7 Quick Takes: The Path of Least Resistance

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1.

The 4th grade science book had this explanation of charge (negative, positive, etc) that was just not computing with a certain child. Trying to figure out how to explain what the girl needed to know was going to take more brain power than I wished to exert.  So I fetched the boy’s old snap circuit kit, and said, “Read the directions, make a couple of these, and then we’ll talk.”

She loves them.  She’s made maybe twenty of the projects now.

And the SuperHusband came home and explained the habits of those wiley electrons in terms we could all understand.

2.

In his explanations, he observed electrons are a lot like people.  Certain children, for example, would much rather we evenly populate the rooms of the house, than have three girls crowded together in one bedroom.  It was an analogy our people-person girl grasped immediately.

3.

On the evening walk after dinner, Mr. Boy proposed seminars that run the opposite direction.  “People Skills for Engineers”, for example.  In which you explain that people are a lot like electrons.

4.

Every time your blood pressure spikes from reading about offensive jury verdicts in which parents are paid millions to publicly wish their children dead, Allie Hathaway’s the perfect choice for your offering up. Have I mentioned that reading the news is a near occasion of sin for me?  You might have noticed.

5.

Benadryl season, here.  I ran out of the liquid.  Seven-year-old had dark circles under her eyes, perpetual sneezing, and was losing her voice.  But the pill.  It doesn’t want to go down.

Until I remembered this stuff:

Now she’s very punctual in reminding me when she needs her next dose.

6.

We weren’t sure whether our dog would get along with our friends’ dogs during the pending staycation, in which all Fitz creatures under a certain age vacate castle premises for the weekend.  So we ran a test the other day.  One of the host dogs was not pleased at the arrival of the guest dog, and our pup insisted on saying a few pointed words back .  The altercation slowly edged them towards the pool.

Our dog, unaware she was backing up towards the water, fell right in.  She swam to the side, and my friend showed her the way up the steps.

And after that, the dogs got along just fine.

7.

And with that, I’m out of here, and offline, until sometime Monday.  Think I might send the telephone off with the kids, too.  Have a great weekend!

***

UPDATE: Thank You Facebook Helpers.  The new page name is: www.facebook.com/JenFitz.writes.  You guys are the best.

(Meanwhile SuperHusband and I are enjoying an eerily silent weekend.  I’ll check back at the combox and all that come Monday, or whenever we lose our un-plugged concentration and just have to ignore each other for a while.)

Kolbe Reviews: MCP Word Study

What on earth is “Word Study”?  That’s what I wanted to know.  Ignorance is no barrier to a woman with an excuse to buy books, so I took the plunge and ordered the MCP Plaid Word Study books as prescribed by Kolbe.  It seemed like the kind of thing my kids might could use.

The pictures you see are different than the one currently showing in the Kolbe Store, and I don’t know what the story is on that.  The ones above are what we have (ordered from Kolbe last spring), and if you click through, the pic takes you to the Amazon page.  There are other editions, so if you enroll with Kolbe but purchase the book not from Kolbe, verify to make sure you’re getting hold of the book to match your course plans.  My review is for the books you see here.  Love that 1970’s decor, matches my kitchen.

So what is this “Word Study” thing?  It’s the answer to people who look you straight in the face and tell you English is not a phonetic language.  Well, yes it is, it’s just that we feel free to use the phonics rules of virtually every language in the known world over the past 1500 years, and don’t get around to updating our spelling when pronunciations change.  Understandable, since English speakers never have all pronounced words the same way everywhere.

Sample Rule from Level F (6th Grade): The roots “cap”, “cept”, and “ceipt” mean “take” or “seize”.  Capture = to take someone by force. [p.88]

Sample Rule from Level D (4th Grade): When “ed” is added to a base word ending in d or t, it stands for the “ed” sound.  Other times “ed” will stand for the sound of d or t: They planted a tree.  He cheered for the team.  She jumped over the rope. [p.52]

–> Word study re-inserts method and understanding into the vast and varied rules of English spelling, so that you don’t live your whole life stuck in kindergarten, forever believing everything must be a “sight word”. [Or a sig-ha-tuh word.]  The MCP books group words with similar rules, so that students see the logic in how they work.  You’ll notice that Kolbe spends about ten minutes on Science, and whereas the 4th grade Language Arts category has a full seven different elements to it.  (And I’m reviewing each item one by one.)  If you the follow program, sooner or later you’ll end up learning to read and write.

How the book works.  The books are two-color,  consumable workbooks.    Each page presents a rule of phonics, spelling, or vocabulary at the top of the page.  Then there are a variety of activities to help students practice the rule.  Every now and then there is a reading comprehension or composition exercise mixed in as well.

Can students self-teach?  For the most part, yes.  My kids work 98% unsupervised, and every now and again when I check their work I see that some disastrous phonics accident has occurred.  But usually they can read the instructions and do the work completely on their own.  Both kids are supposed to save this part of their homework for later in the day, and usually they sneak into it early, because it is fairly light work and they’d rather do this than tackle a harder subject.

Warning: The Picture Words Are A Mystery To Me.  In the fourth grade book there are sometimes exercises where you look at a picture, guess the word it stands for, and use that information to complete the assignment.  The girl and I stink at this.  We just skip these.  Maybe you don’t want us on your team for Pictionary.

What to buy?

• The student book is a consumable.  You would not want to try to do the exercises on a separate piece of paper.  This is the one book in Kolbe’s line-up that I’d not dream of trying to hand down to the next kid.
• I’ve never even considered that there was a teacher’s manual, let alone wanted to use it.  I’d skip that unless you the teaching parent have a serious phonics disorder and your consultation with the Kolbe people or some other expert indicates the teacher’s manual would help you.  Remember these are exercises your child can probably mostly do with no adult help.
• The course plans just divide up the book into pages.  If you aren’t enrolled in Kolbe, don’t purchase them.  They do include quarterly exams, but for the à la carte price, you could take ten minutes a quarter to quiz your child orally and call it good.

Do you really need to do this?

I made it all the way through grad school without ever studying phonics with this intensity.  I was a natural reader, and had no difficulty with spelling.  Other than a few technical terms, nothing in these books is news to me, it’s all stuff you just figure out from being a word person.  But, I’m very glad my kids are doing these books.

Although they are reading well, spelling and advanced phonics is not something that just flows out of my unschooling heart on a consistent basis.  I like that they are getting the intensive trickle.  For my 4th grader, the focus on phonics strengthens her weakest area — she tends to hop over difficult words rather than slowing down and concentrating on them.  For my 6th grader, I like that he is being pushed to master skills that come naturally to him, and I hope it will show up on his SAT scores.  (Yes, I’m mercenary that way.  Were you planning to send us college money? I didn’t think so.)

–> My intuition is that if you have a student with strong language skills, you could skip this and do fine.  In many ways it might be more like daily vitamins than necessary medicine.

If you have a student struggling with spelling, reading, and vocabulary, these might be the skeleton of a program to help your child with specific strategies for mastering language skills.  For my 4th grader, I would sooner drop assignments from another subject, so that she has time to work through her word study book.  If she’s a strong reader, she can always catch up on her history facts another day.

[If you are working through a serious learning disability,  ask a specialist and ask if this is in fact the type of help your child needs.  The last thing you want to do is to drop $20 on 160 pages of pure agony. You’ve probably done that enough times already.]

And that’s all I know to report.  What other questions do you have?

Kolbe Reviews: Voyages in English (Grammar)

Voyages in English is a vintage Catholic-school grammar book series. My mother-in-law used it growing up, and I love this because whenever my kids complain it’s so hard, Grandma is there to remind them she did just fine with it.  And went on to have a story published in Redbook Magazine, no less.

Originally published in the late ’50’s and early ’60’s, it is available as a reprint from Lepanto Press.  There is an modern version of Voyages in English still being published by Loyola Press, and I am told that Lepanto’s vintage reprint will soon be re-named Lepanto English to avoid confusion.

What I love about the old Voyages:

• I like using vintage and historic textbooks, because they double as primary sources for history.
• The grammar is rigorous.  Studied well, students will learn to write clearly and edit effectively.

What other people hate about the old Voyages:

• It’s so old-fashioned.
• Not everybody wants to grow up to be an editor.

Realistically, some of the material in the sixth grade book was new to me, and is understandably overwhelming to parents who aren’t word-geeks. (Fourth grade is no problem.)  The teacher’s manual has explanations and answers, but could make your eyes swim if you don’t already know roughly what the book is talking about.  Also, I giggle every time I see the word “copulative”.

The Kolbe Course Plans

The course plans assign the exercises, and every now and again tell you to diagram some sentences, or write a letter, or something like that.  There are quarterly exams and answer keys in the course plans.  If you aren’t enrolled with Kolbe I’d skip the plans and just type up your own list of dates and assignment numbers at the beginning of the school year.

I would encourage you, if you do follow the Kolbe plans, to blackline assignments that cover topics your child has clearly mastered, and generally avoid anything that smacks of busy work.  The plans, like the text, cover every possible grammar need, allowing you to be the Benevolent Dictator, mercifully skipping over long exercises training students out of bad habits they had no idea existed until seeing them in the book.

What if you can’t stand VOE?

You’re not alone.  A popular alternative used by Kolbe and Mother of Divine Grace families is Easy Grammar.

I picked up an older edition at a used book sale, and I like having it on hand as a resource for extra practice pages.  The edition I have (1994) has reproducible worksheets and then the filled-in worksheet on the facing page.  It seems to cover all the topics normal people cover in English grammar.

Another option that comes highly recommended  is the free online K.I.S.S. Grammar Books by Dr. Ed Vavra.  Worth a look.

Do you even need a formal grammar program?

Sooner or later, sure.  But if standard English is the language spoken in your home, I’m not persuaded students need to do a rigorous study of grammar every single year.   And note that if you are studying a foreign language of any kind, then the kids are getting quite a lot of grammar education that way.

Having largely unschooled grammar until 4th grade, I had no difficulty transitioning both kids to Voyages this year.  I looked through the Kolbe Placement Exams early last summer, and used a selection of worksheets from the Super Teacher Worksheets to give the kids an introduction to the concepts they’d be seeing in the fall.

So although I happen to like the Kolbe selection on this one, and I find that using it this year was well-timed for us, I wouldn’t make your child’s love of Voyages in English the make-or-break on your choice of programs.  I would be very comfortable with giving any student a year off of hardcore grammar study here or there, if that seemed like a better way to manage time and energy and avoid frustration.

Kolbe Reviews – Latin

Children do not teach themselves Latin.

Children.  Do Not.  Teach. Themselves. Latin.

Okay, now that we have that cleared up:

Kolbe Academy prescribes The New Missal Latin – Book One for upper-elementary Latin — typically grades 5-8.

If you purchase the book set from Kolbe, it comes with the book, a test booklet and separate answer key, a teacher’s manual with answers to the book exercises, and a pronunciation CD.  Easy to overlook is the Supplemental Exercises, which are called for in the course plans, and which you need to purchase separately.  It will not surprise you to learn that I have no idea what is in the Supplemental Exercises.

The book is a vintage-rescue.  Originally written in 1941, it was republished by St. Mary’s publishing in 1996, and St. Mary’s has written the teacher’s manual and test books as well; together they are designed for the Latin enthusiast hoping to learn enough Latin to follow the Mass with ease.  The teacher’s manual provides explanations and encouragement for how to teach yourself the language.

The text drops you straight into depths of Latin grammar with a minimum of warm-up.  It was originally written for students who were hearing and praying the language weekly if not daily; therefore the text centers on helping students make sense of, and use intelligently, a language with which they are already familiar.  I like the book, but I’d recommend it to others only if:

1. You actually want to learn Ecclesiastical Latin.  We do, so this is great for us.

If you prefer to study classical Latin complete with Siege of Troy and all the best monster stories, consider using the Oxford Latin Course, which the boy and I have used and we both liked.  It is fun.  I like fun.  Here’s a link to professor Robert Cape’s Internet Workbook for that text.   It is not designed to be a self-study course, but you can make it one by supplementing with a few references along the lines of Latin for Dummies and so forth.  [Notice this is supposed to be a college textbook. Except that when I saw it in my public library, I assumed it was a middle-school textbook.  Goofy cartoons.  Thin book.  Anyway, it’s entry-level classical Latin.  If you move slowly, it will work for young students once they can read (English) fluently at a middle-school level.  Read the historical notes yourself before having your children read them, so you can provide any necessary parental guidance.]

2. You can provide some amount of “Latin Immersion” to go with the program.  That could be your conversation, the memorization of select prayers in Latin, or the singing of Latin prayers or hymns.  We do a little bit of Latin-fun, but not as much as we really need to.  It shows.

3. You have time to learn with and teach your child. This is the part that is kicking my rear this year. Even with the teacher’s manual and course plans, you may need to do a little researching around to get all your questions answered.  I’m a firm believer in picking up bargain-table texts so that if I have a question I can go see how someone else explains it.

4. Your child has studied a foreign language before, or has an incredibly sound grasp of the analysis of English grammar.

Kolbe suggests Latina Christiana as a possible supplement in 4th grade, and that would make a good warm-up program.  (I’ve looked at bits of Latina Christiana and I did not fall in love; I prefer the monster stories and goofy cartoons at Oxford Latin.) But there are any number of  early-years Latin choices, including just doing some memorization work.  Studying a different language would work as well.

The important thing is to be able to accept foreign languages as something other than merely English Re-Coded, and be able to understand how words sometimes work as objects, sometimes as subjects, sometimes show possession, etc.  If you’ve mastered Seton-quality English grammar in the early years, that would be sufficient.

The Kolbe Course Plans.   The course plans provide instruction and explanations for each chapter.  I find them very helpful to have on hand.  Recommended.

If you are enrolled with Kolbe, make sure you request the course plans for the year of Latin you are actually studying, which may not be the default for your student’s grade level.

Where to begin? Although the boy and I had done Latin in the past, we opted to start in with New Missal at page 1, and I am happy with that decision. The grammar is intense from the very beginning, much of the vocabulary was new to us, and frankly I needed to be able to coast for a while.

If you are switching into this program after several years with something else, I’d take a look at the book and judge for yourself.  If you are enrolling with Kolbe, call and explain your situation, and ask for some guidance.  Remember that you can request a limited number of extra course plans.  So you could decide to speed through year 1 as a review, and pick up with year 2 (or later) when you reach the point where the material begins to be more difficult for you.

Should you study Latin?

Note that if you like Kolbe overall but are hestitant about the Latin, you can choose to skip it altogether.  For high school, Kolbe does not have a wide variety of foreign language offerings, but you are entirely free to study whatever language you like, using materials from another program or taking a course in your community.

You can also delay starting Latin until 6th grade or later.   If the pace of the course is too intense for your addled mom-brain, you could choose to cover the material more slowly.  There is nothing dumbed-down about this course, and it would be valuable even into high school.

We Catholics have a longterm interest in the language.  Even if you study Latin only lightly during elementary and middle school, this is a handy course to have around for continued use as an adult wishing to dabble and slowly learn more and more over the years.

UPDATES 3/26/2012:

1. The boy begged me — not a whining beg, but a non-nonsense plea of manly desperation — to please go back to OLC.  So I’m going to let him, even though it means more work for me.  We both like it.  Cartoons, you know?  I made a little sidebar section with various internet helps for that book.  He loves the hangman games at the Internet Workbook.
2. You’d be remiss not to check out Dr. Peter’s Ecclesiastical Latin Page before making a decision on what Latin program you wanted to use.

7 Quick Takes: Lucky Women

Where is the brain? The other Jen F. wants to know. Trust me, it's not here.

1.

It’s been a long few days here at the Castle.  I would be very grateful for your prayers.

2.

This is hilarious: “Teach Yourself a New Culture in 100 Easy Lessons”, in which we see how a Haitian man studying English describes the pictures in the reading book.  I want the whole series.

 

3.

Lent report:

1) Yeah, we pretty much stink at prayer-n-fasting.  Especially when housework is supposed to fit in their somewhere.

2) But I did have an Adrian Monk Moment, and clean the yard in a frenzied response to stress and frustration.  It looks really nice.  Or it did 24 hours ago, anyhow.

3) And then here’s what happened: We planned to meet Fr. W for lunch because after six months of trying, dinner just wasn’t happening.  Too busy.  And we decided that ‘at the restuarant’ was smarter than ‘at our house’.  And this morning I thought, “Yes, I’m so glad it’s at the restaurant, because this place is a wreck.”  And then I realized: “This place is waaaaay cleaner then the first time he came over last summer.  For one thing, at this time I would not need to send the children out on an hour-long mission to “get rid of the disgusting things”.

So, yes.  Progress.  Not as stellar of progress as my vivid imagination had envisioned.  But it’s something.

The Fitz House, Now 75% Less Disgusting!

4.

You thought you could just pray for my intention up there in #1. No can do.   Allie Hathaway. Right now. 

. . . Okay good. Thanks!

5.

Helen Alvare e-mailed me (and 18,000 of her closest friends, I’m pretty sure) with the reminder that:

 . . . The Obama Administration has put real accommodation of religious employers, insurers, and individuals off the table. And they have managed to get leading media to continue to claim that women are on the side of shutting down religious witness on the issue of the “free” birth control in employer insurance plans.

If you’re female and you haven’t signed the Women Speak for Themselves letter, do it now, here.

And this the Facebook page:  facebook.com/WomenSpeakForThemselves.

[H/T to the inimitable Mrs. Tollefsen for the head’s up about the letter and the encouragement to sign it.  They let me on, so they’ll take anybody.]

6.

Bearing links to a really cool history article on eugenics, politics, and the Irish in 1940.  Click on her link and read the whole thing — very well-researched and written account of a suspicious marriage certificate, and the man who made it so, 52 years after the wedding took place.  For that matter, if you’re having withdrawal because you don’t like how my 3-D life is interfering with your goofing-off schedule, Bearing’s been pretty much rocking the house lately, so you just go read her for a while.

7.

And that’s it.   Catholic Writer’s Conference starts tomorrow.  My yard is clean.  My blog is sad and lonely.  The weather is beautiful.  My truck is pale yellow from the pine pollen.  My 5 year-old has a new green plaid outfit made by her 10-year-old sister from scrap fabric, just in time to keep the neighbor kid from pinching her tomorrow.   I have given up all hope of predicting the future, and now consider my calendar to be a work of speculative fiction.

Oh speaking of saint’s feast days, last night I read the account of St. Abraham Kidunaia.  And I thought as I read, “Gee, his poor fiance, abandoned on the eve of the wedding, when he fled to the desert and locked himself in a cell.”  And then I read a little further, and concluded: “Probably once she learned he was planning to wear the same goatskin coat for the next 50 years, she was okay with it.”

 

Help! I’m homeschooling a six-year-old! Up at CatholicMom.com

My first article’s up at CatholicMom.com – Yay!.  Go read.  Natural follow-on to Patrice Fagnant-MacArthur’s column on How to Homeschool your Preschool Child, which you can treat as a pre-req. I think people run into trouble by thinking “1st grade” = “High School Lite”, when really it’s more like the final glorious days of preschool in all their imaginative, bigger-than-life power.

Jon & I noticed the other night that several of our kids have gone through a Terribly Tired phase right around six.  So if your junior hiker has just announced, “I was not made for walking”, take a deep breath and just work around it for a couple years.  Sometime in the sevens the big-kid-legs seem to show up, and the stamina returns.

BTW, Lisa Hendey has a nice collection of homeschool links on her homeschooling page.  Worth a look and maybe a bookmark.

7 Quick Takes: Doing it Wrong

Click to see more takes.

1.

My ashes have worn off.  Anyone know where I can get them touched up?  I made it till Sunday being moderately virtuous in the life of prayer and penitence, and then . . . well, some of us are more “childish” than “childlike” in our faith.  But God is merciful, and every day is new.  Back to it.

1B

I’m contractually obligated to tell you:  You are doing Lent wrong.

At least, I think that must be a line in the Catholic Bloggers Handbook, because that seemed to be the theme this past week.  Probably my punishment for too much internet and not enough diligence.

Take away lesson: If you are praying and fasting the wrong way, for the wrong reasons, and entirely too lightly, we the Catholic Bloggers of the World are here to let you know.  You see how convenient it is, giving spiritual direction to complete strangers?  So much simpler.   You can say thank you anytime.

2.

But if you are putting sand in your holy water fonts, that is just plain wrong.  It’s not my fault that I have to link to the grumpiest priest on the internet in order for you to find that out.  Tip for mothers of tween boys:  My son loves Fr. R.  What’s not to love, between the guns and the complaining about lousy hymns?  The girls got mad at me for reading one of his posts aloud — bad language (for our house).  I used the “just quoting a priest” defense.

Anyway, I figure it’s best to go ahead and get the boy hooked on crotchety right-wing gun-enthusiast priests, because then at least our arguments can be fun.

2B

The boy recommends you watch Matrix run on Windows XP.  I agree.

3.

Are we the only Catholic home where the wall and floor beneath the mini-holy water font are now very, very blessed?  I’m divided between whether that means we are very bad Catholics or just that much more desperate for God’s blessings.

4.

If you want to do one thing right today, quick stop reading and say a prayer for Allie Hathaway.

5.

Look, I’m a grown-up now! I told Lisa Mladinich that she’d have to re-name her site “Pretty Good Catechists”, or “Amazing Catechists Plus Also Jen Sometimes”.  She told me the no, she’s expanding the “amazing” brand to reach out the “It’s amazing anyone let you be a catechist” segment, and I was the perfect choice to lead that charge.*

Anyway, I posted one column at AC introducing myself, so if you aren’t sure who I am, quick go look.  I’ll stick up a regular catechist-y column sometime soon, and you can be sure I’ll let you know about that.  Double bonus if you go: You can see my picture instead of just a pile of rocks.  My writer friends are all patting me on the back.  Because now if you ever meet me somewhere, and I’m trying to stick my head through a very small window, sideways, you’ll be able to identify me right away.

6.

There’s a rumor that my first column at CatholicMom.com is going to appear tomorrow (Saturday) morning.  I’m interested to see what I have to say.  Something about homeschooling.**

7.

Blair of Blair’s Blessings pointed me (and many others) to the free audio stories for kids at EWTN’s site.  Do you see how happy and sweet her kids are?  She does things right.

***

*That is a COMPLETE FABRICATION. Lisa Mladinich is a friendly, cheerful person unlike your hostess here, and she would never ever say something like that.  I had to make it up.

**Lisa Hendey has you send in your first two columns before you start.  I don’t know which one she’ll put up first.  I love the suspense — now I have to get on the internet right away at 9:00am Saturday to find out.

Kolbe Academy Reviews – History

If you’ve just found this and want to see the whole series of Kolbe Reviews so far, scroll down the very bottom of the page where it says “view posts by topic” and select “Kolbe Academy” from the drop-down menu.  Or try clicking here.

As with science, last year I learned that the mother’s brain works much, much better if all children are studying approximately the same history topic.  Kolbe’s high school curriculum covers world history from a western-classical perspective over the course of four years: Greek in 9th, then Roman, then middle, then modern.  The readings for high school literature coordinate, which I absolutely love.

Now remember I have special accounting powers, which means I must a) plan ahead far into the future, b) seek to maximize efficiency and utility, and c) involve a spreadsheet in that process.  With distractions like that, you can see where my house gets to be such a mess.

And here was my challenge: My children did not think ahead.  They were not born four grades apart.  Result: I expect to spend six years of my life with two students in high school.

–> I could handle it if I had three younger ones on their young-person topic, and just one child doing his own high school subject thing.  But there was no way I was going to apply my brain to both the Illiad and the Cantebury tales in the same year.  Just not.  Not.

Good News:  The people at Kolbe have this problem too.  I sniffed around the forums, and learned that in their day school, which is small, the entire school just cycles through the four time-periods together.  I confirmed that a 9th grader could confidently do lit & history of some later grade.  My trick would be to go ahead and get the kids on the G-R-M-M cycle right now, so that no matter where in the cycle the newly-minted 9th graders landed, they’d have the background info they’d need to get going.

And I had one secret weapon that made it all massively, massively easier: #1 is a certified History geek.  So we could pretty much do whatever we wanted with him, and it would be fine.  In this case meaning that I ordered the complete set of elementary Greek history and literature offerings for him to read the summer before we launched into Ancient Rome in the fall, and he polished it off in about two weeks.  Like I said.  Secret weapon.

I requested the 5th grade Famous Men of Rome course plans for both big kids.

After browsing through the book, I determined my rising 4th grader was going to find it a bit overwhelming.  She likes history, but not in a pour-through-pages-of-military-history kind of way.  More in a dress-up-like-a-Roman way.

I decided she’d do better if we spent the fall warming her up to this whole Rome thing, and conveniently my local crack dealer had the History Pockets series in stock.  She worked through those the first two quarters, and now is underway with the Famous Men, and that was definitely a successful plan.  Having been introduced to the general ancient roman lifestyle, form of government, founding legends, and so forth has made it much easier to for her to follow the text this spring. Amazon has a preview of the Famous Men text so you can see what I mean.

What you need to know about the Famous Men of Rome and Greece books:

• The text is great.  Nice narrative style, Christian worldview without being in-your-face about it, and overall the amount of reading is not too much, if it’s spread over the course of a year.  If you have a struggling reader, plan to read aloud together.  The illustrations are goofy.
• The workbook (“Student Guide”)  is very useful for helping the kids learn the material and prepare for exams.  Recommended.  You could treat it as a consumable, but it’s pretty easy to just have the kids do the work on a separate piece of paper.  You can look at the Amazon preview here.
• The teacher’s guide = the workbook with the answers filled in.  Smart money says you’re going to want this if you get the student guide, unless you just know a lot about Rome and/or have the time to study along.

About the Course Plans:

• The Kolbe course plans do not mention the student guide, you just assign the pages to go with the lesson.  The way the course plans divide up the work across the year, sometimes only part of a workbook page will apply to a given day’s or week’s work.
• In some places the course plans give additional guidance or assignments, and in other places they just indicate what pages to read which day.
• The course plans do include quarterly exams and answer key.

–> With my fourth grader starting the book mid-year, I found it very simple to just assign one chapter per week, and have her do the two-page spread of workbook pages that go with the chapter.  If you aren’t enrolled with Kolbe, I would skip their plans and just do that.

***

What about the Land of Our Lady Series?  I know nothing.  It didn’t work with my masterplan.  If someone finds a good review, please feel free to put a link in the combox.

What about the study of non-western cultures?  See “history geek” above.  That child was not spawned from gravel.  I assure you, my children could no sooner miss out on world history than miss out on ice cream.  But if you lock your child in a closet outside of school hours, yes you’ll need to shove a few library books under the door to make sure they find out about the existence of China and all that stuff.

***

Any other questions?

Next week I’ll review the Latin I think (is that what we said, Tracey?), and after that, name your subject if you have one you want me to do next.

Kolbe Academy Reviews – Science – What about the Littles?

I forgot to include in my science report about how it all fits in for the littles.  Here you go.

Last year, I experimented with having all four kids study the same subjects for history and science.  They weren’t necessarily reading the same books or doing the same assignments, but they were on approximately the same topics.  I loved it.  Totally sold.  The sanity factor is just there.  100% there.

–> I’ll discuss the elaborate strategy I worked out for Kolbe’s history courses in my next installment.  But what about science?

I decided to let the boy — 6th grade, and very comfortable reading for information on his own — do his own thing with the purple book, and not worry about coordinating him.   The independence (translation: labor saving) we gained by going with a textbook and student-readable course plans was worth the loss in academic camaraderie.  He tends to be studying his own thing anyhow.

For the girls, I used the 4th grade text as my outline for the year.  I went through the course plans and picked out the main topic week by week, and used it to write up a general outline of subjects to study with the littles.  I  have enough odds and ends of science-y books that mostly I can work out of the home library to find some read alouds on the topic of  the week.

When we do hands-on work, all three girls end up participating, regardless of who the assignment was intended for.  (And usually there is a boy lurking in the background as well.)

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Separate note: What happens on all those Mondays that the kids don’t do the goofy “investigation” called for in the textbook? The boy likes to use that as his excuse to play with the microscope.  Which means the girls want to look, too.  The kids are big fans of using educational activities as a delaying tactic to avoid their other assignments.  I think I spend 25% of my parenting time telling the kids to quit helping each other and do their own work.

Kolbe Academy Reviews – 4th and 6th Grade Science

First thing to note: I 100% agree with Erin Arlinghaus’s seminal blog post on everything elementary science.  The way she teaches is the way we’ve done science in the past, though maybe not with quite such organizational flair.  Keep that in mind as you read my comments.

The Texts

Kolbe uses Harcourt Science 4^th Grade for 3rd and 4th grades, and Harcourt Science 6^th Grade  for both 5th and 6th grades.  [Both from Harcourt Publishing, 2005.] The units are divvied up so that you do half the units in each grade — if you have used part of one of the books on your own already, you’d want to figure out which course plans cover the sections you haven’t already studied (call and ask), or if you are enrolled with Kolbe,  just request a copy of both grades, and use what you need.

  

The textbooks are fine.  Colorful, informative, full of things you’d want to know.  I try not to read them too closely, and I’m sure that helps.  Each chapter opens with an “investigation” (like an experiment or a project), and these are almost always goofy.  If you’ve seen and felt and played with real tides in action, swishing around blue colored water pales.  We skip these 98% of the time.  Sure makes Mondays easier.

The chapters themselves just teach you science-y stuff, and in all the books are a nice compendium of technical facts and concepts.  Basic model science book, no complaints.  Does what we need it to do.  I have not felt the need for an answer key to the review questions, because it is very easy to quickly find the answer in the text if I don’t know it.

–> The textbooks are pricey – $87 (4th) and $95 (6th) retail.  It helps that you use the books for two years.  Also, these are very durable, school-edition hardbound textbooks, so there’s a good chance they’ll survive ten or more kids before they retire.  But if you are comfortable with handing your child a pile of library books and saying, “Write me a report when you’re done,” that is definitely the cheaper route.

[We’ve also had years that I handed my independently-reading child an ancient freebie textbook someone gave us.  I loved that.  Can I say Abeka was writing some nice stuff in the late ’70’s?  Yes.  Yes they were.  And back up to the ’60’s and you get some seriously good science books for children.  I honestly think something has been lost in the art of science writing lately.]

The (optional) workbooks are goofy and sort of annoying; neither of my big kids liked them.  But my currently-a-second-grader is begging to “do Kolbe,” and she loves workbooks, so we’ll save them for her.  The Kolbe course plans don’t call for the workbook; all the reading and assignments are from the text.

The Kolbe Course Plans

The Kolbe course plans provide a fair amount of guidance and instruction.  For each day, the ‘parent guidelines’ give a summary of the key points to discuss with the student — basically, how to teach the chapter day by day.   My kids just read the info themselves (or not), and do the assigned reading and questions from the book.  So far the only time I’ve needed to step in and explain something was when the 4th grader was studying the effects of the tilt of the earth’s axis.  We carried a globe into her bedroom and walked it around the big light on her ceiling fan until she got the hang of what was going on.

I bet the kids would score better on their exams if I sat down with them every day, but for now we’re satisfied with what they are learning independently.  My on-grade-level-for-reading 4th grader has no difficulty following the plans and studying on her own, though both kids do come up with interesting pronunciations for the new words they learn.

–> If you aren’t enrolled and would have to purchase the plans a la carte, you could just divide the book up by the day or week, type it up in excel, and thus tell your kid what page numbers which day.  Or do that a day-at-a-time with a bookmark.  The plans do provide some useful info, but you could live without it if you are comfortable just working through the book on your own.

(I would do that myself, though I like the ease of having all the typing done for me, which was a big reason we enrolled in the first place.  I also like that by following the plans, it stops arguments: The kids can’t accuse me of being the meanest, most slave-driving mother on the planet, when we have printed proof that I’m no meaner than the sadists at that horrid Catholic school in California.)

The course plans do include four end-of-quarter exams.  Answer key for the exam is in the course plans, not in the separate answer key book.  [That is, it might be also in the book, but if you own the course plans themselves, that suffices.  This is true for all the Kolbe course plans — if the plan includes an exam, it also includes the answer key for that exam.]

The Verdict

This science program is a good choice if either:

a) You aren’t comfortable teaching science on your own, and want a formal curriculum that walks you through a  traditional text step by step.

or

b) You need to just shove a formal plan in front of your kids and say, “Do science!”

You might get a very good science education, and worst case scenario, you won’t get a bad one.

I’d recommend purchasing just the textbook; for most people, skipping the workbook would be fine.  I’d skip the answer keys as well, unless you’re sure you’ll need an answer key — for example if your students are going to be checking their own answers, or you need to grade at maximum speed.  I’d be inclined to start the course with only the text (and course plans if desired), and only go back and purchase the optional extras if you felt something was really missing.

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Any questions?  Any votes for what subject to cover next week?