An Inside Look into Scholar Phase

My daughter Cailynn and I

My eldest daughter, who is 16, is knee deep into scholar phase. I'm so pleased with trusting the process of TJED.

When we first pulled her out of school we went through a two year "detox". She had such a difficult time with school and her self esteem was shot. By the time I pulled her out, I put her into Core phase and my only goal with her at that time was to nurture and build her self esteem. The other children were going through similar experiences but not to the extent that she was. She was also diagnosed with autism: Aspergers with high anxiety.  She could barely read and hated learning and hated school.

As I read, I mentored and we did {do} a LOT of reading aloud. This post isn't to go over our long journey, but if there is interest in that I can post more on it later.

She is blossoming, happy, centered, and I'm very pleased to say you can barely tell she has anything going on with autism.

This is what has been working best for her now...

Here is what she has read so far this year {2012}:

Religious Books

• Finished the Book of Mormon
• A Marvelous Work and A Wonder by LeGrand Richards
• The Miracle of Forgiveness by Spencer W. Kimball
• The Last Days by Avraham Gileadi
• A Witness and a Warning by Ezra Taft Benson

Classic Literature

• Song of Roland ~Unknown
• The Confessions ~ St. Augustine
• Julius Caesar by Shakespeare
• Hamlet by Shakespeare
• All's Well That Ends Well by Shakespeare
• The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare
• Othello by Shakespeare
• The City of God {book 8} by St. Augustine
• The Virginian by Owen Wister
• The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• The Koran {The Cows}
• Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Old Yeller by Fred Gipson
• Beowulf ~Unknown
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede

Other Literature:

•  Catherine Called Birdy by Karen Cushman
• Ten Peas in a Pod by Arnold Pent III
• Nancy Drew and the Sky Phantom {She loves Nancy Drew, but only gets to read them every now and then or on her own time}
• Nancy Drew and the Mysterious Mannequin
• Toby Tyler or Ten Weeks with the Circus by James Otis
• ABC Murders by Agatha Christie
• Homesick: My Own Story by Jean Fritz
• Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell

Science:

• Astronomy: A Self-Teaching Guide
•  On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres by Nicolas Copernicus

Reading for Educational Subjects:

• A Rulebook for Arguments by Anthony Weston
• Lives of the Musicians by Kathleen Krull {We all agree this was kind of negative}
• The Annotated Mona Lisa {Art History}

This Week

We have our mentor meetings each Sunday evening or Monday morning.  Here's this week's list of things to do that we prepare together.  She sets the goals and sometimes does more and I encourage and mentor where needed.

History Timeline: 400 AD-1600 AD

Book Report: The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede

History:

Begin the Inferno by Dante.  Get to at least page 213 by Sat.  (Our copy has Italian on one side and English on the other so it's half of that first #)

The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome by Susan Wise Bauer read to page 777.  {Pretty sure she is finishing the book}

Spiritual: 

Daily Scripture readings for seminary.
Whom the Lord Loveth by Neal A. Maxwell ~ finish


Literature:

Julie of the Wolves ~finish
Candleford by Gaskill ~ finish

Read one storybook a day to the little kids.

Journal: 3 times this week.

Copywork: 100 words a day in 20 minutes.

Lost Tools of Writing Workbook ~ get to page 102 by Friday.


Science:  {Astronomy}

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei ~ finish

2 experiments.  Write a paper on one.

Foreign Language:

5 Lessons in French {Rosetta Stone}

Latin: {Henly} get to lesson 31  {Almost finished with year 2}

Greek: to lesson 5


Personal Improvement:

Run: Tuesday and Thursday
50 crunches/15 pushes every other day
Work on Personal Progress.  {She just earned her Honor Bee}
Help brother with his Duty to God and Scout Merit Badge


Music:

30 min. Piano, 30 min. viola daily
Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers {book} ~finish
Listen to 10 minutes a day of Classical music, composer of your choice.

She checks in often with me and we have seen our daughter blossom into a confident, happy, and progressing young lady.   I love Leadership Education!

To Book, Nook, Swim, Audible or All?

Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds and so many times my head is swimming with all that is available to us. I was homeschooled growing up and the resources my mom had to work with were slim. Still she managed to find us some neat curriculum and learning tools. Today I am a homeschooling mom and while I enjoy simplicity I also enjoy technology and technology is not always simple and there are so many options what is a modern mom to do?

The Book

Let’s start with the “old-fashioned” book. I’m a traditionalist, especially when it comes to books. I love to hold them, smell them, read them, curl up with them and dog ear the pages {shhh, don’t tell!}. I’m in love with classic books new or used. I’m a Barnes and Noble chick all the way. While other moms go to the movies or to the mall for their time out, I am sitting in a corner of a Barnes and Noble or a Borders reading and browsing books or writing an article in my notebooks. I feel inspired just being around books.

The other thrilling aspect of books is collecting them and having a library in my own home. While I enjoy brand new books I also adore perusing through used books stores. I will travel 45 minutes away just to go to a favorite used book store. You know the kind, the ones that are jam-packed full of books, old fashioned cookbooks, antique books and many of these used books stores are usually dusty or dingy. That’s okay, because book collectors know where to go to get the “good” books.

To Swim

To swim or not to swim, that is the question. Just like Netflix has DVD’s you can rent through the mail and keep as long as you’d like without late fees, BookSwim does the same thing- only with books!

BookSwim says,

“BookSwim is the first online book rental library service lending you paperbacks, hardcovers and now college textbooks Netflix®-style directly to your house, without the need to purchase! We stock all the latest bestsellers, new releases, and classics! Read your books as long as you want - no late fees! Even choose to purchase and keep the books you love!”

Sounds like a better option than the library as far as convenience. Still there’s nothing like being “around” books sitting in a library. {sigh}

The Nook

Barnes and Noble has come out with the Nook- an electronic book! Amazon has it’s Kindle, but I’m looking at the Nook because of pricing and the size of that beautiful piece of electronic glory. I’ll admit, though when I first heard of books on an electronic piece of equipment I wasn’t thrilled. I wondered how you could curl up with it; you don’t get the sensation of turning the page or looking in the back of a book store for a treasured book. You DO get free classic ebooks and the “pages” are lit up so if you want to read in bed you don’t even need a lamp. You DO get to loan an ebook to a friend who also has a Nook for two weeks.

What Barnes and Noble says about the Nook,

“Choose an eBook using the beautiful color touch screen, then watch it appear instantly on the E Ink® display, where text appears as crisp as a printed page. The 16-level gray scale display offers great contrast with no glare or backlight. Choose from five font sizes so you can read with ease.

Store as many as 1,500 eBooks, eNewspapers, and eMagazines on your nook’s 2 GB of internal storage, so you'll never be without your favorites. Need more space? Just add a Micro SD card.”

Audible

But will the Nook replace my love for books on audio? Doubtfully. I have a subscription to Audible.com where I can buy one audio book for $14.95 a month. They have a children’s section and {thrill} a classics section among all the newer books as well. I LOVE that I can listen to audio books while I’m at the computer. I love that I can put them on the Ipod’s for the kids to listen to either on the stereo, in the car, or whenever they want to. It is great putting an audio book on while they’re doing dishes. They’re pulling double duty and don’t even realize it- learning and working! Audible has many sales on their audio books and even offers free audios as well!

So tell me, with all these options can a book lover like myself really have the cake and eat it too? I’m loving the options! What about you?

Libraries with No Books

A few days ago, I read an online article on The Boston Globe by David Abel. The article was explaining how the New England prep school the Cushing Academy is riding their entire library of our 20,000 books and replacing it with digital screens, places for laptops, etc.

The first question that entered my mind was how the library cannot invite the digital books and books online along with the books? I’m all for the convenience of modern technology, but there are many things that technology cannot completely take the place of without consequences and one of those is books. What has been working well for centuries shouldn’t just end because one generation found an invention they liked better.

It was mentioned in the article that the staff of Cushing believe it is the start of a new era. The problems I foresee, aside from losing the pure love of books, are what if there was a power surge? What about the effects on the eyes as people do more reading on a computer screen? Like the television the computer screen can affect the brain waves as well. The author also pointed out various other problems with digital "books" such as sand, liquids and the cost of accessing the materials as many of the materials online are not free.

I'm also not in agreement with the library bringing in a coffee shop containing and encouraging the use of legally addictive stimulants for youth. Not just any coffee shop mind you, but a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

We travel an hour away to go to libraries in a large city nearest us. We have access to almost twenty libraries that inter-loan. I cannot imagine not being able to browse through the shelves, picking out books that catch my eye. Sometimes the spiral bound cookbooks are my favorites to browse, or books that are warn on the covers and pages dog-earring showing me that this was a well-read and well-loved book.

I write ebooks and articles, most of which are featured online. That still doesn’t replace the value of a book in my mind. Call me old fashioned but I love a book, a real book.

-Shiloah B.


Photo of old books by:  Ivan Vicencio (Pepo)

Poetry for Children

"Do you know what is wrong with people who never read nursery rhymes? I will tell you. When little boys and girls grow bigger and older, they should grow from the outside, leaving a little boy in the middle; even when they are quite grown up, the little child that once they were should be within them. But some unlucky people grow older from inside and so grow old through and through."

We have been reading several poetry books as a family. The book Honey for a Child's Heart has a section about Poetry which inspired me to get back on track with reading the children poetry aloud. We're currently reading "The World of Christopher Robin" by A.A. Milne as a family and we love the silliness of them.

Some other wonderful poetry books aside from our favorite Dr. Suess:

Randolph Caldecott's Picture Books- mostly nursery rhymes, but pictures are magnificent!

Works by Edward Lear:

The owl and the pussycat
A book of nonsense
There was an Old Man--: A Gallery of Nonsense Rhymes
Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets

Hilaire Belloc:

Cautionary Tales for children

Robert Louis Stevenson:

A Child's Book of Verses

What wonderful children's poetry books do you have to add to this list?

Our Homeschooling is Always Improving

I recently found and loved the guidelines set in The Well-Trained Mind. It goes along with TJED so well, but I needed a more rigid idea of what needs to be done for my kids but with the classical mentality that I love and feel strongly about. I've been ordering some of the books suggested.

In addition I have a friend, a mentor, who owns hundreds of Classic children's books I had NEVER even heard of! I thought I had at least a mediocre idea of children's literature. I found that I am but a babe, a child myself in this wide world of classical children's literature. I spent two separate days copying all of the book titles in her many bookshelves. I still have another day or two to go to finish. I have hundreds of books on my list to get. When I have some extra time I will be sharing this list. She then took me to the numerous used book stores and helped me pick out additional titles of children's classics to get, many for $1 or less.

Two of those books are from the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle series of which there are four, I believe. We begun reading the first one aloud. I highly recommend this book! It is an easy to read aloud book meaning it is easy to imitate the characters and it is enjoyable. My five year old and up absolutely love this book and beg me to read just another chapter. Even my husband laughs with the kids during some of these funny adventures. We have read almost half of the book in three separate sittings, so it is also a quick read. I am so glad we found this series!

M, my almost eight year old daughter, is listening to the CD that is the audio companion to The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. She loves it and the songs that go with it. I love hearing the younger children repeating all the alphabet sounds too.

Hope your homeschooling life is going as well!

Baker Reads

I have been busy, but I hopefully my life will slow down a little bit near the end of the month. Hasn't it just begun? Reading will still happen, though. I'm excited to share the fruits of our new system. It is really working and I'm excited to see the flurry of reading activity in the home. I'm even more thrilled at the children's excitement over reading.

Shiloah (Me)

Finished last week and this week:

The Chosen by Chaim Potok

Working on this week:

The Age of Innocence by Edith Warton
Trying to finish Doctrine and Covenants




Cailynn (Practice Scholar)

Finished last week and this week:

A Mid Summer's Night Dream by Shakespeare
Time Machine (Abridge version)

Currently Reading:

Antony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare
In Loving Hands by Kris MacKay


Charisa (LOL)

Finished Last week:

All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor

Working on This Week:

How To Be A Lady: Useful Hints on the Formation of Womanly Character (Paperback)
by Harvey Newcomb

Benjamin Franklin: Young Printer (Childhood of Famous Americans) by: August Stevenson

The Mystery of the Queen's Jewels (Boxcar Children Special) by Gertrude Chandler Warner


Benjamin (Core/LOL)

Finished this week:

Viking Ships at Sunrise (Magic Tree House #15) by Mary Pope Osborne

Working on:

Castles and Forts (Usborne)
Horrible Harry Goes to the Moon


Makenzie

Finished this Week:

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

Working On:

Plum Fairy

Reading System with Rewards and Small Miracles

We began a new system in our home this week. I felt like there was too much television watching and not enough reading. Sure, we read a lot, but when our family curriculum revolves around reading a lot of classic books it cannot be done well when there is too much movie watching. My husband and I discussed this and a light bulb went on in my brain and I came up with this new system.

For every book read they earn an hour and a half of movie watching.

The rules are:

1) They cannot be baby books or below their reading level. Mom approves the book after discussing their book suggestions and if the child has no suggestions then mom gives ideas.

2) They pick the books. Nothing is more boring that reading an assigned book.

3) An in depth oral exam will be issued after each book. If a child is found to have lied about reading a book, that child will lose an hour and a half of TV. It pays to be honest.

4) The television watching will be redeemed when mom or dad gives permission.

5) If all the children read their book(s) and can watch the movie and one child did not. That child will spend their time during the movie in another room reading their books.


We have already presented this to the family. I am so excited to see their enthusiasm for reading flourish. My daughters are requesting set aside uninterrupted times for reading throughout the day and an hour extra at night to read. They also have been having more impromptu book discussions with me and are excited to share with me their future reading lists. I am so excited to see this little fire lit within the children and the rewards for their hard work are motivating as well as appealing.

My husband is a non reader. I asked him if he would take the challenge and lead the family by his example. I am a voracious reader so I will keep up my reading and each year I make it a goal to read more. My husband agreed to try again. The only book he's read all the way through since I've known him (14 1/2 years) is In Loving Hands. We have been listening to Dave Ramsey and my husband really likes him and is interested in learning more of Dave's system. We went to Barnes and Noble and bought The Total Money Makeover. Tears come to my eyes as I see him reading during his spare time. We found something that interests him!

We have a large family library and I continue to add to it so that the children can always have something to read. My son learned that he loves the Magic Treehouse books. My son was a very late reader, but has recently discovered he is getting better at it. To excite and motivate him I bought him another book in the series yesterday- Viking Ships at Sunrise. He began reading it today. Before lunch he excitedly announced to me today that he finished the first chapter.

We also are doing the same thing with music. The older children can earn computer time one for one for each hour of violin or viola practice. The younger children will learn hymns and receive voice lessons from mom for their music time. My older girls have already earned their computer time today and are excited to redeem it! They love getting on www.goodreads.com.

We are thrilled over the excitement the children have in this program. I am excited because reading is happening more which means learning is increasing too. We have had to change television habits, but it has been worth it. We all know it is more fun to earn something and you enjoy it more.

Our Reading

Heather
Sarah's Quilt- Nancy Turner (For Women's Colloquim)
The Last Lecture- Randy Pausch

Andrew Core/emerging LoL
Vacation Under the Volcano- Mary Pope Osborne
The Lost Wreck of the Isis- Robert D. Ballard

Family Reading With Jeremy, Cassie, and Seth (Core)

The Call of the Wild
Little House on the Prarie-Laura Ingalls Wilder

Book Renting

Dawn shared this website with me and I thought I'd pass it on!
Rent books like you do netflix in the mail!

Check it out:
http://www.bookswim.com/