April | 2013 | Homeschool Discoveries

Book Discoveries this Week: From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler April 4, 2013

Filed under: Books — kirstenjoyhill @ 5:03 pm
Tags: read-aloud

This year for our bedtime reading, Miss M and I have mostly read books to correlate with our American History studies. Before beginning a serious read-aloud about the Civil War, however, Miss M and I decided to pick something more on the “light and fun” side of things.

From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg is a book I am nearly certain I read in elementary school, though before we started reading I couldn’t really remember much about it other than it had something to do with kids running away to an art museum.

Claudia and Jamie are two kids from the suburbs who decide to run away together. Claudia is the instigator in this effort, and she wants not just to run away to some random place — she chooses the Metropolitan Museum of Art as her destination. Claudia is dissatisfied with all the typical things — life is boring, parents are unfair, allowance is too small, brothers (except for Jamie, apparently) are too annoying. She and Jamie leave for school one day with instrument cases packed with clothes, and head for the city instead of the school building.

The two kids manage to hide well enough in the museum to not get caught each night, and find a large old bed to sleep in. They become intrigued by the mystery of a statue that the museum purchased at a bargain price, and may have sculpted by Michelangelo. Claudia and Jamie hope they can solve the mystery of the statue — a quest that takes over any other reason they may have run away.

Miss M and I had a good time with this book — it was hard to put down each night at bedtime (always the sign of a good book!). I’m sure Miss M could relate to many of Claudia’s complaints about life (especially the part about the brothers!). I think there is something appealing at any age to hiding somewhere exciting like a museum and getting away with it! Miss M and I had a great discussion about how a story like this might have been somewhat realistic in the 1960s when this book was published (It won the Newberry in 1968), it could probably not happen now — art museums have much more sophisticated security systems these days!

This is a bit of a “finding yourself” sort of a story as well. Claudia wrestles with why she really wanted to run away — what her purpose was in it and what she wanted to accomplish. I found Claudia to be very relate-able as a character — when she is a bad mood or frustrated she “needs an argument.” I may or may not resemble that characteristic. 😉 I’m sure I must have really enjoyed it as a child as well.

From the Mixed Up Files… would be another great choice for a mid to upper elementary student to read alone, but it made a very enjoyable read-aloud to share together too.

I’m linking up with Read-Aloud Thursday @ Hope is the Word!

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Curriculum Discoveries: The Sentence Family

Filed under: Curriculum — kirstenjoyhill @ 12:11 am
Tags: grammar

It’s been my plan for a while to delay formal grammar instruction until at least 4th grade. A friend I really respect in this aspect of homeschooling gave me advice that tended in this direction, and given that a big priority for me with Miss M has been to work on her spelling, I was eager to follow this advice.

With spelling going quite well, I decided that it might be time to add in a little bit of “fun” grammar as a preparation for more serious grammar studies next year. I had read some good reviews of The Sentence Family, so I decided to give it a try. It’s available as an inexpensive download at currclick.com, and this was the format I purchased it in.

The Sentence Family takes the parts of speech, as well as four main types of sentences, and turns them into characters that are all part of the same family. Each member of the family has a short story about him/her, and these comprise the chapters or lessons of the text. Each lesson also has suggestions or directions for drawing a picture of the character, and sample pictures are provided. The chapters are quite short and take only a few minutes to read, though there is also the additional time for drawing to consider. The drawing is really a pretty key part of his program, as the drawings help the student remember key details about how each part of speech or type of sentence operates.

Since no student workbook or notebooking pages are provided for drawing each character, I created my own simple notebooking pages to go along with The Sentence Family. I bound a little notebook together for each of the three older kids using my proclick filled with one page for each Sentence Family character.

After the four sentence types and several of the parts of speech are introduced, there is a brief lesson on diagramming sentences. We skipped this portion, as I didn’t want to take our study to that depth. Example sentences are provided in several places in The Sentence Family, and we did use these sentence to do some “color coding.” Each part of speech is assigned a favorite color, and Miss M coded the sentences using these colors.

I originally assumed that only Miss M (3rd grade, age 8.5) would participate in The Sentence Family. Much to my surprise, Mr. E (Age 6, Kindergarten) and even Mr. K (age 4, Pre-K) wanted to listen in and draw pictures for each character as well! While I am not sure the boys will remember the parts of speech very clearly, early exposure to grammar concepts certainly won’t hurt anything!

We read Sentence Family two or three times per week, and possibly even missed a few weeks here and there all together. It’s a fairly short book (only 14 chapters if you don’t count the section on diagramming), and we completed it in less than three months. All the kids were sad to see it come to an end!

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C is for Chronological April 1, 2013

Filed under: History — kirstenjoyhill @ 11:00 pm

I decided pretty early on in my research about homeschooling that a chronological study of history was sensible and appealing. After all, history has a clear path to it — it begins at creation and moves steadily toward the present day. Why not study it that way?

Like most of us, I didn’t study history chronologically when I was in school. In fact, other than a brief study of state history in sixth grade, I don’t remember studying history very much at all in school until I had US History from the Civil War to the present in 8th grade. After 8th grade we moved to a different school district, and I took a year of Ancient History in 10th grade, and another year of US History from the Civil War to the present in 11th grade. Lucky me to get the same thing twice! I guess if we wouldn’t have moved, I might have gotten the first part of American History sometime after having gotten the second part.

Despite my lack of history study at school, I grew up in a family that loved and appreciated history, and we watched many historical movies and documentaries at home. My mom passed on to me her love for European history (especially the history of England), so in college I selected the History of Western Medieval Europe and The History of England as humanities electives.

While I did enjoy all this exposure to history, it was very disjointed. I knew a lot about a few time periods, while knowing next to nothing about other important time periods (like the Revolutionary War or other early American history).

With Miss M, after dabbling in a bit of light US History and World Geography in her Kindergarten year, we embarked on what I planned to be a 4 year history cycle when she was in 1st grade. We covered world history from creation to about 1600 using Mystery of History, then switched to US History, which I plan to cover over two years. Then we’ll go back to Ancient History.

All of that is a backdrop to a recent conversation I had with Miss M:

Me: Mrs. B___ told me that this book [a book about the underground railroad] was her daughter M___’s favorite about that topic.

Miss M: Oh, is the B____ family studying American History this year too?

Me: No, they study history a little bit differently than we do. They study different picture books, and use those to inspire their studies of different topics in history and geography. I prefer a chronological study of history, so that’s what I planned for our family.

Miss M: Oh, so what does chronological mean again?

Me: It means studying history in time order, from the beginning until now

Miss M: That makes sense. Like we started this year at the beginning of American history, and we are moving closer and closer to now.

Me: Right, but we started a couple years ago, way back at the beginning of time. Do you remember that?

Miss M: Oh, you mean those books we used to read?

Me: Yes, Mystery of History

Miss M: Yeah, those seemed kind of like a bunch of random stories. You mean they were chronological too?

Me: (wanting to smack my forehead). Yes, they were definitely chronological. I guess we should have kept up on our timeline. Maybe then it would have been a bit more obvious that it was chronological!

——

Do I regret using Mystery of History (volume 1 through the first half of volume 3) in first and second grade? No, but I now can look back on it and see that we could have done “something else” and her overall memory and understanding of history from Creation to 1600 might not be all that different. She definitely enjoyed it most of the time while we were reading MOH those two years, and she always looked forward to our history time together.

Will I continue with a chronological study of history? Yes, if nothing else because it does make sense and seem easier to me as far as planning goes. We may even repeat Mystery of History again, since Miss M will get a lot more out of it as a 5th-6th grader (and Mr. E will be a 2nd-3rd grader when we wrap back around to ancient history!). But maybe we’ll also take more time for tangents or “out of timeline” topical studies. After all, there is so much history to learn that a person can easily spend a lifetime learning about it!

I’m linking up with Blogging through the Alphabet @ Ben and Me!