History Curriculum

Before I go into what we're working on for history this year, I'd like to clarify my earlier post. It's important to me to be fair to her school when I talk about our reasons for leaving it. The school did a lot of things right. The staff is dedicated to teaching and instilling faith in their students. R had some great years there with passionate teachers, but also some discouraging ones, with teachers who seemed to be just putting in their time. We have five years of good memories and are grateful for what she learned there. By all accounts that school works well for a lot of kids. We also knew many families who transferred their kids out for various reasons, some that paralleled ours.

One of the first subject areas I researched this summer was history/social studies. I felt a "could this really be true?" excitement when I saw how much we could cover with one-on-one instruction. I went to a Great Books college for undergrad, and I liked the idea of a classical curriculum. I looked at some curricula that we could just unbox and start teaching, and while they were tempting because I am so new and inexperienced in all this, we ended up putting together our own approach and sources. The Well Trained Mind forums were the most helpful source I found for researching and getting feedback from homeschooling parents. (Susan Wise Bauer's book The Well Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home has been the best jumping-off point for us. It's an invaluable book.) 

We decided to use K12's  The Human Odyssey Volume 1: Prehistory Through the Middle Ages as our main text. K12 is a full curriculum, but we wanted to use only this book. I found this, and most of our books, used on Amazon or eBay.

Again based on recommendations from the Well Trained Mind forums, we supplement the textbook with individual volumes from The World in Ancient Times series from Oxford University Press.

 

So far we use these Oxford Press books the most. They have turned out to be perfect, at just the right reading level to be challenging without being so difficult that R gets discouraged. We use the workbooks and study guides from the Oxford Press series for some volumes. 

What we are both loving about homeschool is that we can take our time exploring all kinds of additional sources. My dad is a retired history professor and my mom a retired English teacher, and we have inherited some wonderful books from their library. Others come from our local library, or from thrift stores, library book sales, garage sales or online sources for used books.

We watch a lot of documentaries on Netflix and Amazon Prime, and check others out from the library. We also use our desktop computer and the iPad for interactive presentations, to research new words and questions that come up, and to go more deeply into ideas that R likes. She was interested in the pharaohs' journeys through the underworld, so we watched a National Geographic "Egyptian Secrets of the Afterlife" documentary. It dramatized the afterlife journey of Seti I guided by the Book of Gates, and made the history come alive for her.

I feel nervous all the time, that we are missing important lessons or going too deeply but not broadly enough. When she goes back to school, it will be with students who have been preparing to do well on tests that cover specific material. Whether or not we agree with that, it's the academic world she will have to function in for many years to come, and I wonder if it's a mistake to lead her away from that approach. When we first started, I was surprised to see that R's skills are mostly limited to completing worksheets. She wants to choose from multiple choice bubbles, and gets impatient when I ask her to think critically. "What's the answer? Just tell me the answer you're looking for." That seems so fundamentally wrong to me, that I'm willing to take a risk to try to turn that tide. How will we feel if it turns out she's not testing as highly, because she's learning differently for right now?

D and I agree that we're taking the long view, and we have to be brave about it. In many ways, it's been like watching her brain wake up, and recapture the curiosity and confidence of her early childhood. She will read a textbook in after school hours because she's interested in, say, Mesopotamian cuneiform script. She wants to use it as a guide to make up her own symbol language to exchange notes with her friend E. Is she missing out because she's doing that instead of homework that covers more ground more shallowly, where her knowledge will be measured by a chapter test? 

The fortunate thing about starting this in 2014 is the internet resources that are available now, and the guidance and encouragement from other parents who have been down this road. 

Bright New Chapter

First day of homeschool, August 2013

 

I've let this blog languish, in part because I started to feel conflicted about my family's privacy. Even though I've been careful not to publish names or identifying details and nothing embarrassing or private, as my daughter gets older I'm more aware that her pictures and the details of her life are not necessarily mine to share. I started the blog when R was five and we had just moved into this house. She's ten now, and it has been a wonderful record of these years. I miss it. I've decided to start posting again, to track the new adventure we've embarked on. We're homeschooling this year for the first time. The blog name, Bright Refuge, seems apt for this new part of our lives. We're opening the windows to new landscapes and prospects, with a solid home base underneath us. Most importantly, I have my husband and daughter's permission to share these photos and details. 

As we came to the end of fourth grade last year in the Catholic school where R has gone since kindergarten, I couldn't shake a discouraged, dissatisfied feeling. It seemed like we were always settling. It wasn't good enough, and she wasn't happy, but the alternatives seemed out of the question. This is our parish, and our faith is at the center of our lives. We bought our house because it was easy driving distance to school and church. We had put in a lot of years (and volunteer hours!) in this school, and we loved our school friends.

But the messages kept coming to me at odd moments. Aren't you ashamed to be only half-invested in life like this? Why are you trying to convince yourself that this is as good as it's going to get? Why are you calmly accepting that your sunny, curious little child spends most of her day bored and sullen and resentful? And worse. Miserable and resigned to being bullied. Feeling invisible; given only cursory attention from teachers who were grateful that she made their lives easier by being a quiet, well-behaved good student. 

She worked for weeks on a book report and took great care with her character descriptions, and when she read it aloud to the class they mocked her for doing more work than she needed to. The teacher said sarcastically, "Wow R, you really outdid yourself," and she came home crying and ashamed. None of it was outrageously evil or damaging. I liked the teacher personally, and the kids were good kids for the most part. But that incident stuck with me as a dull heartache. A growing conviction that she deserved better than she was getting, and it was my fault.

I'm in my third of four years at the Denver Catholic Biblical School. This year, we're studying the Old Testament Prophets. Our summer reading assignment was Eugene Peterson's brilliant book about the prophet Jeremiah: Run With the Horses: The Quest for Life At Its Best. It made me ashamed of my passivity. What happened to my courage? In Jeremiah 12:5, God says to the prophet, "If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses? If you stumble in safe country, how will you manage in the thickets by the Jordan?"

What kind of a life was this school preparing R for, in these critical years?

The messages kept coming. That July on World Youth Day, our new Pope Francis challenged his young listeners: "I ask you, instead, to be revolutionaries, to swim against the tide; yes, I am asking you to rebel against this culture that sees everything as temporary and that ultimately believes that you are incapable of responsibility, that you are incapable of true love." I almost always choose what's easy. I will go very far out of my way to avoid confronting people, or changing something that's comfortable. I'm good at coming up with reasons why the prevailing tides are just fine, and thank you but I'll just continue to float here in the warm salt water. And even if I know in my heart that the tide is moving in the wrong direction, what do you expect me to do about it?

One night I woke up thinking about homeschooling. How did that work, anyway? I knew I could never do it, but curiosity kept me from falling back asleep. I went downstairs to the computer, and the first thing that came up on a Google search was this quote from my Confirmation saint, St. Catherine of Siena: "Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” That described nothing about R's education. Or me, as her mother whose job it is to make sure she gets what she needs to accomplish that.

We had registered for the next school year and paid our hefty non-refundable tuition deposit. R had an inspirational science teacher in fourth grade who was slated to teach science and social studies in fifth, and we had resigned ourselves to letting her at least finish out fifth grade at this school before transferring. She loved that teacher, and at least those two subjects would be rigorous and enjoyable for her. Then at the last day of school Mass, the principal announced that that excellent teacher was leaving. I sat in the car after Mass and cried. Should we start in June, looking around for other schools for August enrollment? How could we make a responsible decision in that amount of time, without seeing other schools in session? How could we introduce that kind of upheaval in R's life, unless we were certain that the new school was going to be better than the old one?

I blame the Peterson book and Pope Francis and St. Catherine. We jumped off the bridge without knowing where we were going to land. We met with the principal and withdrew from school. And I spent my summer trying to get up to speed on homeschooling and quietly panicking.

Now, at the end of January, I have a lot to say about homeschooling, and some words of comfort and encouragement I would like to go back and give my worried summer self. There are challenges, some foreseen and some un-. For the most part, these have been some of the best months of our lives. We have our happy, confident, curious little girl back. Much of the tween moodiness and defiance that had started to creep into her relationship with her Dad and me is just gone, like a fire that died down without school stressors to fuel it. I'm aware that that might be temporary, but I'm enjoying it for as long as it lasts. I feel like I am watching her brain wake up, and shake off the cobwebs of worksheet and test-prep education. My brain is waking up too--I'm learning about Greek history and life sciences and Latin vocabulary and all kinds of things I would never have pursued on my own. 

Maybe I get lonely for adult conversation, and miss some of the freelance and volunteer activities with which I used to fill my days. That's probably why this catch-up blog post turned into a much-too-long essay. But I'm looking forward to having a place again for errant thoughts and photos of homemade bread and snowscapes and Charlie and his chickens. I've always felt like E.M. Forster, "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" And I know these days are fleeting. That one day, the light will shift and the seasons change. And this beautiful little daughter, who brings us so much joy, will be gone into her own life. I hope we can both look St. Catherine in the eye by then, and be proud of the work we did.

                                                                                                                                                

Chickens!

My goal for this summer is to update the blog with garden news. We have lots of news about our backyard chickens--more to come.

Bookworm

The first cold Saturday of fall, a book sale at the library, some interesting fashion choices, and a happy reader with her arms full of books.

Raspberry Bento

Raspberries; local pears; whole grain apple and cheddar flax mini-muffins; broccoli; grape tomatoes; shrimp & carrot curls on spring greens; whole grain oatmeal raisin cookie in the middle. R loves shrimp, and it's been working well this school year, putting them in her lunchbox frozen and with an ice pack. They're thawed by lunch, but still in the safe temperature zone.

DeLaney Farm Brunch

Farm-to-Table brunch this morning at DeLaney Farm in Aurora. They made breakfast burritos with produce from their own fields. It's an historic farm started by Irish immigrants, who deeded their land to the city as open space and a place to grow food. A lot of labor, paid and volunteer, goes into growing food on this farm, donating it, and delivering it to CSA members.

This is how you would make salsa if you had a whole field full of heirloom tomatoes. It was amazing.

We got there really early and staked out a table. When they started serving breakfast, we put our coffee and orange juice cups and a jacket & bag at each seat to hold our place. We came back from getting burritos to find people sitting at our table, our drinks gone, and our stuff swept into the dirt next to the table. I tried not to let that ruin my morning, but it was hard. I didn't feel like taking pictures for awhile, so I don't have any of the breakfast.

My high school friend T, the most talented gardener I know, came with us. Everything is more fun with him. He brought an elegant carpet to sit on and his iPad and speakers with music, and we set it up in the dirt and had a great time anyway.

After brunch, we walked out into the fields and saw their bee houses.


I got so many good ideas, from signs to smart ways to stake tomatoes. They do rows of fencing with tomatoes tied to each side, and also a single stake or rebar for each plant, with the main stem tied to it with plastic ties, and the rest pruned away.

Aurora peppers, which turn purple-black when ripe, and are supposed to be insanely hot.

T had just been telling us about Indigo Rose tomatoes, which he tasted for the first time at his community garden. He was blown away by how sweet and smoky they are. And then we saw them in the field. They are truly purple.

Once we got past the table-stealers, everyone was so friendly and happy to be there.

Onions and greens.

 . . . and pumpkins!

September Harvest

Such a long dry summer for a yard and gardens that are all hand-watered. No rain, week after week into months, and hours of hand-watering weren't enough. We will have to figure out something else next year. Eggplants surprised me by being  more resilient than tomatoes. Rosa Bianca and Listada eggplant, and the long purple Japanese eggplant kept producing all summer too.

September is harvest month, and we still have some tomatoes. This was a year of early hail storms that stripped seedlings to the stem, and an unusual explosion of hungry rabbits. And then waiting all summer for rain and watching for the monsoon season, which never came.

Still, we got some gorgeous eggplants.