No Opinion Required

Exploring Early American history, DrS was given a lecture on the life and work of Alexander Hamilton. I give open forum lectures, allowing interruption with questions and comments, especially jokes. This encourages an engaged dialogue which fosters learning and sparks an interest in the subject matter beyond the lecture and documenting test.

This lesson continues for a couple hours while we explore the complexity and humanity of Alexander Hamilton's life, accomplishments, and mistakes. He was not the villaneous schemer portrayed in HBO's mini-series, John Adams, nor was he any kind of angel. Like any individual, Alexander Hamilton was affected by life experience and the people around him.

As we conclude, DrS says, "I don't know what the message is here. Am I supposed to like him or not like him?"

Personally, I like Alexander Hamilton. Not everyone has the same opinion as me. So, I teach facts, not opinions. There are more than enough facts about Hamilton's life and work that my opinion is entirely irrelevant to the lesson. DrS has to form his own opinion.

The following hour was a discussion about his opinion on various aspects of Hamilton's triumphs and failures. DrS will only be tested on the facts.

New Student

After reviewing my posts, I am surprised that I have not mentioned this, yet. My fourteen year old has decided to homeschool. He is my child with high-functioning autism and there were a few aspects of this school year that were very difficult for him to connect and make work. Since I could see the pattern emerging where this turns into a downward spiral, I decided to allow him to remain home for his education and we'll see if we can work him ahead for the next school year.

To avoid the mess with a portfolio and remain in compliance with Florida's homeschooling laws, he is going to continue taking the FCAT. These scores will suffice for his academic achievement for the school year.

I have not consulted him for a blog pseudonym at this time so he will remain nameless until I do.

I've picked up a reputable Algebra I textbook and keep him working on Khan Academy for his mathematics. It is important to me that he completes and excels at both Algebra I and Geometry before the next school year begins.

He remains ahead in both history and science so I'm finding it difficult to challenge him. I have finally decided on an assignment for this quarter.

First Quarter Essay Assignment

Compare and Contrast two Nations geographically located on two different continents. These nations can be from different eras and do not need to exist during the same period of time. They should be superficially distinct from each other.

• Include a general review of history, culture, religion, political climate, and governments, then choose a specific aspect to compare/contrast for these nations, explain why your chosen aspect is significant for each nation.

• Cover the ways in which these nations are similar to and are different from each other in the chosen aspect.

• Include 3 graphic aids that are relevant and help illustrate the information of the essay.

• Minimum 4,000 words, Maximum 6,000 words.

• Spelling, grammar, and vocabulary will impact your grade. To get more information on how to write at a 10th grade level, use:

http://www.azed.gov/standards-practices/files/2011/09/grade10.pdf

• Cite sources using CMS. To reference how to use this citation style properly, use:

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/media/pdf/20110928111055_949.pdf

http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html

* access this assignment sheet through Google Docs to easily follow links.

To Build Your Essay Properly

Contributing work should include*:

• Notes of material to use with citations
• Outline with revisions through writing drafts
• First Draft
• Second Draft

* does not need to be included with essay assignment

Completed Essay Due: November 21.

Subject Credits:

History

Social Studies

Political Science

Geography

I was impressed with his interest and eagerness to begin. He was impatient while I typed out the requirements and details of the assignment for him. Giving a young teen with HFA so much freedom to learn and write will yield positive results. And, just to make sure he doesn't slack, I reminded him that I will fail him and he will end up repeating the nineth grade, if he does not do his assignments on time and as expected. That is a choice he makes, not me. HFA kids are not lazy. Sometimes they feel overwhelmed or exhausted by a project and will become slap-dash to be done with it. While this essay is not easy, he's well within his realm of ability. By providing him the ability to choose his own elements and focus for this essay, I've empowered him the ability to write well over 6,000 words. I know he will learn editing skills with this assignment.

Overall, I'm pleased with my new student. He's getting along with his little brother very well and is assisting in Reo's lessons, as well as taking a positive energy with his own education and work. This is becoming a tremendous homeschooling year!

Walk like an Egyptian...

...which turns out to be not too dissimiliar to how we walk now so, I guess, just walk like you normally do.

As I'm prone to do, I download an enormous amount of ebooks through Amazon Kindle and then let Reo decide what direction he'd like to go.

Per-Bast: A Tale of Cats in Ancient Egypt by Lara-Dawn Stiegler. Buy it here.

Reo chose to begin reading, "Per-Bast: A Tale of Cats in Ancient Egypt" by Lara-Dawn Stiegler. It's a mythological/historical hybrid fiction that places cats front and center in ancient Egypt. It's a marvelous, creative novel that captivates and compels. I was impressed by his choice. Reo had officially decided the first quarter material of his fourth grade year.

Ancient Egypt

These things are actually the least interesting parts of ancient Egypt.

Beyond the egos of the pharaohs, we have a rich and prosperous civilization. Language, art, math, economy, cities, farmland, markets, schools, music, dance, marriage, celebration, funerals, families, traditions, religion, architecture, food!

First stop: Scribe School

Reo will get nowhere if he can't read and write the language, so it's a crash course at scribe school for both of us to get the gist of some hieroglyph basics. How do you have a crash course for a written language so intricate and articulate that it surpasses in beauty and originality any other language on earth? Clumsily, of course! But my job is to drive his curiosity wherever it wants to go. If he wants more than this crash course, he'll get more. Our school isn't about "getting by" or "just getting through it". It's about learning, understanding, and having permission to seek more.

Math is always fun!

You can probably understand why few people went to scribe school.

Reo already has a handle on addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions. So, we implemented all those mathematic methods with hieroglyphs. Does it work? Is this a more or less efficient way to calculate sums and communicate numbers?

We will continue using hieroglyphs in our following lessons as we explore more ancient Egypt. I'm especially interested to introduce him to geometry and how the ancient Egyptians used it for architecture.

Fourth Grade

Third grade was an awkward beginning to our homeschool adventure, but it provided many opportunities to understand homeschooling and gain confidence in both Reo's ability to learn and my ability to teach. The blogging became too absorbed in how ridiculous the curriculum from Christian Liberty Academy Satellite School [CLASS] was that, naturally, when we went into "just get through it" mode, I stopped blogging. CLASS' fundamental christian and anti-science curriculum did push me into going off-textbook a lot to make sure my son was learning Science and would continue to be above grade level.

Hey, you can't use omnipotent deities to cheat!

I have said time and time again that our local school district rocks. If it weren't for the budget cuts that massacred the wonderful programs that enriched children's lives in elementary school, I would have kept Reo in public school. The teachers and administration at his former school are still awesome. The homeschool office at the district has been fantastic and cooperative with me as I struggled with the difficult CLASS administration to get documents I needed - the "convenience" of those documents was why I chose CLASS in the first place, ironically - for Reo's annual evaluation. Now, Reo is ready to begin on September 1.

Fourth grade is exciting for both of us. We are venturing into unschooling territory, which will allow us to explore the world without sitting for hours pouring over workbooks. I will be blogging more about this year, from start to finish, as well as getting to maintain my first homeschool portfolio. The next post will be Reo's academic goals for his fourth grade year, my academic goals for his fourth grade year, and what our first week's lesson plans look like.

Spoiler Alert: It's all Adventure Class now

Our school year begins on Labor Day, which is a holiday and no school day for the public and private school kids in America. Over thirty years ago, I was younger than Reo, and I asked my father what the point of Labor Day was. He explained that Labor Day is the day we honor the people who made sacrifices to establish unions to protect American workers. He went into age-appropriate detail about the tragedies that happened at the expense of workers whose companies didn't care about their lives and the unfairness of pay for the work that people did. That day, I learned why we celebrate Labor Day and that my workaholic father was very smart and I could learn a lot from him. For both of those reasons, and the added fact that unschooling is a continuous, neverending experience, Labor Day is a perfect day to begin.

Halloween Week

Halloween is my favorite holiday. I'm not a fan of being scared or horror movies or zombies, but I enjoy the process of celebrating the melding of the spiritual world into the physical world, dressing up and trick-or-treating at night, and just having fun with pumpkins and all the imagery of the holiday (except for zombies). I am also divorced from my older children's father and this is a holiday that I do not have to ever share. That's a big part of it, too. So, we celebrate the heck out of this holiday.

The outline for the week is on the dry erase board

Monday was the day of decorations! We cut out pumpkins, bats, and tombstones. Reo decorated them to his pleasing. The first craft of a bat and jack-o-lantern mobile:

I found a great print-out of several different jack-o-lantern faces, and we cut out each pumpkin. We found another print-out with bat shapes and cut those out, as well. Using yarn, we dangled the pumpkins and bats from a frame we made from construction paper. The end result is simple but a fun indoor decoration.

The next craft were colored in pumpkins that Reo decided to adhere to our front window as a decoration. We found a great full-page print-out shape of a pumpkin and Reo went to work designing different pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns.

We also designed bookmarks using orange foam bookmark bases that I already had in the craft box, yarn, markers, and the left-over jack-o-lantern cut-outs from the mobile project. If we'd had the materials for 50 or more bookmarks, we could have added them to the trick-or-treat bags for Thursday.

The last project we did were tombstones. I had intended to have these cardboard tombstones, cut from a basic shipping box, stay as an indoor decoration but Reo had other plans. He enthusiastically planted them on our front lawn so everyone could see his funny and Dr. Who themed epitaphs.

Today, Tuesday, we learned the history of Halloween. To serve this, I wrote a brief book that gave each version of Halloween, from Samhain to its secular version today, its own page and description. I wrote at his reading level but sought to keep it interesting so I kept it short and to the point. Then he answered five questions I'd provided at the end.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, we get to prepare Halloween-themed food, which I plan to include a great fairy cake which is an old recipe that folk lore says will attract fairies and deter them from being mischievous in your home.

The History Book

History Stories for Children: Second Edition by Dr. John Wayland;

a Christian Liberty Reader published by Christian Liberty Press

This is the history book for my son's homeschool program provided by Christian Liberty Academy Satellite Schools [CLASS]. It's the size of a standard paperback book and each history story is about two to three pages long. There's simple illustrations and it appears to be written at a fifth grade level, although I have not yet submitted an excerpt for proper analysis.

As with American Pioneers and Patriots, I was expecting a white washing of history and glorifying of colonialism. That's what he would have gotten in a public school education, anyway. I was already prepared to supplement his education with factual information.

 

Unfortunately, these were not just white washed versions of history to make America seem great all the time. Those stories are in there, too. We even have the folk lore of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree and not lying about it when questioned.

What children will first learn from this book is contained in the first section, titled, From The Bible. We learn a couple little bible stories, then learn about the first Christmas song, and about Easter lilies, a poem about Jesus' crucifixion, and even a Psalm. History! 

The second section, titled, Around the World, tries to teach us about Alexander the Great, although they skip over his callous military prowess and champion homosexuality. We get to learn about his relationship with his father. Granted, that's a new perspective. There's also short stories for Alfred the Great, Charles the Great, and Peter the Great because why bother learning about leaders unless they're great? But then it gets into Saint Valentine, Martin Luther and other religious individuals. They did actually exist in history so that's passable but still it's all Christian themed.

This becomes predictable, right?

Well, just when you think you have them figured out, that's when they throw the curve ball...

Nobody expects the overt racism!

American Pioneers and Patriots

The first history book in my son's curriculum from Christian Liberty Academy Satellite School [CLASS] is American Pioneers and Patriots.

At first glance, it was expected and nothing out of the ordinary. There was a heavy emphasis on colonialism lacking accountability but Reo would have received that same perspective from the public school. In my fifth grade year, I received that white washed perspective from my public school education.

I already knew I'd have to go off-textbook to provide supplemental lessons to give Reo a complete picture of the history being taught.

As we plunged into Unit 1 and enjoyed the narrative of a fictional family making their way from Spain to the New World in the 1600's, there were some Christian-themed drop-ins but since the people from Spain in this time were Roman Catholic, it was proper context and not preaching.

What was interesting to me was contained in the end Unit questions.

6. Read Luke 8:22-25 and explain why it is proper to pray to Jesus during a storm.

How about no?

The actual story tells us that the men on these ships traveling from Spain to the New World helped the crew manage the ship during the storm while women and children braced themselves inside the cabin. When a door dramatically blew open and the water rushing in threatened to sink the ship, two boys acted quickly to secure the door. Jesus didn't really help there. He wasn't even asked to help. The moral of the story, if anything, was to get off your butt and do something.

Neither Reo nor I could figure out what Jesus had to do with the story told in Unit 1, so we skipped it and moved on to the serious business of drawing ships.