Educating Oaks

November is glorious in Oklahoma. This year the colors have been brilliant, the sky has been a beautiful azure blue, and temperatures have been pretty mild. It is December 1. We haven’t turned on the heat yet, but the air conditioner is definitely off.

This was a particularly busy month. Every day on my calendar had more than one thing outside the house scheduled. It was a month of finishing-things-up. Josiah and Gideon finished up their term in Foundations and Essentials. Micah took blue books for Challenge 2, and I gave exams for Challenge 3 and wrote progress reports.  There were meetings, field trips, and dentist appointments.

Rejoice:I have still been staying up late with Jon and Micah, so I am not getting up early enough for a long and quiet morning study period alone with my coffee. I did write a gratitude-based series on Instagram in November, and I was consistent with Bible study but not personal reading.

Relate: Our CC community is now on recess until January. We miss seeing our friends consistently, but we were all very much ready for a break from the pace of life when classes are in session. Jon and Micah and I continued to work companionably at the big table in the evening. Occasionally, one of us tutors him in algebra or Latin or edits work for him. Most of the time, we are all working on our own projects. We have enjoyed hanging out with him as fellow autodidacts.

Remember:  We had three or four Council of Oaks meetings a week and did memory work each time. We are on track with Foundations memory work, but the younger boys fell behind with the Essentials memory work because they didn’t want to take time to recite a chart for an adult in class.  We did a few more Spanish and German lessons and learned our hymns and poetry. It feels like we are behind in Scripture memory work, but in reality,  I had delusions of grandeur when I made the Memory Work Packs for each month. I’ll fix that.

Reason:  Math, Algebra 2, and Calculus are all on track. Logic and Latin are on track. English grammar is too. Check. Check. Check.

Read: Josiah and Gideon and I finally finished Abigail Adams: Witness to a Revolution by Natalie Bober. We read it a little bit a day over fifteen weeks, and it was enjoyable.  Abigail was quite a behind-the-scenes hero of the American Revolution, and her story was engaging.

Record:  I wrote mostly on Instagram, and I met the monthly challenge on 750words.com. The boys all wrote essays for school, and Micah wrote his blue book exams. I did a lot of essay reading and coaching.  I have a couple of ideas for article series for this blog, but I can’t decide where to start.

Books Finished in November:

By Micah: Jane Eyre, plus a lot of other school reading and internet research

By Josiah: Nathan Hale’s Raid of No Return and Natalie Bober’s Abigail Adams: Witness to a Revolution., Of Courage Undaunted by James Daughtery, And a pile of re-reading. He is still finishing up The Silver Chair and Johnny Tremain.

By Gideon: Nathan Hale’s Raid of No Return and Natalie Bober’s Abigail Adams: Witness to a Revolution. Of Courage Undaunted by James Daughtery, And a pile of re-reading. He is still finishing up The Last Battle and Johnny Tremain.

By Me: a whole stack of cookbooks (none of which I would particularly recommend), a book about dot journaling, (from which I learned nothing new), and I started eight books and finished none of them. For recipes and bullet journaling ideas, Pinterest is still my go-to.

(Links in this post are Amazon affiliate links. Any funds earned through them go to support our homeschool.)

 

Like every other household in the world, we have a hard time fitting things in. One that we have found particularly difficult to put into the schedule is time to study the scriptures together. As our kids get older and as work gets more hectic, we no longer are all home after dinner every day. Jon leaves for work early quite often, and he isn’t home by the time the boys and I sit down for a council meeting. We read the Bible as part of that most days.

Jon and I were talking while we were gone to Kansas City a couple of weeks ago, and we realized that we will only have all of these boys under our roof for two and a half more years. We decided to look for a Bible reading plan for our family that will insure that Micah has read and heard the full council of Scripture at least twice more before he leaves this house. We settled on the Bible Project’s Read Scripture app for daily reading assignments, though we are aware that we won’t be successful every day. We’ll try hard, and Jon might miss some of it.

On Sunday morning, we are all home and committed to a slow morning after Saturday night church. Once everyone is up, Breakfast Man make the pancakes and bacon, and we feast on maple syrup and scripture. It isn’t fancy, and it isn’t a perfect plan, but perhaps we can build a daily habit of systematic scripture reading into these boys before they leave us.

Breakfast Man’s Pancakes

Normal-Sized Recipe:

Beat together:

• 6 eggs
• 4 c. milk
• 3 T. butter, melted
• 6 T sugar
• 1 t vanilla

Combine in a bigger bowl

• 4 c. flour (ours is gluten free)
• 2 heaping T baking powder
• ½ t. salt

Get your griddle or skillet ready. Pour wet ingredients over dry ingredients and mix together.

Make pancakes. Add blueberries or chocolate chips if you want.

We make the super-sized version of this, and it makes enough for one big breakfast and six extra cups of batter. Those six cups are divided between two quart mason jars and stuck in the fridge for mid-week waffles. When it is time to make waffles, we add two tablespoons of avocado oil to one of the jars, and whisk it up.

Super Size Version:

Beat together:

• 8 eggs
• 5 c. milk
• 5 T. butter, melted
• 8 T sugar
• 2 t vanilla

Combine in a bigger bowl

• 5 c. flour (ours is gluten free)
• 3 heaping T baking powder
• 1 t. salt

Proceed as directed above.

One thing that we do to simplify our mornings is to cycle through the same breakfasts every week.  These boys like to eat, and we tend to not buy much processed food. My challenge was to find things we all didn’t mind eating over and over again that were easy to make, gluten free, eaten by everyone and low prep on the morning we were going to eat them.

Each Sunday, we eat pancakes or waffles and bacon for lunch and leave two mason jars of leftover pancake batter in the refrigerator. On Sunday afternoon, we will stir up Breakfast Cookie dough and press it into two pans.

On the mornings we need to leave the house quickly, we will bake and eat the breakfast cookie bars that we prepped on Sunday. They have to bake for a while, but the prep is completely hands off.  On mornings we aren’t running out the door, we’ll add a little oil to the leftover pancake batter and make waffles. Those waffles are either eaten with ham, cheese, and eggs or with peanut butter and jelly. The fifth morning is either toast and sausage or frozen potato cakes and sausage.

On Saturday and Sunday, we leave people to fend for themselves until lunchtime. They can choose from cereal, omelets, yogurt, oatmeal or eggs. But everyone is responsible for his own food and for his own mess.

Oatmeal and More Breakfast Cookies

Makes 2 9×9 pans of bar cookies

Cream together:

• ¾ cup sugar
• ¼ c butter, softened (or coconut oil)

Mix in until combined:

• 1 cup nut butter that makes you happy (We use peanut or almond depending on what’s in the pantry)
• 2 eggs

Mix in until combined:

• 1 ½ tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp chia seeds
• 2 scoops protein powder (We’ve used several with success. I’ve also left it out and added an extra ½ cup of oats)

Stir in:

• 3 c quick oats (We use gluten free oats here, but if you don’t, it shouldn’t change things)
• 1 cup craisins, raisins, nuts, chocolate chips or a combination thereof

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spray or butter or oil two 9×9 or 8×8 pans.  Divide the dough between the pans. Press it out somewhat, but don’t stress over getting it flat. Bake until done – about 20 minutes, I think.

What can you think of that you can do ahead of time so that you and your family start the day well?

It is suddenly October, and I haven’t written the wrap up post for September.

We had a good September learning about Igor Stravinsky, Thomas Moran, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George Washington, Abigail Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Linneaus and Thomas Jefferson. We explored the people and places of American history up to the War of 1812, and we are on track with science experiments and reading. Micah finished his work for Challenge 2 for the month. I am mostly caught up in tutoring duties for my Challenge 3 class. We did some work for The Little Light House, and we participated in a jog-a-thon to raise money for that organization.

I am constantly doing the next thing, but I am never finished.  In this odd season that I am in, where most of the homeschooling work is to direct children back to their assignments when they are distracted and only a little is hands-on teaching, I have snippets of time to learn things that I will need to know in a little while (like Chemistry and Calculus), and I have snippets of time to tutor my mom-friends in Latin and math as needed.  It seems like I should have more time to do other things than I actually do. I wish I didn’t need quiet in order to write. I’d get a lot more written if that were the case.

Books finished by Micah: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin, and  “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift. He also read snippets of other books that he will read a little at a time over the year and did some internet reading of research for a large project.

Books Josiah finished:  The Witch of Blackbird Pond (which he was surprised to learn isn’t about a witch at all) and The Horse and His Boy, bits and pieces of other books that he will finish over time. He also read most of the Ranger’s Apprentice series.

Books Gideon finished: The Witch of Blackbird Pond, The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian,  bits and pieces of other books that he will finish over time. He feel in love with Narnia, and he read most of the Ranger’s Apprentice series too.

Books I finished: Reading People by Anne Bogel,  The Millennials, Hamlet, Of Mess and Moxie by Jen Hatmaker, Jane of Lantern Hill, and some articles and parts of books about education and teaching, like Stratford Caldecott’s Beauty for Truth’s Sake.

(Links in this post are Amazon affiliate links. Any funds earned through them go to support our homeschool.)

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I have organized our entire school schedule around working in one month blocks. The younger boys’ schedule and copywork books are done by the month. Drew and I tend to both work about a month at a time. It does mean that some months have only three weeks instead of four. But it is an amount of time for which I can see the end from the beginning. Most of the time by the beginning of a month, I have a clear idea of what it will hold for us schedule-wise. I can plan meals and such around the activities, and I can see which weeks will have a lack of school time (like the week of the 16^th of September) and which ones will afford us more time at home doing as we ought. It is hard to keep a balance between the two.

SO – In August, I discovered that I was too ambitious with our scripture memory work. I need to add some copywork for it, maybe into a commonplace book or something like that. We didn’t manage to memorize the first twelve verses of Philippians. But we did learn the first six. But we do have them down pretty well. I am concerned that the poem that we have on deck for September may be too long. But I know that the rhythm of the poem will make a difference in how well we can memorize it.

Books read by Micah: Beowulf by Seamus Heaney, the Tolkien Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, parts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Books Josiah read:  The Magician’s Nephew, Oceans of Truth, Amos Fortune, Free Man, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Books Gideon read: The Magician’s Nephew, Oceans of Truth, Amos Fortune, Free Man, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Books I read: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Gracelaced by Ruth Chou Simons

(Links in this post are Amazon affiliate links. Any funds earned through them go to further our education budget.)

Wonder drives learning. Nothing else really works. Ambition doesn’t drive education at all. It just compels the learner to think more of herself than she ought. I am completely fascinated about how passion and beauty drive education, but really, all of that boils down to the ability to wonder. God fascinates me, and the amount of talent and effort that people spend in worship of Him is amazing.

“General curiosity, imagination in forming hypotheses, and method in testing them, then, mark the classical spirit of inquiry. This bent of mind allows the educated man to go on educating himself or extending the realms of knowledge for his fellows” (Hicks, Norms and Nobility 18).

If I wonder at something – the turn of a phrase in a poem or a hymn, a scientific fact, a historical event – my children usually will wonder with me. If we are walking in the neighborhood and I marvel at a mushroom, they will take note of it also, whether they comment on it or not.

I wish I could get them out in real nature more. I wish we had a travel trailer and could easily camp in as many National Parks as possible, but I can’t make that happen right now. But we find plenty to wonder at in our own yard, in city parks and gardens, and on friends’ farms.

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As you can see, our Council meeting runs on routine. While we plan to start at 8am this year, I don’t tie our mornings closely to a clock. We’ve tried that, it is frustrates me because we are constantly behind. Instead, we tie our activities to each other, and we continue through the tasks in a particular order.
Chores are done before breakfast. Council meeting is followed by Algebra for Micah and kitchen cleanup for the younger boys. 

Micah will continue through his own work while I help the younger boys. I’ll read aloud before math. After math, they are off to a reading assignment, and I station myself at the kitchen table where I have a view of the living room and the kitchen to work on my own tasks until someone has a question. Gideon and Josiah come back to the table for narration and copywork (from Foundations memory work), then go read something else. They return to the table for narration and Essentials work. After that, it is time for either IEW work or lunch preparation.

We have lunch sometime between 12:30 and 1pm. Micah eats with us, and they listen to a non-school audio book or watch a thirty minute show while I eat by myself in another room. (That is an Introvert’s survival technique.)  

If Gideon and Josiah have been diligent with their other work, then IEW can be done before lunch and the rest of the day is theirs. If we had orchestra practice in the morning, if I need to go to a class at lunchtime, or if people lolly-gagged around instead of working, they work on their IEW projects after lunch.

The routine means that everyone knows what to expect. If we practice the habits of attention, obedience, and best effort, we are rewarded with time for masterly inactivity.

Have you been wondering what a Council of Oaks Meeting (our Morning Time) looks like? It really isn’t complicated, and being prepared makes it less complicated.

We sit around the table with our memory work notebooks and my iPad or computer. Any other books we need are handy on my school cart. We start our hour with eating breakfast and listening together to the day’s scripture reading and a read-aloud that everyone is listening to (Trial and Triumph, This Country of Ours, Plutarch, or Charlotte Mason’s Ourselves). That takes about twenty minutes. Since most of us aren’t really ready to talk yet, this works just fine. When the listening portion is over, we carry our dishes to the kitchen and come right back.

If all goes as planned, we open up our memory work notebooks and start on the day’s memory work, which includes some recitation and a lot of singing. We work through the daily tab, the even or the odd tab (according to the date), the day of the week tab, and one numerical tab. (We don’t do the date for that. We just do the next one, and I mark the next day’s with a post-it. That’s because we have stuff in 24 tabs, and we want to make sure we hit them all regularly. This gets us through all our review work once every six weeks.) Working through just the memory work takes about twenty-five minutes, so this brings our total time invested to forty-five minutes, give or take.

We use  Spanish and German resources from Cherrydale Press and Latin resources from Classical Conversations and Visual Latin. Reviewing those series is incorporated into the memory work binder. We’ve done 2/3 of the Spanish book, and we are starting the German book. If students in Europe can learn three languages at a time, I guess we can too. (I teach Latin, have a degree in Spanish and study German also. I love linguistics and am passing that on to my children. It is more normal in the US to learn one language at a time. Charlotte Mason’s students were mostly English speaking. They started French at age 6, German at age 8, and Latin at age 10. We are running a few years late on the German, and we swapped in Spanish instead of French because we hear it around here. In England, French was the most important language for Charlotte’s students to know. In Oklahoma, Spanish is definitely more often used than French is, so this swap is logical. This takes about ten minutes a day, bringing the total time to fifty-five minutes so far.

After memory work, we look at some beautiful things. Most of the material for this is on the Resources page for the Memory Work Pack we are working on. I read a poem aloud from the month’s poet. One day of the week, we’ll look at work from the Artist of the Month. Another day, we will listen to a snippet of the month’s composer. I might read a little of a biography of one or the other. One day we will listen to or watch a scene from Shakespeare or read from Shakespeare. The fourth day, we usually skip this portion for music lessons or orchestra practice, or our twice monthly meeting with other Charlotte Mason families. This beautiful portion takes about ten minutes, so now we are up to sixty-five minutes.

Last, but not least, this year in our Council meeting we will do a cursive handwriting lesson, because this needs more attention in our house. Micah is working on speed and endurance, and Josiah and Gideon need practice forming letters and stringing them together smoothly. This brings our total meeting time to about an hour and fifteen minutes. I’d like to shave it down to an hour, but I don’t know what to cut.