New "old-fashioned" education

It is such a joy to report to you regarding the wonderful adventure we are having with our new old-fashioned education. Here are some of the excerpts from my journal:

Ellie hard at work

Olivia had a lesson which described boys blowing bubbles, so we all watched a YouTube video from the Discovery Channel on them. Then today I mixed a really thick bubble solution with liquid dish soap and some corn syrup, and the children and I used a vacuum hose attachment to blow all kinds of bubbles—most of them on a flat counter-top we prepared with water. We tried some of the things we saw on the video. After a while the fun was turned over to the little girls as we continued with our academics—they were mesmerized for a few hours, then they took the experiment outside onto the deck and continued blowing huge bubbles into the open-air.

Eliana loves creating comic strips as a format for her lessons. Her current lesson is from the Psalms, so she split her page into six equal parts and created an illustration in each of the sections. She colors and captions everything—it seems to flow from her. She, at ten-years-old, is in the highest level of the McGuffey Readers of all of the children, and seems to be quite comfortable there. She only learned to read just last year—another example of late-blooming readers that are brilliant! She is the only child to complain about the lessons, but the first one to finish.

Sarah and Joshua on special projects

Joshua's lesson was a poem filled with irony—he didn't catch it at first, so I read it aloud to him so that he would. Then I set him to the task of reading the poem aloud so that someone else could catch the satire. This won't be hard for him, since the poem is about sailing, a subject which he is avidly interested in and has been previously studying. He and Ryan, his younger brother, have been working on some posts and are now collaborators in their blog, Sons of the Right Hand. Ryan originally created the blog—with Joshua now doing most of the article writing.

Ryan writing an essay

Ryan has needed some work on his narration and sentence creation. He was trying to do the minimum required, but I am pushing him to do his maximum effort. Sometimes I allow my grace and mercy, as a mother, to get in the way of expecting a higher standard from my students. When I raise my measuring stick, it's amazing how much my children will strive to meet its height. His artistic portion of this week's work is to create a compass face, with our house as the center, oriented correctly. Ryan's creative endowment is so tremendous that he is often consumed by it, so our focus is to help him keep a proper balance. So many talented, creative people have been shipwrecked in this life—I am related to a few of them. We want his life to be completely centered on the Lord Jesus, and in this way he will never be mastered by his giftings, but he will be the master of them—everything in moderation.

Sarah is so enthused by astronomy. Last night the sky was so crystal-clear that we could see the stars better than we have been able to for a long time. We brought out our star chart and constellation wheel and tried to identify as much as we could. After looking through The Star-Gazer's Handbook, Sarah moved on to the Internet to search out and download some photos of nebulae, galaxies, etc. She really enjoyed the time she spent.

Dear Olivia Celeste

Olivia's lesson was the poem for Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. During her recitation her voice was so sweet and angelic that tears welled up in my eyes. Olivia is a steady learner, and spelling is easy for her. She struggles a bit with penmanship, but that will come in time. Quiet and gentle by nature, she is a joy to be around. Everyone takes special care of her because she is so endearing.

While the children were at the table, we turned on Mozart's Ah vous dirai-je, Maman in celebration of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, and the little girls danced about like three petite ballerinas—how I wish I could capture these moments and live in them!

Sarah, Josh, Nicole

Sarah started sewing headbands for the little girls today. She used some elastic I bought in a huge bag at a garage sale this last summer. She took scraps of cloth from our sewing projects and fashioned flowerettes with buttons as centers to put on the bands. She made her sisters very happy, and they even stayed on their heads for the greater part of the day, until they slipped down to become silly eye-ware and the giggle level rose to the rafters! Oh, what wonderful memories!

I think if she could, Sarah would do math and reading lessons all day. She has taken the Spencerian Penmanship so seriously, making her handwriting a beautiful sight to behold!

Of course, little Lorilee (four) had to sew, too, so Sarah took a diminutive tote bag and filled it with a variety of engaging notions for her—she was very happy. Lorilee loves to pretend to read aloud to us, and we all enjoy it so much when she does. She has her very own copybook, with quite a few pages scribbled on, but it is still special and unique. She likes it when we pull up a Baldwin Reader and revisit old-fairy-tales. Her favorite is The Gingerbread Boy.

Patience and Lorilee

Patience is fond of The Wee, Wee Woman as it is done in the Winston Primer. I have it nicely printed out and placed into a folder between page protectors. We have read this story over and over, and she even has parts memorized. Patience is entering into a "clothing optional" phase, so we are constantly dressing her, or she is often found attempting to dress herself by putting panties on her head, or wearing assorted shirts as pants, etc. She loves anything with the word "baby" in it, so Daddy finds old songs and videos for her—"Sherry Baby" By Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and "Baby Come Back" By Player, etc., and they sit and listen together, the same songs—playing them numerous times in order to please her (each time she says, "Go back!"). Learning to share is one of the things we concentrate on, and I must admit we have spoiled her quite a lot—this is the problem of being parents at a time of life when most couples are grand-parents. But we are also wise and experienced enough to know just how badly things can turn out, so building good habits by setting boundaries for acceptable behavior is our main focus these days.

Joshua has been practicing using an extension pole (about 15 feet long when fully extended) with a scrubber/squeegee attachment to clean the windows on our two-story house so that he might be able to earn a little money cleaning windows in our neighborhood this spring. He is such a diligent young man—coming in and out to check and see if he missed anything. I am so proud of him.

We all memorized Psalm 1 in about a 30 minutes the other day—it was to kick off the beginning of our working through all 150 of the Psalms. We often spend two hours a day just studying, sharing and praying together in God's Word. We then discuss how to practically apply what we have learned to our daily living. A part of that time is spent in devotions working through a good book like, Hearing God By Peter Lord. Daddy runs these times, and I am so glad. I don't know where we would be without the spiritual leadership of this great man of God (he will be embarrassed that I wrote this about him, but it is true).

Nicole focuses on her new assignment

Nicole always appears to have piles and piles of books everywhere—she is such a spaghetti-head! We often talk of how we need to get all of this creative meandering under control—I am qualified to speak because she has inherited her spaghetti-head tendencies from me. I do so admire her will to study hard. She even keeps little sticky notes on her mirror to remind herself of the basic ideas she has been gleaning from her reading. Like all young people, she has many questions about her future, and attempting to be a "stay-at-home" daughter is just one of the things she is still working out. She is an excellent cook, a fine seamstress and a wonderful help to me. Nicole and Patience have a special friendship—Nicole tends to be a "night owl" and these nocturnal tendencies were very expedient when Patience was a new-born baby enduring many tummy aches.

Faith sounds out her words

Faith is my little jewel. I enjoy our times together, learning to read and learning basic math. She has completely filled in a Roaring Springs composition book with her copy work and illustrations, all of which I love. She has graduated to becoming the proud owner of a "school satchel" like her older siblings. In it we have included a special set of colored pencils, her McGuffey Primer, composition book, nature notebook, and many times our New England Primer, which she enjoys reading with me (I think she loves the smallness of this little book). I have been using the flashcards I created with her—and they seem to be doing the trick. Faith is the type of person who allows you to see straight into her heart, and it is so bright and sunny there, which truly makes teaching her such a pleasure.

Our current family read-aloud is The Winged Watchman, by Hilda Van Stockum. This is the second novel we have read authored by her. This is a story about the experiences of a young boy in Holland during the Nazi occupation of WWII. I appreciate how her characters pray and discuss Christian virtues throughout the entire narrative.

The children are also taking turns on the computer practicing their keyboarding and Spanish lessons. I made up a sheet which keeps track of their progress. They sit in teams (we require teammates for computer time for safety and accountability reasons) and each person gets 15 minutes for each task.

Sweet Patience

We have been practicing singing hymns together A capella. Our family recently visited an elderly couple's house (my husband's mentor for the last 35 years) and sang hymns and worshiped with them—and a Christian woman, named Christine, showed up to play and sing hymns on her portable keyboard—so we actually had some accompaniment. It was a special time in the Lord with some very precious people. Our children all behaved very well and enjoyed this time of worship together.

I love spending time with my precious children—they teach me new things each and every day. I am so humbled that God would give me such a wonderful job to be about until He returns—and He just might be cracking the sky pretty soon too! I pray He finds me absolutely faithful.