With December only a few days away, I feel I ought to share what our
plans are for the month. I am going to call ours a 'December plan'
rather than an Advent plan because we are not Christians, so I don't
feel right about using the term 'advent' when we don't actually
celebrate the days leading up to Christmas Day in a religious way.
In our own secular way, we honour Christmas Day as a major festival with our own family traditions, which include setting aside time each December to do something special. To me, the significance of Christmas Day to the English side of our family is on par with that of Chinese New Year to the Chinese side of the family.
Since we are not calling our December activities 'advent' activities anymore, I feel a sense of relief that I don't have to come up with 24 different activities for us to complete in order to earn our place at the Christmas table. I have come up with fewer than 24 activities because I would like to spend some time this year to observe the Dongzhi Festival (冬至), which is another important Chinese festival that takes place near Christmas Day.
Below are our Christmas-related activities for December, in no particular order:
make Christmas cards
make lanterns
watch Christmas-related movies
listen to Christmas music
see Christmas lights
learn to sing three Christmas carols
learn to recite one Christmas poem
decorate the house
decorate the tree
watch a Christmas-related documentary
go for two nature walks
make mince pies
read Christmas-related stories
draw Christmas-related drawings
I aim to be more diligent with blogging in December, so having a planned list of activities for the month will give me a good reason to do so.
This post has turned out to be more difficult to write than I had expected. In fact, I have deleted three previous attempts at writing about what we are going to do for Tiger's Year 6 journey because I've realised that what we do here is not just about book lists or the types of external activities that Tiger is engaged in.
Engrossed in his self-initiated cartography project.
This realisation came about after a recent conversation I had with a deputy headteacher of a private school where she was very interested to find out how Tiger is being taught. While I tried to explain to her about our approach which stems from the fundamental principle of mutual respect between the teacher (me) and the student (Tiger) that in turn results in positive relational interactions that propels our learning journey forward, she was convinced that I must be using some kind of secret formula/curriculum/resource that the school teachers have no access to, based on what she has observed of Tiger. I emphasised that it takes more than a curriculum list, although I also shared with her the sources of Tiger's curricula since Year 1 as the list was clearly what she was after.
Perhaps I have not explained it well, or maybe the actual process can't be explained so easily. Having said that, I do have a broad overview of what we will aim to focus on over the next 12 months. This is a plan that I now share with Tiger to get his input and feedback on the nitty gritty details with regards to the actual implementation as the months ahead unfold. Tiger is in the position to share ownership of the learning plan and to provide input in terms of the order in which he will approach certain topics, and the materials he prefers to use to learn.
So, here is our broad plan for Year 6: History
History remains the spine of our learning plan, so we are returning to the Ancients in Year 6, which will span the first civilisations to the fall of Rome. This will be our second time studying the Ancients, so the focus this time round will be on developing analytical skills (for logic stage) rather than facts gathering (at grammar stage).
Science and Nature Study
Since we are taking on the Ancients again, it seems logical to us to focus on Earth Science, which allows us to start way back in prehistory and follow the development of Man's understanding of his relationship with land, sea, and the sky.
Chinese
After a very successful year at the Chinese school where Tiger took weekly Chinese lessons, we were both disappointed when there was a change in staff at the beginning of the year. Tiger's new Chinese teacher taught in such an uninspring way (compared to his previous teacher) that he could not bear to go to class, so I took him out and resumed teaching him at home. Unsurprisingly, we find that we are covering wider topics in a quicker pace compared to the Chinese school, so it looks like I will continue to teach Tiger the Chinese language myself.
Latin
I was listing the Latin resources for sale one day when Tiger walked by, saw what I was doing, and decided to have a go at the placement test, just for fun of it. When he scored 97% at the Level 1 test, having no contact with Latin in the past 18 months, he looked at me and mused, "I guess we'd better resume Latin!" It is so much easier when it is Tiger's own decision to take up Latin again!
Maths
We have been hopping around quite a bit in maths for two years, primarily because at one time, Tiger was not too keen on following any curriculum. Even so, we have been able to cover the same topics as are covered in schools, and more. In that sense Tiger hasn't suffered any gaps in maths compared to school-going children of the same age. This summer Tiger has shown signs of becoming more cooperative (!) so I hope he will complete RightStart Level E alongside the supplementary maths activities that we have been doing these past two years.
Music
Unless Tiger shows a strong desire for instrumental lessons, his music training will consist of: composer study - I am happy to follow the suggestion made by Ambleside Online to focus on knowing the works of one composer per term. However, instead of following their schedule, which is a perfectly good one, we have picked and chosen the composers whom we are most interested in:
Art
Tiger had the opportunity to gain the Bronze Arts Award last year, which he completed successfully.
He has been invited to carry on with the next level but he has decided to take a break from it, in order to get back to just creating art for the sheer joy of it rather than worrying too much about documentaion and reporting. Tiger says that he may continue with the next level in a year or two to allow himself time to mature a little bit more and to grow in other areas so that he may get more out of the process of acquiring the award. What he says sound very reasonable, and going for the first level was just for a bit of fun and experience so it really doesn't matter in the overall scheme of things. I am nonetheless pleased with his show of self-awareness and knowing what he wants to do, so he has my full support in his decision to pause.
Without the pressure of working towards the specifications of the award (which involves a lot of report writing), we can resume our leisurely pace to learn art history as we encounter it in our other studies.
External Activities
As always, I seek to strive a balance between individual study and group actitivies for Tiger so that he experiences both in the most effective, productive way.
I'm not going to over-plan this year, as I have done in previous years. In fact, I am going to under-plan in the hope to avoid the frenzy of Christmas preparation. The basket pictured below contains most of what I hope to cover in the three weeks before Christmas:
With luck, we shall have some space and time this month to focus on
enjoying one another's company as a family (as opposed to busily running
around to achieve 'goals' or 'targets').
English, History:
1. For the month of December, we will be reading through Dickens' Christmas, which contains the story, A Christmas Carol, in addition to all the other Victorian traditions surrounding the Christmas festivity.
Although we have read A Christmas Carol last year, this year we shall read it again and use the related back issue from The Boomerang to support our reading, in addition to learning more about Victorian Christmas in general as part of our history study of the Victorian era.
2. We are most likely going to have Christmas-themed teatime in December, so we will be looking at a few Christmas poems while enjoying some homemade seasonal food such as:
Maths:
I expect to use the following book over a few Decembers so we will be working through one or two maths problems together each day.
The Arts
1. Although we tend to celebrate Christmas in a secular manner, I feel that Tiger ought to be familiar with a few of the well-known carols, so we will learn to sing three of them this December:
I shall be very pleased if we manage to do everything on this list by the end of the third week in December, leaving the week of December 22nd to enjoy the Winter Solstice and to do some last-minute shopping before we get together with the rest of the family for the big day!
This week has been a "non-week", as in, there is nothing exciting or of interest to report. Tiger has been trying hard to get over his third-time-in-two-weeks cold, so we have been staying indoors and enjoying -- as much as we can muster our good cheer for -- the November weather:
There's nothing quite like a dismal, rainy November week to bring home the reality of my utterly unglamourous life and to spur me on to some form of escapism by looking ahead to December, which signifies (for me, personally) the start of the Christmas season which never fails to bring forth a warm, cozy feeling filled with images of glittering, bright lights.
I don't usually start thinking about Christmas until December 1st, but this week, because it has been so dull, I have taken the liberty to get started on my December/Christmas planning. I hope to be have a better idea of what we'll be doing in December, and to be able to share our plan in two weeks' time.
We were introduced to Dickens last December while reading The Christmas Carol. This year I plan to continue to explore The Christmas Carol more in depth (starting from Decmeber 1st), as well as Dickens' other Christmas tales. We are currently reading The Chimes from the following collection:
I am currently enjoying this little book which gives a good oveview of the Christmas tradition in the context of the larger scope of British history and traditions. Having married into an English family, I figured it is only basic courtesy that I should learn a little more about my husband's cultural heritage.
As we haven't started our new term yet, I am not able to write a day-in-the-life post. However, I do have some idea of how our day should turn out when we start.
The basic structure of our day goes like this:
Wake up
Breakfast
Morning chores
Morning lessons part 1
Break
Morning lessons part 2
Lunch
Lunchtime chores
Afternoon lessons
However, no two days are the same, as most homeschoolers will tell you.
The timetable above reflects the emphasis that I feel is needed in Tiger's Logic Stage years: English, specifically writing. I have been very gentle with Tiger when it comes to the process of writing in his elementary school years, giving him time to develop his fine motor skills and build up his stamina to write more than one sentence at a time.
This past summer we have done a few dictation sessions and some copywork. The outcomes of those far-and-few sessions show me that Tiger is now ready to write for a longer time than before and is ready for some formal instructions to get him started on the road to writing. While some children are natural writers who can write long compositions with zero or minimal instructions, Tiger is not one of them, and he recognises this in himself. To this end, he feels more comfortable having some kind of structure to guide him along (as do I!) and he sees the value of using a formal writing programme to bridge the (very wide) gap between his reading level and his writing level, so we'll be spending most of our time in the new year to develop his writing ability.
This seems like a U-turn from our more autonomous approach from a year ago. It is in some ways, in that there are certain basic skills that Tiger needs to master before he can confidently progress onto the next level of learning. Acquiring these skills (e.g. writing) isn't always going to be fun or easy, so if I didn't plan them into our week, there is a very high chance that they will get pushed aside and we will not have progressed at all on those specific areas by next summer. The timetable helps us stay focused on our tasks but we are not bound by the clock to move to the next subject if and when a topic really takes our interest. Homeschooling allows us to maintain a high degree of autonomy and flexibility in our learning approach while keeping a focus on achieving the goals that we have set for ourselves.
Having a timetable while maintaining an interest-led approach makes perfect sense to me but perhaps not so much to the reader yet. Afterall, I do have the advantage of having all my plans, schedules, activities and calendar at hand so I have a clear view of what's going to happen. We shall see how the new year pans out. It promises to be a very busy and exciting year of learning.
Each year our approach seems to alter just ever so slightly:
Based on the plan that was published on Monday, how on earth am I going to pull it off? Well, with the help of many good books, materials and good people in my community, of course!
This autumn, Tiger will be ten years
old and will head towards the Logic Stage
(according to the Classical Education convention). As we are
progressing according to his interest and ability, we are not adhering
strictly to school year definitions when choosing what he will be
learning in the new academic year. In fact, Tiger's study programme will be tailored, as much as is possible, to align with his continued interest in military history.
While
Tiger is strong is a few areas (history, reading, maths), he needs to
develop in others (notably writing). Therefore, instead of rushing into
Logic Stage, we will be spending the next 12 months concentrating on
language arts to bring Tiger's skills up to a level where he will be
ready to take on the amount of written work required of a Logic Stage
student. In short, I am looking to focusing on three specific areas over the next few years:
writing
character building
study habits
The resources that we will be using will vary
according to the theme that we are studying at any point. I will share
the specific resources that we use as we progress through each theme.
Maths
Topics that will be covered this year include:
Decimals
Prime numbers
Percents
Factors
Addition
Subtraction
Multiplication
Square numbers
Division
Fractions
Money
Constructing triangles
Angles
Coordinates
Symmetry
Measurement - imperial and metric units
Patterns - numeric, symbolic and algebraic
Data and graphs
Probability
Science
Topics that will be covered this year include:
Forensics
Biology - genetics and DNA
Physics - engineering, sound, flight, relativity
Scientists and inventors - Faraday, Bell, Wright brothers, Einstein
English
Topics that will be covered this year include:
Grammar - Eight Parts of Speech, Plurals, Four Types of Sentences, Diagramming, Simple and Complete Subjects, Direct Objects, Predicate Nominatives, Predicates, Abbreviations, Contractions, Direct and Indirect Quotations, Compound Subjects and Predicates, Fragments, Splices, Punctuation, Synonyms and Antonyms, Double Negatives, Dictionary Skills, Oral Usage
Spelling - Prefixes, the four sounds of Y, Months of the Year, Spelling Strategies, Unaccented A, Words ending with double S, Words with silent E, Plurals
Vocabulary - Suffixes, Prefixes
Handwriting - cursive copywork
Writing - Letter Writing, Oral and Written Narration, Dictation, Analogy, Comprehension, Sentence/Word Play, Rewriting, Summary, Amplification, Idea, Conflict, Outline
Poetry - Similes and Metaphors, Sound-words, Rhyme and Limerick, Rhythm, Alliteration, Comparison, Personification, Recitation, Interpretation
Structured Reading - written narration and summary, plot and character analysis, comprehension, book reports
Drama - Improvisation, Storytelling, Performance, Movements, Voice Work
Mandarin
Topics that will be covered this year include:
Countries and languages
Subjects of study
Making phone calls
Weather
Seasons
Sickness
Hobbies
Vegetables and fruits
Meals of the day
Eating out
House
Furniture
Neighbourhood
History
Topics that will be covered this year include the following period, with a emphasis on war studies:
Victorian Britain
Edwardian Britain
WWI
WWII
Military history (self-directed study)
Music
Topics that will be covered this year include:
Instruments - piano, recorder
Music appreciation - instruments of the orchestra
Art
Topics that will be covered include:
Drawing - contour drawing, negative spaces, proportions, light and shadow, hatching and crosshatching
Art appreciation - the Pre-Raphaelites, war art of WWI and WWII
Character building - discussion of different scenarios and stories
P.E. - tennis, swimming, squash, table tennis
"You
can make your own son or daughter one of a kind if you have the time
and will to do so; school can only make them part of a hive, herd or
anthill."
My original plan for the summer looked pretty much like this: plenty of summer reading and just chilling out in the sunshine.
Perfect for the summer: the entire Swallows and Amazons series
Yes, that was my plan. Notice the past tense.
Tiger has other ideas about what he wants to do with his summer.
First of all, he now considers watching Shakespearean plays at Shakespeare's Globe to be his annual, unmissable summer experience.
It has got to be a good thing, hasn't it? A child who loves Shakespeare's work
and who reminds his mother to book tickets to each season's performances
when it opens. Hence, it looks like the two of us will be hanging out by the south
bank quite a bit this summer. Most of the plays this season are
tragedies where the characters are much more complex than those of the
comedies, so it will be interesting to see what Tiger makes of them.
As if to make up for lost time in the past year due to his ill health, Tiger has also decided to attend a few summer camps:
sports (football, trampolining, swimming)
film-making (photography, 2D animation)
singing
The most surprising part of the above is that Tiger actually agrees to take part in the one-week classical singing camp where the repetoire will include:
1) songs by Bob Chilcott,
2) Ave Verum Corpus by Mozart,
3) Laudate Dominum by Mozart
We shall see how the singing camp works out. I'm feeling slightly jittery about it because the repetoire is a far cry from the boy's preference of electronic music. He's either going to see the irony/funny side of my putting him in a classical singing camp (it's my attempt to keep him in the civilised world), or he's going to absolutely despise the stuffiness of certain classical music circles (that can happen when the workshop is run by stiff, old-school types). I pray for the former.
Our first sunflower this year. It marks the start of our summer holiday!
Meanwhile, I plan to reread The Well-Trained Mind while sitting on the benches (as you can see from the activities listed above, I shall have many opportunities to do that this summer) as I feel we are being drawn once again back to the Classical Education approach. I will also be going through all of John Taylor Gatto's articles to see whether I can figure out a way to incorporate his points (he had a classical education) with those of The Well-Trained Mind into our plans for the next academic year. Specifically, I will be spending time to think through whether I am preparing my son to be a truly educated man.
Please note that I am not suggesting that John Taylor Gatto's definition of what constitutes a true education is to be applied universally to every child. I just happen to have a lot of respect for the man so I make a point of reading his writing every summer as part of my planning process.
Ball #5: History and the Arts British History
It seems that we have been studying Medieval England for ever and ever. The short stint with Chinese culture over the two weeks of Chinese New Year has rekindled my interest in exploring world history through the trading route of Marco Polo.
The last time I looked, we were still studying the Plantagenets with Edward I and his trebuchet. There are two more Edwards who ascended the throne immediately after him, so I thought it would be a good idea to round up the next two Edwards before we take a break from British History.
Therefore, in the next two months our focus will be on various significant topics that happened during the reign from Edward I to Edward III, specifically:
Medieval food
Medieval queens
Medieval jobs
Medieval medicine
The Black Death
Being the out-and-abouters that we are, there will definitely be plenty of field trips and workshops to supplement our study at home. Now, if only I can get myself organised to make them happen...
The Arts Visual Art
I have been wondering for some time now why our artist study has taken a back seat this year. The answer seems to point to the new (and positive) focus that we have been taking in Tiger's Chinese study. The time and energy required to establish a strong foundation in the Chinese language makes it difficult to carve out extra time in our week to do proper indepth study of any artist's style. Nonetheless, I am still very fond of going to art galleries and exhibitions, so we shall strive to bring artist study back, now that we have established some routine and method in how we study Chinese.
From now until Easter, I plan for us to study the following artists:
In addition, there will be many opportunities in our history study to create crafts so we will be spending time on that as well.
Theatre
As a supplement to his drama sessions, Tiger and I will be learning about another aspect of theatre, physical actor training, from the course here.
Music
Music has been terribly neglected since September, apart from Tiger playing around with the electronic music software by himself and experimeneting with different sounds. In this respect, he is not inclined to have instructions, at least for now, so I intend to let him just play around with it until he finds his own gaps and feels the need for further assistance.
I haven't found an approach to composer study that I like, but this term we will endeaver to start the process by focusing on one composer -- Beethoven. There is no particular reason for choosing to study Beethoven over any other composer. The choice is made simply because:
Klimt made a famous Beethoven Frieze that gave us the connection between visual arts and music; and
there is a course on Exporing Beethoven's Piano Sonatas being offered. This course will be more relevant to me than to Tiger, but attending the course will help me make better contributions to our study and overall discussion about Beethoven and his work.
Ball #4: Science, Nature Study, and Geography Weather
Before we took two weeks off from our normal schedule to celebrate Chinese New Year, we had spent some time studying the erratic weather in the UK this winter. It appears that the flood is not letting up at all, so we shall resume our weather study next week.
Since we have studied about the rain (through the water cycle), which is the most obvious cause of the flood, the next topics to follow on from that will to be:
storm
wind (hurricane, tornado)
blizzard
I am looking to using the following book as the main source of ideas for projects and experiments but I shall also be using other resources online to support our study.
Our decision to study the weather is borne out of its immediate relevance to the current state of our environment. Not only does studying the weather allow us to understand better the environmental crisis that is unfolding around us, the issues involve spans across multiple subject areas such as nature study, earth science, and geography, thus enables us to better appreciate the importance of looking at things from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Ball #3: Mathematics - Addition and Area
The way that we have been learning mathematics here seems to be increasingly topic- or themed-based rather than curriculum-based, which suits us fine. We started off following a maths curriculum, which worked very well, but was starting to get a little tedious for Tiger. Once we started experimenting with learning-what-we-want-to-learn-when-we-want-to in maths, the approach feels a lot more logical and natural to us and is what we do now.
This term we are going to focus on two topics:
addition
area
What About Gaps?
It seems that many homeschoolers are uncomfortable with the idea of not following a curriculum in maths. Usually their biggest concern is gaps in their children's maths skills or knowledge. Following an established curriculum certainly gives some people -- notably adult and children who are naturally predisposed to a systematic, highly organised way of learning -- a sense of security that they have "covered everything" that a child of a certain age/level needs to know.
The way that I handle the question of gaps is very simple: I make a mental note of it when I notice it, then I find an opportune time to introduce it. The next question then is, what is an opportune time? Well, my definition of an opportune time is:
when I have gathered the necessary teaching materials/resources; or
when the topic ties in with another area that we are studying, e.g. there are many cross-curricula opportunities to be created around the topic of geometry, symmetry, tessallations, Islamic art, etc; or
immediately - we are prepared to drop everything else if it is a matter of urgency to learn a certain topic. So far, we haven't come across any situation that requires us to adress our mathematical deficiencies immediately.
My confidence in our approach comes from the realisation that:
Time is on our side. Tiger is only nine years old so he still has quite a few years to go before he has to worry about standardised tests or entrance exams. I might start panicking if we were still on the topic of addition when he is 19 years old.
Tiger is capable of buckling down to do the work when it becomes necessary.
Once I got over my initial fear of gaps (yes, I experienced much doubts and fears in the early days as well), I have come to view the learning of mathematics to be more than the acquisition of multiple sets of facts, short-cuts, and formulae. It is a language of its own. As soon as I realised that mathematics is a language, I decided that, as with any language-learning, establishing a strong foundation is very important. Just as a strong language user needs to have a contextual base to understanding and mastering the subtlties of any language, a strong maths user needs to have be able to apply mathematical skills and knowledge for them to become meaningful. Merely memorising mathematical formulae without the experience of applying them to solve real problems (as opposed to clinically designed textbook problems) is akin to memorising English idioms without knowing how to use them in the right context.
What About Practice and Mastery?
Having explained (I hope) above why I'm ok with Tiger's maths progress not following exactly in the same order or at the same pace as determined by any curriculum, you can see why I can tolerate us dwelling on any topic -- addition comes to mind immediately -- forever. However, the time that we spend on any one topic is not used on repetitive drills or learning the same set of skills at the same level over and over. An example is the latest addition game that we played. Different maths skills were used at the same time to solve that set of problems -- addition, long multiplication, counting, number sense. When we play maths games or riddles like the example that I have just referred to, both Tiger and I can easily and clearly determine whether he has any gaps in his knowledge (in which case we will work at closing those) or where his gaps are (so that we can direct our effort more effectively)
A tool that I find to be effective for practice is the Khan Academy's maths section. I've mentioned before our sporadic use of the website whenever we feel Tiger needs to have more focused practice on any topic. Most recently, we discovered a new feature on the website called Mastery Challenge, which is very similar to a series of short composite tests on various maths topics. Tiger doesn't mind working on a few rounds of these each day.
To me, it works in the same way as what we have been doing at home to identify gaps and areas of improvement. For example, one of the recent challenges shows that Tiger needs more work on the long division (which we had touched upon briefly in November but not formally worked on yet). With this information, Tiger watched the two-digit division video:
and worked through the example alongside the video, before attempting several rounds of two-digit divisions on the site. Working on these exercises enables Tiger to solve a recent maths challenge, but it is not the way in which I would like him to learn long division (even though he certainly can do them mechanically now), so we will spend some time later in the year to learn division in a more visual, hands-on way.
I don't claim that our method of learning maths is superior to any other method, but it is one that suits Tiger's need for variety, applicability, and minimal repetition.
This is the second part of a series of my termly plans. The first part is Ball #1: Language Arts.
Ball #2: Mandarin - Language and Culture Language
Tiger's
Chinese class is working out very well for him. He has been able to
keep up with the speed of the lessons (by putting in a fair bit of hard work)
and it is paying off. His interest and confidence in learning the
language has increased substantially because: (1) he feels encouraged and recognised by his teacher when she gave him a
classroom assistant role to teach the rest of the class a small part of
the new lessons, and (2) he is motivated to
maintain his recent exam success.
We are all encouraged by Tiger's positive experience at the Chinese
school so he will continue with the course there. Staying on top of the
weekly homework and revisions will be our focus -- there is very little
time or need for us to do much else in terms of studying Mandarin at home.
Our commitment to learning Mandarin also means that we will have to forego Latin. Boo. Sed valefaciens, et lingua decora!
Culture
Learning
a language is best supplemented by an understanding of its culture of
origin. Getting to know a culture makes the language come alive, so
while the Chinese school is now taking on the bulk of language training
for Tiger, we are supplementing his learning and experience by watching a
few cultural-related clips online.
We find the individual lessons at Growing up with Chinese
to be very lively and interesting. Each lesson focuses on a certain
aspect of social engagement, as well as a few tips on understanding the
Chinese characters, all set within a story.
For a more contemporary understanding of modern China, we are currently watching the 10-part BBC TV series, Real Chinese:
After we have watched the series above, I plan to continue with our armchair cultural immersion by working our way through the documentaries here.
A new project that I'd like to take on this year is to spend two
weeks focusing on Chinese New Year. It will be very similar to how we
usually spend the month of December focusing on Christmas-related activities. I am getting a lot of ideas for Chinese New Year from Marie's Pastiche, which has a whole year's worth of China-related ideas and activities to learn from.
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:
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.
