Why are we so hung up on narration?

What if the reason for narration was not because it was the best way for children to process a reading, but because narration was a reaction to the educational methods being used in Victorian England? In Victorian England, instructors did the talking and students did the listening. Because students were viewed as containers to be filled, they weren’t explicitly taught how to process new learning. But if this isn’t effective, then maybe students aren’t containers. Maybe this understanding of what a student is not leads us to an understanding of what a student is, and maybe this understanding brings us to the realization that a student needs to process new learning. This realization leads to the need for a method, a method which can be explicitly taught, for processing new learning. Narration was a method. Could it be that the real lesson here is not that narration is the right way, the only way, but that a person needs to process new learning? Could there be other ways? More organic, more enjoyable, more effective ways?

James Herriot as Science

About a year ago, when I was planning Gemma's Year 1 (first grade), one of the sources I used for inspiration was Ambleside Online (AO). (I love AO, and I refer to it often.) One of the books AO, and other Charlotte Mason curricula, recommended for Natural History was James Herriot's Treasury for Children.


At that time, I didn't know much about the difference between Science and Natural History. I was quite ignorant. I thought that Natural History was just a Victorian/Edwardian term for Science. My daughter would be studying Natural History. How quaint.

I ordered the Herriot book and read it. The stories in it were very sweet. Quaint. But not science. I might be able to read this book to my daughter as a series of bedtime stories, but how could I call it school?

Over the past year, I've come across other homeschoolers with the same question. They wonder what science curriculum they should use with their kinder through third grade students. The whole learning-through-stories is nice and all, but where are the facts?

Over the past year, I've also read a little bit about the difference between Science and Natural History, and about the importance of giving a child time to develop 1)their skill of observation, and 2)some general understandings about the physical and natural world.

So, what do I think now?

I think James Herriot's book is an essential Year 1 book. It is a Natural History book in that Herriot models how to observe nature. He displays a sense of humility when he writes about the ways animals surprise him. He watches animals closely, wondering what they will do next, demonstrating curiosity.

There is also has quite a bit of science in the book. By hearing Herriot's stories, children implicitly learn:

• Living things move.
• Living things take in and use food.
• Living things sense changes in their surroundings. (Example: An animal can sense a change in temperature.)
• Living things grow.
• Living things die.
• Living things reproduce. (Example: Mommy pigs have piglets.)
• Animals can feel comfort and pain.
• Animals can remember.
• Animals can communicate.

These are just some of the science lessons children learn from James Herriot's Treasury for Children. In a science textbook, these facts would be stated explicitly. However, by using a living science book, children "observe" along with the storyteller, and discover ideas for themselves.

I'd love you to leave me a comment sharing What science lessons did your child learn from James Herriot's stories? 

Year 1: Week 25

This is the first week of our last term of first grade. Gemma will turn seven years old in only four months!

This week, we:

• read 3 pages of Lamb's As You Like It. We're nearing the end. Next week will be our final week of As You Like It. I'm not sure which Shakespearean tale we'll read next.
• completed Chapter 1 of Life of Fred: Mineshaft. 
• read poems from Nature in Verse
• started learning "Mary Ann" on piano
• read the fable "The Wind and the Sun"
• went on a field trip to see Paddington 2
• read more about Alexander the Great
• listened to a Classics for Kids podcast about Mozart (Gemma's choice for composer this term), as well as some of The Magic Flute and one of his piano concertos
• read about tapirs in Brazil, and read a poem from Elementary Geography
• looked at Monet's La Grenouillère
• read 1 Samuel 16:6-12 (The Sons of Jesse). Gemma chose this as her Old Testament recitation passage for the term. We also read Psalm 23 and Matthew 13:44-46 (parables - The Treasure and the Goodly Pearl), and The Feeding of the Five Thousand.
• listened to Deck Yourself, My Soul, with Gladness, Gemma's hymn choice this term. I gave her the choice between this and a couple of others, and this is the one she chose. She was familiar with it because it is in her Sacred Solos piano book.
• went to ballet
• went to jiujitsu. Here is Gemma taking down her partner...
  
• read the Andersen tale The Tin Soldier. She hated it. "Worst fairy tale ever" were her words.
• sang along to Chocolate (Jose Luis Orozco) - the song Gemma chose as her Spanish song - and Les Trois Rois - the Christmas song Gemma chose as her French song
• watched several episodes of Salsa (children's TV show in Spanish)
• worked on greetings and responses to "How are you?" in Spanish and French
• practiced cursive
• drew these pictures (a fairy on a mushroom). The duct tape is a nice touch, don't you think?
  
• handicrafts ✔️- Gemma made this car from a kit from - see if you can guess where. It's a pull-back car, which makes it even cooler, and, from what I could tell, is the best kit in the Build & Grow line. The kit requires hammering nails, and Gemma built it all by herself.
  

This week, we had the privilege of attending a birthday party with some very special guests...

...like an alligator...

...a serval...

...a fennec fox...

...an eagle owl...

...a porcupine...

...a sugar glider...

...a skink, and an enormous boa. That totally counts as Nature Study, right?

Year 1: Week 24

This was my favorite quote from our school reading this week: "But if you keep your eyes open, you can learn a great many things like these, which children shut up in towns cannot see." It was from Plant Life in Field and Garden by Arabella Buckley. The reason it jumped out at me is because we ARE children shut up in towns!

It's the end of Year 1: Term 2! Oh my!

We:

*spent a day playing with friends at the beach

*actually did paper sloyd! We made envelopes.

*read Bible passages, including The Stilling of the Storm

*drew a princess sitting and reading

*completed Life of Fred: Liver and started Life of Fred: Mineshaft

*read 3 pages of Lamb's As You Like It

*read some poems in Nature in Verse

*read about seahorses

*read about Alexander the Great (and reviewed where Macedonia and Greece are)

*did some cursive

*played piano

*went to dance class

*completed a couple of pages of our new French & Spanish resources - Carson Dellosa's - Middle/High School. I considered the Elementary version of these boooks, but it was too easy after months of Duolingo and children's vocabulary apps. We're going to go slowly, and utilize pronunciation resources on the internet (and my husband, as a pronunciation resource for Spanish). I wanted a little more structure because I want to end first grade with Gemma having learned a few basic sentences, as opposed to just a bunch of nouns.

*read the final chapter in Plant Life in Field and Garden. Looking back on the past eight months, I'm happy I chose two books for Natural History (an animal book and a plant book), and it's something I want to continue - at least - through Gemma's second grade year. Our next plant book will be Margaret Morely's Seed Babies.

*read a fairy tale and a fable

*biked to the beach with Daddy

*sang songs

*listened to Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty Waltz

*re-viewed Van Gogh's Sunflowers

*completed our current read aloud - Detectives in Togas - which I didn't love at first, but grew to enjoy. Gemma couldn't get enough of it. She loves mysteries.

Year 1: Week 23

We're nearing the end of our second term of first grade. Here is some of what we did this week...

*listened to the waltz from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty

*drew a picture of Sleeping Beauty, the ballerina

*watched 2 Horrible Histories videos about Alexander the Great (so funny)

*read Alexander & Bucephelas and Diogenes (from 50 Famous Stories Retold)

*played the singing game "Rise, Sally Rise" (Thank you, Children of the Open Air!)

*read Bible passages, including Early Works of Healing

*completed 2 chapters of Life of Fred: Liver

*played some multiplication games on multiplication.com

*read Andersen's "The Ugly Duckling"

*practiced piano - began learning Kum Ba Ya and hymn Holy Holy Holy

*read CM's Elementary Geography (ch. 12) about the earth being tilted on its axis (We also watched a video about earth's orbit around the sun. It's quite a complicated idea for a 6 year old. The picture in CM's Elementary Geography - as in many books - is wrong, and  children's models of the solar system show the earth orbiting the sun in a circle. Books show the earth orbiting in an ellipse with a sun in the center of the ellipse. While earth's orbit is elliptical, the sun is closer to one focus than the other. In January, at perihelion, the earth is 91.4 million miles from the sun, 3 million miles closer to the sun than it is in July. In July, at aphelion, the earth is 94.5 million miles from the sun, 3 million miles farther from the sun than it is in January. 

*read poetry from Nature in Verse. We had to skip some autumn poems to start the winter poems. Our verses this week were about Christmas, cold weather, and the holly plant.

*bought a hyacinth bulb in a vase at Trader Joe's, and continued to observe and enjoy our amaryllis bulb. One of the outcomes of educating using CM methods has been that I have an impossible time saying no to purchases like amaryllis and hyacinth bulbs. 

*read a chapter in Plant Life in Field and Garden about the plants we eat as food (carrots, onions, potatoes, etc.). This chapter went so nicely with our bulb observation. We talked about how onions are bulbs, just like the amaryllis and hyacinth, and how bulbs store food (which is why the amaryllis can be coated in wax and still flower, and why the hyacinth's roots can be in water only and doesn't need to take in nutrients from soil). We also looked up images of onion flowers (have you seen the flower of the Persian onion - beautiful!), and pulled a potato out of the dark cabinet to examine its eyes.

*looked at Van Gogh's 🌻 

*read Hercules and the Carter

*practiced cursive

*currently reading (as our bedtime read) Detectives in Togas

*read 3 pages of As You Like It

*read The Burgess Seashore Book about jellyfish young (and looked at images of jellyfish polyps), sea cucumbers (and watched a short video about sea cucumbers), and sea spiders (and watched a short video of a sea spider walking on the ocean floor). Did you know male sea spiders carry their eggs until they hatch?

*sang Alouette, Des Colores, and All Creatures of Our God and King

*for handicrafts - sewed a leg of doll & stuffed it, but then Gemma lost the big needle, so that project is now on pause

And finally, an update on my dollhouse lighting project...

Year 1: Week 22

Sometimes you just have to call it a week.

This week, we got to travel and celebrate Christmas with family. We did a ton of school-related this-and-that, but we didn't do everything.

Turandot

Here is some of what we did...

*completed 2 chapters of Life of Fred: Liver

*read The Stag Looking into the Water

*practiced piano (Gemma was having a tough time with one song - Toymaker's Dance - but I sat her on my lap and bounced her while I sang the melody, and it started to make sense to her. Those pesky eighth notes.)

*read some poetry from Nature in Verse (not every day, but some, and some is better than none)

*did some Duolingo

*read some Bible passages, including "The Call of the First Disciples"

*listened to our Maestro Classics CD of The Nutcracker

*read about Coriolanus, Alexander the Great (and located Macedonia in our atlas), and sculptures like Venus de Milo & Winged Victory of Samothrace

*added Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria, and Tchaikovsky to timeline book

*read The Bremen Town Musicians

*went to dance class

*read two chapters of The World by the Fireside. The first was about sugarcane. We located Jamaica in the atlas and watched this YouTube video about how sugar goes from cane to the sugar we buy in the store...

...The second was "Where Does Cocoa Come From?" For Mother Culture, if you're interested in how cacao became a product of West Africa, check out this:

http://www.worldagroforestry.org/treesandmarkets/inaforesta/history.htm

*read 3 pages of Lamb's As You Like It & watched the animated As You Like It

*Gemma independently read several books, including Betsy-Tacy and Tib, For Biddle's Sake, and Betsy-Tacy Go Over the Big Hill.

*decorated our Christmas tree

2017

2011

*read about sea anemones and how plants store food

*spent a day playing with friends at Temescal Canyon

For Christmas, Gemma received the lighting kit I bought two years ago (40% off!). She received lots of wonderful presents, including lighting fixtures and a dollhouse family. So, I've spent eight hours over the past couple of days learning (by doing) how to wire her dollhouse. (What was I thinking?!) I have one room - of six 😳 - done.

Year 1: Week 21

While my public school students were having their last-day-of-school-before-Winter-Break party, my homeschooled daughter was in jail...

Gemma and Daddy took a field trip to the Los Angeles Police Museum.

This "week" (11 days), we read so many things: poetry from Nature in Verse, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, The Baptism of Jesus (Matthew 3:13-17, recitation passages, Aesop's The Gardener and his Dog, Plant Life's chapter about vines, The Burgess Seashore Book's chapter about jellyfish, 3 more pages of Lamb's "As You Like It," The World by the Fireside's chapter on cotton, "Poles & Axis" from Mason's Elementary Geography, a chapter about Romulus & Remus (and identified Greece, Italy, Sicily, Mediterranean Sea in our atlas), and "How Horatius Kept the Bridge."

Gemma had her in-class dance recitals.

Unbeknownst to me, Gemma decided to do her cursive with red colored pencil...

Christmas pageant songs (including A Maid Engaged to Joseph and O Come All Ye Faithful) were practiced, as well as this term's hymn and foreign language songs.

In math, Gemma did assorted pages of Mathematical Reasoning E and a chapter of Life of Fred: Liver.

On piano, Gemma practiced Toymaker's Dance.

We revisited Van Gogh's First Steps, After Millet. 

She drew these pictures:

So, I'm reading her Burgess Seashore Book about jellyfish, and the fox compliments the seagull, telling the seagull that he would know what the weird jelly on the beach is because he knows everything. I say that the fox is being humble and the seagull is being humble. Gemma says, "But what if someone is only pretending to be humble?" And I say, "That's false humility." And she says, "That's like Uriah in David Copperfield. Look, I'll show you." She pulls out her Usborne Illustrated Dickens, and shows me. Uriah Heep is a great example of a character who demonstrates false humility.

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Her independent reading this week included Betsy-Tacy, Henry Huggins, The Courage of Sarah Noble, 3 Gail Carson Levine books, etc.

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We finished one of our read alouds - The Year of Miss Agnes. Gemma asked if there was another Miss Agnes book. There is, so I'm sure we'll be reading that one in the not-so-distant future.

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Two of the funniest things she said this week:

1)"I don't like it when I'm being bidden to do something."

2)(Of Romulus and Remus) "That was so mean of him to kill his brother. He should have just said, 'Hey! Get your own hill!'"

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Masterly Inactivity: Gemma spent TWO HOURS cutting and duct taping a cardboard box into a carriage for some dollhouse dolls.

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We went to see A Christmas Carol at the community college. It was a very strange production, but I liked some of the strangeness. Modern dancers as spirits and clock gears danced to 19th century hymns.

Our giant amaryllis is opening up!😊