Finishing Up the Hound

When we started looking into the Sherlock Holmes series, I used the related Boomerang back issue of The Hound of the Baskervilles to get a little more out of the story than just reading it for fun.

It took us more than the scheduled four weeks to complete the study.  The reason for the delay is partly due to our going out a lot, and partly due to the dictation passages being very long and rather difficult.  And since I think the dictation passages are difficult, I decided to do it in a buddy system with Tiger, in that we will take turns to do the dictation passage so that he would not feel as though he had to suffer through a difficult task alone.

The way we did it for the first three weeks' dictation was to have Tiger read the passage out loud to me twice before I recite it back to him.  The rule is that I could not start writing until I could recite the entire passage without any error.  This proved to be much harder than I had originally anticipated it to be.  It took me several attempts before I could start writing the passage down.  Even so, I still managed to get a few errors in my dictation, which Tiger was only too glad to point out.

By arrangement, I always did the dictation first.  This was to give Tiger the time to listen to and memorise the dictation passages while I struggled through mine, so that by the time it was his turn to write the passages down, he was able to memorise entire paragraphs with very little problem.  Given the length and difficulty of the passages, I think this is a fair way to encourage a child to complete a task that would otherwise seem insurmountable.

When we came to Week Four's passage, I decided that it was just too long to even try to do a successful dictation of it at this stage, so we used the passage for copywork instead.  Tiger does all his dictation and copywork in the handwriting exercise books where he can practise his penmanship at the same time.

While the passage in Week Four concentrates on the description of the hound in the story, we did a little research to establish what kind of hound it was and came to the conclusion that it would have a cross between a bloodhound and a mastiff, which can be a rather frightfully vicious dog, especially when it was painted with luminous paint, as in the story.

To spare us from having nightmares about being chased by luminous-coated mastiff-crossed hounds, Tiger decided to end the study by making his own stop motion animation version of the scene that we had just studied, using paper cutouts as his back drop for the moors, plasticine for the hound, and an unfortunate LEGO man for the victim.

I won't mind running into Tiger's colourful version of the hound.  It seems harmless enough and does not even have teeth, and it reminds me of a soppy St. Bernard which, incidentally, is from the mastiff family!

The Greatest Detective

A Sherlock Holmes pantomine kicked off our interest in the most famous detective who was invented in Victorian England.

We had never watched a pantomine before (because they can be too silly for our taste) so I took a risk by taking Tiger to see this outdoor show since it could potentially turn him off the whole idea of Sherlock Holmes before we even got started.  Luckily Tiger found this production to be quite funny (his own humour is quite quirky so it is often hard to tell which way things would go) so that was a good start.

Tiger then worked his way through the numerous related books (fiction and non-fiction)

that are related to the Sherlock Holmes exhibition at the Museum of London.

The exhibition is a must for fans of the great detective, of which Tiger is one.  It contains many of the memorabilia of the characters in the story, the background of the story (i.e. Victorian England), and some facts about Arthur Conan Doyle.

While we were there, Tiger also attended a creative writing workshop, which started with the workshop leader sharing his method of writing fiction with the children, highlighting techniques such as characterisation and plot development.  The children then spent some time in the People's City gallery, specifically the Victorian Walk, where they would experience the sights and sounds of a replica Victorian quarter, in order to get some inspiration for their writing exercise when they returned to the workshop room.

Tiger learnt a few tricks for writing fiction, and told me that he enjoyed the session but what he has been enjoying the most is reading all the adventures of Sherlock's younger years.

Our Chinese New Year Week

The Chinese New Year ended on Thursday with the Lantern Festival (元宵节).  Compared to last year, my effort at this year's Chinese New Year celebration is somewhat lacklustre.  However, I console myself that we have at least managed to focus on having Chinese dishes this past week.

The recipes have been adjusted for our dietary requirements:

1. Braised sweet and sour spare ribs
2. Vegetable stir-fry
3. Stir-fry pork with noodles
4. Lemon coriander chicken
5. Soy sauce chicken
6. Slow cooker braised chinese pork

We also pulled out our copy of The Warlord's Puzzle to have a play with tangrams, a 7-piece puzzle from ancient China that Tiger had a go with nearly five years ago.

The appeal of the tangrams is its deceptive simplicity.  There are only three shapes and seven pieces.  However, as we have found, to solve the puzzles are not an easy task.  Tiger has been working through a tangrams puzzle book last week just for the fun of it.  At first, he was quite frustrated with hiimself for not being able to solve the puzzles immediately but after a few rounds, he started to be able to visualise how the different pieces can be combined together in numerous ways.  From then on, he was able to solve a few puzzles on his own.

I used the study guide that accompanies the book for activity ideas and the one that caught Tiger's interest most was that of writing a cinquain, which is a 5-line patterned poetry form that bears some resemblance to the nature poems written by ancient Chinese poets.

It appears that the patterned format of cinquains has a strong appeal to Tiger, so not only did he enthusiastically write three of them, he even went as far as editing and rewriting each one a few times before he was happy with the final result.  In the process of editing his various drafts, Tiger happily highlighted to me that he was employing the write-in-the-margin lesson that he has learnt from Tolkien not so long ago.

We had time to have another poetry tea with a Chinese snack (sesame cookies) in the week, so I taught Tiger to recite another Tang poem about spring: "Early Spring" (早春) by Han Yu (韩俞)

This poem describes the beautiful scene of a street in Chang'an (长安), the capital city during the Tang dynasty, in the early spring drizzle.  After having the meaning of the poem explained to him, Tiger was attracted to its sound and rhythm so he learnt the poem easily and quickily, and he even sang the poem alongside the clip above!  Poetry, regardless of the language it is written in, portrays a sense of linguistic beauty and mastery to its reader/listener.  I am very glad to see Tiger showing much joy and pride in reciting and translating classical Chinese poetry very well.  After all, having an intimate relationship with classical Chinese poetry is part of identifying with the soul of the Chinese culture.

This post is linked up to:

1. Creaive Kids Cultural Blog Hop #24 
2. Hip Homeschool Hop - 3/3/15
3. Finishing Strong #45 
4. History & Geography Meme #156
5. My Week in Review #27
6. Collage Friday: Refresh and Have Faith
7. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with winter and spring in the same week

Getting a Little Help From Mr. Tolkien

"Mum, may I use your computer to do some research on an aircraft?  I'm writing a mini essay and I need to know a specific detail about this aircraft,"  Tiger asked me a few days ago.

Wow, the boy wants to write an essay?!  Under such unbelievable circumstance, of course I let him use the computer for as long as he liked.  It turned out that he only needed five minutes.

I saw Tiger scribbling down some notes as he said to me, "Writing notes in the margins is a really good idea!"

We have not done as much formal writing as I would like to have so I was curious about where Tiger has learnt that idea from.

"I learnt it from Mr. Tolkien," was his reply.

"Which Mr. Tolkien?"  I pursued.

Tiger said very matter-of-factly, "J.R.R. Tolkien who wrote The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and all the rest of the books I've been reading."

Seeing that I still had a puzzled look on my face, Tiger pointed to a book on the bookshelf and explained, "I finished reading this book last week, and it explains Tolkien's writing process.  He wrote a lot of notes in margins."

I see.

Later that evening, Tiger showed me what he has written on the A4 page.  I am not at liberty to show that piece of writing here so I can only describe it: it is a short paragraph explaining the history of the Hawker Hunter, complete with hand-drawn illustrations showing the plane at various angles, both front view and side view.

I am not surprised at the illustrations since Tiger has been practising his drawing.

I am somewhat surprised at the coherence of his writing, as well as the motivation and tips that he has picked up from his reading of Tolkien's work.  For a boy who strongly prefers to direct his own learning, it is absolutely within expectation for Tiger to pick his own teacher.  I am very glad to see that his years of reading good books have helped to form his ability to identify excellence and beauty in writing.  I can't think of anyone who is more qualified for the job of a writing mentor than Mr. Tolkien is, can you?

Scaring Ourselves Silly

This week we have been indulging ourselves scary stories.

Individually, Tiger has been reading horror stories written separately by Ted Hughes and Brian Jacques,
 

while I have been enjoying reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and following the book discussion that took place at the AO Book Discussion (which can be found by joining the Ambleside Online Forums).

W also let ourselves be entertained by more-humourous-than-scary Victorian ghost stories,

and making a not-so-scary skeleton puppet (named Jonathan by Tiger, in honour of a friend he made at last year's science class):

We also read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow together.  I first read the story to Tiger as a bedtime story a while ago but I decided that we ought to do a little bit more than mere reading to learn more from the story.  Therefore, this week we shared the reading of this story by reading alternate paragraphs to each other and writing down every word that we were unsure of.  We filled both sides of four A4 sheets by the end of the story!  We then looked up each word and satisfied ourselves that our vocabulary has increased through this process of slow reading and not skipping over words that we haven't fully understood.

Following the word study, we discussed the story using the lesson plan here and also watched an animation of the story, which met with little enthusiasm from Tiger due to its inevitable abridgement and adaptation:

I agree with Tiger that much of the beauty and nuance of the language in the original written story has been lost in the film adaptation, even though the above is one that I found to be least offensive in this regard.  Tiger is still annoyed by last year's experience whereby the film version of The Witches made several alternations to the original story, which he found to irritate more than entertain him .  I think that means we shall stay with reading the original books rather than watching film adaptations, suits me just fine.

Although I did not succeed in getting Tiger to enjoy the animation of the story, we did, however, got quite excited when we came face-to-face with the headless horseman!  Unlike Ichabod Crane who could not wait to get away from the headless horseman, Tiger and I gazed at him and walked around him several times (I would have touched him to find out where his head was, if I thought that was appropriate), admiring him and our good luck at meeting him. I certainly didn't know he was going to be there!

We were at the Warwick Castle's Halloween event when we chanced upon the horseman.

At dusk, we entered "The Haunted Hollows" and were greeted by three talking pumpkins:

We took our time and walked the trail twice just to admire the various Halloween decorations that were put to good use.

The event was very well organised, especially after it got dark, where the lighting was used to create a very spooky atmosphere.   We took the "ghostly castle tour" where we were told stories that happened within the castle related to:

1. apparitions of servants who used to work in the castle and atristocrats who used to live there appearing in certain rooms in the castle;
2. the links between Aleister Crowley and the practice of Satanism to Warwick Castle;
3. the secret corridor that led to a flight of stairs where a servant girl, impregnated by an aristocrat, was murdered to prevent the scandal from emerging;
4. the organ in the small chapel that sometimes plays by itself;
5. a room where another servant girl was bricked up alive.

Suffice to say, it is all rather grim.

This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 10/28/14
2. Finishing Strong - Homeschooling the Middle & High School Years Week 35
3. Hearts for Home Blog Hop #89
4. Collage Friday - Developing the Habit of Attention in Your Homeschool
5. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with gymnastic team practice, prodigal cats, and car problems

A Few Surprises, Literally

The week started with a creative writing workshop at the British Library.

Tiger and I attended the workshop with much interest.  While Tiger was just generally happy to be out and about and seeing other children, I was curious to see how he fared at a writing activity as we have not done very much formal writing in the past.  I was pleasantly surprised to see Tiger being really engaged throughout the workshop and participating eagerly in the various writing games and exercises, even to the extent of reading aloud his draft towards the end of the session.

The next day Tiger went to the first of a series of creative writing classes held in a homeschooled friend's kitchen.  The class is made up of six homeschooled children, ages 9 to 13, and a tutor who guides them through discussions and techniques.  Tiger says he loves this class for its intimate atmosphere where everyone sat around the small dining table and had plenty of opportunities to discuss their ideas and respond to one anothers' writing.  It also helps that the creative writing tutor is the same man who also teaches Tiger drama at another location, so they are already familiar and comfortable with each other's teaching-learning styles.

The class has obviously been a success, as Tiger came home inspired to write three different drafts followed by two different short stories.  I don't think I've ever seen him write so much and for such a long time at one go.

The good start to the week led to more positive things.  The boy who resisted playing the piano and who hadn't done so for two years suddenly sat and played a few tunes one day.  Seizing the moment, I asked Tiger whether he would like to learn to play new pieces, and he said yes!  So I taught him two more pieces whereby I was amazed at his newfound patience to persevere through the difficult sections to practise over and over again until he mastered them.  Compared to his typical response two years ago whenever we came upon a new, unlearned part ("This is too hard!  I've had enough!"), his sudden willingness to keep trying really took me by surprise.  Needless to say, I am over the moon about this.  I continued to feel really pleased when Tiger practised the new pieces on his own, without needing to be prompted, and couldn't wait to show Tortoise in the evening what he has learned.

Tortoise is of course very happy to see Tiger's renewed interest in playing the piano, so the two of them have been spending some time in the evenings doing improvisations at the piano. 

We also did a bit of maths -- looking at patterns and square numbers.

The irony about having such a seemingly 'great' (i.e. productive) week at the start is that it leaves this mother thinking, "Why can't we be so productive every day?"  Success breeds success, doesn't it?  I was all geared up to give Tiger a tonne of work when I stumbled upon this article that made me say to Tiger, "You know what?  The days are getting shorter and the weather is cooling down.  Wouldn't you rather be in your 'fortress' right now while the sun is out?"

Tiger's "anti-wind, anti-rain, structural fortress".

With that, Tiger spent an entire afternoon and a few more hours afterwards playing in the "fortress" that Tortoise helped him put up at the weekend.  My decision to let Tiger play outside in the middle of what seemed like a terrific week almost certainly disqualifies me to be upheld as the epitome of discipline, I am at peace with it because I am keenly aware that Tiger's childhood is quickly passing by.  I don't recall any of the formal lessons I had as a child but I remember the sights and smells of my childhood playtime.  I doubt very much that Tiger will remember any of the superb maths lessons that I give him or the delightful vocabularly pages that he has to fill in, but hopefully he will have fond memories of hours spent under a big blue sheet of tarpulin on a warm, sunny day.

Still, there are ways to combine fun and learning if one looks hard enough.

At Shakespeare's Globe, again!

This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 9/23/14
2. Finishing Strong #30
3. Collage Friday - Improve Your Homeschool: Know Your Child's Love Language
4. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with the hair, the clay pots, and the guitar solo
5. Home Education Blog Link Up #17
6. The Homeschool Mother's Journal (9/27/14)

Eye on the Ball, Please! Part 1

This is a bit of a planning post for this term, mainly to help me keep our focus for the new few months.  I realise that it is now near the end of January 2014, but a few of Tiger's classes have not settled until very recently so it is until now that I have a better idea of what our term will look like from now until the Easter holidays in mid April.  Over the next few days, I will be posting up the rest of our plan for this term.

Ball #1: Language Arts - Poetry and Shakespeare
Poetry
This term our focus for language arts is poetry.  This is driven primarily by the happy coincidence that both his drama teachers, without knowledge of what the other is doing, want to focus on poetry.  Tiger has two drama teachers -- one focusing primarily on literary analysis and acting skills, the other focusing on speech and recitation.  Since such a serendipity doesn't happen all the time, I shall take my cue from it and use our time at home to brush up on our poetry skills through our weekly poetry tea where we shall continue to bake and read to each other.  Nobody here will object to more tea and cakes!

I hope to add a little bit more meat to our weekly tea sessions by using the Arrow Poetry Guide, and to focus on two specific poems:

1. Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
2. The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes

Literature
Somehow this is turning out to be a rather Shakespearean term for us.  To begin with, his drama/literary analysis class will be doing five sessions of The Winter's Tale.

In addition, I found out about a MOOC looking at Shakespeare's Hamlet, which I am personally very interested to attend since I have not read Hamlet before.  I asked Tiger whether he would be interested to study this particular play with me and he said yes, so we are attending this MOOC together while working at our own levels.

Shortly after this course ends is the start of another Shakepearean course -- Shakespeare and His World, which Tiger and I will again attend together.


Grammar, Spelling, Writing
Handwriting will continue to be practised, because I think it is important to have beautiful handwriting. We will start with a review of print handwriting, followed by cursive handwriting.

Most of writing will be covered through our study in poetry and literature, as well as the monthly book club which has a creative writing component in addition to book discussion.

At home, we will change our strategy with regards to grammar study.  Instead of a touch-and-go approach to the different parts of speech, we will focus on just one or two aspects of it so that Tiger can have a good understanding of the different components of grammar.  As such, this term we will focus solely on studying nouns.

For spelling, we will resume where we had left off with All About Spelling level 2.



This post is linked up to:

1. Hip Homeschool Hop - 1/21/14 
2. Entertaining and Educational - Hasty Pudding
3. Collage Friday: The Key to Successful Homeschool
4. Weekly Wrap-up: The One with the Love Languages, Too Much Castle, and New Curriculum
5. Homeschool Mother's Journal {January 25, 2014}

Be Sociable!

With the exam out of the way, Tiger and I started to look for recipes to make foodie gifts for people.  We haven't set out to do it this way, but this year our Christmas theme seems to be "simple", especially if we were to compare it with our efforts last year.

This year we made Coconut and White Chocolate Snowballs.

It is so easy to make that we made two batches of them to give to everyone.

Next, Tiger made cards to accompany the foodie gifts.  Again, this year's cards are very straightforward to make.

The material list:

• foam Christmas tree template
• green and red ink pads
• alphabet stamps
• strong craft cards
• Christmas-theme craft papers
• sequins
• glue and scissors

To make the card:

1. Choose a Christmas-theme craft paper and trace the tree template.
2. Cut of the tree shape.
3. Paste it on the front of the card.  Decorate the card with sequins.
4. Stamp the words "Merry Christmas" inside the card using the alphabet stamps.  Tiger alternated the red and green inks for his words.

Once we've made our gifts, it was time to socialise with friends again.

I spent a day at a drawing workshop with my artist friends.  Tiger tagged along and did a few drawings as well, but mostly he was enjoying himself by being a social butterfly during break times.

Tiger knew about half the people there, but by the end of the class he has made friends with everyone in the workshop, engaging each person or a small group in turn with various topics.  I sat in a corner of the studio and talked with my own friends but all the while keeping half an eye on Tiger as he exercised his socialising prowess around the room.  Some of the topics that I managed to overhear him talk to the adults about were:

• the two world wars
• making paper aeroplanes
• military blunders
• drawing, art, collage, Matisse
• homeschooling, what he is learning at home

At the end of the workshop, a few people whom we met for the first time there came up to me to tell me how delighted they were to meet Tiger and how impressed they have been by his overall demeanour.  I thanked them for their kind words, and was pleased that Tiger has contributed to some positive P.R. towards the overall impression people have of home-educated children.  A few people there had never met a homeschooled child before.  Now that they have met and talked with one in real life, I hope they will be able to rely on this experience and apply their critical thinking ability (assuming it is still intact) to avoid being duped into believing the ridiculous myths about homeschooling children.

There is certainly no shortage of opportunities to socialise this week!

We topped our reading of A Christmas Carol by spending a day at a homeschool creative writing/book club.  The book club is led by a homeschooling mum-of-six who used to be an English teacher.  The format of the club is such that the children spend the morning discussing the book as a group, noting several points of interests, such as the author's writing style, or use of descriptive techniques.  This is followed by a short creative writing exercise where the children will work in groups of two to five to get their drafts in before lunch.

Lunch there is a highly sociable, community event.  Each mum brings a dish to share at lunch so food is always plentiful and delicious.  This week being our last meeting before Christmas, lunch is especially scrumptious and in abundance, which is a truly wonderful way to enjoy the festivity.  The children usually wolf down their lunch and run outside to play for an hour or so while the adults stay indoors to tidy up and chat.

In the afternoon, the children present their work to the group.  Previous presentations include an adaptation of a novel into a play, a short paragraph written in the style of an author, and descriptive writing.  On this occasion, the children were tasked with writing their own Christmas carol based on the structure and storyline of Dicken's story.  I have been constantly impressed by the children's creativity and by the quality of their work, individual ones as well as group projects.  Above all, I am grateful for the opportunity to be in the company of these parents who are contributing so much to creating the most suitable educational environment for their children.



This post is linked up to:

1. Entertaining and Educational - Christmas
2. Collage Friday - Remembering Ecuador
3. Weekly Wrap Up: The One that will be Hard to Top for a While
4. The Homeschool Mother's Journal {December 21, 2013}
5. Hip Homeschool Hop - 12/24/2013

Bewitching Tales

Since Halloween is just around the corner, we did some work based on the book, The Witches.  We started off using the corresponding Read & Respond activity book to aid in our study, but soon abandoned it due to the activities being too 'schooly' for us.

Instead, we read the story through once, listened to the audio book version (where Tiger pointed out quite a number of omissions from the original book), and watched the classic film based on the story.

I had never watched the film before so I was more interested than Tiger to watch Angelica Houston's wonderful depiction of the Grand High Witch.  However, Tiger was somewhat irritated by the numerous alterations or as Tiger called it, "inconsistencies", in the film (he's a purist when it comes to being "true to the original story") because he has read the story so many times that he can memorise it.  As such, my film recommendation didn't go down well with him at all.

After the unsuccessful start, we moved on to more the productive activity of research.  I asked Tiger to read as many books on witches and witchcraft as he could get his hands on.

Part of our research into witches consists of watching the following documentary, which Tiger didn't mind:

After the research, I asked Tiger to illustrate what he thought a witch would look like.  I thought his drawings show the sense of innocence and lack of horror in the pure heart of a child:

The witch disguised as a normal-looking woman carrying a handbag.

The witch in her real form: a hideous non-human creature.

You can hear the description of a witch from the Roald Dahl himself:

Tiger also made a few items that are commonly associated with witches: foam spider, spider web (made from paper plate and yarn), and a multi-eyed creature.

He then decided to complete this study by making a few spells of his own, after looking into it using The Guide to Wizards of the World.  I don't know what his spells are, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were about having more fun days and field trips.  Life can be very hard when your mother puts you to work all the time.

This post is linked up to:

1. Look What We Did!
2. Hip Homeschool Hop - 10/29/2013
3. Entertaining and Educational - Letter Learning Obstacle Course
4. Collage Friday - Math, Friendship, Shoeboxes & More
5. Creative Learning On Friday #19
6. TGIF Linky Party #100
7. Weekly Wrap Up: The One with the Solo Drive
8. The Homeschool Mother's Journal {November 2, 2013}