One big change is that I stopped thinking in 6-week blocks a long time ago.  We will be going back into something like that, though, once we get our Waldorf on.  I’ve also been tracking what we’ve been doing with homeschoolskedtrack, which is fantastic, and lets me see at a glance exactly what we did, and when, and what we’re going to be doing, and (approximately) when!

Just for fun, I thought I’d check in and post an update, subject-for-subject in comparison with the March post.  So here we go, seven-and-a-half months later (or about 100 potential “school days”, accounting for occasional summer breaks…) this is how we’ve progressed:

Math

In March, we were at lesson 59 in RightStart level E.  Now we’ve finished lesson 108, and the end is in sight!  If we continue on schedule, we will be finished the level before Christmas and we’ll start Intermediate Geometry in January.  Recent lessons have focused on polygons, angles, and lots of drawing.

Over 100 school days, we’ve only worked on RightStart half the time, apparently.  But I should remember that we took a short break to focus on Life of Fred (which we didn’t have yet last March) and another break for some Math Mammoth extra fractions practice.

Our current math situation consists of RightStart every day, as well as additional practice time on ALEKS and/or Mathletics, both of which we’re trying out to see which one we will stick with.  We love ALEKS but Mathletics seems to be winning right now… Life of Fred is on hiatus just while we drive through the rest of RightStart level E, but he’s waiting patiently and we will have fun with him again soon!

Canadian Studies/Geography

The who the what now?  Oh that’s right, we used to be working on this.  But with so much on our plate, something had to go, and this was one of the somethings.  We will get back into it, probably with a multi-week block at some point.  It’s not gone forever, just not a current priority.

In fact, I’ve just downloaded a nifty learning-geography-through-art e-book (a really MASSIVE one) from currclick… looking forward to drawing from this resource (punny!) soon!

French

We’ve moved on from the oral-only approach we were using in the spring.  I think it did the trick, getting him over his last hurdles and fears about the language.  We had previously finished book 1 and started book 2 of L’art de lire, but took such a long break that he’d forgotten nearly everything.  I ordered fresh copies of books 1 and 2 (we still have all the CD’s and books 3-6) and we started anew!

Last week, we finished book 1 and are currently in the first unit of book 2.  I think he’s picking it up much better than before, and he certainly complains about it less!

While l’art de lire does have a CD, it is primarily a written language program.  So we’ve also added a primarily oral program, continuing the sort of thing I had started with him.  I’ve chosen Ecoutez, Parlez, and I have to say he loves it!  True to Charlotte Mason philosophies, the lessons are short and easy.  He simply repeats the same unit for 9 days, then goes on to the next unit.  He’s even started using some of the phrases he’s learned in everyday situations — a sure sign that it’s sticking!

Literature

This area was fascinating for me to review what we were doing in March, because it has reminded me of some things I should really bring back.  Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost his independent reading time.  He has been reading on his own, of course, but not overly much, and we’ve done virtually no literary narration at all for months.

So I will need to make sure I reincorporate reading time, with assigned books, into his daily rhythm.

On the plus side, though, we’ve maintained and even expanded read-aloud time, where I read to him.  Once we finished “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” we started “The Hobbit.”

This was met with… some resistance.  I think he remembered when I had tried reading The Hobbit to him years ago, when he was really too young and it was a disaster.  This time, he was literally yelling and crying at the thought.  I played the “mean mommy” card and started reading it to him anyway, yelling right over his wails.

Within the first page, he had stopped and was listening, then smiling.  Then begging for more.

In fact, when we finished “The Hobbit”, he begged that we continue straight into “Lord of the Rings”.  A challenging book for an 11-year-old, even if he doesn’t have to do the actual reading himself!

I’m so pleased to say that he’s been loving it.  It’s very slow going, we’ll go days where it’s just descriptions of landscapes, but he doesn’t mind.  He doesn’t mind my attempted renditions of elvish epic poetry.  And he has an astonishing recall of detail.

The party accompanying the ring has just set out from Rivendell and is quickly approaching Moria.  Flipper joked “300 pages in, and the story’s finally getting started!”

Anyway, I’ve also started reading aloud at snack time.  For this, it’s “Watership Down.”  Considering how much he has loved the feline “Warriors” series, I think he’ll enjoy the rabbits.

History

Back in March, I was free-styling my way through Ancient History.  Since then, we dove into History Odyssey – first with the level II free trial, and then (when that proved too much for him, being very new to the subject and a reluctant writer) the level I free trial.

Level I has been going much better — we supplement it a LOT with additional materials, but it’s a good core.  I’m still not sure, though, whether I’ll actually purchase the rest of the program once we’ve finished the free trial materials.  We may just continue on our own, now that I’ve got a better idea of how to go about it.

We have been moving very slowly through Ancient History.  Partly because we had stopped level II and then started over again in level I… but we’re still in ancient Mesopotamia.  That’s okay though, he’s enjoying it and just built a cool model ziggurat!

Science

In March, we were at week 22 of NOEO Biology II but had to backtrack a bit because he hadn’t been doing his summaries.  7 months later, we’ve just finished week 26…

Oy!  We’re taking our time with this.  Most weeks we only do 2 or 3 lessons, instead of the recommended 4.  I think that once we start working in blocks, I’m going to have a NOEO block, to really drive through and finish this thing.

It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy it.  In fact, right now we’re in a unit of building body models which he is having a great time with.  It’s just that it hasn’t been a priority.

We’ve added some other science-y stuff too, such as his Intellego unit study on Whales.  This is by far one of his favourite subjects.  We have a lapbook on Marine Habitats which we will do in the near future, as well.

Once we’re finished NOEO, we’re going to go through Ellen McHenry’s The Elements… then we’ll decide where to go from there.

I think that’s more than enough for one post… Look for part 2, where I’ll discuss what we’ve been doing in Music, Art, Grammar, Poetry, Handwriting, and Miscellaneous.

It’s a bit more structured that “pure” CM, though, since there are some guided question-and-answer activities, not just “pure” narration.

When you buy History Odyssey, you’re not buying a textbook… you’re buying a schedule, you’re buying organization.  You’re getting a fully coordinated program incorporating different literature materials as well as hands-on activities.  The “level two” programs (where Flipper would be) gradually introduce the skills of making and using outlines, and writing research reports.  These skills are taught with much hand-holding, step-by-step guiding through to eventual independence.  This is the way he needs things, fully spelled out — but still with room for individual creativity.  I think the way it’s done would be a good match for him.

When I started our CM-inspired approach a couple months ago, I followed the instructions at an online Charlotte Mason site (I can’t find which one, at the moment… I downloaded an e-book planner…) for setting up my own history curriculum, based on spine books we already had.  I thought I came up with a pretty good program, coordinating with lots of living books.

But now that we’ve been into it a little while, I’m not completely satisfied with it.  I think there could be so much more, especially in the hands-on activities area.  I’m just not very good at coming up with those kinds of things myself.

We’ve been using NOEO Science this year, which is a similar kind of system (a schedule of readings and assignments using third-party resources) and I like having the schedule already laid out for us to follow.  I know that I could organize something like this myself, but to do it with the depth and completeness that NOEO does would take… well, more time than I have.  I can trust that the program is well thought out without worrying that I missed something.

So I’m contemplating trying History Odyssey for similar reasons.  It would take a lot of pressure off of me to trust someone else’s organized schedule.  Of course, avoiding someone else’s arbitrarily imposed schedule is one of the reasons we’re not in the regular school system in the first place!  But, if an externally-imposed schedule is accepted willingly because it synchronizes with your own ideas and philosophies and is similar to what you would put together yourself had you the time and talent — then why the heck not follow it?

Pandia Press offers a wonderful Try It Before You Buy It option, which I think is just fantastic.  Rather than just a few random sample pages, you can download the first couple month’s worth of lessons for free, and try them.  If it works for you, then you buy the whole thing to continue.  If not, no great loss.  What a great expression of confidence in the success of their product — and of respect for the homeschooling parent, who often has great quandaries and dilemmas comparing countless curriculum options, evaluating the perfect match for our families without being able to leaf through everything, trying to figure out what really is worth spending our limited financial resources!

My only real concern is that the level two Ancients program, which we would start with, uses The Story of Mankind as one of its main spine books.  Being an older history book (originally from the 1920’s), there are many cases of author bias and inaccuracies.  Whether these are serious enough to actually be a problem is a matter of some debate, with many homeschoolers finding them not in the way at all, and others completely ditching the book because of them.

This blog entry, comparing SoM with another similar resource, is very interesting and would tend to lead me to worry about SoM.  For example, this quote about Phoenician traders:

They bought and sold whatever promised to bring them a good profit. They were not troubled by a conscience. If we are to believe all their neighbors they did not know what the word honesty or integrity meant. They regarded a well-filled treasure chest as the highest ideal of all good citizens. Indeed they were very unpleasant people and did not have a single friend.

But I can’t truly know until I’ve had a chance to look through it myself.  I can get a copy free from my library, and of course the History Odyssey is free to try.  The only thing we have to buy to try it is the Kingfisher History Encyclopedia, which is unfortunately not available at our library.  But it looks like a good resource to have whether or not we continue with History Odyssey, and it’s not too expensive.

I’ll post some more reviews as we try it out over the next few weeks or so!

There were days that we abided strictly to the schedule, eschewed distractions, and were finished everything by noon.  There were days that we scattered ‘lessons’ throughout the day, fitting them in here and there, while doing other things in the meantime.  And there were days when we just said “screw it, we’ve got other stuff to do today” and tried to squish that day’s lessons into the rest of the week as best as we could.  That’s one of the great things about homeschooling, though… that flexibility.

So here we go, subject by subject:

Math

We’re using RightStart Math, on level E.  At the beginning of the session, we were on lesson 39, and ended at lesson 59.   My goal was to end at lesson 65, doing a lesson pretty much every single day.  This means we “lost” one lesson each week. So, I think for the next session, I will only schedule 4 lessons each week and leave on day as a ‘games day’.  We’ve really been neglecting the games, and Flipper really does love them.  I confess that I’d like to get through this level quickly so we can get to Intermediate Geometry, but I really need to take my own advice and not worry about hurrying him through so much.

On the whole, the lessons have gone well.  He still has occasional ’stubborn days’ where he insists that he’s forgotten everything he’s ever learned about math — or insists that he never learned it in the first place — but these are becoming rarer, and by the end of the worst of these lessons he always says “you know what?  That was actually kind of fun!”

He’s learned about area, square feet and yards, mixed and improper fractions, decimals, converting tenths and hundredths from fraction to decimal and vice versa, and metric measurements.  Along the way, he’s picked up squares (and other exponents) and square roots, and order of operations.

Canadian Studies/Geography

We started at lesson 2 and have completed lesson 5 out of the guidebook I’m using for a foundation, just for structure.  Each lesson involves several days of activities and we don’t do this topic every day.  We’re using some of the worksheets from this book and I’m adding in other activities like our Canada Puzzle Map.  I had hoped to be into lesson 6 but I’m happy with this pace.

He’s learned the provinces and territories and their capitals, both in terms of name and location.  He knows the oceans around the country and the postal abbreviations for each province. We also start each week singing O Canada together.   I didn’t do anything formal or grand or even print out the lyrics… I just sang for him!  He now sings along for the entire song in English, then I repeat it in French.  He’s starting to pick up some of the French bits too, and was very interested about the very different meaning of the French version of the anthem!

French

We had previously done some French language curriculum, but it never stuck and we couldn’t keep it up.  So this time around I decided to just forego the curriculum altogether and do what Charlotte Mason suggests — we’d just speak it first.

Flipper is not a boy who enjoys the physical act of writing.  All the written exercises were getting in his way.  It also just makes sense that we learn language first and foremost as a way of speaking, and then only afterwards do we learn to transpose that symbolically onto paper.

We started with reviewing the dozen or so words he already knew and adding a few ‘extra bits’ to make a couple basic sentences.  He already knew all the colour words, for instance.  So I asked him “Quel couleur est-ce que c’est?”, pointing to various things, and he’d answer “c’est rouge” or “c’est noir” or whatever it happened to be.  We didn’t worry about how c’est is a contraction of the pronoun ce and the verb est which is the third-person present conjugation of être… blah blah blah. He’ll figure that out later.

Over the session, he’s learned to count to 100, tell time, identify various foods, use comparative opposite adjective (lourd-léger, long-court, grand-petit, etc), and we’ve started singing the avoir and être conjugation songs (to the tune of Mexican Hat Dance, if you didn’t know…)

I can’t believe how much he’s loving this approach.  We spend at most 10 minutes a day and he never complains, in fact he’s excited and keen to show off what he knows.  He especially loves colours and started turning things around, asking me the question “quel couleur est-ce que c’est?” at random times.  Important point:  I never specifically taught him to say that sentence, he just imitated me saying it.

We’ll probably do purely oral french for at least one more session if not two.  Now that we’ve learned the basic verb conjugations, I plan on working in more complete sentences for him.  We’ll learn some animals and some related verbs, maybe things like dormir and courir and manger and marcher…

Literature

Under this heading, I’ve created a list of “great books” that we own, which he hasn’t read yet.  Each day he reads one chapter, more or less, and narrates it to me.  I’ve offered for him to do alternate narration styles, such as drawing a scene or making it in Lego (which, honestly, I thought he’d love), but his preference is always to just orally tell me about it.  He has really, really taken to narration.

First of all, at bedtime I’ve been reading to him from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  I don’t officially count this as “school” for him, but we do practice narration.  In fact, we started this before we started the “new” Charlotte Mason curriculum, as kind of a ‘test run’ to see how the style suited him.  Basically, at the end of each reading I ask him to tell me “what happened”, and at the beginning of the next session I ask “now, where were we?”  It’s fascinating to see what he picks up on, what he misses, what he does and doesn’t understand.

For his “official” literature, which he is reading himself, he started with Pippi Longstocking and finished that within a week.  I couldn’t stop him from reading more than he was “supposed” to each day!

So we went to something a bit more challenging  — The Secret Garden.  I had to warm him up to that one by reading to him myself.  I would have happily read the entire book to him, but by chapter two he was hooked and insisted on reading it himself!

When that was finished, we moved on to “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” and that’s where he is now.

I had only expected to finish Pippi and be into The Secret Garden, so in this area he’s surpassed my expectations!

History

As this is the first time we’ve done history formally, we started at the very beginning.  Not in terms of the most ancient history, but just readings about history… Why we learn about history, how historians do their work, and especially, archaeology.

We also started a Book of Centuries and while we’re not yet in a regular routine of adding to it, he was surprisingly keen on the idea.

He already subscribes to Dig magazine which was a great resource in addition to the encyclopedias we’re using as our “core” books.  No real ‘living books’ for history this session, but we’re going to more than make up for that next session – Ancient Egypt!

Science

We’re using NOEO Science, Biology II.  Four days a week, and generally he does this independently.  I had planned to be finished week 23 at this point… looking at his notes, it seems that he’s on week 22, but hasn’t been doing the summaries for the last 2 weeks!  So some backtracking is in order, to make sure he’s actually covered everything.  And I’ll need to keep a closer eye on things next session.

Of the summaries he did in the first few weeks, one especially caught my eye.  He generally does just a short written narration, a couple sentences at most, and a more detailed drawing (one of the reasons we love this science program!)  This particular lesson was about the opossum’s defensive death-faking.  His sketch showed an opossum (with an arrow pointing to it labelled ‘opossum’), a predator looking over it (with an arrow labelled ‘predator’), and a word balloon from the predator saying “I’m not going to eat a DEAD opossum!”

He also did a really cool experiment, digging rodent bones out of an owl pellet.  I actually meant to blog about that, we took a ton of pictures… I’ll have to remember to do that.  It was fascinating.  After he had found and cleaned all the bones, we identified them and glued them onto a skeleton template.  It makes quite a keepsake!

Music

My intention for this session was to focus on Mozart… listen to Mozart every day and read a book about his life.  This got derailed a bit in the second week when the book disappeared, which was a shame because Flipper was actually enjoying it.

Still, we listened to Mozart quite a lot, and talked about some important things about him.  He knows that I’m currently playing the Requiem with the orchestra and that I’ve previously performed it in choirs.  Maybe we’ll be able to get him to come to the concert…

I had also hoped to get him back on track with regular piano practice, but that didn’t happen this session.  He is playing his electric guitar regularly and has started watching some instructional videos on YouTube.  All the same, for the most part he only wants to figure out songs he knows from “Guitar Hero”, and make up his own bizarre nonsense songs, and isn’t responsible about actually learning to play well.  Not that there’s anything wrong with what he’s doing — he actually shows some fantastic innate feel for riffs and patterns with the songs he makes up — and he’s gone so far as to create an entire tracklist for his “debut CD”, recording himself on his MP3 player, drawing the cover artwork, the whole shebang.

So I’m not at all knocking that part of it… it’s just that it’s not enough if he wants to actually get further with it, which he says he does.  He’s going to need to learn to buckle down and do some nitty-gritty practice, not just playing for fun.  One step at a time, I guess….

Grammar

We’re using Daily Grams, grade 5, one page every day.  He’s finished lesson 100, and I had planned to be on 105.  So, like Math, we’ve lost about one lesson per week.  So I’ll probably bring it down to 4 times per week for the next session.  He’s doing fine in this… still has a habit of guessing when he doesn’t know instead of looking a word up in the dictionary or (heaven forbid!) asking me for help, but he’s improved a lot.

Handwriting

Using A Reason for Handwriting, level F.   We fell behind when his book was misplaced for a couple weeks.  I used that as an opportunity to do some more ‘traditional’ Charlotte Mason style copywork, taking selections from his history or literature books, for example.  He didn’t really like that.  He complained that I made the passages too long!

The book was eventually found, and he’s completed week 18.  Hopefully next session will be more on-track.  I think maybe I’ll alternate, a week of Reason for Handwriting followed by a week of copywork from his other books… and I’ll try not to make them too long!

Poetry

Starting in the second week, we’ve been working through a basic poetry-writing manual, doing lessons twice a week.  He’s learned how to write limericks, concrete poems, rainbow poems, and parodies (possibly his favourite!)

We’ve now finished that part of the book, the next part is on writing prose stories.  I gave him the option of continuing with that, or instead, staying with poetry but reading poems (such as A Child’s Garden of Verses).  He’s chosen to write stories, so that’s what we’ll do next session.

Art

We added art appreciation in the fourth week, twice a week.  We decided to start with DaVinci.  I put the Mona Lisa as his desktop picture, but he wasn’t impressed, he wanted his dolphins back!  We looked at a bunch of DaVinci’s paintings and sketches online and chatted a bit about his life and importance.

I had him copy one of DaVinci’s paintings, and he chose “Lady with an Ermine”.  He hasn’t finished colouring it yet… but he enjoyed the project.

In our last week, we found a fun book about DaVinci in our library, a real “living book,” a kid’s story based on real events in DaVinci’s life with large colourful pictures.  It was a very easy read for him, intended for younger kids for sure, but he found it fun and enjoyable.

Miscellaneous

Finally, there are a few various things that we put in once or twice a week.  To work on his logic skills, I schedule a Mind Benders puzzle once a week — though he loves these so much he’ll often do extras on his own time.  He’s now in book A3.

To work on reading comprehension and analysis, he has one Reading Detective lesson per week.  He’s very good at getting the point of a story, but still has trouble with the analysis of where the information came from.

And also on reading comprehension but also with values lessons, he does studies on Aesop’s fables twice a week.  I believe the workbook is called “Christian Values Using Aesop’s Fables.”  They’re short and easy lessons, and he enjoys them.

Whew.  I think that’s it… It really is enlightening to get this all written up, to see just how much we are doing!  Some days we just feel so lazy, it’s good to remind ourselves that overall, we’re more than fine.

In addition to these, I’m hoping to add some journalling and/or dictation next session, or maybe get back into our spelling practice.  I’m really looking forward to the Ancient Egypt studies, though!  I’ve learned more just in preparing for this unit, than I ever learned in school about Ancient History (which is precisely: nothing at all).

I’m particularly looking forward to Home is Where You Start From’s look at Homer’s Odyssey.  As I’ve mentioned, we’ve recently shifted to a Charlotte Mason style with my 10yo son, Flipper.  Into week 5 now and still liking it!  For history, we’ve been doing “introduction to history” things this session (each of our sessions is 6 weeks), looking at archaeology and what history means, as well as a wee bit on the earliest civilizations   Our next session will be Ancient Egypt, and I’m all planned up for that.  Following that, we’ll be taking a session on Ancient Greece, which I haven’t done too much planning for as yet.  I’ve heard about only a couple adaptations of the Odyssey for kids, so I’m very keen to check out all the great ideas in this post.

The Recession Depression Therapy blog has a post on Cookbooks for Kids, and I think I’ll have to search out the Little House inspired cookbook!   I’ve recently been exposed to Montessori’s teachings on little kids in the kitchen, and so my 2yo daughter Pomme helps me a great deal with food preparation.  But I was none so enlightened when Flipper was a wee boy, and boy oh boy it’s a struggle to get him interested in helping.  Or doing anything for himself.  “MOM!  I need you to butter my toast!” is a refrain heard far too often.  One trick that sometimes works is dangling the carrot that girls like boys who can cook… he’s only 10, but he’s already looking forward to finding a wife!  What works the very best, however, is one cookbook we have, a Company’s Coming cookbook for kids.  He’ll do absolutely everything by himself when he finds a dish in there he wants to try.  He even made breakfast for himself and his sister this morning, a toasted “cheesy apple melt.”  I’ll pass, thanks.

The Thinking Mother ponders about Self-Directed Learning Moments, and how not every “teachable moment” has to involve parental interference.  Once again, I find Montessori parallels… Dr. Montessori observed, very wisely I think, that parents and teachers should not automatically jump in and help, cheer on, encourage, enrich, advise, or otherwise interfere when a child is absorbed in something.  We want to help, it’s a natural impulse, but in fact we’re breaking their concentration.  Since learning this, I’ve found myself having to restrain my impulse to ‘jump in’ with Pomme fairly often (although like any habit, this has gotten much easier with practice), wanting to show her how to do something, or — even worse — just do it for her.  I’ve been gratified, amazed, and enlightened to see that when I just sit back and let her do her own thing, she’ll figure it out on her own.  Not only does this foster confidence and independence, but it’s practicing her own problem-solving skills.  Of course, if she gets frustrated and ASKS me for help, I will.  The idea is not to never help your kids.  It’s just to realize when they really do need help, and when they just need some time to work it out for themselves.

And finally, Dad’s Homeschool Blog sings the praises of StumbleUpon as a search tool for homeschooling resources. I’ve been using StumbleUpon myself for awhile, to help promote my articles at Eco Child’s Play as well as my little blog here.  I’ve also randomly stumbled through their listed sites, and have found some really amazing things.   I’m a bit annoyed right now, in fact, that my latest Firefox upgrade seems to have deleted my StumbleUpon toolbar, so now I have to go find it and install it again.  Such is life, I guess.

We should want to sing the anthem because we love our country, because we feel it to be a country worth being proud of.  The cause and effect goes in that direction, not the other way around.  We don’t come to love our country by singing the anthem!

Anyway, I still think it’s important that my kids know the anthem, and can sing it.  So we’re going to start singing it together… maybe once a week.  Maybe not that often.  Whatever, just so that we learn it.  And the history of it is quite  interesting, so we’ll take a look at that too.

For instance, there’s the whole changing-of-the-lyrics thing.  I found this great clip on youtube, which is a wax cylinder recording of a performance of the 1908 lyrics.  These were not the first english lyrics, but they are the ones from which our current version eventually evolved.

Then I visited the official government heritage website detailing the history of the anthem.  It was fascinating, except…

According to the listed history, a committee formed in 1967 recommended a version of the lyrics which are the ones we use today, adding “from far and wide” and “God keep our land” to replace two of the “we stand on guard” phrases.

But that did not match my memory.

I distinctly remember having to learn the new lyrics in elementary school, in the early 80s.   I wasn’t even alive in 1967.  What’s more, the lyrics that I remember having learnt first did not match the previous version as listed on the official website.

Leave it to wikipedia to clear it up for me.

In 1980, the song was (finally) officially adopted as our national anthem, with a revised set of lyrics.

The original 1908 lyrics went, from just before the ‘chorus’:

And stand on guard, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee,
O Canada, O Canada,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee

The lyrics used until 1980 were:

And stand on guard, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee,
O Canada, glorious and free
We stand on guard, we stand on guard for thee
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee

Ahh… THAT’s what I remember.  And THAT is not mentioned anywhere on the official heritage website!  How confusing must our anthem’s history be, that even the government’s own history website does not get it right?

And of course, here is the version officially adopted in 1980 that we use today:

From far and wide, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee,
God keep our land glorious and free
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee

Even our modern version is not without controversy.  Many Canadians object to the religious aspect of “God keep our land” — interestingly, that was one of the lines added later, and was never in the original.

There is also objection to the “In all thy sons command” line, as it is gender-exclusive.  Before you go thinking “oh that’s just overly PC, we should keep it the way it is for history and tradition’s sake” — you should know that this was also not part of the original.  The original line, as you can hear in the youtube clip, was “Thou dost in us command,” which was changed to the “sons” line in a 1914 revision.   Considering that at that time in our history, bills proposing women’s suffrage and property rights were still being defeated in some parts of the country, it is not unreasonable to interpret this as a sexist sentiment, that women are not capable of “true patriot love.”

A proposed modern alternative is “In all of us command.”   I could live with that.

The other line that raises hackles is “Our home and native land,” and this one has always bothered me.  The issue is simply that this is not the ‘native land’ of all Canadian citizens.  Not only is it not true for more recent immigrants, but the vast majority of the Canadian population is descended from immigrants.   This is only truly “native land” for the aboriginal populations, and it’s quite offensive IMO for us white folk to loudly proclaim that this is OUR native land, after everything we’ve done to the aboriginal peoples.

In fact, when I sing this line, I make a subtle change in my head.  I don’t change the words, just the meaning.  This is “our home”, but we are living on “native land.”

You know, those moments where you can glue back in the hair that you’ve been pulling out and say “whew… this DOES work, after all, doesn’t it?”

This afternoon, Flipper was doing his math lesson for today, and it involved a few questions on calculating sales tax.  He asked me what it meant by “sales tax,” at first he didn’t understand what the question was asking.

Well, sez I, you know how when you buy a bag of chips at the store for $2.50, you actually pay like $2.80?  That’s the sales tax.

He asked why the tax was there in the first place.  Well, it goes to the government, it pays for health care and schools (hey, there is a need for them even if we don’t use them ourselves), roads, government salaries, and everything else a government has to pay for.

At this point, he got a bit confused, and I confess that I was rather lost trying to follow his line of reasoning.  He was no longer thinking about sales tax, he’d got that bit… but about the whole buying and selling thing.  He was insisting something about… that business owners paid employees out of their own money, or something, and not from what people bought… or something.

I explained that business owners get their money from selling their goods to people who buy them.  No, he said, that can’t be right, because where do THOSE people get their money from?  Well from their own jobs, of course.  But then where do THOSE businesses… Ahh, and then I spotted the fundamental question that he was trying to figure out that he was trying to ask.

“Are you wondering where money came from in the first place?”

“Yeah!”

Well okay then.

So we talked about the barter system, and trading a cow for 7 chickens.  But what if you wanted goats and I only had chickens?  Or what if I had only 2 chickens, but could give you 5 more later?   So we talked about promissory notes.  And what if you had a promissory note from me, for 5 chickens, and you wanted a goat, and you knew a guy who would give you a goat in exchange for 5 chickens?  Well, you could give him the note, which is worth 5 chickens from me.

And we talked about how it eventually made more sense to assign absolute values to things, so that a cow was always worth exactly 8 chickens and a goat exactly 4 chickens, so a goat is worth half a cow… but these things are kind of subjective, so gold was chosen as a standard instead.  If a cow is worth 40 gold pieces, and a chicken is worth 5 gold pieces, then if I want to buy your cow, instead of giving you however many chickens, I can give you 40 gold pieces.  Then you can use that gold to buy some chickens from the fellow down the road who has some to sell.  This way, in order to buy something, you don’t have to have the specific something that the seller is wanting to trade for it.

And we talked about how money itself isn’t valuable.  A $5 bill and a $1,000,000 bill are printed on the same paper, same ink, they’re just paper.  They are just representations of what you have of value to trade.  You earn money by selling material goods, but also by selling your time.  If I wanted to buy your cow but had no chickens, I could instead offer to work at your farm for a day, cleaning up manure, washing clothes, whatever needed to be done, in exchange for the cow.

And so we observed how a desire to accumulate money is kind of silly, because money by itself is pretty meaningless.  It is only a symbol.   It is only in trading it, in giving it away, that it becomes powerful, to buy stuff with.  It’s really just like the promissory notes.  It is loaded with potential, but not with concrete value.

He reflected that he had no desire for money.  He just wants the stuff you can buy with money.  Heh.

Still, it was a fascinating conversation that I wish I could remember with greater detail.  It wasn’t just me lecturing at him.  He was making pertinent observations and insights, I was responding to his queries, following his promptings, it was a real two-partner dance.

And the math lesson?  He finished the problems.  In his head.  Easily, and without complaining.  Thank you, thank you, thank you RightStart!

I should also clarify, that we don’t consider ourselves “Christian Homeschoolers” although we more or less subscribe to the Christian faith. I’ve drifted more towards agnosticism myself in the past few years, and I hope to instill a sense of religious understanding and freedom for my son as he grows and matures, to come to intelligent decisions regarding his faith. We do use some Christian materials when they are of good quality, and Flipper enjoys them. I do think there are useful lessons on character development in our Christian materials. But our educational philosophy is not religion-centered or dogmatic, religion is simply one part of our life… how large a part it plays varies widely from person to person within our family!

Anyway, here’s what’s currently on our homeschool shelf:

RightStart Math level E
NOEO Science Biology II
Daily Grams Grade 5
Reason for Handwriting level F
Natural Speller
Reading Detective A1
Usborne Seashore Sticker Book

He also does piano and guitar practice, as well as exercise and martial arts practice.

Here’s what’s on deck to come up next, as we finish things off we add in something else:

Draw & Write Through History: Greece and Rome
Mind Benders A3
RightStart Intermediate Geometry
Easy Grammar Grade 6
Canadian Government unit study
Le Francais Facile 1A
J’Aime Lire
Christian Virtues through Aesop’s Fables
Word Roots A1
100 Vocabulary Words Kids Need to Know for Grade 5
100 Vocabulary Words Kids Need to Know for Grade 6
How to Write Poetry
How to Write Stories

More detailed reviews and explorations of some of these materials will come in later posts. I’ll also talk in later posts about what we’re doing with Pomme, who is, of course, only almost 2 years old!