A Mother's Journal » Prairie Tuesdays

Beginning Ambleside Year 5

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:48:49 +0000

I think Ambleside Online Year 5 is going to be a perfect fit for us. I am so happy that I chose to go with it this year.

Even after saying she’d like to forgo Prairie Tuesdays for awhile, Miss Michaela suggested we put on some “prairie clothes” and have tea. Apparently just a bonnet is enough to make one feel prairie-ish.

We began school on Tuesday by easing into our weekly Year 5 assigned reading. I chose three books to start with and read out loud to Michaela from each one. The first was Wild Animals I Have Known, the second was Christian Liberty Nature Reader Book 5, and the third was The Story of King Arthur and His Knights.

The reading went much more quickly than I’d expected. I know that at Michaela’s age (11) she should be doing much of the reading on her own, and she will be. At this juncture, however, I want to get a feel for which books I think she should read on her own and which I want to read with her. I also want her to have a sense of how long she should sit and read each day – how long it will take her. And did I mention that I just want to read some of the books myself?

My ”assigned” reading this week, from the CM Series Yahoo! Group I am taking part in, is Volume 6 pages 119-127 of Home Education. In it Miss Mason shares the thought (from A. Paterson, Across the Bridges) that “reading aloud is but a poor gift compared with the practice of reading in private.”

I do not think this means that reading aloud can’t be fun or worthy (we love read-alouds), but that a child should have to put some effort into their own education. They should train their minds to be able to read and then digest complex works of literature on their own. It is what their minds crave, if Miss Mason is correct, and I think she is.

Michaela had Lady Earl Grey while I had green tea. She then worked on a scarf she is knitting with a circular knitter while I read more to us about Lobo.

The reading from Charlotte Mason’s Home Education Volume 6 pulled on me as much as any of her writing has. I love the thought that “a well-educated man with cultivated imagination, trained judgment, wide interests…is prepared to master the intracacies of any profession; while he knows at the same time how to make use of himself, of the powers with which nature and education have endowed him for his own happiness; the delightful employment of his leisure; for the increased happiness of his neighbours and the well-being of the community; thst is, such a man is able, not only to earn his living but to live.”

If you teach a child to learn; if their minds are cultivated to enjoy learning, reading, the humanities; if their spirit has not been neglected, but rather good character has been nurtured and duty to others made important, they will excel in whatever profession they find, and enjoy life too.

I love that! More than once yesterday we encountered life situations to which having a right response was way more important in the long run than cramming ourselves full of facts and figures.

One such situation was that a friend had worked on Michaela’s scarf during a recent visit and had nearly ruined the project by making the stitches too tight. Michaela almost could not proceed at all, the stitches were so tight and hard to pick up. We abandoned reading long enough for me to make two new rows of stitches, working past the nearly-impossible row, while I spoke to Michaela about not dwelling on the natural tendency to be angry over this, but by remembering how delighted this little girl had been to sit with us and work on something domestic. After handing the knitting back to Michaela and continuing with our reading, the reading seemed even better than before.

One quote from these assigned CM pages I feel I have to mention, though sad and quite alarming is this: “Germany became morally bankrupt (for a season only, let us hope) not solely because of the war but as the result of an education which ignored the things of the spirit or gave these a nominal place and a poor rendering in a utilitarian syllabus.”

It feels good to do something nice for another person, to give of oneself, to nurture the spirit.

As the days progress, we will add in more books. We have started light copywork (at this point, one quote a day from her reading with attention paid to excellent handwriting), and of course math, and will add in subjects and work until we are doing a full Year 5 schedule.

I have set up the white board and am keeping track of new words we find in our reading, writing out the definition and keeping it up so that all the family might notice it. So far we have:

puissant
bivouac
descried
fastidious
despot
loup-garou

Narration so far is going beautifully, with Michaela telling me at intervals about the stories we are reading. This will soon be transitioned to blog entries and writing.

Last night at bedtime one of her stuffed animals, a wolf no less, was given a new name: Blanca, from Wild Animals I Have Known.

I will continue to post about our progress.

Have a wonderful Thursday!
Lynn

Wagon on the Prairie

admin — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:16:43 +0000

Yesterday I had a lovely moment of confirmation. And a gentle urging to be careful regarding any boxed curriculum. I need the freedom to create.

You may notice that we’ve not actively done our Prairie Tuesday in a few weeks. I’ve let it die down a bit to give Michaela a summer. School will be starting up again for us in August and I want her to run and play and not have any school to worry about for some weeks, even if it is fun school that we do.

Yesterday Michaela disappeared into her room for quite a long time. I had no idea what she was doing. She could have been playing with the bunnies, drawing, reading, or just playing. I had no idea. I was busy working.

She came and got me later and said, “Come look at what I made. It’s for Prairie Tuesday.”

She had put together a covered wagon from things we gathered up at our last Scrap Exchange visit: cardstock pieces for the wagon, straws for the axles, bottle corks for the wheels.

I was so impressed with her creativity. I didn’t tell her how to do this! I didn’t even tell her to do this. I was happy that she had been thinking over things we had studied. It was confirmation that she was feeding on ideas that we had talked about in our schooling.

I was also impressed with how she used these ideas she had gleaned about pioneer life. The little bracelet draped across the front of the wagon?

“And mama, this is peppers drying.”

I was reading yesterday in A Charlotte Mason Companion. (Yet again.) I was inspired. (Yet again.)

Charlotte urges us to give children a regular feeding of ideas through sweeping tales of history, wonderful inventions and discoveries in science, lives of great men and women, stories that radiate the moral life as well as paintings, plays, Psalms, poems, symphonies–and everthing else wonderful we can think of. She says these ideas are the children’s very bread of life.

How I love that our reading of Laura and Mary on the prairie has translated into a little girl who made a covered wagon and hung on it peppers to dry for later use!

This is the essence of what school is to me at her age. It’s why I’m so hesitant to box her in.

Lynn

Green Beans

admin — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:56:37 +0000

This one simple thing was sufficient for Prairie Tuesday.

Green runner beans. They grow well in a little kitchen garden. All they need is something to climb on. They are also easily found in the supermarket.

Ignore the summer heat and the pesky mosquitoes and pick a bowl full. Or go to the farmer’s market or the supermarket and buy a bag full.

Little hands do well learning to snap and string beans.

Prior to “Prairie Days,” but interesting nonetheless. From Early American Herb Recipes:

Fresh vegetables and fruits were in scant supply except in season, for ice houses were relatively unknown until just before the American Revolution; even then, it was only the most luxurious homes which possessed one. In general, items considered perishable were placed into the well where they could remain cool.

Actually, many fruits and vegetables were not raised or eaten at all. The usual vegetables which served as staple items of diet with fish and meat were beans, turnips, carrots, and cabbage.

The food situation in Philadelphia and its environs was different from many colonial towns in that from the bginning Penn’s city had excellent markets. There, one could find a huge supply of all kinds of privisions–vegetables, meats, poultry, fruits, and many foreign delicacies, available because of that town’s active trade with all parts of hte world.

An interesting rabbit trail: how much did the average American diet change between the early 1700s and the mid 1800s?

Happy Prairie Tuesday.

Prairie Tuesday — Painting!

admin — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:49:57 +0000

This week for Prairie Tuesday, we talked about making art. I doubt that many prairie girls could run over to A.C. Moore and get a set of paints and brushes, but I bet they knew how to decorate things with what they had available.

We didn’t adhere purely to our Prairie Tuesday protocol this week as I let Miss Priss ride my bicycle and wear clothes appropriate for riding, but I think learning has to include some fun. (And she asked so sweetly!)

A bicycle basket full of herbs, and maybe you noticed that in the wagon was a bowl full of mulberries. Our paint!

We decided that we would create some artwork using berries for our paint and a cut-up brown grocery bag as our canvas. I can’t imagine that anything as useful as brown wrapping paper would have been thrown out back then, so we pretended we had packaging paper that Ma had saved.

As an aside, we noticed a plant with berries that I cannot identify. Something about it strikes a chord in my memory, and I think I should recognize it, but I don’t at the moment. Any takers?

Michaela gets busy grinding up berries with our mortar and pestle.

We made sure we gathered many flowers and leaves, varied in textures and size, for dipping in our paint and using as stamps. The narrowleaf plantain’s bloom made a great paintbrush!

We covered the entire paper with leaf designs, painted-on words and flower shapes, all by using our mulberry paint and our natural paintbrushes and stamps.

The two bags we used looked to me like they’d make a great notebook to hold the nature “plates” we’ve been working on. I folded one in half piece long-ways and ”wrapped” it underneath the bottom of the other piece (also long-ways).

I strategically glued it in place at the edges and at two points in the middle, on each side, to make a tri-fold notebook with six pockets — three on one side, three on the other.

Michaela truly enjoyed this, though she was a bit slow to be enthusiastic about another nature walk at first, especially in the heat we’ve been having.

Last night I spent some time gluing my folder together, applying a layer of mod-podge for durability, and then gluing some fabric strips in place so that we could tie it closed.

We have about a dozen nature plates so far.

As Michaela pointed out, the pockets on the outside will hold our gathered specimens until we get home. She suggested taking the notebook with us when we go out.

It was a successful Prairie Tuesday!

Lynn

Prairie Tuesday – Week 2

admin — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:59:19 +0000

Our Prairie Tuesday is not over yet, but I thought I’d take a break and give you some details so far. I am loving the overall “feel” of Prairie Tuesdays. When I wake up on Tuesdays now, I have a different attitude — a more relaxed feeling because I know the day can just flow. We are home for the day, in our ”old clothes” doing mostly reading and letter writing and domestic things. No one can deny that pioneer women worked way harder with their hands than we do now, but I think they had fewer ”worldy” distractions and less mental anguish over things that don’t really matter in the long run. Things like (insert whatever annoying modern distraction comes to mind.)

We started our day with some morning chores. I had planned for us to go outside and put some soil over the potatoes, but it was raining, so we did some indoor chores.

Breakfast consisted of a couple of fried eggs. They came from our pretend chickens. Yum.

This would be a good time to tell you about Michaela’s prairie clothes for today. Last night I made her a very primitive “jumper,” cut from a linen tablecloth purchased at Goodwill for 1.29. The hem on the tablecloth was beautiful and I knew it would make a lovely little prairie dress. I did not even use a pattern. I just cut the front and back, tracing generously around a slip she already had. I hemmed the neckline and arm openings and then stitched up the sides, using the tablecloth’s hem already in place. I used buttons to attach the shoulder straps.

And I have found a very easy way to make a pinafore: take the dress of your choice (thrifted dresses are good; we had a dress that was very cute, puffed sleeves, etc, but was too tight), cut it down the back center, then trim each side of the back to the size you want and hem. (It’s pretty to see the long dress peeking out from underneath the pinafore in back.) Make it shorter if you want as well. Sew on pretty ties near the top at each side in the back so it can be tied in the back. Clear as mud?

We retired to the parlor where Michaela worked on her embroidery while I read to her A Letter from a Pioneer.

We were amazed at the different utensils used to cook with and how cooking was always done using fire or coals.

Real Life Stories and Literary Selections, Book One and Two.

These books contain so many real-life stories, if you ever see a set for a good price, my recommendation would be to purchase them. They have bits of history in them that you don’t read about so much anymore.

Next week we plan to read a little about Lincoln’s Schooling.

As her reading, Michaela is working on Nancy Hanks of Wilderness Road: A Story of Abraham Lincoln’s Mother (Le Sueur, Meridel. Wilderness Book Series.)

She read some of it aloud to us: “and I remember her, a wild one, that year runnin’ in the woods, nary afraid of Indians, bright as a penny — could read some too. It was a riddle how she could read and how much she could remember from the Sunday preachin’.”

Oh, and there’s more! I love this book! I’ve read it before and it warmed my heart to think of the woman who gave birth to Abraham Lincoln and how she loved him so and wanted him to be educated and to read. I believe she was a spirited, sweet woman.

Michaela insisted we switch aprons (pinafores) since she liked mine better and thought hers looked “prettier” on me.

So far lessons today are:

Morning chores
Read from Nancy Hanks of Wilderness Road
Listen to A Letter From A Pioneer
Write a letter to your pretend cousins in the west
Work on sampler
Visit the following website and learn about clothing and life in the 1800s: Memorial Hall Museum On Line – Kids Page

That website is a great one, by the way. There’s much on there to learn and I’m sure I’ll have Michaela visit it several times.

There’s more yet to do. We’re working on a homemade game. We’ll be eating by oil lamp tonight and we have some math to do. I’ll post more later.

Happy Prairie Tuesday,

Lynn

Our First “Prairie Tuesday”

Lynn — Thu, 21 May 2009 13:23:56 +0000

Please forgive us for starting our Prairie Tuesdays on a Wednesday, but I simply had to do a bit of a test run yesterday, in preparation for upcoming Tuesdays. I have to admit I was also just excited about the fun of it and didn’t want to skip it this week just because I thought of it late on Tuesday. I’ll use bullet points for the things I considered lessons, whether it’s something just talked about or a written lesson or craft.

We were so excited we forgot our bonnets! I called Michaela a bit early yesterday and told her it was Prairie Tuesday. She looked at me with a funny expression and said, “But mommy, it’s Wednesday.”

After a bit of explanation, she got up and put on some leggings a little “petticoat” and a dress. (I’ve got to make her some pantaloons! )

The day started out with:

a brief discussion about 1800s children having many more chores than children of today. They cared for younger siblings, helped with cooking and farming, and helped to make candles and things needed for the home, and more.

Children of the 1800s certainly wouldn’t get up and have a bowl of Cheerios and then visit Webkinz World before getting to work. So we had a major chore to do before we could eat breakfast!

We took the wagon to get some large stones to outline our 1800s kitchen garden. I know Princess of the Universe looks totally smile-less in the picture above, but I promise she had fun. I pulled her in the wagon on the way down and we took turns pulling the large rock we found on the way back up. By the time we placed it as the cornerstone in the kitchen garden, Michaela was “starving.” We went inside and had our breakfast, which included some of the mulberries we picked fresh the day before.

We talked about food and how much of the food eaten had to be grown by the family and then stored, how some things were traded for, and how many things were only available when ”in season.” I hope to expand on this lesson as I learn more.
We looked at roadside plants on our walk and identified those that we could. We talked about how people from the 1800s — adults and children alike — would have been familiar with the types of plants growing around them. They were used as food and medicine.

The rose above may be Rosa carolina, but I want to have another look at it today and make sure. There are several species that look similar at a glance, but there are some defining characteristics that I did not check for yesterday. In the fall, rose hips, rich in vitamin C, could be used for jellies and syrups. We also noted red clover, poison ivy, and Queen Anne’s lace (or wild carrot).

Children of long ago had to know their plants. When asked to go out and gather herbs for the stock pot, they had to be careful not to confuse wild carrot with poison hemlock. How’s that for responsibility?

For arithmetic yesterday, Michaela did a page of problems in this old math book, Ray’s New Primary Arithmetic. We had to go to the back of the book to the word problems, because she is beyond primary math at this point, but the word problems definitely made her think. For example:

“How many pine-apples, at 10 cents each, will pay for 5 peaches, at 6 cents each?”

“If 6 men can do a piece of work in 8 days, how long will it take 4 men to perform it?”

You definitely don’t have to use this particular book. You could easily make up word problems that are applicable to your pretend farm!

I was looking at this 8th grade final exam from 1895 and marveling at how the context of what children learn in school has changed. This would be a very difficult test for me because I don’t have to work and think in most of these terms anymore.

The next book we’ll be using is Lincoln’s Devotional, which I happen to have a fairly old (1957), beautiful copy of. It’s basically a book containing verses from scripture, one for each day of the year. Bible was taught as an integral part of lessons in most home and public school settings. We’ll use this for reading and copywork.

As an aside, I loved reading this about Abraham Lincoln in Carl Sandburg’s introduction:

Of course, we have some old readers that we’ll read and take copywork from as well. (I love the illustrations!)

One of our really fun lessons yesterday was making butter!

Making Butter
You need simply a container of heavy whipping cream (we used 16 oz.) and some jars with lids.
Fill a jar about half full of whipping cream, put the lid on and shake. (We each had our own jar.) After about 5 minutes this whipping cream will start to become thick and frothy. Keep shaking. Eventually it should harden and turn into butter, and you may even have it separate into butter and buttermilk, depending on how much butterfat is in the whipping cream you buy. You can use the butter and drink the buttermilk. (They didn’t waste anything in the 1800s!)

Our whipping cream got thicker and thicker and ended up being like whipped butter. It tasted yummy — like real butter, but mild and light. We didn’t end up with any buttermilk.

Papa Bear, who grew up on a working dairy farm and who milked cows every day and grew up drinking raw cow’s milk to his heart’s content, explained to us about butter. When you have a bucket of milk from the cow, over time the cream will rise to the top. You can scoop that off; it’s full of butter fat. When you churn it, the butter will form, just like when shaking the jars, only I imagine raw milk fresh from the cow would be amazingly and deliciously different. Maybe we can actually do something like this some time!

For supper last night we boiled a chicken. We pretended that we had to go out and kill it. I even fried the chicken liver, which was yummy, and Michaela studied the chicken heart and looked at the chambers. (Don’t worry, we washed our hands really good.) Later on, we had chicken and dumplings, and bread with our homemade butter. Yum.

For writing yesterday, Michaela wrote her first letter as an 1800s farm girl. It was full of adventure. That’s all I’m going to say, as I plan to mail it out to a wild west cousin. I just need to copy it first so I’ll have a copy for her notebook.

After yesterday, a million fun lessons are swirling around in my mind. We have seeds to plant, a sampler to make, clothes to sew, games to play, and so much more. I can’t wait until next Tuesday!

I’ll leave you with a picture from one of our garden beds and a list of books I’ve pulled out to use, so far:

Lincoln’s Devotional
Ray’s New Primary Arithmetic
Little House in the Big Woods – We love the edition with Garth Williams’ illustrations.
Nancy Hanks of Wilderness Road: A Story of Abraham Lincoln’s Mother
All of our McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers
Little House on the Prairie

Prairie Tuesdays

admin — Wed, 20 May 2009 00:24:39 +0000

I had an idea today that I’m excited about! I’m calling it Prairie Tuesdays. Every Tuesday — for awhile, Michaela and I are going to dress in our very best prairie clothes and live like in the “old days.”

Well, “prairie clothes” may end up being something just a bit more old-fashioned than usual, and “old days” may end up being a meal by candlelight and an old recipe for supper. Still, I want Tuesdays to be prairie days.

I chose to call this endeavor Prairie Tuesday because I’ve been reading to Michaela from the Little House books and I just love the things we are learning as far as how people procured and kept their food, how they cleaned, hunted, etc.

Having plenty of bonnets and aprons will be no problem because my mother makes them!

A little bonnet my mother made for me.

Some of the ideas I have had for Prairie Tuesdays are:

rising early to do “farm chores” (think garden and bunnies)
writing letters to our imaginary cousins who moved west and telling them how things are going back here on the farm (I wondered if any of our pen pals would want to participate)
writing letters from the Wild West to our imaginary cousins back home on the farm
reading first-hand letters and stories from the 1800s. In fact, I know one of our first choices will be “A Letter From A Pioneer” in our book Real Life Stories and Literary Selections
baking bread
making a craft
sewing
hanging laundry on the line
our school journal entries on Tuesdays will be all about old-time living or something pioneer we are studying
studying 1800s history and people
listening to music from the 1800s
old-time arithmetic (I know I have some old school books around the house)
nothing electronic, i.e. games, computer, movies
visits to local antique stores and historic sites

I know my time could be limited as far as Princess of the Universe being willing to dress in “prairie” clothes, but maybe not. After all, I’m still doing stuff like this and I’m way past the 10-year mark.

I’ll be going through my home library tonight to begin getting books together. I know I have plenty of good things on our shelves. I just need to go through and mark them and make notes.

Maybe you are wondering what made me think this up?

Well, I’ll tell you anyway.

Today Michaela and I took the ladder outside and picked mulberries. It was so much fun and it just felt so clean and old-fashioned compared to CD ROMs, DVDs, being cooped up inside, etc. I thought how fun it would be to dress the part and spend the day doing old-fashioned things. An idea was born.

In other news…

Around the garden, there is a shift from early spring to summer-coming-on, even though the last couple of nights have been chilly. The day lilies are getting taller.

The yarrow, or soldier wort, is blooming.

I have a “gold flame” Spirea that’s in bloom.

The Doll House…

On a final, fun note, the dolls received gifts last week! You simply must visit the doll house.

Happy Prairie Tuesday!

Lynn