bearing blog

Pretending I'm not here.

I am hiding in the bedroom upstairs.  Downstairs I can hear my children enjoying a dinner of pizza, juice, and carrots, under the watchful eye of a pair of polite young ladies we know from church.  They are tween sisters, #1 and #2  of five.  My kids, especially MJ, like them.  I do too.  I overheard them leading my children in grace before meals when they sat down to the pizza.   Good for them.

The girls who are paying us a visit this evening -- sorry, the girls that I am paying to visit us this evening -- have something in common with our family.  We are just getting started with babysitting. 

This evening, I have hired them to play with the kids (technically just the younger two -- Oscar is 9 and old enough not to be babysat, but not old enough to be in charge of his siblings) while I am busy hunting through the attic for baby clothes and newborn-size diaper covers.  Mainly, though, the evening is a dry run for "real" babysitting later on.  You know.  The kind where Mark and I leave the house.  Without (some of) the children.  And we pay someone to make sure they, and the house, survive for a couple of hours.

Odd as it may seem, we have literally never done this before.  Oh, we've had dates from time to time, but we've always left the children with someone that we know and love enough, um, not to pay.  Grandma and Grandpa have taken the kids for an evening, of course.  And we've relied on dear friends, "we'll watch your kids this weekend if you'll watch ours next weekend," that sort of thing -- always people the children know and love and feel very safe with.   This means that we haven't gone out without the children very often over the course of our marriage.  Grandma and Grandpa live far away, and though we trust the goodwill of our friends and are happy to return favors any time we can, it's sort of self-limiting because nobody wants to exploit that kind of generosity.  We know they're there when we really NEED a date night; that means saving it for those times.

Which makes it kind of an interesting case study.  Why didn't we cultivate babysitters sooner?  Why have I been a mother for 9 years and tonight will pay a babysitter for the very first time ever?  Or, conversely, if I'm not the type to pay a babysitter, why am I doing it now?  Is there some principle I've renounced?

Yes and no.  I think it's more a case of the family dynamics being different now that there are three children, the ages we have.

I believe pretty strongly in maintaining strong attachments with and among the children, and limiting separations.  I have always done the sorts of things you'd expect -- lots of babywearing, nursing past age three or four, that sort of thing -- and one of the things we've done is kept the kids with us quite a lot, not using institutional day care or babysitters, which took some juggling when I was in grad school and Mark was working, let me tell you.  We were never willing to leave Oscar with someone he didn't know very well, back when he was our first and only, and it wasn't much different for Milo either.  At the YMCA we would take turns playing with our little guy(s) in the childcare facility, rather than leave them while we both exercised, until they were so comfortable with the staff there that they weren't upset at all to be left -- I think not till well after they were two or three  years old.  We weren't willing to teach them the hard, tearful way that we would come back to them, we wanted to steer clear of the discontinuity, of that first shock of abandonment.  And Mark and I really and truly preferred to keep our "date nights" rare, or to take the children along with us, rather than get used to leaving the children with someone else.  We really didn't feel we needed to get away from the kids and be just a "couple," at least not very much. 

After all, we're not just a couple.  We're a mom and dad.  We have sought to find our romance, and our selves, within those roles, and it's generally worked for us.

(Pausing here to acknowledge that not everyone feels the same way, and really, that's fine.  If parents truly need to get away by themselves more often than we have needed to, to nurture their marriage and each other, then by all means they should do it.)

But since MJ came along we've been more cavalier about the kid-care.  Take the YMCA for example.  We worked pretty hard to get MJ to stay in the YMCA child care from a young age -- she was somewhere between one and two when we started leaving her there with her brothers.  We are hoping to get the new baby comfortable with the place at an even younger age, obviously not until he is content to go without nursing for the block of time and is comfortable with the staff.  And here I am paying a babysitter.  Have I abandoned my principles? 

With the caveat that I am probably good at fooling myself -- I do not think I have.  What I think has happened is that I have seen the development of the dynamic among my children -- the sibling relationships.  Remember, these are kids who spend a lot of time together, constant playmates, since they're not separated daily for age-segregated schooling.  Here's the thing -- when Oscar was my only little person, to leave him in the YMCA childcare for 40 minutes was to leave him totally unmoored from every anchor of safety he'd ever known.  Until he could really understand that he was safe there in that environment, it felt so very wrong to force him into it.  But now, my children are a package.  Mary Jane, at age three, doesn't enter alone.  She enters with her six-year-old and nine-year-old big brothers.  She calls Oscar her "protector."  She believes she is safe and loved in their presence.  And from what I have seen, she is right.   I see that she is comfortable and unafraid.  (No, she's not always really HAPPY about going into the childcare while I work out, but I can see she is not terrified or disturbed.)

Anyway -- Mark and I talked it over and decided that it's  time to branch out a bit.  We still like to take our kids with us when we go to restaurants and gatherings (heck, the kids joined us for our anniversary dinner date last Saturday night, and it was a blast.)  But as time passes, as we have a little bit more money to spend and a little bit more burnout sometimes at the end of the week, the truth is that we would like to have a chance to concentrate on each other just a bit more often.  More often, I think, than we are willing to exploit the good will of our friends.   The new baby will be coming along for quite some time, of course, but that's fine.  New babies have their challenges, but it is not hard to give a new baby everything he needs while still carrying on a continuous conversation.  And I think that's what we're after.

I have about 45 minutes left of my babysitters.  I am resisting the urge to eavesdrop some more, but I am wondering whether I could possibly sneak downstairs to find out if there is any pizza left.  Should have packed myself a sandwich before sequestering myself up here!  How funny that on this, my first night in 9 years in which I have literally bought myself a few hours of freedom, I am somewhat imprisoned in my own bedroom.  Hurray for the wireless internet connection.

Bland and cautious: Two posts that say something I meant to say.

First, from Darwin, a few weeks ago.

[T]here are a good many people who know me in real life who read the blog. More than that, after writing a blog for four-and-a-half years, you get to think of a number of your long-time readers and commenters are friends. The blog becomes like a corner coffee house or bar where the same characters assemble regularly -- with the occasional stranger dropping in as well -- and discuss a range of topics, with everyone knowing the basic terrain of who everyone else is and where everyone is coming from.

The way in which a blog can serve as a combination magazine and coffee shop is, to me, one of the most appealing elements of the medium. It's more personable than simply sending one's words out into the void, knowing that someone out there is reading them but seldom sure of what others think about them. 

At the same time, however, this community element to blog writing makes one particularly aware of the difficulties of writing within a community. As the number of people I know (whether locally or online) who are blog readers increases, I increasingly find myself thinking, "If I write about that, so-and-so might be offended."

Next, from Betty Duffy, and indirectly Pentimento, more recently.

On one of the shelves in the bookstore, I picked up a book for grown-ups that looked interesting. I read the back cover, absorbed the synopsis, then looked for an author bio. “Well what do you know,” I thought, “It’s that angry man on the internet,” and re-shelved the book. I’d recently happened upon the author’s blog, on which he peeled apart the writings of some bad Catholic with whom he took issue.

The author bugged me, not because of his lack of charity. Mean people are a curiosity. He bugged me because his self-appointed Catholic gate-keeping functioned as a sort of literary terrorism, scaring anyone who writes with a “Catholic” next to his or her name out of writing anything interesting.

As Pentimento suggests in a recent comment here:

“If your Catholicism is an openly-stated aspect of your writing and your consciousness, you may find that some of your equally open and self-conscious co-religionists are standing by waiting to judge the way you express your faith and tally how well you live up to it…. I was surprised a year or so ago to receive deeply hurtful criticisms in my comboxes from some who thought my writing was inappropriate, and from others who called my faith into question and even slandered me in the comboxes of a friend. My best friend in real life… took me to task after that because she thought my writing had become bland and cautious.”

Who wouldn’t write cautiously when our writing about our personal experiences as a member of this Catholic Community faces such vicious scrutiny? 

...Here then, is one Catholic blogger who will say without shame, I write this blog only because I enjoy doing it. It is not my apostolate. I might lead you astray. I might cuss. 

I've been a little stilted lately. Like Darwin, I don't conceal my identity terribly hard on my blog. I'm not trying to shield it from friends and family. But I recognize the signs of hesitation sometimes when I write about politics, morality, sometimes even the petty arenas of judgmentalism that arise from parenting style, schooling style, liturgical preferences. No wonder I take refuge in posting so many recipes.

I appreciate posts like this by Darwin and Betty, whose writing I have admired for its candidness. It's nice to be reminded that others are dealing with the same kind of internal censor. And I am beginning to appreciate the value of the blog as a learning environment for... what -- sensitivity maybe? There is a balance to be learned:  a balance between honesty and truth, and charity to the real people who might see themselves (rightly or wrongly) between the lines.

What is the good and true purpose of this blog? It is not my apostolate, either (though see Betty's followup to her post quoted above). I don't write in an attempt to entertain others -- not much anyway -- nor to have a soapbox -- okay, I do my share of venting, I admit it. Even though I pad it with a lot of fluff and kid-pictures and recipes and "funny things that happened to me" bits, things that would be better suited to Facebook if I was the sort of person to have 293 "friends," there is a "main purpose" belied by the actual word-count I spend on various side purposes.

Once during Christmas vacation midway through graduate school, I sat down with a pencil and a new legal pad and I wrote the date at the top and a title, "On the isotropic and unidirectional compactions of compressible packed spheres" or something like that, and I began at the very beginning and I wrote for hours and went straight through, as if I was explaining to someone with absolutely no background, everything I knew, guessed, and was trying to demonstrate about my thesis topic.  I made few corrections and I drew a lot of pictures along the way.  I filled the legal pad over the course of a few days.  With surprisingly few changes, that legal pad became a large chunk of the explication my doctoral thesis, and I still consider it one of the most viscerally satisfying pieces of writing I ever did.

The reason I want to blog is the same reason I have always used that kind of derivation, and also the reason I have always journaled, and also the reason I have always savored (when I can get them) long conversations over a bottle of something or other: figuring something out, breaking sloppy reality down to its elements and reconstructing it into a model that I can wrap my mind around and say "This much I understand."

Lately I think I have been overwhelmed by the thought of who might be reading, and have lost some of the courage I need to lay out what's on my mind.

Well then.  PASS THE BOTTLE.

History headaches.

We have a few weeks left in our 18-week literature-based unit study of the Civil War:  up ahead are two weeks on Reconstruction, and two weeks I called "Aftermath" which should take us through Plessy v. Ferguson and lay the groundwork, I hope, for grasping the Civil Rights movement when we study it next year.

 I started out very stressed that I hadn't worked out an exact week-by-week schedule of readings, but as I went on, planning just one or two weeks ahead from a master list I had prepared before the beginning of the year, I relaxed into a routine.  I am definitely getting better at flexibility.  And I am finding that it's far better to pick a few good, lengthy books that go into details, than to try to cram EVERYTHING in.   

 For example, we spent two weeks on one gem of a book about the Monitor and the Merrimack, and two weeks on another book about nothing but Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox -- and let me tell you, I always thought of that latter event as being worthy of one or two paragraphs, as it had appeared in all the American History texts I'd ever read before.  How amazing to read it all fleshed out into a 180-page book -- a gripping read, really.  Notes passed back and forth between the two generals; the constant threat of a deadly skirmish breaking out just as the surrender deal was about to go through; the drama of the negotiation of the terms of surrender; striking and contrasting portraits of the two very different men who met that day; the comical, frantic bidding for souvenirs from Mr. McLean's sitting room after the surrendering was over.

I'm surprising myself.  I always thought I would be the sort to insist on memorization of key dates and things.  Instead, I'm hitting my stride with an approach of "bringing the era to life," the best I can, through good stories and biographies.  The children are really, really interested in it.  History is, after all, a collection of stories, and who doesn't like a good story?   

This leaves me 18 weeks to "do," um, the rest of the 19th century in America.  WOW was it hard to make decisions about that.  Finally I just laid a printout of my book list on the table and moved eighteen pennies around on the pages until it seemed I'd distributed the best books evenly.  So:

• 3 weeks on pre-Civil War leadership and foreign policy.
• 4 weeks on expansion of the United States.
• 3 weeks on immigration, urbanization, and social change.
• 3 weeks on daily life, art, and entertainment.
• 2 weeks on technology and economics.
• 2 weeks on innovations in transportation and communication.
• 1 week on post-Civil War leadership and foreign policy.

The reference spine is Joy Hakim's A History of US.  I plan to anchor the century in biographies, choosing them mostly for the quality of the writing, which leaves me with the lives of Andrew Jackson, Crazy Horse, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Luther Burbank, the Wright brothers, John Muir, and Teddy Roosevelt.   (How's that for a survey?)*   A handful of other really good books should round it out, covering topics like the Monroe Doctrine, stagecoaches, railroads, captains of industry, labor unions, the Edison-Westinghouse rivalry, settlers in southwestern Ohio, one-room schoolhouses, and European waves of immigration.   Whew.  Even with all this work done, I'm still sort of making it up as I go along... but it's actually working, I think.

____________

*Don't forget we did spend the first half of the year on the Civil War, which gave us the opportunity to read biographies of Dred and Harriet Scott, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Lee and Grant, and  Abraham Lincoln ... and coming up we have bios of Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. 

Snow.

"Six inches!  Maybe I should declare a snow day, what do you think?"

"Doesn't the superintendent of schools get to decide that?"

"Um... okay... I forget, is that you, or is that me?"

"Maybe I should just let you declare a one-hour delay."

"Mark.  This is bigger than that.   I declare a one-hour delay every time I find an extra cup of coffee left in the pot."

Embarrassment.

At Gravity and Levity, before he gets into the meat of the post, there is a short memoir of his embarrassing first day as a graduate student.  He concludes:

The following month proceeded something like this: I would go to his office in the morning and he would give me a problem to work on.   I would spend the afternoon and evening reading through my old textbooks and lecture notes and trying to piece together a reasonable solution, usually using the direct and formal mechanisms I had learned as an undergraduate.  The next morning I would bring my big solution to his office and present my result (the usual evaluation: you’re kind of right, but not completely right).  Then he would show me how to solve the problem with one diagram and three lines of algebra, give me another problem to work on, and the cycle would repeat.

If I have any “intuition” in physics, it was only developed through a painful and somewhat embarrassing process like this one.  Sometimes I think that to be a scientist is to live in constant fear of embarrassing yourself.

I totally related to this post and wish I'd read some of it before I started grad school so long ago.  I had many days in graduate school that felt very much like that.  Fortunately, I didn't have the embarrassing moment of first encountering my adviser in the men's room.  If I had, that would have been even MORE embarrassing.

Grammar.

Eugene Volokh is blogging about grammar again and getting lots of comments.  It's the old "what is standard?" argument again...

So, commenters, is it that all these writers (whose work ranges from the late 1500s to the 1900s) and many more were wrong, and you’re right, when you say that “their” can’t be used in these contexts? Is it that you have the Logic of the Language on your side — the same logic that tolerates the singular “you are,” “aren’t I?,” “ice cream,” and much more, but that as a matter of the laws of logic balks at a singular “they”? Or is it just that you’re discussing what you find aesthetically pleasing (or even pedagogically optimal, for instance with an eye towards teaching students usage that will satisfy self-described “purists” and will thus serve them well socially)? If it’s the latter, I’ll happily end the debate. But my sense is that many people who denounce the singular “they” (including where the singular relates to nouns with a collective meaning, such as “everyone”) and similar matters are making an assertion about correctness, and not just about their own tastes or about the most useful teaching approaches.

As a writer -- of blog posts, personal correspondence, scientific papers, and the like -- my style priorities come in this order.

1. Clarity
2. Elegance (a context-dependent subjective judgment)
3. Logical construction
4. Adherence to standard grammatical rules

Most of the time, these four goals align.  Occasionally they don't.  And when they do, a writer has to make a choice.  Everybody must take his or her own bag adheres to rules, and is logical.  It is, I think, just as clear as Everybody must take their own bag.  In most contexts it's not as elegant.

As a teacher, though, I'm a big believer in instructing kids and other emergent writers "slavish adherence to standard grammatical rules," followed by "logical construction of sentences."  

First, I want them to learn the rules; occasionally context demands slavish adherence to standard rules, and in most contexts nonstandard writing creates unintended distraction rather than intended style and elegance.

Second, it's easier to teach younger children objective, clear rules.  It's much harder to explain concepts like "elegance" and "clarity," at least until they're older.

Third, subjective evaluation of writing is made easier over time as learners gain confidence and comfort with the language they're writing in, and as they gain exposure to many contexts and to examples of really excellent writing that may play looser with standard syntax.

Fourth, you get more leeway with nonstandard writing when you're good at it, and especially, good at judging when it works and when it doesn't.  

That's pedagogy for you -- and not everyone with an opinion on the subject has bothered to distinguish pedagogical from stylistic issues.

Art lesson.

Milo and Silas have been working together on art prints, Charlotte-Mason-style, for several months now.  Yesterday I took the  two of them to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for a brief visit, and a chance to see some "real" artworks up close.

I took them straight to the "Art of the American West" collection, because I thought they'd find it exciting.

 Milo picked Edgar Payne's "Canyon Portal" as his favorite piece in the room; here's Silas examining it.  

Meanwhile, Milo sat on the floor with a sketchbook to produce his own version.  Here it is: 

 See the two little men on horseback at the bottom?

Silas chose a Bierstadt as his favorite painting, but while we waited for Milo to finish his sketch copy of the Payne, Si was drawn to this bronze by Harry Jackson, "Stampede:"

He talked about it at length, pointing out the three cowboys among the rushing mass of cattle, and was especially interested in two details:  one cowboy who'd fallen off his horse, dragged by his ankle in the stirrup, and one steer's missing horn-tip.  I suggested that perhaps it was the artist's intent to show that some of the cattle were hurt in the stampede, their horns broken off, but Silas was sure that some mishap had occurred to the artwork.  "It is really old," he told me.

We moved on to the next room of American Art, where the boys studied two beautifully crafted flintlock rifles.  "Why is a gun in an art museum?"  I asked them.  "Can a gun be art?" and got some interesting answers, mostly revolving around the idea "Because they're old."   

The room after that was a bit of a mixed bag, with furniture, textiles, still lifes, and things.  I thought the boys would go for the ENORMOUS still life on one wall, or the striking painting of a tornado over St. Paul on the other -- but no; Silas grabbed the sketchbook and crayons, and made a beeline for a jewel-like little still life on the opposite wall, next to a marble bust.

It turned out to be a Peale -- Raphaelle Peale's "Still Life with Fruit, Cakes, and Wine."  Silas has an eye for the well-regarded, I think.

I don't have a picture of Silas's sketch, but it was charming -- sort of a linear left-to-right catalog of all the items in the still life.  A line across the bottom made the surface the elements rested on, and from left to right he drew a cup of wine, an apple, a leafy twig, a medium orange, another leafy twig, two "cupcakes," and a stick-straight vine with five grapes like beads on a string.

Meanwhile, Milo was entranced by a giant silver Tiffany urn.

 

I let the boys choose the last room.  They led me downstairs and decided on the Chinese pottery.  Each picked some items to draw, and then I had them both draw the same item to finish up:  a little Sung Dynasty dish that had attracted Silas.  "It's so little, I can make it little like it is," he said happily.  Milo shrugged -'s'OK - and dutifully they passed the red-orange and green crayons back and forth until they had finished.

On the way home they were immersed in a book of picture puzzles Milo keeps in the car ("can you find the twelve differences between the two photos?") and wouldn't talk to me.  But they were happy to be singled out together for a "special" lesson today, while all their siblings stayed at our house and did "the usual" lessons with Hannah.  And they both agreed that it is more interesting to see the "real thing" than to study a print of a painting.   

History and today.

I've started thinking already about next year's literature-based American History study.  Last year we did "prehistorical North America through the War of 1812."  This year we're doing "19th century" -- really, "war of 1812 through U.S. entry into WWI," with half the year spent on Civil War and related topics.  Next year we'll wrap it up with "Twentieth-Century America" -- which is really going to be "World War I through 9/11/01," I think.

When I prepared the book lists for the first two-thirds, I started by picking up a couple of good high-school history textbooks and reading through them to get an idea of which topics to cover.  I think this time around, though, I am not going to do that.  That approach forces you to start in the past and look forward.  It's also an approach in which everything is important -- in which it's hard to make priority choices, given the limited time we have to spend.  But I need a way to decide which topics we must cover and which must be set aside.   So I think maybe the best approach is to start in the present and look back.  I want to ask myself, "Where are we now?  And how did we get here?"

It's not that I want to focus heavily on current events with the kids I'm teaching, who will be two fifth-grade boys and one seventh-grade girl next year (plus whichever younger kids "tag along" with the subject from day to day).   I don't think they are old enough to really dig into the complexities of modern-day politics, domestic and global.  

But I do want to supply them with the basic historical background they will need to understand today's United States and its place in the world.  I want to steep them at least a bit in the past, so that when it comes time to understand a complicated present, they'll have some idea that it didn't come out of nowhere.  And so when I select topics, I want to do it with an eye toward setting the stage for today.  That, I think, will be my primary organizing principle, since I can't cover everything.  Does this topic help us understand where we are today?  Here in the U. S.?

I think it has a way of focusing how to teach about things.  It's so easy to think of the twentieth century as a string of "eras:"  the World War I era, the Depression era, the WWII era, the Cold War era, the era of the Civil Rights Movement, and so on.  I was tempted to break it up like that myself.  But there are other ways to think about all these pieces, less as discrete time blocks than... phenomena maybe?   The end of American isolationism and the beginnings of intensive global involvement, for better or worse.  The great migrations from rural areas to cities, and from south to north.   U.S. involvement in the Mideast.

Let's talk presidents.  I'd rather cover a few in depth than all of them superficially.  In the 19th century I planned to cover biographies of only three presidents, the most interesting ones:  Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt.  In the twentieth century, whose full biographies to cover?  It strikes me that two are no-brainers:  FDR and Reagan.  They make interesting counterpoints, if nothing else.  When I was talking it over with Hannah I also ticked off "and Kennedy," but when I mentioned that to Mark he said "No way.  Kennedy's only interesting because he was assassinated.  You want an interesting character study, you want to do Lyndon Johnson."   

"Nixon maybe?"

"Well, sure, he's a character too, but a lot of interesting things happened under Johnson.  Think about it."  And I am thinking about it -- he has a point.

Anyway, I am a long way from committing anything to paper, but I will definitely have food for thought over the next few weeks.

Details, details.

Having less time to spare has forced me to learn to be more flexible.  Last year, for instance, I had planned out every book we were going to read for our literature-based American History study down to which chapters we'd read which weeks, all in advance, for the entire school year.  I felt sure I'd fall behind or miss something if I didn't.

This year (19th century, with half the time spent on the Civil War) I managed to make a list of books I wanted to use, and to divide them roughly up into topical chunks lasting two to six weeks long, but I didn't get around to figuring out exactly which ones, and which pages of which ones, I would have time to cover in two hours' reading and discussion per week.

To my surprise, the world has not stopped turning, and the children seem to be getting some decent history education.  

This is what I am doing now:  A couple of weeks in advance I request the dozen or so books I need for the next several-week chunk.  Then, the morning that we're doing American History -- Tuesdays with Hannah -- I frantically flip through the books and find some decent excerpts that add up to the number of pages I can reasonably cover in the allotted time.  Then, I read them to the kids and we talk about them.

There's a lot of stuff we never get to.  Especially, there are many books that I would love to read in their entirety, but can only afford the time to read half, or a couple of chapters.  

For instance, a few weeks ago, I read about half of a wonderful old book by Fletcher Pratt called The Monitor and the Merrimac.  Fantastic.  Yeah, it covered the Battle of Hampton Roads.  But it also contained biographical information about Ericsson, the engineer who developed so many original innovations that became part of the Monitor; a lot of really interesting (to me anyway) technical information about the process of working out the kinks in the boat; detailed explanation of the North's strategy of naval blockade against the Confederacy, including discussions of the implications for international relations, blockade running, and the like; and it gave us the opportunity to discuss the concept of an "arms race" with the fourth graders.  But the whole book is 180 pages long; I got as far as the end of the actual battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac itself, and really didn't have time to go on to the second half which went into the rest of the naval campaigns of the war.

Still, it was a great choice.  The boys loved it.  So did I!

Today was another example.  I cobbled together a lesson from:

• 1 picture book, the text of which was the Gettysburg Address, to use with the younger children as their history lesson
• One section of a children's book about the Battle of Gettysburg, for the background leading up to the battle
• A few pages of 1 book for young people called "The Military History Of Civil War Land Battles" written by a military historian, for covering the actual battle, and using its maps to discuss troop movements
• Parts of two chapters from a book about women in the Civil War, for covering hospital work and bread riots
• Part of Daugherty's biography of Abraham Lincoln to cover NYC draft riots, Lincoln's many pardons of army deserters, the famous letter to Mrs. Bixby, and the Gettysburg Address again in more detail.

The whole lesson wound up being surprisingly cohesive, since the chapters about women and the civil war (A Separate Battle by Chang) centered around the time period near Gettysburg.  

Next week we begin the wrap-up; all I know is that we'll read one book about Sherman's march to the sea and we'll read part of a book about Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox -- a book that is itself 180 pages long.  The next week we'll read more of that book and also a book about Lincoln's assassination.  Then we cover Reconstruction.

Anyway, my point is that I am learning to wing it.  "You call that winging it?!?" says Hannah incredulously, knowing that I have already put a lot of work into selecting the list of books to read from -- even if the list is too long and I still have to pick and choose and excerpt the morning before a lesson.  Believe me though, this amount of flexibility is new to me.  It's giving me so much more confidence that things will go all right, the children will still learn, even when I don't have a super-detailed plan.

Medium-detailed, though, I'm clinging to as long as I can.

Concentrating on the youngest.

Hannah and I recently picked a couple of pre-writing exercise books from Rainbow Resource Center, because Hannah wants her pre-K daughter Hazel to concentrate on stroke development before she starts in on proper letter formation, and we thought my three-year-old could tag along with that work.   We were delighted to discover Let's Write:  Prewriting Beginner's Level.  It's a slim workbook of sheets for practicing tracing a variety of dotted-line strokes; what we liked about it is that each sheet has a nursery rhyme theme (see the sample sheet), like "Rain, rain, go away" or "Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub."  We immediately saw that we could use the sheets both for pre-writing stroke development and for memory work, kind of a proto-poetry memorization.  So on a given afternoon we've been memorizing a nursery-rhyme verse with the girls, and then "doing the sheet."  Also, each day we have practiced the ones they've already learned. 

We've had to resort to some Googling to find the words for some of these nursery rhymes.  I had never heard the one that starts, "Cock-a-doodle-doo/My dame has lost her shoe."  Hannah thought she remembered it going on, "Give her another/to match the other/and then she'll walk on two."  We Googled it and discovered that its most common form appears to be a riff on erectile dysfunction. 

Cock-a-doodle doo,

My dame has lost her shoe.

My master's lost his fiddling-stick,

And don't know what to do.

There's more, in which the dame goes to bed and scratches her head, but for the girls we went with what Hannah remembered. 

Mary Jane and Hazel have sort of been running feral while we concentrated on the four school-aged boys. But the co-schooling has been going so smoothly that we decided to add in a little more discipline -- self-discipline that is -- to work with these two younger ones.

In some subjects, we think Hazel will eventually converge to be a work partner with my 6yo Milo, but Milo is busy working hard on learning to read, at the same level as Hannah's 7yo Silas. There's not much they can do besides that.

What Mary Jane does, exactly, doesn't matter all that much.  She's three years old, for pete's sake.  But she wants to be doing something she can call "schoolwork," and she needs one-on-one time with the adults.  So it seems pretty natural to let her tag along with Hazel, the next youngest, and let Hannah set the pace at the proper pre-K level for Hazel.  Hazel does other things on other days of the week, of course, so we had room to start "easy and simple."  

First we added a dedicated reading/narration time just for the two little girls, first thing in the morning after everyone has a chance to settle in.  That only has to be about fifteen minutes, the length of one or two good picture books, with time to ask the girls questions about what they are seeing and reading.  No planning necessary -- one of us just pulls a promising storybook out of the library basket or off the shelf, cuddles up with the girls on the sofa, and we're off.  

In the afternoon we can do the aforementioned nursery rhyme work and prewriting practice.  If we have time, we have the girls draw illustrations for brief stories from a children's Bible.  So far the favorite story seems to be "The Story of the Real Princess Who Saved The Baby And Is Possibly Also A Ballerina," a story which you may know better as "Moses in the Bulrushes."  We have also given them their own five-minute session to look at and talk about an art print, much like we're doing (in greater detail) with the middle boys.

It's only a total of about 30 minutes out of the day, but already we are seeing a little extra peace in the day just from taking these two brief times to concentrate just on these youngest two children.  Later we can work on "serious" things like phonics or math, and we've already bought some materials to use with them when they're ready; but for now, just starting small and simple.