Constitution Museum

We are on a two-week break from our typical schooling schedule.  Taking advantage of museum passes, we are taking some field trips to area museums.  Today we visited the Constitution Museum at the Charlestown Navy Yard.  While we couldn't board her, we did get to walk beside the U.S.S. Constitution.

We needed to go through security in order to enter the visitor center and the part of the yard where she is docked.  We pretty much had the whole place to ourselves, being mid-winter in Boston during school.

 

One ship we could board was the U.S.S. Cassin Young, a World War II destroyer in dry dock.

We actually first went into the Constitution Museum, a small facility dedicated to facts and artifacts from the ship. The picture to the left was taken near the entrance.

The upstairs is a large hands-on children's center where kids can experience and learn about life at sea in the 18th and 19th centuries.  Ds#2 cleverly set himself up like this for a picture. 






Because today was St. Valentine's Day, the museum had a large spread of pastries, bagels, coffee, and juice for anyone to enjoy.  Mostly they were employees of the museum, visitor center, or military working on the ships, though we enjoyed some of the festivities ourselves!


Even without a pass the museum has a very low admission price, which is even voluntary.  This made a great half-day field trip.

World War II

This is the subject Ds#1 wanted to study this year.  With Memoir '44 being his favorite board game it was hardly a surprise.  Between what I already had and the recommendations in For the Love of Literature by Maureen Wittmann (which I now have on my Kindle), I was able to easily put a unit together.

For spines I have several books. World War II for Kids: A History with 21 Activities by Richard Panchyk; and America: The Last Best Hope (Volume II) by William J. Bennett.  (I see that a Volume III is coming out next month covering 1988 to 2008.)  I also have a couple of OOP books for younger kids: The First Book of World War II by Louis L. Snyder and America Moves Forward by Gerald W. Johnson.

The Landmark Book series has a lot of titles on the subjects.  I own eleven of them, plenty to keep my kids reading.  If you are not familiar with this series, they are non-fiction books told in a story format.  They have too much fact to be historical fiction yet the details in the dialogs, for example, are made up.  I suppose you can consider them on the factual end of historical fiction.

Bethlehem books has quite a few WWII historical fiction titles that my boys are enjoying, like Penny for a Hundred for Ds#3, The Secret War of Sergent Donkey for Ds#2, and Enemy Brothers for Ds#1.  We own these.

Some of Maureen's recommendations include Twenty and Ten by Claire Hutchet Bishop.  We were able to borrow Miracle at Moreaux, the film based on it.  She also listed Against the Dayan out of print book by Michael Cronin that turns out to be the first in a series of three that can still be gotten cheaply through used book sellers. We're waiting for them to arrive.  She recommends some great picture books that I got from the library like The Snow Goose and The Secret Seder.

I purchased Saint Maximilian Kolbe: Mary's Knight by Patricia E. Jablonski and Saint Edith Stein: Blessed by the Cross by Mary Lea Hill, both in the Encounter the Saints series.  I even found a 1959 biography of Pope Pius XII by Richard Cushing in the juvenile section of a local library, though it was also in a college collection.  At 180 pages maybe Ds#1 could read it, but I'll have to read through it first.

I've put my husband on the task of recommending some classic WWII movies--John Wayne comes to mind but I am sure there's many more.  So far Ds#1 is reading the historical fiction faster than I can get them in, and that's a good predicament to be in.

Constitution Day book

Eva March Tappan's book, The Story of Our Constitution, would make for some great reading for today, Constitution Day.  You can read the entire text online at Heritage History or download the pdf from Google Books.

Maps from Heritage History

I have written about Heritage History, one of my favorite places for online history and literature books in the public domain.  Besides viewing the books online for free, you can purchase an eBook for a Kindle or other reader for only $1.99 each.

Well, I just found another wonderful resource on their web sites. They have collected a whole series of large, color, historical maps onto their Heritage History Maps page so they can be downloaded.  They are organized by a variety of geographic an cultural categories: African, American, Asian, British, Christian, European, Greek, Hispanic, Moslem, Norse, Roman, and World.  The page lists the region, year (that that map is depicting, not when it was published), and description.  It's an online historical atlas that is a wonderful addition to our history studies!

The War of the Vendee

Navis Pictures is the genius behind St. Bernadette of Lourdes, the film with a cast of all children, most of them homeschooled.  Our family is very excited about the new film with a similar cast coming this fall: The War of the Vendee.



You can read the Wikipedia article, War in the Vendee, to get a general overview of the event depicted in the film.  This would make an outstanding suppliment to a study of the French Revolution, but why wait to enjoy something this good?

I have put together a reading schedule for studying some Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary War.  You can access the pdf schedule here on Google Documents.
Of course you can substitute your favorites on your bookshelves or available through your library for anything that I have listed.  That's the beauty of a Charlotte Mason education.

US History--the Revolutionary War

We finished the colonization of the United States and now we are moving into the Revolutionary War.  I am focusing more on personalities rather than events, along with some great character formation.  I have not planned out this unit as well as the last yet, but here is what I have put together.

I am reading American Hero Stories by Eva March Tappan to Ds#3.  Eleven chapters cover inspiring people and events of the Revolution.  We are also reading the shorter Jean Fritz biographies in my home library, while ds#2 is reading the longer titles, Why Not, Lafayette?, Early Thunder, and Traitor: the Case of Benedict Arnold We're also using another favorite author of ours, F. N. Monjo (5 short books for Ds#1 and one long one for Ds#2 and Ds#3.)

We are continuing to use An Elementary History of the United States (for ds#1 and #2) by Eva March Tappan, but only 4 chapters relate to the time period we're covering.  This book will give the boys the basics of the events of the Revolutionary War.

Along with those chapters they will also continue reading The Catholic Pioneers of America by John O'Kane Murray.  Seven biographies are relevent to our time period, from Casimir Pulaski to Lafayette.  Included is the longest survivor of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll. Other signers accused him of having less courage than they did because so many other Maryland citizens had his same name, and so he added to his signature, "of Carrollton," to be sure the king knew which one.  This book continues to enrich our US History studies from which Catholic accomplishments are typically excluded.

Ds#3 has started the Treegate Series by Leonard Wibberley from Bethlehem Books, starting with John Treegate's Musket  Each of the three books in the series are available as a Kindle edition for only 3.95 each.  The other two books are Peter Treegate's War followed by Sea Captain from Salem (Treegate)



We own and enjoy many of William Bennett's books and so I pulled Our Country's Founders: A Book of Advice for Young People.  We'll skip the second chapter, "Love and Courtship," unless we have time at the end since the boys will be far more interested in the other topics at this point in their lives.

I was looking at what they needed to read for this week and I noticed at the end of Israel Putnam at Bunker Hill is the note, "Adapted from Eva March Tappan, American Hero Stories."

Colonial History

Our family will be studying Colonial History for the next eleven weeks and I put together our reading schedule based on Eva March Tappan books along with a few others.  Here are the spines linked to their full text at Google Books or Open Library:

An Elementary History of Our Country by Tappan
This is a straight-forward chronological history of the United States.  It's good for dates and facts.

Letters from Colonial Children by Tappan
As I mentioned in the last blog, this lovely historical fiction is a series of letters written by colonial children to their families and friends in the Old World.

American Hero Stories by Tappan
This is a book of biographical sketches that is great for younger children.

Builders of Our Country Vol. 1 by Gertrude Van Duyn Southwick.  I'm not sure where I found this, but I had it in my Google library.  It is also a series of biographical sketches, many of which are colony founders, so it filled in a lot of gaps I had.  This will be a read aloud.

The Catholic Pioneers of America by John O'Kane Murray
This is another series of biographical sketches dedicated to American Catholics.  It has over 80 biographies, written more as stories than a factual retelling, arranged by date of death.  I found sorting through this book fascinating.  This will also be a read aloud in preference to Builders when they both cover the same person.

I have two stories about South Carolina in Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans by Edward Eggleston.

You can download the entire 11-week schedule as a PDF.

Now to search through For the Love of Literature and Let the Authors Speak for some good historical fiction to go along with this reading schedule!

Eva March Tappan

I have found a children's non-fiction treasure in Eva March Tappan; her books have become the center of our history education.  I have read Marshall, Eggleston, and Guerber, yet we most enjoy Tappan.  A Massachusetts native, making her a local favorite for us, you can read her full biography at The Baldwin Project.

Her writing engages my boys better than other similar books have.  For her events-based books, she ends each chapter with a summary, which is a great narration helper for me, and then three or four creative writing suggestions.  All of her books are all in the public domain and available at the usual places--Google Books, Open Library, The Baldwin Project, and Heritage History to name a few.

For World History we are reading The Story of the Roman People instead of Foster's Augustus Caesar's World.  She of course has books about Greek History and English History, too, among others.  Here is Open Library's list of her titles.

For American History we are focusing on the Colonial Period.  We will use American Hero Stories as well as An Elementary History of Our Country.  In addition, she wrote a delightful book called Letters from Colonial Children.  Ten fictional children, each from a different colony, have written one or more letters to relatives back in the Old World.  According to the preface, while using the modern language of her day she still strove for historically accurate details.

From a Catholic perspective, though Tappan is a Protestant Christian, she by far gives the best account of Catholic American history that I have found in these types of books.  One of the children in Letters is a Catholic girl from Maryland.  While not a perfect Catholic perspective, it gives a lot of Catholic detail and falls only a little short compared to Eggleston, Guerber, and especially Marshall.

With these books as a spine, the rest of my U. S. History should fall into place for the next term.  I'm looking forward to incorporating more of her works into our studies.

This Year's Program

I have been very busy over the summer and this fall such that I have not been able to blog, so now that the first term is two-thirds over I guess I will post something about what we are using this year!  I am now into our sixth year of homeschooling and finally, finally have I found what works for us

Religion:  We are continuing using the excellent Faith and Life series, only this year my two older boys are going through the program online.  I purchased access through My Catholic Faith Delivered which not only has the text read aloud to them, it also has a lot of multimedia and interaction to reinforce what they are learning.  They very much enjoy working this way.

Math:  This is our third year with the Mathematics Enhancement Programme (M.E.P.), still a free download from the Centre for Innovation in Mathematics.  Ds#3 is about to start Year 2, while Ds#1 and #2 will move up to Year 5 and Year 4 respectively by the start of our next term.  We have a lot of living math books as well that the kids are free to read and use, but this is really our focus.  The program is truly excellent for teaching math.

Language Arts:  Ds#3 started Primary Language Lessons from Hillside Education.  It's been a slow start for him as he gets up to speed with his reading and penmanship, but he is at the stage where he is progressing rapidly.  The program is designed to be covered in a single year, 3rd grade, but I like to go more slowly and cover it in two.  I really love how this program prepares my kids for writing.  No, this program will not put them on "grade level" with grammar or spelling or vocabulary.  But I no longer do any formal spelling since I have found that for some children it comes easily (Ds#2) and for others not so much (Ds#1), and they have best learned spelling through writing.  Vocabulary, too, is best learned through reading.

Ds#2 began Intermediate Language Lessons also from Hillside Education.  He brings his writing from this program to a writing class at our co-op and together they have really improved his imagination and narration.  Ds#1 is on the third section of this program, and also has a co-op writing class, and he has blossomed into a talented creative writer--and this from the loudest complainer about writing!  These boys, they do complain, but eventually they grow into it and this program has helped.

As for grammar, I agree wholeheartedly with the philosophy put forth by Analytical Grammar, a program we are trying, and liking, this year.  They believe, as I do, that grammar is a finite subject that can be learned during the 3 middle school; no year after year of grammar.  The program consists of 3 "seasons" or 10 week sessions, one for each year for grades 6th through 8th.  The bulk of the grammar is taught in these sessions, one building on another; periodic worksheets keep the information fresh between seasons.  I had my doubts that Ds#1 would be able to handle something this intensive and fast-moving.  I made a point of giving him my attention as he learned each section.  It was rocky at first; now I am quite impressed with how well he parses and diagrams sentences.  If he can do it, anyone can do it!
 
World History:  This is our second year using Connecting With History from St. George Books. We are using volume II this year, from the Birth of Christ to the Battle of Hastings (1066).  Between the books and the activity suggestions, this is how history should be done.  While this is a Charlotte Mason approach based on living books, the program is designed like a Classical approach such that you revisit each volume every 4 years, each time moving up another stage.  The whole family worked out of the same volume, yet they each read books and so activities for their level.  If only such a product was available for American History!

American History:  Since we do not have something as great as CWH for this subject, I try my best to set up something similar.  I have decided this year that we are going to study early America--American Indians, The Colonies, and People of the Revolution and the Constitution.  Our focus will be on biographies rather than events.  I used LibraryThing to figure out what books I already have relating to these topics, and then I use the library to fill in anything I may be missing.

You can see what we are doing for Science and Nature on my two other blogs, At Home Science and A Private Eye Nature.  More about co-op, Charlotte Mason, and learning to come!