Archive for November, 2013

Poetry Teatime: “The dignity and repose of the tea party”

Poetry Teatime

We’ve just started using Brave Writer end of last year and the beginning of this school year we started the Teatimes. The kids were really excited to share poems together. My son (age 12) bought me a book “Sixty Poems” by Rudyard Kipling this summer at a used book sale in anticipation of these teatimes, so we tried some of those out, in addition to our Robert Louis Stevenson favorites.

Poetry Teatime

One funny thing that happened was that we set the teatime up on the front porch area due to the amazing weather we were having. As soon as our teatime started, the neighbor across the street starting using some kind of really loud saw or grinder. We kept laughing about how it “disturbed the dignity and repose of the tea party.” (which is a quote from the Tale of Tom Kitten). Every poem was accented with a loud grinding/sawing sound.

Last weekend the kids asked if we could buy a half gallon of apple cider for our next Tuesday Teatime, which shows how much they are enjoying it!

~Angie

Images (cc)

Poetry Teatime

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Create question marks

Question markImage by The Italian Voice

Neil Postman (famous educator) says, “Children enter school as question marks and come out as periods.”

Homeschool gives you the opportunity to resist that trend. While the impartation of our own worldview, beliefs, and values is often part of what motivates the choice to home educate, we must resist the temptation to “download” those ideas onto the heads of our children, blunting their natural curiosity and creativity.

The best educational models rely on the Socratic method of inquiry—asking good questions. Writing depends on the ability to ask yourself good questions. Your leadership at home can facilitate that growth and development.

Here’s how.

1) Ask thoughtful questions (even if you think you know the answer):

“What might have motivated Paul Revere to ride through New England warning ‘The British are coming!’?”

“Why do you think we practice X as a tradition?”

2) Ask imagination questions:

“What would it feel like to wake up in the morning and see a green sky and blue grass?”

“If you could fly, what might be a few of the dangers you’d encounter?”

3) Ask personal experience questions:

“What did it feel like to ride your bike without the training wheels? Did it remind you of any other experience?”

“Can you describe to me how the toothpaste tasted so I can imagine it in my own mouth?”

4) Ask factual questions:

“What happened first: the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the writing of the Constitution?”

“How fast can a cheetah go at maximum speed?”

“What is the difference in plumage between a black-capped chickadee and a Carolina chickadee?”

Model how to ask yourself questions by talking out loud in front of your children:

“Let’s see. If I’m going to host 15 people at Thanksgiving and each person will eat .25 lbs of turkey, how big does my turkey need to be? I wonder if the weight includes bone. I better find out.”

“I wonder why some people are against ____________ when I am for it. Could it be that they have a different experience than me? I wonder what that might be. I need to find out so I can understand how they see the world differently than I see it.”

Teach your children to ask themselves questions:

“Do you know the reasons for your main character’s choices? As you think about the main character, ask yourself questions about his motivations, his childhood and how that shapes his understanding of the world, and what his goals are. These often tell you why he makes the choices he makes.”

“I hear you: that idea makes good sense to you. Maybe you are thinking that way because of an experience in your life. Can you recall a time in your life where you faced a similar dilemma? Think about what might have happened if that situation had resolved itself in a different way. How does that impact your idea?”

“If you think some historical event makes the people in it seem out of control, it might be because we have the benefit of hindsight. See if you can ask yourself what it would be like to have lived in that era without knowing how the event or condition (war, battle, court case, revolution, institution of slavery, the Holocaust) ended. Does that change how you understand it?”

Your job as a home educator is to be a person who trains children to be quality, effective question marks. Academics (those who make their living at research and teaching) are incurable question marks! To enter that world, we all need to be better at asking questions than providing conclusive answers.

Who better than you to lead your children into that habit of practice?

Cross-posted on facebook.

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Start a Commonplace Book

Start a Commonplace Book

A commonplace book is described this way:

“Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.” (Wikipedia)

Yours can include meaningful quotes from the books you read, thoughts you gather from blogs and FB pages that help you, printed lists of ideas, images you clip and glue to the pages to remind you of artwork you want to study, and so on.

Your children may discover that they would like to keep a similar book, with only one section devoted to copywork. You can use a three ring binder with tab dividers, or you can all use a lovely bound journal and simply let the mish-mash of ideas flow in an undifferentiated manner. It’s up to you!

Commonplace books are incredibly soothing to keep and offer a quieter, more creative space for writing and exploration than journals because they are not limited to personal experiences in writing. My Commonplace Book from when my kids were homeschooled included ticket stubs to concerts I attended, articles from the newspaper about historical events I wanted to remember, and sketches of nature as I learned how to draw.

Enjoy!

Image by Winston Hearn (cc cropped)

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Brave Writer spotlight: Claire

Brave Writer spotlight Claire

From Brave Writer mom, Jennifer:

Dear Julie,

This is bound to become lengthy, but I am so excited about our day, that I feel compelled to share it with you! My daughter is 6.5 and my son is almost 4. My daughter has always been “verbally precocious” with a vocabulary of well over 300 words at 2, reading at 4, and at a roughly 5th grade reading level now. I have subscribed to your blog, Facebook feed, Yahoo group, etc. for perhaps a year now. I find your words inspiring and your philosophies resonate with me. I haven’t been sure about where to begin BraveWriter-style writing instruction with my daughter. We don’t do any explicit reading instruction any more – just spelling. She gets handwriting through copy work, she reads voraciously, and I read aloud several times daily. Her writing has been largely lists, love notes, thank-you cards, and occasionally she writes her own “Thankful Thought” in a daily journal we keep – though she typically prefers me to write for her. She did spontaneously write a story during her quiet time one day, and I was thrilled!

I began Poetry Tea Times with my children this summer. The first time I used a fancy table cloth, fresh cut flowers, a candle, fancy tea cups, and fresh, home-baked treats. They LOVED it! We read mostly Shel Silverstein – my daughter read her own selections, and I read those that my son chose. He asks for “Bear in There” regularly. I found that level of preparation a bit much for weekly commitment. It seems that the tea, baked goods, and poetry are enough for them to find magic in it. When we bake, I put the cookies, muffins, or quick bread in the freezer, so I can just pull some out when I need it. I put the tea kettle on while they gather the books, and we enjoy it even with the dirty daily table cloth and mugs. We have branched out a bit with the poetry, but they still prefer humorous selections. As someone who has never found the appeal in poetry, it is funny to me that they enjoy this so much, but it does seem to be a magical time.

Last month, I bought my daughter a journal for writing, with the intention of doing Friday Freewriting with her, but I only ever manage to get a sentence or two. I am thinking I should write in my own journal at the same time. I thought maybe Jot It Down would be too simple for where my daughter is at, but got some feed back from another user that it might be good fit after all, so I purchased it.

I told her we were going to do a fairy tale project, and since “The Emperor’s New Clothes happened to fit in with something else we were doing, I got a bunch of versions of that tale from the library. Over the last week and a half she read several versions on her own, and I read a few to her as well. She completed her illustration last week, (choosing to work on it during her brother’s doctor appointment!) After math and our literature read-aloud (we are reading Pippi Longstocking in preparation for seeing the play on Friday), I sat down to take her dictation today. She gave me the first sentence, and then squirmed a little bit and declared she didn’t know what to call the characters who pretend to weave fabric. She said, “They are sort of like burglars, but that doesn’t seem right.” So I showed her my thesaurus, and we looked up “burglar.” It had a few options, but only one was sort of close to what she wanted, so we looked that word up, and found a host of options that would work. She settled on “swindler.” From there, the words just poured out. I was typing as quickly as I could, making a bunch of spelling mistakes – which she noticed. I assured her that the important part was that we capture all her wonderful thoughts – we can always go back to correct spelling and punctuation or make changes if she wants to. She finished her retelling, and we made the easy spelling and punctuation corrections, and talked about paragraph breaks. We plan to read it over again tomorrow and make sure she is satisfied (my experience with her tells me that she will not choose to make any structural changes, additions, etc.) I am so pleased with her story, and she was pretty pleased with the whole experience too. It did feel like we were partners – or at least that I was simply coaching and facilitating when she needed it. Once or twice I thought about asking a clarifying question, or asking her to elaborate on something, but I decided against it. I think there is time for that a little later. I want her to solidly feel ownership and joy in this for now. I can’t wait to do the next tale in a week or two!

After we finished writing, we went to the library, out to lunch, and to swimming lessons. During her quiet time after swimming, she listened to Tchaikovsky and read the third book in “The Roman Mysteries” series for an hour and a half. (My son listened to “House At Pooh Corner” on audio book.) Then we had a poetry tea with Vanilla Rooibos and apple muffins. It was a great day! Thank you so much for letting people know that it is the writer’s voice that should be nourished – all the boring mechanics can easily be learned later. No sense in drumming the joy out of writing for children!

Thank you!
Jennifer

The Emperor’s New Clothes

by Claire (age 6)

Once upon a time, there lived an emperor who liked lots and lots and lots of new clothes. One day some swindlers came long and said that they were the best weavers in the land. The emperor said, “I must have the cloth they make!” So the swindlers came and pretended to work on looms all day and all night.

The emperor sent a servant to check on how the swindlers were doing. When he saw the swindlers working at the empty looms, he said to himself, “I can’t believe that there is nothing at the looms! I must not let anyone know that I saw nothing on the loom!’ The swindlers pretended to hold silk out to him, asking “Isn’t it marvelous?” When he went back to the emperor he said, “It is marvelous, the silk!”

After a few months the emperor became impatient and sent a servant to check on how the swindlers were doing again. When that servant saw nothing on the looms he though to himself, “I must not let anyone know that I saw nothing on the looms!” When he went back to the emperor, he said. “It is magnificent, your majesty!”

After a few more months the emperor became even more impatient and sent another servant to check on how the swindlers were doing. When he saw nothing on the looms, he said to himself.”Well, there is nothing on the looms, but I must not let the emperor himself know that there is nothing on the loom.” When he went back to the emperor he said, “It is so beautiful, Emperor!” Then the emperor sent him back to see when the swindlers would be done. The swindlers said, “We will be done tomorrow night.” He rushed back to the emperor and said, “They said they will be done by tomorrow night.” The emperor said, “Then I shall hold a great celebration on the day after tomorrow night!”

When that day came, the swindlers brought the cloth before his majesty and pretended to dress him in it. When he walked out everyone crowded to see him and they said, “How marvelous the emperor looks in his new clothes!” Then a little boy said, “But the emperor has no clothes on!” and all of the villagers started whispering to each other, “But the emperor has no clothes on!” Soon they were shouting, “The emperor has no clothes on!” But the emperor, foolish enough to think that he did, just waved and walked on.

The End

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Friday Freewrite: Shoes

would you let your daughter wear these shoes?Image by woodleywonderworks

Describe your favorite pair of shoes.

New to freewriting? Check out our online guide.

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