First, it was Charlotte Mason.  Then Montessori.  Now most recently, Waldorf and Enki.  Each time that I researched a new philosophy with an open mind, I found measureless inspiration and wisdom.

I also found nonsense, of course.    No single curriculum or philosophy is likely to suit any individual 100%.  But rather than simply rejecting the entire philosophy outright due to a few weird bits, or even without really understanding the philosophy at all, much can be gained from an honest investigation of some idea you had not previously considered.

If nothing else, your existing assumptions and beliefs will be challenged, and if you decide that this path is not for you, your beliefs will be all the stronger for having met and withstood a challenge.  And misguided beliefs (however well-intentioned they may have been to begin with) will be cleared away.

So as I mentioned, the most recent exploration has been Waldorf (and the greatly related Enki).  There is much about the root of Waldorf that does not sit right with me.  I am not, personally, a fan of anthoposophy, or of Steiner in general.  The idea of the “morality of colour”, with black crayons being forbidden, seems unnatural to me.  Then there’s the strictness of delaying reading instruction until age 7… while in principal I agree with this, ‘pure’ Waldorf makes no exceptions for exceptional children.  Individual variations in development are disregarded.  All children are expected to develop at pretty much the same rate, at the same ages, solely as a product of age.

If you believe the anthoposophic ideas of the schedule by which the soul enters and inhabits the body, this makes perfect sense.  But if you don’t, well, then, it doesn’t.  No more than it makes sense to expect children to all walk or talk at the same age.  Strict Waldorf teaches that a 5-year-old child who is already reading is “too much in their head” and their reading should be limited, so that their body can be properly developed instead.  But would you tell a 10-month old baby who has begun to walk or talk, that they should refrain from doing so because it’s too early?

That being said, there is some good wisdom to glean from this (on-the-surface rather bizarre) belief.  Namely, that a child who does show early propensity for academics could be at risk of neglecting their physical and practical skills development.  Not merely because of the child’s own natural development, but because of an over-zealous parent eagerly pouncing on their child’s academic gifts, spending hours on books and worksheets, rather than time spent cooking together, painting, drawing, learning to fasten buttons, pour liquids, or use scissors.

In other words, it can be a warning to “the rest of us” to be careful with our precociously academic youngsters, to ensure that they still have a rich diet of natural, physical activities, even if we do commit the grievous sin of allowing them to read, if they want to.

And this is the great strength of the Waldorf philosophy: the emphasis on art and on nature.  Not merely as enjoyable activities for children, but as important learning tools.

Form Drawing, a progressive study of drawing shapes, moving from simple lines and curves to complex Celtic knots, works along the same lines as “brain training” exercises.  Many forms work on “crossing the midline”, a common difficult task for children with sensory integration issues.  There is almost a meditative quality to the forms, which are said to help with attention and calmness, as well as with handwriting.

Full-body movement also addresses “crossing the midline” and other sensory integrative tasks.  Strict Waldorf uses a specific kind of movement called “Eurhythmy”, while Waldorf-inspired programs may use various other types of dance and movement.  Think: action songs with a purpose.

Drawing and painting are central to Waldorf as well.  Lessons are taught through story (frequently involving fairies and gnomes), which children then interpret through pictures.  This reminds me a lot of the Charlotte Mason ideas of learning through living books, and of narration.   While oral and written narrations are the “standard”, drawing is one of the many other options available as well.

In fact, drawn narrations are what drew me to Charlotte Mason in the first place, and one of the most appealing features of Waldorf to me.

The final main aspect of Waldorf (in my understanding, anyway), is that of rhythm.  Rhythm to your days, as well as rhythm to the seasons of the year.  There is much focus on routine, with verses and songs to ease transitions.  Festivals and holidays are celebrated throughout the year.

In our house, we are not as attached to the idea of seasonal rhythms and endless festivals as some are.  But I am intrigued by this particular version of developing a daily schedule that is smooth, natural, and effective.  And I confess, I’m starting to appreciate the value of at least some recognition of the passing of the seasons, renewing a connection to nature and our world which is sorely lacking in modern generations.

This is not, by any means, a thorough and exhaustive review of All Things Waldorf.  There are many other great elements… and many not-so-great ones as well (depending on where you’re standing).  This is, rather, a collection of my personal thoughts after researching Waldorf to the best of my ability over the last couple of weeks.

Enki markets itself, in part, as deriving from Waldorf, but also drawing from the best of Montessori and Charlotte Mason.  In my recent wanderings, I’ve encountered several other homeschooling families hoping to accomplish a similar sort of blend on their own.  I think this is the direction I’m heading in as well…

I should give the disclaimer right up front: I haven’t really tried any of this yet!  Well, I’m trying to restructure our daily rhythm a bit.    But over the next little while, we will be incorporating some of my favourite ideas gleaned from Waldorf, and we’ll see how it goes.  I don’t think we’ll be having any visits from gnomes anytime soon, but there may well be some playsilks in our future…

            ]]> http://motherbynature.ca/2009/10/thoughts-on-waldorf/feed/ 1 http://motherbynature.ca/2009/05/considering-history-odyssey/ http://motherbynature.ca/2009/05/considering-history-odyssey/#comments Sun, 17 May 2009 17:23:37 +0000 heather http://motherbynature.ca/?p=599 I just learned about a program by Pandia Press (who also does R.E.A.L. Science) called History Odyssey. It’s kinda Charlotte Mason-ey, in that it focuses on living books and history through stories as much as possible, rather than pure textbooks.

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).

So what are we doing, and why?  For the most part, I’m really just getting more organized.  Getting some long-range (and medium-range) goals for what we want to accomplish homeschool-wise.  And incorporating some more varied ideas and topics.

I’m a huge fan of unschooling.  In retrospect, I wish I’d been more unschooley with Flipper when he was younger.  Maybe he’d have better self-motivation now.

But that’s water under the bridge.  Right now, he thrives best with a certain amount of structure and direction — but not too much.  And he’s getting older.  He’s almost 11.  He’s ready to start to dive into some more complex and intricate subjects.  Things that you would have to spoon-feed to younger kids.  Things that there’s really no pressing need to teach to younger kids.   He’s not a ‘younger kid’ anymore though.  Those teen years are coming up quick.

Plus, he’s been asking more questions about these more complexd ideas.  So, the time is right to get more organized.

Next question — why Charlotte Mason?  That’s pretty interesting, actually.  We’ve been using NOEO Science this year, and it’s been amazing.  He loves it, does his daily work independently, with enthusiasm and — say it with me — self-motivation.  NOEO uses a CM-inspired methodology, where the kids “narrate” their lessons rather than complete fill-in-the-blank or question-and-answer worksheets.  Usually he will draw a picture and write a few sentences about whatever topic he’s read about that day.  Each lesson is very short, so it holds his attention and isn’t overwhelming.

I have just been loving this approach for him, it fits his style so well.  So I decided to research some more on the CM philosophy and see if it was something we could incorporate more into the rest of our ‘schooling’.   I quickly found that much of it is stuff that we were already doing — or that I’ve been wanting to do.  I found some resources to help me figure things out, and started the plans.

Yesterday, our entire “school day” took about 4 hours.  That’s including the break we took for lunch, and about an hour where he decided to play outside.  In that time, we did math, Canadian studies, french, grammar, literature, logic, ancient history, poetry, and music.

Today we spent slightly less time than that, again including lunch.  He didn’t play outside, but he was having a cranky, unfocussed morning and it wasn’t until halfway through the subjects that he finally settled in.  We did math, Canadian studies (geography), french, grammar, cursive practice, literature, Aesop fables, and… um… and music.

Once we’ve got the routine down, I think we’ll be able to get the “bookish” stuff done in under two hours.   There’s a couple other things we’ll be adding in as well, or modifying as we progress.

I’ll post more details and what approach and resources we’re using with the different topics another day.  Right now, I’m just excited that we’re getting so much done, with really very little resistance and complaints from Flipper.  He even said “this is more fun than I expected” while tracing border lines on his Canadian geography map for today…