2017-8 School Year Plans

These are our plans for school this year, with a 12th-grader, 9th-grader, 8th-grader and 4th-grader. A copy of this will remain under my pages (found in the sidebar and in the tabs under the header photo) for future reference, though I will update it at the end of the year to take out what we didn’t like/do or what we added.

History: US History. In the past I have wrapped US history into our world history by period, but I recently discovered that didn’t count for Colorado’s high school graduation requirements. This year, we will study US History and add in what’s happening around the world at the same time for context.

Our 12th-grader is taking US History at the community college. Depending on where he decides to go to college next year, we will either take the in-state guaranteed transfer credit, or have him take the AP exam next spring.

For 4th, 8th and 9th grades I’m shaking things up. Instead of reading the spines we’ve used in the past (The Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer, and Genevieve Foster’s The World of George Washington, etc.), I’m using investigative strategies I learned from Yohuru R. Williams’s excellent book, Teaching US History Beyond the Textbook.

I purchased an assortment of collections of US history primary sources called Researching American History (found at Rainbow Resource Center) for the kids to use in their research.  I don’t expect my 4th grader to pull from multiple sources, but for the older kids, I have asked for at least 4 sources per project.

I’ve assigned US history books (biographies, autobiographies, novels and picture books) for them to read independently, and they will present their findings (travel brochures, PowerPoint presentations, reports, posters, comic books, movie trailers, plays) to each other every 2-3 weeks.  We will also play Timeline regularly to help us cement a mental timeline. We have a list of US history movies to watch. My older two will participate in National History Day in the spring.

Geography:

For 12th-grade, Jonah will be reading Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography and Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures in North America. Then, with the idea in mind that the natural resources and paucities of a region help determine the political struggles of that nation/region, he will do a series of case studies of different regions in the world.

For 8th and 9th grades, we are studying US geography in the context of history, incorporating historical maps and states’ geography.  For my 4th grader, we will work through 36 states week by week, hopefully incorporating some out-of-state travel. We like these coloring books and games for geography.

English (Composition/Grammar/Spelling/Punctuation):

My 12th grader will be doing an essay-writing intensive (aka, writing tons of college and scholarship essays).  His US history class also has weekly writing clinics and lots of assigned papers.

For 4th, 8th and 9th grades, we will use Spelling Power for the first time. Additionally, they each have a daily grammar review with a one-page grammar exercise. I’ve tried lots of Charlotte Mason-esque “gentle” or “natural” grammar reviews, and they don’t seem to work for us. I think the problem is me. Anyway, this year we’re trying something less oral and more written (and formal).  The Spectrum series of test prep books works well for us to teach writing concepts in small chunks, which we then try to reinforce with writing assignments.

English Literature:

Shakespeare: This year we will read The Winter’s Tale. It’s one of my favorite Shakespeare plays and seems to flirt the line between tragedy and comedy. It covers serious ideas of betrayal, suspicion and grudge-holding, but it has a happy ending. Something for everyone.

Poetry: We will read Emily Dickinson, Claude McKay, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Langston Hughes. My older son will read some Gwendolyn Brooks, Bob Dylan and Tupac Shakur.

Read-alouds: We have a limited time all together as a family for reading now that my oldest has two days each week on campus, and the kids are still attending their once-a-week school.  We began by rereading Because of Winn-Dixie, but I haven’t entirely decided what our other read-alouds will be.

Independent Reading: A significant portion of my younger kids’ literature will be historical reading, including Phoebe the Spy, Little Britches, Steve Sheinkin’s The Notorious Benedict Arnold, The Port Chicago 50, King George: What was his problem, Lincoln’s Grave Robbers, and Most Dangerous; the Little House on the Prairie series, Elswyth Thane’s Williamsburg series, Elijah of Buxton and The Watsons Go to Birmingham by Christopher Paul Curtis, and Gary D. Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars and Okay for Now. I also have a collection of other MG and YA literature on the list.  More booklists to come.

Picture (Art) Study:

Our picture study will focus on Normal Rockwell and Edward Hopper. But I’m also planning a unit on Native American textiles and pottery, and a unit on the quilter Harriet Powers.

Math:

12th grade: AP Statistics. 9th grade: Singapore NEM Level 2 (continuing). 8th grade: Singapore NEM Level 1 and the Life of Fred: Geometry. 4th Grade: Singapore Primary 4A and 4B.

Bible: Everyone is doing some Old Testament reading to improve our Bible literacy, and we will finish the Gospel of Mark (again) and some epistles (yet to be determined).

Science:

12th grade: Chemistry with Lab

9th grade: Veritas Academy’s online Chemistry and Biology through the enrichment school.

8th grade: We’ll be using biology modules from Science Fusion, including Cells and Heredity and Diversity of Living Things.

4th grade: We are planning weekly nature study with a focus on plants, although we started with the total eclipse.

Foreign Language:

12th grade: he is taking a year off FL.

4th, 8th and 9th grade all are taking Spanish through our enrichment school. Hooray!

If you have any resources you think I should include to make this a better year, please shoot me an email. Thanks!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Summary of our 2016-7 curriculum

This year, our kids were in 3rd, 7th, 8th and 11th grades. Our curriculum isn’t determined by those grade levels, but I list them here so you have a rough idea of who the audience is. We have 4 days/week at home, and one day in class at a homeschool school sponsored by a local charter school. My kids take mostly enrichment classes there (think Art, Music, Drama) with a few academic exceptions, but I don’t rely on it for our core subjects (reading, writing, math, history, science).

History:

Spines:

• Genevieve Foster: The World of Columbus and Sons
• Genevieve Foster: The World of Captain John Smith

This is the first year we’ve made it through two entire Foster books in one school year. I chalk that up to age (the children’s, not mine) and consistency. It’s amazing how much more we can get through at 16, 14, 12 and 9 than we could at 8, 6, 4 and 2. That said, I wish I had emphasized regular narrations (written) for retention.

Additional history read-alouds:

• Castle (Macauley)
• Who Was Ferdinand Magellan? (Kramer)
• Mansa Musa (Burns)
• Longitude (Sobel)- (this one was a hit with 8th and 11th grades and NOT a hit with 3rd and 7th grades)
• The Queen’s Promise: An Elizabethan Alphabet (Davidson Mannis)
• The Pirate Meets the Queen: an Illustrated Tale (Faulkner)
• Johann Gutenberg and the Amazing Printing Press (Koscielniak)
• Seeds of Freedom: The Peaceful Integration of Huntsville, Alabama (Bass)

3^rd, 7^th and 8^th also did two biographies on historical persons of their choice. (3^rd: Aaron Burr and Hillary Clinton, 7^th: Isabella of Castille and Mozart, 8^th: Einstein and Abraham Lincoln). 11th grade participated in National History Day through his school.

The election

2016 was a fascinating year to learn about our electoral system. We used CNN10 (formerly CNN Student News) and Syd Sobel’s Presidential Elections and Other Cool Facts, and we mapped the electoral college on election night.

Geography

We study and color maps and talk about historical changes between political boundaries in the history we study vs. how countries are now.

Areas we studied: England, UK, Europe, North Africa, Central America and the Caribbean

We also kept a globe in the living room and hung a world map in the kitchen. We referred to them all the time, which was a vast improvement over our geography study in previous years.

Literature:

Read-Alouds:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare)- we assigned parts and read this aloud together
• The Mysterious Benedict Society (Trenton Lee Stewart)
• Swallows and Amazons (Arthur Ransome)
• Greenglass House (Kate Mitford)
• Raymie Nightengale (diCamillo)
• daVinci and Michaelangelo (Mike Venezia)
• Flush (Hiaasen)
• Kira-Kira (Kadohata)
• Echo (Munoz Ryan)
• The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (Robinson)
• Unfinished Angel (Creech)
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare)- we read this in parts, and each of us memorized a speech made by a character we read.
• lots of older picture books (think Bill Peet, Dr. Seuss, Margaret Wise Brown, Mary Ann Hoberman, Cynthia Rylant and others) and new picture books we enjoyed, including the Zorro series by Goodrich

Everyone read other books independently every day. I’ll post on some of their favorites in a separate post.

Poetry

Jack Prelutsky, Shel Silverstein, Maggie Dietz’s Pluto, Lewis Carrol’s Jaberwocky, GK Chesterton’s The Donkey, Rachel Field’s Something Told the Wild Geese, Carl Sandberg’s Fog

I feel like we started strong with poetry and then fell off the wagon in the second semester (with a slight boost during April, National Poetry Month.)

Bible:

1 Timothy, James, 1 Peter, Ann Voskamp’s Jesse Tree (now available as Unwrapping the Greatest Gift: A Family Celebration of Christmas), The Gospel of Mark.

Picture Study:

Picture Study is a Charlotte Mason subject. In the past we’ve been more thorough in our study, but this year we looked at the paintings 1-2 days a week, we played I Spy with them, and we reproduced a few of them. I saw it mostly as a way to familiarize the children with styles of art, and to enjoy the individual painting themselves. We didn’t put a lot of effort on this subject, but we got a big bang for our buck. I bought our post-cards from Memoria Press. We have their Kindergarten, First and Second Grade sets of postcards. I pulled these paintings from all three sets.

Titus as a Monk (Rembrandt), Five o’clock Tea (Mary Cassatt), The Stone Breakers (Courbet), Paris Street: Rainy Day (Caillebotte), Still Life with Apples and Oranges (Cezanne), Three Musicians (Picasso), The Goldfish (Matisse), A Girl with a Watering Can (Renoir), The Fighting Temeraire (Turner), Rain, Steel and Speed: The Great Western Railway (Turner), Golden Eagle (Audubon), Starry Night over Rhone (Van Gogh), God Creates Adam from the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel (Michelangelo), The Last Supper (da Vinci), View of Paris from Montmartre (Dufy), The Thinker (Rodin), The Peaceable Kingdom (Hicks), Tree of Life (Tiffany), Umbrellas in the Rain (Prendergast), The Little Owl and (Durer).

A special day of Picture Study was when we visited the Masterworks Exhibit at the medical school- a collection of amazing paintings and sculptures collected by some physicians on the faculty. It was a great exhibit in a very intimate setting.

Field Trips:

Reykjavik, Iceland

London: The British Museum, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, Hampton Court, The Tower of London, Greenwich including the Cutty Sark museum, Harry Potter’s World.

Concerts and Plays- In the Heights, Wicked, The Proms (Mozart and Bruckner).

Other field trips: skiing, the DAM (The Art of Venice, and Star Wars Costumes), Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Kindness

• the constant sand paper of living together day by day
• the 30 hour famine
• spending time with our refugee friends

Videos

• Nature’s The World Without Amphibians
• CNN10 (10 minutes of non-partisan middle-school appropriate news)
• This Day in History
• Crash Course History with John Green

Math:

• 3^rd grade: Singapore Primary 3A/3B
• 7^th Grade: Singapore NEM 1
• 8^th Grade: Singapore NEM 2
• 11^th grade: AP Calculus BC through Pennsylvania Homeschoolers

Foreign Language:

• 7^th grade French:
• 7^th/8^th grades: Spanish through our once a week school
• 11^th grade: Latin: translating Julius Caesar through Memoria Press’s Online Academy, and the National Latin Exam
• 11^th Grade: Biblical Greek 1 through Memoria Press’s Online Academy

Science:

• 7^th and 11^th grades: Environmental Science through our once a week school
• 7^th and 8^th grades: Focus on Middle School Physics (Keller)
• 3^rd Grade: Real Science-4-Kids Physics (Keller)

Additional classes for our 11^th grader:

US Government (fall semester): de Toqueville: Democracy in America; Hamilton, Madison and Jay: The Federalist Papers. Various: The U.S. Constitution, readings drawn from The Washington Post and The Economist, satire from Stephen Colbert, SNL, Trevor Noah and Seth Meyers.

This class focused on the set-up of the US government and the checks and balances put in place. Additionally, we spent a lot of time talking about the tensions between states’ rights and a strong federal government.

AP Comparative Governments and Politics (spring semester):

For this class, I combined several of the online class syllabi available at the College Board. His spine was Introduction to Comparative Politics: Political Challenges and Changing Agendas (Kesselman, Krieger and Joseph). (They’re changing the class for 2018, so make sure to check in before you design your curriculum.)

Other readings included:

• Baer: The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower
• Schell: Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the 21^st Century
• Fukuyama: Women and the Evolution of World Politics
• Friedman: The Lexus and the Olive Tree
• Marx: The Communist Manifesto
• Machiavelli: The Prince
• Dahl: On Democracy
• Economist special editions on Russia, Nigeria, Mexico, China, UK, Brexit, and Iran
• Preston and Dillon: Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy
• Breaking the Cycle of Electoral Violence in Nigeria (pdf)
• Special Hearing on instability in Nigeria (pdf)
• Zakaria: The Rise of Illiberal Democracy (from Foreign Affairs, pdf)
• Lots of news online (esp. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC)

I think this was his favorite class, despite (or because of?) the heavy reading load. The readings (I got all of them from the AP site and my amazing dad) were excellent, and with the unfortunate instability in many parts of the world, it made for a fascinating class.

Coloring in the Electoral College Map on November 8, 2016.

Introduction to Grant Writing

He had an opportunity to be work on writing grants for a non-profit run by friends of ours. We used two books as introductory spines:

• O’Neal-McElrath: Winning Grants Step by Step: The Complete Workbook for Planning, Developing and Writing Successful Proposals
• Karsh: The Only Grant-Writing Book You’ll Ever Need

We also reviewed other grant applications from a variety of sources.

This class was a huge stretch for him and not an unqualified success. By no means did his drafts of the grant proposals go in without major editing, but it was a great opportunity for him to have to think about writing within very specific constraints.

His (and my) favorite part of the class with the non-profit he worked with, Foster Source, which provides support, practical help, and education for local foster families. He had an opportunity to provide child care, meet amazing foster families, and learn about the incredible (and often invisible) needs right in front of us. We will continue to be involved with this great organization even after his class is done.

Other writing for him this year included a major paper for National History Day, and completing NaNoWriMo in November.

All right, that’s all for this year. For previous years’ curricula, please see my pages (links by year, at the top of the blog.)

9th Grade English Literature and Composition- 2nd Semester

This is the curriculum I wrote for my son’s second semester of freshman literature and composition. Feel free to adopt and adapt it to your own home school, and add your suggestions in the comments!

Revenge versus Mercy in Literature

Choose any six of the following books:

• The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)
• Wuthering Heights (Bronte)
• A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
• The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas-abridged okay)
• The Iliad (Homer)
• Unbroken: The Louis Zamperini Story (Laura Hillenbrand)
• Les Miserables (Victor Hugo-abridged okay)
• Baking Cakes in Kigali (Gaile Parkin)
• Cry, the Beloved Country (Alan Paton)
• King Lear (William Shakespeare)
• Titus Andromicus (William Shakespeare)
• The Tempest (William Shakespeare)

As you reach each of the texts, please consider the following questions for any of the characters involved.  (You do not have to make a note of minor characters who do not have a choice before them of choosing revenge or mercy):

1. Define justice, revenge, and mercy in the context of this book.

2. Shakespeare’s contemporary, the philosopher Francis Bacon, defined revenge as a “kind of wild justice.” When one private individual decides to revenge himself on another, he is going outside the official justice system. And yet, as the phrase “wild justice” suggests, the revenger is responding to what he sees as a “higher law.” The revenger takes the law into his own hands when he feels that the state is not capable of or refuses to enforce justice. Therefore, while law and revenge are technically opposed to each other, since revenge is illegal, they also overlap. For example, Shylock, pursuing Antonio’s “pound of flesh,” exposes the intimate connection between law and revenge. He seeks vengeance against Antonio precisely by sticking to the letter of the law within the Venetian justice system. Could the revenge portrayed in this book fit this model of “wild justice”?  (Thanks to LitCharts for this question.)

3. In Romans [12:16-21] Paul advises against revenge. What is his reasoning? Do you think his appeal would be compelling to the characters in this book?

Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. 17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. 18 If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. 19 Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. 20 On the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

4. Are there prerequisites for Justice? What about for Mercy?  How does the book support or deny the need for a divine being?

5. At what point is it right for an individual to take revenge because there is no other way of redressing wrongs?

6. What makes a person choose mercy over revenge?

7. Is there a crime that is too heinous for mercy?

8. The Count of Monte Cristo likens taking revenge to idolatry. “I . . . have been taken by Satan into the highest mountain in the earth, and when there he . . . said he to me, ‘Child of earth, what wouldst thou have to make thee adore me?’ . . . I replied, ‘Listen . . . I wish to be Providence myself, for I feel that the most beautiful, noblest, most sublime thing in the world, is to recompense and punish.’”   Do you agree with this assessment?  Is Mercy then also idolatry, if it is also God’s nature to have mercy on us?

9th Grade Literature & Composition Course: 1st Semester

I wrote this English curriculum for my 9th grader this year.  You are welcome to use and adapt it to suit your own home school.  Please suggest any books you would add in the comments!  I’ll have the Spring Semester in a later post.

Fall Semester: What Makes a Hero?

Choose any books from this list to read at a pace appropriate to your student. I would recommend reading at least one book from ach time period.

Ancient

• The Illiad or The Odyssey (Homer- I like the translations by Robert Fagles)
• Antigone (Sophocles)
• Daniel
• Plutarch’s Lives (these volumes are full of entertaining character studies of ancient Greeks and Romans- they would be good for those who need shorter works)

Middle Ages

• Beowulf (I like Seamus Heaney’s translation)
• Pilgrim’s Progress (John Bunyan)
• Robinson Crusoe (Defoe)

17th-19th Centuries

• Kidnapped (Stevenson)
• Jane Eyre (Bronte)
• The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare)
• Amazing Grace (Metaxas)- this is a biography of William Wilberforce, who lived from 1759-1833)
• Amos Fortune, Free Man (Yates)- again, a biography of an amazing man who lived from c. 1710-1801

20th Century-present

• Endurance, Shackleton’s Amazing Voyage (Lansing)
• The Doomsday Book (Willis)- about a young time-traveling historian who is trapped in history during an epidemic
• Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Metaxas)- another biography- a big read, but worth the time
• Number the Stars (Lowry)- about ordinary people becoming heroes
• Code Name Verity (Weins)- a YA read on WWII heroes
• Lord of the Rings (Tolkein)
• To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
• The Hunger Games (Collins)

Questions for discussion or papers:

• Who is the Hero of this story?  What makes him or her heroic?
• James Geary wrote, “Heroism often results as a response to extreme events.”  Does this mean any person can be a hero in a time of extreme events, or does becoming a hero require life preparation in advance of a person’s becoming a hero?
• How were the actions of the hero extraordinary?  Does heroism require extraordinary times, or can a person be a hero in ordinary life?
• Robert Green Ingersoll wrote, “When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death- that is heroism.”  Was this true in the book you just read?
• What is the price of heroism in this character’s life?
• We looked at each grouping of books by time period to examine how the qualities of a hero differed by time.  How did historical events and understanding influence the portrayal of a hero over time?  For example, the ancient heroes were often physically beautiful or powerful and relied on the gods for their success, while later heroes relied on their own wits and were not necessarily favored by birth.
• Our final paper answered this question through the lens of our readings: How did the characteristics of a hero change over time?