Here I am, the long-lost blogger! I have been spending my time over on my other blog, Learning Together, and have left this one woefully unattended. Trying to come up with a plan or a new focus here. But I will be back.
The Short Story /Create-a-Book class is something I am teaching at the local homeschool bookstore / resource center, and our first meeting went very well. I brought a box full of well-loved picture books from my shelves and we looked at them, identifying the parts of a book such as the cover, title, spine, dedication, publisher, end pages, story summary, author bio., text & illustrations.
Then we looked at a couple of homemade books that my children had created, and I read them the story of "Jason and Grayson and the Missing Baseball Hat", written by my lovely and talented oldest daughter.
Afterwards, we brainstormed story ideas by listing the alphabet down one side of a piece of paper and writing down things we enjoyed or thought were interesting for each letter.
A – Astronauts, Antarctica, Alligators
B – Ballet, Basketball, Band,
C – Christmas, Cookies, China
D – Dinosaurs, Dessert, Dreams
E – Elephants, Ethiopia
etc.
As a class, we created a Jumble Story. On the whiteboard I wrote these Categories: Character, Place, Time, and Problem. The kids in the class then suggested things to put under each category – for instance, 1. Sparkle, the Dragon; 2. Precious, the Princess; 3. Connor, the race car driver… 1. in a castle; 2. at the beach… 1. in 1475; 2. in the winter; 3. today ; 1. a stolen artifact; 2. can’t find his shoes; 3. best friend told a lie………. Once our categories were filled in, I chose someone to roll a die, and the number that came up was the number we chose for Character; someone else rolled and that number was the Place, and so on. So now we had Sparkle the Dragon, in a castle, in the morning, and a stolen artifact. Paired with a partner, the kids then had 15 minutes to write a story with a beginning, middle, and and end, using those 4 elements. They really seemed to get into this and produced some pretty funny stories.
We talked about character, setting, & plot, and the fact that every story has a beginning, middle, and end. And now they have to come back next week with their own story idea, and we’ll get started!
There are 16 kids in the class, ranging from age 8 to 14. We are spending the first 4 weeks learning about and writing their short stories, and then we’ll move into the development and construction of a one-of-a-kind, heirloom hard-cover book! I did this project many years ago with my 3 older children, and then about 5 years ago as a class in our homeschool co-op. The project is from Valerie Bendt’s Creating Books With Children. "J" is in this class with me, and I’ll post more about his progress in creating a story and a book as we go along.
Yesterday was TOG Co-op day. I have a lot more prep work this year, teaching high school level literature and writing to a group of seven 14-15 yr. olds. The kids are super – I love them all – but the material is very challenging, and I am having to read their literature assignments as well as the teacher background notes and discussion script each week, and also prepare some writing instruction materials. whew! We are following the "cutting plan" laid out in the TOG Yr 2 Loom, which trims the literature assignments to make them more manageable for younger high school students. This past week we finished reading Beowulf ( from the Norton Anthology of English Lit.! ) and discussed the story and the elements of theme, worldview, characters, and "experiment in living". Next week we begin tackling Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales!
I’m pretty happy with the effort the kids are putting in so far, but I’m going to need to be a cheerleader to keep them motivated through the tough work ahead. I can tell there is a lack of confidence there. This is a BIG step up from what any of them were doing last year for literature, when they were all in the Dialectic level of TOG, reading stories like The Golden Goblet, Wonders and Miracles, and Eagle of the Ninth.
Writing so far is a review of the writing process, and forming strong sentences and paragraphs, but in a couple of weeks they’ll be tackling their first Literary Analysis paper, and then a 10-page research paper.
This is WAY above the kind of work I did in high school, but I am excited that my children have a high bar to work for and get to tackle such challenging material. I’m sorry that I didn’t have it when my older ones were still homeschooling. They did fine and succeeded very well in college, but my goodness… after TOG, college work should be a breeze for these last two!
Last but not least, here is Jason with the Viking longboat that he made this week.
( tissue box, bamboo skewers, Crayola Model Magic, copy paper )
Co-op was a lot of fun again yesterday. Both Amanda’s 8th/9th grade group (which I co-teach) and Jason’s 4th/5th grade group do a Jeopardy game as review each week, and the kids are loving that! My group did presentations this week ( just to our small group) on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and I was so pleased at the great job they all did! Then we discussed the history and literature reading for the week, read the Pageant of Philosophy dialogue that is included in the Tapestry of Grace curriculum, and started work on our tomb paintings ~
Ancient Egyptian designs from a coloring book, which we traced onto newsprint using an overhead projector, and will then paint and display at our Unit Celebration in October.Next week we’ll be adding a couple of more things to our weekly schedule. Amanda’s Biology class starts Tuesday morning. It is held once a week and is taught by a homeschool dad who is a professor in the Botany dept. at NC State. The are using
Apologia’s Exploring Creation With Biology , which is the same book my older kids all used. The Apologia books are great for high school science ~ they are written for homeschoolers and come from a Biblical worldview. Tuesday is also the first day of Eric’s American Literature class, which is being taught by a former homeschool mom who used to teach English at a local Christian school. She and her husband also happen to be Eric’s Sunday School teachers this year, so that should be interesting! Jason will be starting his science class this week as well. Last year, he met with his best friend, Nathan, and Nathan’s mom, Tammy, for science two afternoons a week, and they worked through Considering God’s Creation. This year they are using Jeannie Fulbright’s Exploring Creation With Botany , part of Apologia’s Young Learner’s Series.We still haven’t started Latin or Write Shop, but it is coming. Easing in is the way to go, at least for me.
Amanda’s volleyball team had 2 games this week. We played against Cary Christian’s lower middle school team on Tuesday, and won very easily. It was not a good match-up, as the Cary girls were apparently all first-year players with barely a week or two of practice under their belts. Our coach and girls on the bench all started cheering for them to hit the ball! Yesterday we played against Franklin Academy, and it was an excellent contest!! Our teams are very evenly matched, and both teams played hard, with our girls pulling out the win! Hooray for the Eagles!
I have been without a car all week, since Mark’s Honda had to go in the shop to have the transmission replaced. ugh I don’t know if there is ever a "good" time for a big financial hit like that, but this comes on top of still paying for our family trip this spring, as well as school books and supplies, clothes & shoes ( these things just keep wearing out!), college tuition bills, a son needing wisdom teeth pulled….. Last night Mark compared our financial crunch to the story of Gideon found in the Bible in Judges 6 & 7. Gideon raised an army of 32,000 Israelites to fight the Midianites. But God said that there were too many, and told Gideon to send home all but 300 men. God wanted them to know that their own strength wouldn’t bring them victory, but trust in Him alone. So maybe God is showing us that we cannot trust in our own resources, but in His provision?
I love the story of George Mueller, the 19th century English evangelist and orphanage director. He cared for over 100,000 orphans in 5 different homes, but never solicited financial support. Rather, he relied on God to provide through His people, as the Holy Spirit prompted them. One morning, the story goes, there was no food left in the home to feed the orphans. George led morning prayers as usual, thanking the Lord for his wonderful provision for them. A knock on the door came shortly afterwards, from a local baker who told them that he had felt compelled to bake bread for the orphans that morning. Then a milkman came to the door, saying that his cart had broken down in the street in front of the orphanage, and would they take the milk he had, since it would have to be spilled in the street otherwise.
NCLighthouseKeeper
Beth
