How we homeschooled today #44
Tennyson, Narnia, and… Christmas in July
The children have played together for hours today. I love it when this happens. Here’s what else they did:
Independent reading: my son read a new Norse myths book, and my daughter started Howl’s Moving Castle. Her father (The Common Reader) was thrilled as he’s currently devouring every Diana Wynne Jones book he can find, but I will be surprised if she carries on as it is rather beyond her current reading level.
How many different books of Norse myths does one family need? We have not yet found an upper limit… We talked about the naming of months: July after Julius Caesar, and August after Augustus. I told them that August was made a day longer so that Caesar wouldn’t have the upper hand in terms of month length, and then we looked at some other month name origins.
Jolly Phonics workbooks and Multiplication by Heart. (To give you an accurate impression, I should tell you that my son only wrote five letters.) This morning both children behaved as though we have never done multiplication before. If you’re new here, we do it very nearly every day. I thought of a comment (thank you, Ruth!) on my recent post about homeschool anxiety, taken from Susan Wise-Bauer’s Rethinking School:
“I am a writer, so grammar is particularly important to me. I drilled my kids in grammar from first grade on. We did grammar drills and grammar exercises. We memorized grammar rules. We diagrammed sentences. We never did not do grammar.
So on the first day of seventh grade, I pulled out the previous year’s grammar book for quick review.
My son looked at me like a newborn fawn contemplating a bow hunter. He remembered nothing.
“How can you not know what a noun is?” I demanded.
“Well,” he said, “maybe it’s because we’ve never really done grammar before.”
This is exactly what happened today with Multiplication by Heart. I’m hoping it comes flooding back tomorrow!
My son read a children’s version of Macbeth, because it was lying around on the floor and he’s often incapable of walking past a book without reading it.
We went to the shops and my daughter worked out the cheapest way to buy onions for me.
My daughter skateboarded and my son continued learning to ride a bike. His sister learnt in 20 minutes—no exaggeration. In some kind of parental karma, I am starting to doubt if her brother will ever learn. My back and my spirit are broken.
At the weekend both children were reading Animals at War which introduced the Charge of the Light Brigade. Yesterday I read the Tennyson poem and today my son asked me to re-read it, and my daughter made a start on learning the first verse by heart. (My husband pays the children for poetry learnt by heart.) We also learnt what a Light Brigade actually is. I played them an 1890 recording of Tennyson reading the poem himself, and they were deeply unimpressed.
No matter what my children think, I think it’s pretty amazing that you can listen to this man speak. In an odd choice for July, the children asked to use old, broken wax crayons to put in moulds to make Christmas shapes. (This was an Advent activity last year—look out for a post on Advent activities in a few months.) I tried to use this as an opportunity to talk about melting points but they were not remotely interested.
In quiet time they did some drawing, of centaurs and the nine realms of Norse mythology.
At tea I started reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. They loved it so much that I read all through bathtime and for bedtime stories. My daughter is now having a go at reading it herself in bed. I think they are enjoying it even more than Tom’s Midnight Garden which was a precious read-aloud favourite.
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