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dinasiano
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| Posted: March 10 2014 at 6:52am | IP Logged
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Hi, we have been homeschooling for six years now. While I have always been attracted to Charlotte Mason, we haven't tried her methods.....yet  Next year I will have a toddler, a 5 yr old, a 10 yr old and a 9th grader. I have older kids in high school outside the home who were homeschooled for a while too. We always used some sort of curriculum that I kind of tweaked. I think I am ready to start using CM but I am uneasy starting it so late with my son in 9th grade.
Can anyone share some ideas and advice about starting this late in the game? Has anyone else started late?
My 8th grader doesn't enjoy reading as much as I think may be necessary. And my 4 th grader isn't reading at grade level so this is a concern too. As I look back on my own education I am kind of surprised how little I have retained  I want more for my kids and am convinced that I need to make a change here to get that. But again, I am worried about starting late and would love some ideas and encouragement. I have Miss Mason's set but I can't seem to adjust the philosophy to my older son. One specific example of what I am struggling with is narration: how would you suggest introducing this to a 13 yr old?
Thank you Ladies!
Dina
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SallyT
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| Posted: March 10 2014 at 9:35am | IP Logged
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I've had my current high-schooler (10th grade this year) keep a notebook -- actually, it's not a physical notebook but a private blog that only the two of us can access. His standing assignment is basically to post a narration of *something* out of his reading by Friday. Sometimes he does more, but that's the baseline. We don't do "pure" CM in high school, and we do outsource a number of classes, but for the integrated history/literature that I do, this is the standing thing. We do our literature chronologically, paired with history, so notebooks function as informal timeline/books of centuries, with important dates noted. I do also make some more formal, directed composition assignments, but this is the core of our reading/writing program.
We also do a lot of "narration" via informal conversation. My pose most often is that of a conversation partner interested in what my teenager is reading, thinking, and doing. I never call it "narration." I very rarely use that word at all, with anyone in my house. I just go, "Hm, tell me about that," a lot.
I try not to make my reading assignments overwhelming -- it's definitely a matter of quality over quantity. For a ninth grader, when I'm doing ancient/classical history and literature, I offer the option of using a younger-reader's version of something like The Iliad (I've done this when I've taught a co-op class with a wide range of ability and maturity levels), because to my mind what's important at this stage is cultural literacy: knowing the stories, whether they're stories from history or from literature.
What we've done is pretty rigorous overall, but I definitely give myself room to adjust down if needed. I threw a LOT at my tenth grader this year, but he's also taking a really challenging chemistry course, so I've adjusted the history/literature load a bit to accommodate the demands of that class. (Here is how I set up tenth grade -- we've ended up streamlining a lot).
I also lean heavily on Teaching Company lecture courses (which you can get with credits on Audible.com, if you have a subscription -- getting a Great Courses course for a monthly credit totally justifies the $14.95 subscription!). Being able to listen and learn from a lecture is a good college-prep activity (whether it's CM or not), and my son really enjoys them.
True Spontaneous Narration Story: This son works three afternoons a week for an equine veterinarian who's a member of our parish -- wonderful Catholic man, wonderful mentor for our son. Anyway, as he's driving around on calls, our son's boss likes to listen to Great Courses/Teaching Company lectures, and lately he's been listening his way through a course on the Crusades. Our son, who rides around with him on these calls, came home last week full of the Crusades and spent about an hour in the kitchen retelling, for my husband and me, everything he had heard. Apparently it's a pretty good course . . . at any rate, he remembered it in vivid detail. Serendipitously, that's where we are in history at the moment, so bonus! I'm completely counting this as "school."
My current 4th grader also struggles with reading. In fact, after years of trying to figure out what was up with her and reading, we're now in the middle of evaluations for vision therapy, which I hope is going to change her life! In the meantime, I just keep her reading assignments short, to alleviate the reading fatigue she experiences, and we lean a lot more on reading aloud, audiobooks, and the Kindle's text-to-speech feature than I would normally do at this age. Anything to give her the rich and varied reading diet she needs.
My word of encouragement would be that you *can* do this, at any stage. It *is* doable. What makes it doable is that you trust the books to do the heavy lifting in your child's education -- the load isn't necessarily more, because you're cutting workbooks, busy work, subjects like "vocabulary" . . . you're trusting the books to give your child what he/she needs, and you're trusting your child to process what's in the books in a valid way. So from your child's point of view, he/she isn't being given more to do. You've just shifted the emphasis from other things to, primarily, reading.
Jen Mackintosh and several others have done a more "orthodox" CM high-school education than I have thus far (I have one graduate currently in college and the aforementioned 10th grader) and can weigh in with more detail about how her philosophy and methodology play out for high school. I tend to take the philosophy and run with it, playing very fast and loose with the actual method. What I have seen thus far is that a high-school education that's full of riches -- literature, the great narratives of history, theology, languages, etc -- is a very good high-school education, even if you're not seeing a lot of hard quantifiable evidence, which is what tests, workbooks, study guides, and structured, directed educational activities really provide. It can seem like not a lot. But truly, it is. And you can totally do it.
Sally
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Mackfam
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| Posted: March 11 2014 at 12:12am | IP Logged
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For the 5 yo and 10 yo, I think I'd just start with CM full on and run with it. Of course, adjust as needed for your 10 yo's reading ability, which means you may have to read aloud more as you help him build in reading skill.
For the 9th grader, this is a bit of a different story.
How does he feel about this shift? Have you talked with him about it? What it will mean in terms of his time spent during the day, the differences in methods from what you've been doing (maybe you've been doing book reports and reading comp questions - you'll drop those in favor of narrations).
I'd probably start by sitting down and coming up with a simple list of what you're doing now, and how this year would have looked if it had been structured with CM methods and philosophy. That gives a good starting point for comparing.
Then, I'd sit down with my 9th grader to share this. Get his take.
If he's open, I'd drop any dry text from his schedule right this minute, substitute living books and start with oral narrations. I'd work on building the habit of attention to reading, and good oral narrations for the remainder of this year. That would be a great way to set you up for success next year.
I love what Sally says here:
SallyT wrote:
| What makes it doable is that you trust the books to do the heavy lifting in your child's education -- the load isn't necessarily more, because you're cutting workbooks, busy work, subjects like "vocabulary" . . . you're trusting the books to give your child what he/she needs, and you're trusting your child to process what's in the books in a valid way |
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Here's a starting plan idea:
1) Make sure he's reading living books. Not Usborne (though those are great books and good reads and a few of my kids love em - they're not what I'd consider living). Not a text. A living book. Check his booklist. If you have some twaddly stuff in there, remove it. If you're concerned about reading level, it would be better for something truly living that is around 6th grade level (if it's living, it shouldn't scream *I'm for a 6th grader!*) than to have something canned or cartoony that is supposed to appeal to an 8th grader.
2) Remove all the superfluous stuff. This would be anything that is a reading comprehension question, literary analysis, book report, spelling quiz, vocabulary work, workbook page, history activities. Cross all of that OFF HIS WORK LIST. It will be redundant and if you do it ON TOP OF CM methods, you and he will burn out fast...and you'll likely blame CM. But it will be the superfluous extras. CM is simple, efficient, and living - it's also rigorous!
3) Add a narration to his living book reading.
dinasiano wrote:
| One specific example of what I am struggling with is narration: how would you suggest introducing this to a 13 yr old? |
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Here's how this might look as you begin to build this habit:
- Start slow! Choose 2 books to begin with, that he will narrate. This is a beginning. Your goal is that ALL books would be narrated eventually, but for now - 2 books. And these should be the 2 juiciest, most enticing and delightful, adventurous books you can possibly find!
- Drop the number of pages he's assigned WAY back - maybe 2 pages of reading/day.
- Before he reads, very quietly and with not much fanfare, encourage him to pay close attention to what he reads so he can tell you about it. (You are encouraging attention to detail.) Let him read.
- Narrate immediately after reading. As Sally said, you don't have to do a big song and dance about it, announcing with a themed song, "It's Narration Time!!!" Just ask him to tell you about what he read. Plain and simple. Your job is to be engaged and listen.
- Do your best NOT to interrupt, and if possible, let him narrate at a quiet point in your day (I've got a broad age range, too, and littles that chat - my big kids narrate while I make dinner, or during naptimes).
- At the end of his narration, let yourself ask a couple of questions if you were unclear about something. Allow the narration to take the form of a conversation if he's open. He's old enough to have opinions - welcome them if he offers them.
- The total time spent on a narration will vary, but don't be alarmed if this takes 5 - 10 minutes to begin with. Boys can be succinct in their narrations. This is fine. Ask yourself: Having not read the selection, could you understand what was read? Basic ideas? Main characters? If yes, great job! If no, encourage him to pay close attention to his reading the next day, and ask him to really try to pay attention to the character's names so he can tell you those after he reads today.
- After a week, evaluate - is he having a hard time? You may need to drop the amount of pages he's reading even more. Don't worry if you have to get crazy here! Is he slowly but surely starting to get the idea of narrating after reading? Continue for another week and re-evaluate again.
- After a month, increase the amount he's reading a day, and perhaps add in one more book for a daily narration.
- Do not even think about written narrations until whichever of these two items happens first:
1) Half a year has passed. At mid-point of your year, re-evaluate.
2) He is narrating every bit of his reading orally with ease and good detail. He narrates without being prompted.
- Come back to us for written narration instruction - but don't worry!!!!!!!! I cannot emphasize this enough! Just as developmentally you should crawl before you walk - you should narrate orally before it's written! It builds key pre-writing skills that can't be understated! It's TOTALLY FINE if this takes a year to build into a solid habit!
Yes, you'd be starting some of this late with a 9th grader, but I don't see it as something impossible. I'd start with the cornerstones:
** History as the pivot for your curriculum
** Worthy, living books
** Narration
** Work on understanding how to implement education as: (1) atmosphere, (2) discipline, (3) life.
...you can definitely build from there!
__________________
Jen Mackintosh
Wife to Rob, mom to dd 19 , ds 16, ds 11, dd 8, and dd 3
Wildflowers and Marbles
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dinasiano
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| Posted: March 11 2014 at 5:23am | IP Logged
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Wow! Sally and Jen, thank you so much. I have to print this out so I can refer back to it. I definitely will come back to ask questions as I go along, if that's ok.
So, are you saying that even if it takes a full year to implement, his high school education won't suffer? Wait...I know the answer. I know this will enhance his education no matter what.
I think one of the reasons I have been dragging my feet is because I'm afraid “ I" don't have the discipline. I have to master many good habits myself. With a lot of prayer and support I can do this. I am so grateful for this forum
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SallyT
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| Posted: March 11 2014 at 8:20am | IP Logged
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Wow, Jen's concrete suggestions are excellent. And yes, bringing your high-schooler into the planning process as a participant in his own education is a crucial step.
Ninth grade is actually not a bad year to be a "building" year, and a "training" year. It's a big step for any student, even if methods don't change that much. You are, or should be, in any event, working to transition that student into a level of independence with his work that may be far beyond what he's had before (though ideally it's a gradual transition happening through middle school).
And as long as the bases are covered, however you cover them, he'll be fine. Having the bases covered means that you're providing reading in the following areas:
*literature
*history
*geography (though this can be folded into history -- doesn't have to be a discrete subject for you to count it as a separate subject on his transcript, if you want to do that)
*science (might or might not have a lab component -- colleges do like to see at least one lab science, and kids attracted to STEM-type things would ideally need three lab sciences as part of college prep)
*religion/theology
PLUS
*math
*foreign language
So, if he's reading living books that cover all of the above for *roughly* 5 hours per week per subject, plus doing math and a foreign language, you're good to go. And if it seems like a lot, consider that you *can* fold subjects into each other, integrating your reading by choosing books that cover more than one subject area. I always do history and literature in tandem, with various historical readings that follow a chronology and are paired with either literature from a given period OR historical fiction.
Here's how that works for us in Grade 9, when we start over with ancient and classical history as our organizing principle:
Reading list:
Spine text (we've used Warren Carroll's Founding of Christendom, and also the Foundations of Western Civilization I course from the Teaching Company -- highly recommended!)
plus literature:
myths (Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman)
Cat of Bubastes (historical fiction -- Egypt)
biblical literature (psalms, excerpts from Job)
David of Jerusalem (historical fiction by Louis de Wohl)
Iliad
Odyssey
Antigone
The Crito
work of modern literature drawing on classical myth: Pygmalion, or C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces
The Aeneid
some excerpts from Livy
Julius Caesar (our Shakespeare for 9th grade)
The Restless Flame (historical fiction by de Wohl) OR Helena (historical fiction by Evelyn Waugh)
Augustine's Confessions
So, we're keeping things chronological with our spine-text reading and/or our lecture series, but the real meat is in the literature itself, which reveals things about the historical period. I've also been integrating religion into this course of study: last year my son read the Didache Understanding the Scriptures text -- which is a textbook, and pretty textbooky, but also the best of that whole series, I think, and worthwhile. He also read Werner Keller's The Bible as History, which provided some substantial Holy-Land geography.
To all of this we added German (he continued an online course he had been doing, then merged into a class), biology (again, an outside class), and algebra via Saxon.
I've continued this model this year, with medieval and Renaissance history. This time I haven't used one spine text, just a lot of historical-context reading (books like How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, plus readings from Christian History magazine, whose archives are free online -- it's not a strictly Catholic resource, but good scholars from all Christian traditions write for this publication, including some Catholic scholars whom I would trust implicitly, and the articles are excellent across the board). And I have been able to fold lots of saints' writings into our schedule of readings, so those have followed our chronology as well.
We've had to retool a little this semester, because he wanted to take the Theology of Culture class his dad is teaching at Belmont Abbey (our standard outsourcing source) -- so right now he's been reading things like Eliot's Christianity and Culture, Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences, and Pieper's Leisure the Basis of Culture, and we've pruned back our religion reading a bit in consequence. So we think on our feet a good bit, because when opportunities arise . . . :)
Basically in the spring/summer I spend a lot of time divvying up the reading I want him to do over the number of weeks in our school year and assigning it week by week. I've written more complicated plans than we actually follow, because other people have wanted to use them (I've actually published my Grade 9 plans and hope to pull the Grade 10 ones together in print this year) and have requested more direction, and more of things like formal composition. We dip into some of those assignments, but mostly he just reads. I give him the plans, and he works out his own daily schedule. If he falls behind, as sometimes happens -- hard not to give priority to the classes where there's a professor and a grade! -- he just has to catch up on his own time, before he gets a break.
I tend to be somewhat . . . kinder? . . . in 9th and 10 grades, with regard to getting it all together and getting it done. As long as I know he's reading . . . The first two years of high school have always, so far, felt like years of transition. But things get more serious and buckled-down in the last two years, when it really is like, "Look, very soon Mom will not be here to hold your hand. Whose life is this, anyway?"
So that's where you're heading -- towards a student able to work independently and have ownership of his work and his life. As I remarked yesterday on another thread, that's the one thing my college-junior daughter has consistently thanked me for (yes, really, they do thank you for something someday!): that she was able to go off to college already able to manage her time and studies. But she didn't get there overnight, and her brother hasn't, either. Nobody does. A good foundation of habits helps, but I think there's always some degree of learning curve in the transition to high school, no matter what.
Still, if they're exposed to this banquet of reading, you literally cannot get it wrong.
Sally
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SallyT
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| Posted: March 11 2014 at 8:30am | IP Logged
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Oh -- sorry to flood the thread -- but Jen had some excellent things to say on this thread in the high-school forum. We were kind of riffing off each other there, too, but with regard to balancing high-schoolers and younger kids, she articulated what for me has been The Formula:
Mackfam wrote:
LITTLES - TIME INVESTMENT --> DAY-TO-DAY LIVING
I know very well that my investment here pays off in years to come.
Here is where I build good habits and REALLY spend time engaging in skill building and the wise offering of excellent ideas.
In the younger years, my plans tend to flex more as the child needs...this requires more of my very active involvement in the day-to-day.
HIGH SCHOOLERS - TIME INVESTMENT--> FRONT END PLANNING
Their day-to-day living is a skill they learn and exercise.
They submit more in conversations and written work (notebooking) that allows me to follow along.
We have periodic regular check-ins that work well for conversations on books.
Because of established habits of read/narrate, we can engage quickly on subject matter.
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Right now, with my 10- and 11-year-olds, we're starting to make the serious transition to more independent reading and learning (complicated by my 10-year-old's reading difficulties), but my face time, day to day, is still focused on them, while I'm largely just trusting the high-schooler to be competent.
Sally
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4Real Forums : Living Learning
Topic: CM with older kids
