 more stories to me - we're doing review using Bob Books to build fluency. She also completed 6 pages in Explode the Code.

Bug worked on spelling. This week, I simply used printouts from a Scholastic spelling book I downloaded sometime back, during their dollar days sales. He liked the crossword puzzles best! This was a unit working with syllables. He also finished up Homer Price, re-read Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Roderick Rules, read Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Movie Diary, and started reading Boy.

His writing this week was... well, spotty at best. I just purchased The Writer's Jungle, and am reading through it to get him up to speed. So next week we'll have some actual writing going on.

Math

We kept math simple this week, just using Math Mammoth. Cricket worked on multiplication, as groups of objects, as an array, and with number lines. (Note: please ignore the occasional backwards "2" in the sample below!)

Bug worked on division, and got introduced to remainders (or "leftovers" as they are called in Math Mammoth).

Science

We read from The Magic of Reality this week...

and added in a couple of books to explore ideas in more depth...

Both these books were a big hit. The kids liked the clear explanations in the one on DNA, and the whole story approach of the Gregor Mendel book, although they were very sad that Mendel's work went unrecognized in his own time. I have a couple more books on DNA to read aloud, and then I want to do this project to separate out our own DNA with the kids, after which we'll read more in our main science book, and then explore Darwin.

History
We switched gears for a week, and read about some American history.



The kids enjoyed it so much that we read 4 chapters in one sitting! I must say, I've never thought much about Columbus before his travels, and realized after reading this week, that the years prior to that could not have been easy, with him being made fun of on a regular basis. I think we'll continue to read from this here and there. The kids did give good oral narrations after I finished my reading.

I am also curious about this vintage book on American history. I have it as a pdf from Google books, and just need to transfer it to my Kindle.



If you've read either, or both, of these, which did you prefer, and why?

Art and Music
Bug is continuing to work hard on his piano lessons. He is continuing with one song from last week, working on the timing (I think we need a metronome!), has some scale work to practice, and a second song.

They kept themselves quite busy with art. Cricket made about 10 watercolor paintings this week and here is my favorite:


Bug is working on a series of cars and trucks, with perspective and shading. He loves working with inking, and I think he's doing a very good job!


Literature
Bug was so busy reading this week that we didn't get to any of The Hobbit! Instead, at bedtime, he read to himself, while I read animal fables to Cricket. She absolutely adores animal stories, and we have had fun reading through these stories from different countries/cultures.

Next week I hope to get back to our regular bedtime reading. We're also between audiobooks, as The Phantom Tollbooth hasn't come in yet!

In Other News
We deep-cleaned the family room this week, having already done the living room. I am trying, desperately, to get rid of the clutter and get more organized, as per my New Year's Goals. I am doing well with goal #1, as I just passed the 25-pounds-lost mark! And we're making progress with the other goals too, although I need to work harder on #3.

We also discussed and have settled on changes to our current curriculum, which we'll continue through next year as well. Our sort of relaxed, Charlotte Mason approach is working well for us - the lessons are short, the books are good, and we're appreciating the process of learning these days.

Don't forget to go by Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers for more weekly wrap-ups... the exact link isn't up as I write this, but I'm sure it will be soon!

4-H Projects

the Fairy's totem pole, with (in descending order) a werewolf, an owl and a dolphin.

the Elf's totem pole, with a leopard, a Dalmation, and a tiger. He even took the time to put tails on all the animals, which you can just see in this picture.

the Fairy's pinch pot, all painted up (she loved the gold craft paint).

the Elf's pinch pot, which he painted very carefully.