One of Michaela’s narration assignments today was this:  Choose any one of the fairies we have talked about from The Fairy-Land of Science and draw me a picture of what you think she looks like.

This is the completed assignment and I absolutely love it.  I asked her which fairy this is, but I shouldn’t have had to ask. The shield on her chest is a snowflake. (Of course, six sides!) Her cheeks are rosy because it’s so cold.  Her wand is tipped with ice and represents the power that she has in nature.  That’s a snowball on her crown and the smaller snowballs have upsidedown icicles on them.  I think she was paying attention to the story.    Did you notice that fairy Crystallization is able to wear flip-flops in the snow?

One of her assignments for tomorrow (her boxes are all full and ready to go) is to look at this picture and tell me how it makes her feel, and she can do this by writing or by drawing at her easel.  I’m anxious to see what she chooses.  I’ll let you know.

I’m liking that the paintings from our artist study for this term are in the noteook in covers. At this point I am introducing one at a time with an assignment.

Lynn

We’ve completed our second week of school, our second week of using Ambleside Online, and all is well.

Michaela’s first written narration attempt was so cute, folded up like a little love letter and slipped into my “in box” on the Narration Station. I want longer entires with more details, but no way will I be too critical on this first attempt!  She did it with willingness and seems to be enjoying this particular book very much.  I believe as we go along, the written narrations will improve and we’ll find more and more ways to incorporate written narration.

I have already found two ways of incorporating narration: one will be her art appreciation notebook and another will be her timeline.

As we cover people and events in our reading, I am providing images to Michaela. (One more reason to love old, tattered history books from the thrift store.) Each image is glued onto a note card where she can write down information, dates, copywork, or narration and then the whole card can be trimmed of excess and glued onto the time line. The timeline is a series of 8-1/2 x 11 art pages taped together. This will easily come down at the end of the year where it can be folded accordian style and glued into her end-of-year notebook.

The thought of written narration has mae me really excited about all we can put on the timeline. Why can’t narration and even copywork be glued onto the timeline for us to see regularly? 

One of the facets of Ambleside Online that I have not written much about is the artist study. Each term of every year one artist is studied. There is a group online that has links to PDF images (so kindly put up by one of the members — thank you) for personal school use. I copied the files to a CD and had them printed onto beautiful 8-1/2 x 11 glossy photo paper for around 1 dollar each.

Michaela now has an art notebook in which these will be kept in clear protectors. Michaela put them into the protectors and then the notebook yesterday, in the order she wanted, and we talked about the name of each painting.

Her art appreciation notebook will be another way to implement narration and copywork. The only way she will truly remember about Raphael and these paintings is to read about them, talk about them and look at them. I will assign narration and copywork related to this art throughout the term and she can put it into her notebook to refer back to.

We have done an art wall in the past, but I think including copywork and narration in a notebook will help Michaela learn the artist even better.

I feel like we are really getting into a nice routine here, but we need to step up the reading. I’ve been very relaxed this first two weeks, allowing us two weeks to do one week’s worth of reading. (The assigments are plenteous!)

To complicate our already busy schedule, Michaela, as she put it, “messed up her peace sign” this week.

Yes, her left index finger fell victim to a backyard stunt that went terribly wrong and we spent an evening in the ER, didn’t get to bed until after midnight, and slept late the next morning. 

In a nutshell, she tried to jump through a seat-swing hanging from a swingset (running, by the way), got her finger tangled in the rope which twisted her, by her finger, so hard that it threw her to the ground, abraded all the skin off the underside of her finger and made her finger turn blue and become as big as her brother’s finger.  I think she thought that last part was cool, if it weren’t for the pain.  We’ve been icing and buddy-taping and waiting to see the orthopedist to make sure there’s no hairline fracture around a growth plate.

Hopefully we’ll be even more on track with reading next week. Real construction began on the potting shed today, so I’ll be putting up pictures soon. We have science experiements to talk about, and more! Until then…

Happy Saturday!

Oh, you know me and visual appeal.  I love the thought of having something visually stimulating when it comes to assigning lessons and inspiring children to want to create and write and do.

Narration, or the act of telling back in some form what she is reading, will be a bit of a change for Michaela.  I have always incorporated some of Charlotte Mason’s ideas into our schooling, but following the CM style and Ambleside very closely this year, Michaela will be doing a lot of narrating.

If I say, “You are going to tell me every day what you’ve read,” oh my does that produce some sort of expression!

In this pretty, old creamer are narration assignments.  I’ll continue to add to them as I get ideas through the year.

Here are the ideas written down so far:

• If you could send a postcard to tell me what happened, what would it say? Create it! Illustrate, including the stamp! 
• Reporter! Make me a news story to tell what happened.  In fact, do a newspaper page including ads, sales, whatever!
• Draw a picture of one of the scenes you read about today. You can add words if you like.
• Imagine! If the characters could magically fly to modern times, what would they think? Would things have been different for them?
• Use these words to write a creative story about a character you are reading about. (To do this I pull words from the reading and let her choose randomly as she writes.)
• You are the main character and want someone to visit you. Make a travel brochure telling them why they must see where you are.
• Pretend you are the main character and write a journal entry about what happened.

This idea came to me when I found a piece of bright red fabric at The Scrap Exchange. It already had two pockets sewn onto it, but nothing else going on. Except my idea to turn it into a pretty “in/out box” for our writing assignments!

I hot-glued one end over a hanger and then began to embellish it with pretty fabric and tags. I reinforced the back and gave it more length by hot-gluing a bright white and red piece of fabric to the back.

The out box is where I put outgoing narration assignments for Michaela.  I choose an assignment that I think is especially good for what was just read. For example, Michaela talks about Isaac Newton’s mother as if she knows her so I think for her to write a journal entry as Hannah would be good.

There’s a pretty strip of fabric that hangs from the top. It’s our “ready” signal. We can switch it back and forth from “in” to “out,” something fun to signal we’re done!

The “in” box of course is where she puts her assignment incoming to me. She can fold her paper in half longways and slip it right in!

I am already working diligently week by week on our end-of-year notebook (I ended up going with spiral again!) and all of her narration projects will be put into this as we go.

I feel like at some point we won’t be using this bright Narration Station day in and day out for every little thing, but as we make the transition into Ambleside and get Michaela used to narrating, it’s something to make it more fun.

I’m not sure at this point how Charlotte Mason would have felt about it, but given her respect for a mother’s need to lead and nurture and her awareness that children were individuals, after all, I think she would have known that I’m just a visually driven, artsy person who had to do this. 

Narration Help Resources

• Lapbooking and Charlotte Mason
• Simply Charlotte Mason Narration Ideas
• Ambleside Online Language Arts Scope and Sequence for Language Arts

More to come!

Lynn

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