Four Moms Choose Curriculum

Welcome to another week where Four Moms with 35 (plus) kids share our thoughts and experiences on various topics. Today we are going to talk about how to choose curriculum, or rather, how my family chooses curriculum and why and how and what curriculum we chose.

The Four Moms are:
Kimberly @ Raising Olives
KimC @ Life in a Shoe
Connie @ Smockity Frocks
and ME



This week we are supposed to be talking about what curriculum we chose, but I have a couple of conflicts with this.   I already and quite recently blogged at great length about that here, here, here, and here, among other places, and basically, our philsophy of education led us to Charlotte Mason, which eventually got us very involved with AmblesideOnline. (disclosure- I have a lot of emotional investment in AO, but not any monetary interest)

But we were homeschooling for years before there was an AmblesideOnline, so I thought I would share a vingnette of what we did back then- this is from, oh, probably twelve years ago.  We used very few text books.  We wanted living books.  This will give you some idea of what our standard is/was for choosing 'living books.' I wrote this to other people back then, and for this post I have edited it slightly for clarity, and this brings me to another point.

This week we are getting ready to go on vacation- we leave tomorrow, so to save time I found something I wrote a while ago  that illustrates what I want to say.  Unfortunately (or not), it's about what we did when studying a particularly era, which might be a distraction from the main point here  But it can't be helped, so that is the post I have used (see below).

When I first read Miss Mason's books, I had trouble visualizing what she meant by living books, so I read through them again and copied all the titles she referenced and tried to read something from all of them.  It was a daunting, but highly useful and informative project.  It really clarified my understanding.  So... since we did not actually choose a 'curriculum,' the best way to explain what we did is to give a window into one period of study in our homeschool.

Charlotte Mason's description of living books included the criteria of "lucidity, personal conviction, directness," and  these are some of the qualities we look for when selecting the books for our children to read, and this is what I wrote about it twelve years ago:

"Currently we are studying the War Between the States, or more accurately, at this time we are studying the events leading up to it. I knew we had found a living book, one written with that personal conviction which Charlotte [Mason] mentions, when I read this in the introduction:

"I discovered the true story told in these pages while I was working on something else- on "America's Moral and Intellectual Underpinnings," as I rather grandly put it. I had decided to deal with that subject, not a small one, by telling stories. When I came across this one, it grabbed me by the collar, threw me upon the floor, sat upon my chest and insisted on being told."

The book is _Arguing About Slavery_. The author is William Lee Miller. He researched the congressional records during the decades prior to 1861, reviewing the discussions, arguments, and fights on the issue of slavery. He shares them here, with plentiful commentary and background. His style is riveting, the story fascinating, and his personal conviction clearly evident. My teens, especially my 16 y.o., are captivated.

My eldest is making a copybook of quotes from this book alone. She is halfway through the 500 page volume and has six pages (double sided) of handwritten quotes. She has met people in the pages of this book whom she feels she 'knows' now, and she is eager to find out more about them [she is finished now, and has put together a wonderful notebook of her studies in this area]. Our 14 y.o. is also working through the book on her own, making her own copybook. The two girls are planning to compare their quotebooks when they are done, to see if they selected any of the same quotes. In addition to the copywork, my teens write their oral narrations of the day's reading each day, spending from thirty minutes to an hour writing. Once a week we have a time set aside for making entries in their Book of The Centuries. They made their own, following directions in one of Catherine Levison's magazines [ this is no longer published, and I do not know if back issues are still available].

They read for at least two hours of the day, at this time, mostly from Arguing About Slavery. This book is the centerpiece of our study. Playing significant supporting roles are three other volumes, each rather large, one videotape and one cassette tape series, each with important contributions to make to our understanding of the first six decades of the 19th century. We are reading from Samuel Eliot Morrison's _An Oxford History of the American People_, _Paul Johnson's A History of the American People_, and _Clarence Carson's A Basic History of the United States_.

Arguing About Slavery addresses States' Rights issues, but obviously, from the title, concerns itself primarily with the issue of race-based slavery in America and the ongoing public and political arguments about it leading up to the War. I wanted my students to also understand alternative points of view in our studies. { I don't mean that we teach them that all points of view are equally valid.  We do not because they are not.  But we do think it's important to understand that human beings are, well, human, and that you cannot dismiss everything about a person or a position because something is wrong in one area, nor can you demonize.  Nice people can be wrong about things.  WE could be wrong about things.  Right now we are doing the Civil War again with our 11 year old, and he keeps wanting to know who the 'bad guys' are.  Sometimes there ARE bad guys.  And sometimes we say "They are either all bad guys, or there are no real bad guys, here.  Just people, sometimes right, sometimes tragically wrong.  It is a question of humility, I think.}

I chose Morrison's book because he is a careful, meticulous scholar who deeply loves his subject. He is a wee bit on the dry side, but he attempts to be carefully neutral and avoid taking sides in the conflicts of the time.

Johnson's book is enthusiastic, with a slightly humorous touch. It is another literary gem, written by a British born journalist who genuinely loves this country and its history. He also is rather more pro-Northern, although he also does mention the tariffs, the state bank, and government schools. However, I thought he was important because he represents John Quincy Adams as a bit of a crank, and a stiff, sour, unbending old man, while in Millers' book Adams comes out as the hero of the day.  I think JQA was a bit of a crank AND the hero of the day.


Once more, I desire my children to see that there are many sides to the issues we're studying, and many ways of interpreting the facts even when we disagree with some of them.

Clarence Carson's books are the driest of the lot, to my taste, but they are indispensable, in my view. Carson is one of the few historians I know of who truly understands the Constitution of this country and the limits it places on the federal government. Therefore, he continually discusses political changes with an eye to their constitutionality. Those are the books we are reading.

We began this study with a cassette series, America's First 350 Years, by Steve Wilkins. Wilkins is unabashedly pro-South, and defends his position with all the self-conviction, passion, and sincerity which Charlotte Mason could wish. He makes me rather aggravated when he discusses slavery, as, unlike him, I believe that the institution of race based slavery cannot be defended on biblical, or any other, grounds. However, his is an important voice, and on the issues of State's Rights, I feel a powerful and prophetic one [on the slavery question he aggravated my eldest so much that she wrote him a three page letter delineating all the points on which she thought he was wrong. He aggravated my 14 y.o. so much that she is pretty much reduced to speechless fury when asked to discuss him].

Another important resource we are using in our studies is a videocassette tape published by American Vision (associated with Gary DeMar, no we don't agree with everything DeMar does or says). AV hosted a debate between Steve Wilkins and Peter Marshall (author of the Light and the Glory, From Sea to Shining Sea) about the causes of the War Between the States. We watched this two-hour video after listening to Wilkin's tape series (the part concerned with the events leading up to the War), and we were all entranced. I expected it to be boring, but it was fascinating. We will watch it again at the conclusion of our studies.  We think the most important part of the entire debate is when Wilkins insists that the North was denying certain rights to the South, and Marshall asks Wilkins to name one, just one.  The one Wilkins can think of?  The 'right' to transport enslaved human beings into the territories and keep them enslaved (thereby, btw, violating the Missouri Compromise which the South had previously favored).

The videotape is an important component of our studies because I think it is an apt illustration of the fact that our reason leads us to conclude what our hearts have already accepted, and that decent, intelligent  men can come down firmly on opposite sides of the same question. As Miss Mason says in Volume 6, page 139

"…the function of reason is to give logical demonstration of (a) mathematical truth and (b) of initial ideas accepted by the will. In the former case reason is, perhaps, an infallible giddy but in the latter is not always a safe one, for whether the initial idea be right or wrong reason will confirm it by irrefragible proofs…." Teach them to accept or reject ideas based on the "principles of conduct and a wide range of fitting knowledge."

 Peter Marshall has written a third book, which title I cannot recall, and we did not use it.  I should clarify that he's not at all an unbiased author, but I don't seek to provide balance by using unbiased authors. I don't think they exist. I prefer to offer opposing viewpoints- although I do believe it's important not to include outright falsehoods in those opposing viewpoints.

These are not all the books we are reading; these volumes are the core. The girls are also reading Uncle Tom's Cabin [ and we added the Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin when my eldest spotted a reprint at a curriculum fair, that's published by  bluestocking press and it is an important accompaniment], Across Five Aprils, Poems and Songs of the Civil War, A Confederate Primer (the impression this left on my young readers and me was exactly the opposite its authors and publishers intended.  We added it because it was highly recommended by a number of people whose opinions we previously respected, but it is a dishonest and inaccurate book), The Red Badge of Courage, and a biography or two (we especially like those by Albert Marrin), for a sampling, and also Killer Angels.

When we study history, we also like to study works of literature and poetry set in the same time period, so the girls also are reading the poetry of William Cullen Bryant, Whitman, Emerson, and the writings of Thoreau. Those poets, are of course, all Northerners. Southern Poetry of the era was nearly impossible to find, other than that in Songs and Poem of the Civil War. I did find this website useful:  http://metalab.unc.edu/docsouth/southlit/antebellum.html

There are other poets of the period, a multitude of them, that I would have liked to include in this study, but we do have to stop somewhere. Emily Dickinson, for example, is a favorite of mine, and she did live and write during this period. However, she was not published until many years later. I wanted our studies to include poets and writers who were representative of their day and their region. That was part of my criteria for inclusion.

Bryant is a good example of what I mean. He is not currently 'popular' with the literary elite of our day. However, he was a major voice of his time, considered the leading poet of his generation. I didn't think we could leave him out and do justice to the historical period. Each of the children has a poem by Bryant to memorize. The younger children have shorter poems. In this way, they all gain a greater familiar with a broader sampling of his work. I type the poems and print them out, using our word processor (and playing with fancy fonts). I put each poem into a page protector and thumbtacked each one onto a kitchen cupboard.

My plan was to have about five or ten minutes a day where the children each stood in front of their poem, studied it attentively (that all important CM concept) and then took turns reciting as much as they had memorized. The children prefer to take their five or ten minutes of memorization at individual times. One child takes her poem down and sits out on the back porch, one takes it to the bathroom and closes the door, one leaves it where it is and studies it as she dries dishes, and one curls up on the couch with hers. They return their poems to the kitchen cupboards, and that way they don't get lost. We spend about two weeks on a poem.

We include music appreciation in our studies in a simple, painless way. I used The Timetables of History to find out which composers were representative of the time period. Then I looked through our rather extensive collection of CDs for any of the composers I had. Finally, I arbitrarily selected a few specific composers, mainly based on which were best represented in my collection. If I had a smaller collection, I would utilize the library. My children like to listen to music as they study and during meals and chores- in short, all day. I simply put a limit on which composers they could listen to during school hours. During the first week, they can only listen to Schubert during school hours. During the second week, it will be Chopin, and in the third Wagner

For the rest of our time spent on this era, they may choose whatever they prefer, as long as it comes from this era. They may utilize the library themselves to broaden their choices. We plan to spend from 6 to 8 weeks on this, although I suspect we'll go a bit over [sigh, we went waaaay over  We always do...].

In conclusion, let me leave you with these words of Charlotte Mason from volume 6:

"It is not enough to teach reasoning, logic, we must have knowledge of character, of principles, of God most of all, because "without knowledge, Reason carries a man into the wilderness and Rebellion joins company."  A well read person will be familiar with "Men and their motives, the historical sequence of events, principles for the conduct of life, in fact, practical philosophy, is what the emergencies of the times require us to possess and to be able to communicate."  "These things are… are the gathered harvests of many seasons' sowing of poetry, literature, history." 

The books I have mentioned here are only a small part of one season of 'sowing poetry, literature, and history.' Other books would serve equally well, so long as they helped a child to understand "men and their motives, the historical sequence of events, and principles for the conduct of life," and as quoted above, "be written with the lucidity, concentration, personal conviction, directness, and admirable simplicity which characterizes a work of literary caliber.

We are now done with the War between the states. We're going to continue with American History by reading on in Morrison's, Carson's, and Johnson's books, and A People's History if I can find it. If I can't, I'll have to find something else. I have America's First 350 years, and it cost too much money, so I'll probably use it. It helped that we started with the Civil War, so the girls have already noted how he often conveniently leaves out important information that negates his premises, and how he twists others and makes unwarrented assumptions. "
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That's what I wrote then.  Some of the specifics have changed.  We were simply unable to continue to use America's First 350 years much longer, so we sold it.  We use The Light and the Glory much less than we used to as well.  But the point of this post is not so much what we used, as why we used those things.  Those principles apply whatever you use.  Your educational methods and resources should written with lucidity or clarity,  passion, directness.  The things I use should contribute with our goal of giving our children not just a knowledge of facts, but a love of information, an understanding that history is about people, that science is about discovery and wonder, that math is about order and beauty (not limited to these things, of course) and, for my family, that God is the Creator of it all and in Him we live and move and have our being- these are our goals for education, some of them, anyway.  One of the ways we met those goals was through living books rather than textbooks.  Another was to reduce, drastically, the number of projects compared to the reading, writing, and discussing.

How well did this work?

Well, when our second girl was about 16 she took a college CLEP test on the Civil War and scored well enough for college credit.
When our oldest two girls took an online course in philosophy, their instructor loved them so much he invited them to another course with him for free- and he offered to do this twice more.  He also said he wished he had college students who could communicate their thoughts as lucidly as these two did.
Although we never assigned a research paper, the HG wrote them in college without trouble (and got A's and was highly popular with her history professors)
Arguing About Slavery remains possibly their favorite history read of all times- seriously, it is a GREAT book.  

Regrets:
I always try to squeeze in too many books, I don't suggest you follow me there.
We got away from the rules about music during schoolish hours, and I regret that.  Likewise, we let the poetry memorization drop, and I really regret that.

This is just history. What else did we do?

Well, for science we did do a dissection class one term, and we read a lot of nature writing, particularly
Edwin Way Teale.

For math we did Saxon.

You might also find this basic Charlotte Mason how-to useful.

With my godson/unofficial foster child Blynken, who lives with us four or five days, but the times are erratic and unpredictable, I have been using The Core Knowledge series, what your Kindergartener Needs to Know and WHat Your First Grader Needs to know.

Here is what we do for Bible.
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Links and upcoming posts:
Next week we'll be talking about tips for teaching little kids so y'all come back and see us, hear?
Future posts from the Four Moms, a tentative schedule subject to change without notice:
Teaching big kids. what changes? what do they need that little ones don't and where do you need to give more freedom. How do you make the transition.
 Putting it together. How does it work?
 Husbands and homeschooling
Keeping house while homeschooling

For further reading on this topic you may enjoy:


Previous Four Moms Posts:

• March 4: Introduction to the Four Moms series, who we are, where we come from, why we do what we do
  
• March 11: Four Moms Talk Scheduling- or why some of us don't
  
• March 12: In Which I Give Readers a Test On the Aforementioned Post
• March 18 - Live-blog day, in which all 4 of us live-blogged a real day in our home. This was exhausting!
  
• March 25 - Outings with only little ones.  Children are a blessing, but a few consistently enforced rules will make it easier to remember this, and it helps to raise them so that they are a blessing to others as well.
• April 1 - The Growing Family Beats the Incredible Shrinking Dollar: budgeting in the kitchen to feed a crowd (and I mean crowd.  My family has from 12-25 guests for dinner each week)
  
• April 8 - Menu planning, how we plan (or don't plan) to feed our hungry crewmates.
• And....
  

Why we homeschool; Cooking for a Crowd (lots of great recipes, including some our readers who shared in a joint link-fest!); Cooking from Scratch (you might be surprised at what can be made from scratch);What's our philosophy of education?

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