A Mother's Journal ~ A Bit of Birdsong

life is so much easier. 

I think the key for my own homeschooling success is consistency but not intensity.  When I consistently spend time one-on-one with my student each day, we happen upon topic after topic after topic that we can learn from.  I suppose that that is the essence of unit study, which we have always done most of all here in our homeschool. 

Even though I am aiming for a somewhat ”classical” finish with Joseph by moving through history one more time in a sequential fashion and doing much more writing and literature, I still LOVE how one thing leads to another and we learn something new every time we sit down together. 

This morning we were watching Story of a Patriot, the Colonial Williamsburg tape I found at the thrift store yesterday.  One of the characters in the story was William Byrd III.  I knew my son had probably never heard of the original William Byrd.  I told him about a college honors class I had taken called Early American Writers.  We studied William Byrd in that class.  Before the story commenced, we stopped the tape and I pulled The Norton Anthology of American Literature from one of our bookshelves.  We looked up William Byrd and read a bit. 

No, my son is not now an expert on William Byrd, but he understands a bit more about the kind of writing that we studied in that class.  He has a sense that many of these early American writers were Englishmen, well educated, who kept journals and diaries that show us how liberty and land affected them once in the New World.

Another laid-back educational thing we do is take a brisk 15-minute walk each day.  It’s dreary and wet here today, but we walked anyway.  Our walks are very Charlotte Mason-ish.  ~:-D

Our talk today centered around all the trees that we could name.  We saw a squirrel climbing frantically away from us, up and up a tree, to a nest that we wondered about.  Was it a squirrel’s nest or a bird’s nest we were looking at.  Judging by the size, we figured it was a squirrel’s nest.

Note to educators:  Whenever I see a Norton Anthology of any kind that I don’t already have, in the thrift store, I buy it!  They are wonderful resources to pull from as you work your way through a timeline.

Lynn