Mystery of History 4 and Sonlight for High School

As I have posted before, Mystery of History 4 works well with Sonlight and for high school. We're using it this year for my senior and sophomore, and have not been disappointed. This may turn out to be our favorite volume yet! Even my non-history loving child has been excited to tell me about several of the lessons (the early one on Bach and Handel helped my music-lover!)

This year is our most "eclectic" year yet. I had planned to pull books mainly from Sonlight 300 and then other cores for the earlier time period, but I also really wanted my oldest to get some British literature in, and a more focused "literature course" before going to college. (I tend to have us read and enjoy literature, discuss what interests us, and only occasionally do "literature analysis.") So with that in mind, I had to be pretty ruthless in deciding which Sonlight 300 books we could read aloud. I decided in the end to do Learning Language Arts Through Literature Gold (British Lit), some 300 books, a few from 530, and even a book from Core H and Core F, to round out our lit for this year.

We read aloud for about 30-45 minutes per day typically. Here's what I came up with (the number preceeding the book shows the approximate week I hope to start this book, and the chapters after show how much I anticipate reading per day):

Summer Read-alouds:

The Best of Sherlock Holmes (2 days per story, 4 weeks)
The Wednesday Wars (9 sections, 30 pgs each, 2 weeks)

School Year Read-alouds:

1- In Search of Honor. (Core H. 1787 – French Revolution: 3 ch)
3- Jane Eyre – (Core 200. 1 ch)
9-The Importance of Being Earnest – (Core 530. 1890’s: ½ Act/day 1-2, 1 Act 3)
10- The Great Brain – (1900’s beginning: 1 ch)
12- Murder on the Orient Express (2 ch)
15- Old Man and the Sea – (1940’s: 25 pages)
16- The Hiding Place (1940’s: 1 ch)
19- The Great Divorce (Core 530. 1-2 ch)
21- Alas, Babylon – (1950’s written: 1 ch)
23- Breaking Stalin’s Nose – (Core F. 1950’s-ruled 20’s – 50’s: 6 ch)
24- My Father’s Daughter – (1952: 1 ch)
27- Red Scarf Girl – (1966: 1 ch)
30- To Destroy You Is No Loss – (1975: 1 ch)
33- There’s a sheep in my Bathtub – (1990’s: 2 ch)

Movies:

The Scarlet Pimpernel (French Revolution)
As You Like It – Shakespeare (filmed at the Globe)
All Quiet on the Western Front  (WW I)
Cry, the Beloved Country (1940’s just after WWII)
Ghandi (1950s)

Optional:

Gulliver’s Travels (1726: 39 chapters, 2 chapters per day, 3 weeks)
Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus (53 chapters, 2 per day = 4-5 weeks)
Fallacy Detective: 38 Lessons, 1 per week?

Readers:

LLATL Gold

1 – Emphasis on Poetry
6 – Romantic Poets – Wordsworth, Coleridge
9 – Frankenstein
13 – More Romantic Poets – Shelley, Keats
15 – Emma for dd, Gulliver's Travels for ds
21 – Victorian Poets – Tennyson, Browning, Arnold
24 – A Tale of Two Cities
30 – More Victorian Poets – Hopkins, Hardy
31 – The Time Machine
33 – Modern Poets – Eliot, Owen, Graves
34 – Animal Farm

If I wasn't doing British Lit, I might have chosen differently for the readers, though I think the time frame lines up nicely to do British Lit with this level of MOH.

We've already veered from this slightly--since MOH 4 wasn't ready when we started our school year, I started with Jane Eyre (thought-provoking look at character, faith, the internal battle when resisting sin.) Hopefully we'll hit In Search of Honor close to when we study the French Revolution.

One more change--after pre-reading Emma (used in LLATL Gold), I decided my son would not be interested or amused by it! (He did sit through Pride and Prejudice as a read-aloud a couple of years ago, and did well with that after the first 1/3.) So I'm going to substitute Gulliver's Travels for him when that comes up.

That's one reason I really like coming up with a one-page list like this--it makes it easy for me to alter plans depending on what we're doing in the year, and to make the curriculum work for us, while at the same time giving me a solid plan to follow for the year.

I'm really excited about the variety of books this year, and the chance to discuss compelling works, as well as include some humor. I'm treasuring this last year of working with my son before he graduates, and enjoying both students as they become young adults. Sometimes homeschooling high school is intimidating--I can look too far ahead and lapse into worry and fear about the future. But the Lord pulls me back and reminds me they are in his hands, and to treasure and cherish today and the gift of homeschooling.

Copywork Part 2: Teaching Literary Elements

As I said in my post on Copywork andDictation Part 1: Teaching Mechanics, I love copywork as a tool for gently teaching all kinds of things, from grammar and mechanics to literary styles and that ineffable quality of “voice.” You can make a whole language arts course out of copywork and dictation if you want to.  So, in this post I want to focus more on literary elements, although my example below includes some mechanics I mentioned as well.

You can teach literary styles just like you can mechanics. I really think it just depends on what you make of it, and how you plan it out.  One year I focused on copywork/dictation as our main language arts.  Here's a copy of a Sonlight post I wrote that year about The Journeyman—how I chose passages and how I taught them:

First, here are some things that I look for in a dictation passage: Did I go "wow" when I read it? Did it strike me as powerful, poignant, a beautiful description? Did it have a great message? Is it good advice? If it's good to read, it's good to study and emulate. A passage I didn't get around to using, but has great description, is the sunrise on the top of p. 37. The two I did use, I'll post below.

The 2nd I absolutely love for it's beauty and it's power. The first I chose because I thought the message was worthwhile, and in many ways, what summed up Mr. Toppan's teaching also sums up mine.

"Will it always be beautiful, Mr. Toppan?"

"Yes," he answered with conviction, "if you keep true to your own feeling for beauty."

"What do you mean by keeping true?"

Mr. Toppan looked at him until his eyes seemed not to see the boy Jared, but the man Jared might become. "It's letting God have your life, so that your hands do the work He wants you to do. You've begun rightly, Jared, for that's the beginning and end of all my teaching."

Notes: I had my kids do this passage over 2 days (btw, from p. 31). I split it where the line break is. I edited some phrases out and the attributions to make it shorter. It's clear from context who's saying what, and I wanted to get to the heart of the passage without wearing out my children. We discussed what it meant when Mr. Toppan looked at Jared and the kids acted out that kind of expression. We talked about what the message meant too. 

We discussed the use of capitals (names, titles), abbreviations (Mr.) and commas in quotes (lots of practice here). We had been discussing commas in quotations and for phrasing, and this selection added a third usage—around the name of someone we speak to. (There's not one after Mr. Toppan because it's the end of the sentence, but there is one before, and then below there are commas before and after Jared's name when he's addressed.)

I don't go looking for passages that teach certain concepts necessarily—I look for powerful writing and then I ask my kids what they notice, then I point out what I notice, we look at literary elements, then we look at the physical aspects of writing. It gets easier as you get in the mindset of pre-teaching.

The 2nd passage we used: "It was a night for the stars to bless with light—for Eliza, who through the travail of her body had given a child to the world, and for Jared, who through the travail of his soul was giving a man to the world" (p. 98).

This passage might not display its full power until you read it in context, but when you do, wow. When I asked my kids what they noticed, my son noticed the parallel clauses right away—the two travails etc... We talked about why this was a powerful metaphor and what Jared was going through. We talked about em dashes and commas around clauses. This one would have been possible to also do from dictation (sometimes I put names or harder words up on a white board).

Sometimes I point out spelling patterns we are working on. For example, you could point out the igh in night & light.  Or that the wor in world is a pattern when "or" stands for the /er/ sound. The ai in travail. How to turn "give" into "given." I wouldn't necessarily go over all of these, just pick a few to focus on so it won't be overwhelming.

I asked if there were any rhyming words, and my daughter found those.  Things like rhyme and meter sometimes show up in prose and add to the beauty of the language, so it can be fun to look for these in addition to alliteration and other such devices.

By the way, this would be a great book to discuss foreshadowing! I don't want to post a spoiler, but I'll just say if you're looking for it, you can guess much of what will happen. This is a book to relax into and enjoy the beautiful language and the unfolding of the story line. There are lots of other passages one could choose for copywork, I remember almost every chapter having choices, you can't really go wrong in this book. Oh, here's another one: "The moon threw a silver cloak across his shoulders and before it was withdrawn, he was asleep" (p. 44). For that one, you could discuss how personification and imagery are used.

If you can’t think of anything great to discuss, that’s ok. It’s fine to just enjoy some passages, or to ask, “what do you like about this sentence?” and then tell your child what you like.  It's also fine to let your child choose something he or she would like to copy. Good literature is meant first and foremost to be enjoyed.

Copywork and dictation used in this way can be foundational to your language arts, or they can just be a fun extra to do as a break from your everyday language arts program. Use it all the time, or save it for just those times when you are inspired. Most of all, have fun with it!

Planning Language Arts Part 2

Last time I covered how to set up a language arts plan by thinking through your child's skill level.  This time I'll describe in a little more detail some of the things you might work on in each of these areas, and some of my curriculum choices:

Beginning Reading

Reading instruction will start with basic phonics instruction and your child reading to you single words (perhaps on a word list, cards, or from words built from letter tiles).  When my son was little, I had letter cubes and would build "word rockets" that he liked to pretend blasted off!  Then they'll read simple books to you.  As they get into longer books, you might employ a technique called "buddy reading" where they read a page or paragraph and then you read for awhile.  Eventually this time will become an independent reading time.  

For beginning reading we used a combination of materials:  Reading Reflex, readers from Sonlight, Bob Books, Christian Liberty Press K readers, DK readers--pretty much anything I could get my hands on used or borrowed until they were reading more solidly.  

Reading Reflex uses the Orton-Gillingham phonograms and was helpful for the first half of the book, but when it got to what they call the "advanced code" (letter teams that make up one phonogram such as OA for the long O sound), the program felt very disorganized and didn't work well for us.  I would use All About Reading instead if I had another child to teach now. AAR includes research-based instruction in decoding, fluency, automaticity, vocabulary, comprehension, and phonemic awareness. Sonlight has supplied most of our readers and has usually been a good match here.

Reading and Literature

Some of reading time (or some of read-aloud time) might also be spent in literary discussions. A wonderful resource to help with this is Glencoe which has free literary guides for older students, or the book Deconstructing Penguins for all ages.  Even if you are clueless about literary terms like protagonist, climax, theme, and plot, just having normal, every day discussions about books and poetry can teach these concepts (and it's not hard to learn what these words mean, a little at a time, over the years.  The aforementioned book can help and makes it easy and enjoyable).

As you move into high school, you can make this a more formal learning time.  I have not yet used the following, but like the look of Teaching the Classics from IEW, and Learning Language Arts Through Literature Gold.  Sonlight has a nice combination of award-winning books, and always includes a poetry book as well.

Penmanship

Handwriting doesn't have to involve putting pen to paper to start either.  You can do things like writing with an index finger in sand, pudding, on carpet squares or other tactile surfaces.  There's a great description of air-writing near the end of this article about preventing and correcting reversals that is a wonderful tool for young students.  Writing involves both gross and fine motor muscle tone as well as neurological involvement and working memory, and is fairly complex.  I remember thinking that pre-writing types of activities were not all that important, when in fact they are very important.  I was too anxious to get to "the real thing" (pencil to paper) and if I had it to do over again, I'd spend more time doing fun pre-writing activities such as these.

Handwriting Without Tears is a favorite here because the methods help to prevent reversals (or help you retrain a child who is doing reversals).  Letters that are commonly reversed such as "b" and "d" are formed differently and contained in different sets of letters ("b" is a "diver" letter and "d" is a "magic C" letter).  I didn't like the look of the letters at first, but then I learned that my kids didn't make letter that looked like the samples anyway--each person develops his or her own personal style.  I really like their Can Do Cursive book for 5th grade as it includes some light grammar and some basic Greek and Latin word roots too.  (I like things that do double-duty!).  My kids also enjoyed a year of A Reason for Writing, which has some nice border papers to write Bible verses on.  We sent the verses to Grandma sometimes, for her refrigerator, or to a friend who was a shut-in. 

Some people use copywork for handwriting practice, but that didn't work here in the early years.  (See mistake #2 for more on copywork).  But this year my 8th grade daughter decided she wants to improve her penmanship, and she is using America the Beautiful from Queen Homeschool for copywork.  Lovely selections!

Spelling

I've tried a lot of programs over the years:  Spelling Power, Natural Speller, Tricks of the Trade, Sequential Spelling, Spectrum, Apples Daily Spelling Drills...at one point I gave up and started writing my own curriculum!  I've also used dictation to teach spelling.  With dictation, you choose a selection from your child's reader that has 5-10 words for the child to learn.  At the beginning of the week, you show the child the passage and spend time pre-teaching the phonics involved in each of the words.  Point out things like various reasons for silent e's, letter teams that are working together, patterns like AY that are generally used at the end of words (while AI is used mid-word), rules for adding suffixes, and so on.  Of all the methods we had tried up to that point, this was the most helpful.  However, it wasn't systematic enough for my kids needs, and it was time-consuming for mom!  

Then I found All About Spelling and that changed everything for us.  After two weeks my then 5th grader told me it was the most effective spelling we had ever tried, and both children begged me not to ever change programs again.  After a year, both of their reading levels had gone up two full grade levels.  You can read my review here.  AAS includes dictation (no having to find your own sources) and some sentence writing starting in Level 3.  After level 3, students have mastered around 1000 words, and it's a good time to start a formal writing program.

Here are tips on how to teach editing skills.

Writing and Grammar

In the early years I like to do informal writing and grammar work.  Things like thank-you notes or making little books, letting them tell me a story that I scribe for them, having them narrate back to me about something we read together or a movie or what happened in Sunday School are all various ways of working on writing and pre-writing skills.  Kids work on organizing their thoughts, summarizing (a very difficult skill that can take years to master), presenting ideas in an interesting way, "hooking" their audience and so on without the pressure of putting pen to paper.  I also like to do interactive journal-writing with my kids--I write a note to them and they write a note back to me in the same notebook.  The notebook  might put in a special place like in front of the door to one's room, on a pillow, or in a "mailbox" made for this purpose. 

Informal grammar is something many of us do naturally.  When our children use the wrong form of a word or state something in a way that doesn't make sense, we might gently restate what they said and have them repeat it.  In our house, this is second nature and we really don't even realize we are doing it!  Later, a formal grammar program can be used.  I like The Writer's Jungle approach of covering grammar 3 times--once each in elementary school, junior high, and high school. You can do a quick refresher as needed. (I'm doing a capitalization and punctuation refresher with my kids this year for the first 8 weeks, and then we'll focus on writing for the rest of the year--which of course requires them to use all of their grammar skills.)

Another way to study grammar at the high school level is through a foreign language.  There's nothing like a language difference to help one understand the grammar in one's native tongue!

For a formal program, again I have tried several things for writing and grammar.  Early on I was drawn to Charlotte Mason type programs like Primary Language Lessons.  I also used Sonlight D LA. Spectrum and Steck Vaughn have LA programs that cover grammar and writing both.  One year I used Jump In from Apologia for writing.  None of these worked "great" for us, so I would use a program for a year or so and then look for something else.  Over the years I learned that my kids needed more incremental and explicit (direct) methods.  My oldest especially doesn't learn from implicit or discovery-oriented methods.  

My daughter did enjoy Karen Andreola's Story Starters for creative writing.

The best choices for us have been Easy Grammar and Essentials in Writing.  Easy Grammar starts off teaching the prepositions and how to find prepositional phrases in a sentence, which then makes it easier to identify the other parts of speech.  Students are taught how to identify one thing at a time, and then given exercises to work on that.  Things like irregular verbs and noun-forms are taught, plus capitalization, punctuation, clauses, how to identify run-on sentences and fragments, etc...  My son really likes this program, while my daughter jokingly calls it "Not Easy Grammar!"  However, she shows more understanding of grammar through this program than through any of the things we tried previously!

Essentials in Writing includes grammar in the elementary grades, but I haven't used those levels, so I can't comment on that.  I like this one so much that I included a complete review here.

Planning Language Arts Simplified

Why is it that Language Arts seems to be the most difficult subject to plan?  One reason is that it encompasses so many subjects--phonics, reading, penmanship, listening skills, spelling, grammar, writing, poetry, literature, vocabulary, speech...  It's overwhelming at times to consider all that we could do, and to try to figure out what we should do.

Another reason is that it can be an area of struggle for some kids.  34% of children struggle with learning to read.  (As a side note, if you are dealing with a child who struggles, here's a free webinar on that topic).  Many struggle with spelling or complain about writing.  

I remember in my early homeschooling years, longing for an all-in-one language arts curriculum.  I knew if I chose separate curricula for all the various topics that I would either miss something or end up with 3 hours of work per day for my kids to do!  The trouble was, I could never find an all-in-one that fit us.  Kids tend to learn to read faster than they learn to write or spell, and programs that lined up these subjects frustrated us by being too slow for reading or too advanced for writing.  

So, I decided to come up with some basic goals.  Why do we teach language arts?  What are we trying to accomplish?

At the basic level, language arts is all about communication.  Taking in information, and being able to communicate with others.  We've actually been working on these skills from babyhood.  We have already taught them a lot about how to speak and to listen, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, all before they even hit school-age.  We don't really think about it, but we've been busy! 

Practically speaking though, I needed a plan for moving forward.  What order should I teach skills, and what priority do I give them?

Reading Aloud

For all children, 20-30 minutes minimum reading literature aloud to your child is a wonderful way to naturally build language arts skills as well as pass on your values, character training, and just enjoy some snuggle time. 

You can cover so much through this.  It's a great way to teach vocabulary (I often stop to see if my kids know a word, or they will stop me and ask for a definition.  If I don't like the one I come up with, I pull out the dictionary and we look the word up together.)  Syntax and grammar and the flow of our language are taught informally.  Poetry can teach rhyming, alliteration, and the musicality of language.  You can work on listening skills and oral comprehension by asking simple questions like, "What do you think will happen next," or, "Why do you think the character did that?  Would you have done that?"  Most of all, reading aloud can help your child develop a life-long love of learning.  I still read to my high school and junior high students, and will as long as I can get away with it!

Building a Plan for Daily Work:

To reign in our budgets (both time and money!), I recommend some basic time limits for daily work.  I like to do 30-60 minutes or so for kindergarten and first grade, and 60-90 minutes for second grade and up.  

To fill this time, set your priorities.  A basic beginning plan might start like this:

Phonics and reading instruction:  20-30 minutes

Penmanship: 10 minutes

When a child becomes somewhat fluent in reading simple three and four sound words, add in:

Spelling: 20 minutes

When a child can read chapter books fluently, then that Phonics/reading instruction time becomes:

Silent Reading:  30 minutes  

You may still want to have your children read aloud to you on a daily basis.  We cover this during our Bible time, but you could also choose to have them read a paragraph from a reader to you each day.

When your child is ready for more, you can add in grammar or writing instruction.  I start off working on these topics informally, as I find it easier to add in a formal writing program after a child can spell around a thousand words.

Writing or Grammar: 30 minutes

Writing and Grammar do not have to be taught simultaneously.  You can choose to focus on one per year, do units in 6, 9, 12, or 18 week segments, alternate days, or use a program that incorporates both.  

Eventually Speech can be woven in to that writing/grammar time slot.  

So that's it!  Think through your goals, the skills of your child, and step by step build your plan.  You don't have to do every language arts topic every year.  Next time I'll cover what each of these topics might entail, and some of my favorite curriculum choices.

Literary discussions--free guides

I've only used one of these Glencoe guides (The Red Badge of Courage), and we didn't use all of it.  The background info was really helpful, and then I used the "pick and choose" method to decide which questions to answer.  We did this orally because I just wanted to have an enjoyable, meaty discussion, and this fit the bill perfectly.  I can see that it would also be great for a deeper lit. study.  This is a resource I'm sure I'll use again.  They cover lots of books, the links are listed alphabetically.


Not free, but if you are looking for an easy read on how to do literary discussions, check out Deconstructing Penguins: Parents, Kids, and the Bond of Reading.  It's packed full of real-life examples that show how to discuss books even with young children, that can make your books more enjoyable.  We're not talking about "dissect a book to death" type discussions, but ones that make you think a bit more, enjoy the writing, and treasure time with your kids.