Lesson 8 OM9 and Lesson 2 OM4

Well I kind of gave up on those final paers for House of the Scorpion. Abby wrote a good one, if a bit abbreviated, and Faith just crashed and burned. So, moving on! They are working on the poetry lesson now, Lesson 8. Here's Faith's first draft, a Where I'm From poem.

I am from crayons,

from Band-Aids and off-brand apple juice.

I am from tree stumps in an open backyard,

skies summer blue and December gray and stormy green.

I am from post oaks and blackjacks,

and the silver maple tree

whose hanging branches protected me from the rest of the world.

I’m from fairy dolls and well-worn paperbacks,

from lakes so big you can’t see the other side,

and from yellow smoke and noisy coughs,

from shelves packed with things that couldn’t be thrown away.

I’m from the Virgin Mary and her mother Anna,

their plaster forms embracing each other as they have for years,

a plastic rosary hanging above them.

I’m from freshly baked bread with Irish butter,

onion burgers and hand-squeezed lemonade.

From my grandmother’s hair, accidentally bleached orange,

the fists my grandfather used to whip any boy in the county,

the narrow scar where my father’s lung was pierced to save his life.

My sister and I would play for hours,

exploring worlds only we knew existed

within the art covered walls of the upstairs bedroom.

Sometimes we witnessed a family of animals go on a picnic,

other times fairies on a quest to save their kidnapped sister,

I am from those moments,

and even now though we’re grown.

my sister and I will still occasionally explore those secret worlds

that we discovered so long ago.

The middle kids and I are doing well with Fred and Paddle, and progressing in Oak Meadow as well. We are making our landscape this week, in Minecraft!

Hero's Journey Lesson 8?

I think it's 8. The one where you read Lilies, by Mary Oliver. That's what we're doing. I was disappointed that the text didn't point out the reference to Matthew 6. I wonder why not? It enriches the poem.

I think the best way to destroy a love of literature, especially poetry, is to make someone overanalyze it. So we are doing this one not quite as read. We spent the questions in the book as our discussion time.

I'll post their poems when they write them. Today they are drawing what the poem makes them think of.

I have been thinking
about living
like the lilies
that blow in the fields.

They rise and fall
in the edge of the wind,
and have no shelter
from the tongues of the cattle,

and have no closets or cupboards,
and have no legs.
Still I would like to be
as wonderful

as the old idea.
But if I were a lily
I think I would wait all day
for the green face

of the hummingbird
to touch me.
What I mean is,
could I forget myself

even in those feathery fields?
When Van Gogh
preached to the poor
of coarse he wanted to save someone--

most of all himself.
He wasn't a lily,
and wandering through the bright fields
only gave him more ideas

it would take his life to solve.
I think I will always be lonely
in this world, where the cattle
graze like a black and white river--

where the vanishing lilies
melt, without protest, on their tongues--
where the hummingbird, whenever there is a fuss,
just rises and floats away.

Lesson 1 OM4 continued

We drew apples for Science today in OM4.

Trixie's apple, outside/inside

Gloria's apple, outside/inside

Gilbert's apple, outside/inside.

Gilbert read chapter 1 of Stuart Little, some out loud, some to me. All the middles did Fred. Faith and Abby are doing Dragon Box - and liking it - and also slogging through the papers. I gave them a deadline of tomorrow, Sunday at the latest.

OM4, Fred, Hero's Journey progress?

Life of Fred and OM4 for the kids today. It's definitely over Gloria's head - and maybe Trixie's - but it's a great fit for Gilbert. I'll scale it back a little for Trixie and not require anything for Gloria. Or, I could get them both OM2. Hmm. They drew trees for their MLB. Gilbert's, Trixie's Gloria's.

Faith and Abby are slogging away at House of the Scorpion final papers. I keep reminding myself that they have never been required to think this way, so the fact that it is taking much longer than I thought it would is OK. They have been doiing Dragon Box for algebra, and when they finish that we'll do some paper and pencil work. Still up in the air for geography, world history? Who knows.

Day 1 for Oak Meadow 4!

Finally finally Oak MEadow 4! Not much, but they liked it. We discussed old trees. We happen to live in the middle of an ancient growth forest, the Cross Timbers, so the idea of an ancient tree living outside their window isn't an abstraction. The trees here are hundreds of years old.

Also continued Paddle, and Life of Fred. Paddle is in Wisconsin, after 4 months! We remembered the turtles and fish and waterbirds we saw at Martin Park when we were talking about being stuck n a marsh, and Minecraft again made an apperance as the iron ore and coal was loaded onto boats and trains.

The teens are writing their House of the Scorpion papers. Abby is further along than Faith, as usual, but Faith finishes strong, so I expect they both will be done at about the same time. I told them I didn't expect 5 pages, but that 3 was a definite goal.

Paddle-to-the-Sea, Life of Fred Apples, Hero's Journey 6

Continued PttS with the kids. Paddle is wandering around Lake Superior, after a close brush with a log saw. Also started Life of Fred: Apples with Trixie and Gloria. I love Life of Fred.

Faith and Abby are finishing House of the Scorpion this week. They both decided they don't like reading to a schedule, and plan to read the next book ("Kidnapped," by Robert Louis Stevenson) at a regular pace and then reread as necessary. Next week, unexpected houseguests again - it has been rather a extraordinarily houseguest-y summer, for us! - and then a final paper and evaluation of the curriculum. I'm sure we're going to continue.

The kids will start OM4 after the guests leave, so, say August 17. Let's do it!

Catch up, picture post, technology

Here are many children looking at glowing rectangles and using them to expand their minds and make the world a better place. Also me and a couple nonscreeny kids.

We are a very plugged in family. We have phones and computers aplenty, also video game consoles. We like our 0s and 1s. But we all use them in different way and almost everyone creates as much as they consume.

Bede is watching videos on the history of typography. He loves stuff like this. He's taking a break from the storyboards and animatics for his upcoming movie, "DISASTER WORLD."

Abby is coding a video game with a dragon that shoots fire (so far) in Scratch and Gloria is making a giant funhouse in Minecraft.

Faith finished her main lesson book illuminated poem. (It looks awesome - not that you can tell here.) She's watching a Normal Boots YouTuber here, about some Nintendo game. A driving passion.

And here's me, Gilbert and Dorothy,  just for fun.

Hero's Journey Lesson 5

The girls did the reading last week (but with our exuberant houseguests here that was all) and started the writing today. Faith is having trouble with the assignment today, even though she spends hours and hours writing in first person as another character, like, all the time, so I don't know what's up with that. I suspect that it is a symptom of some other anxiety she is experiencing. Or possibly gamma rays. Whatever. Autistic teens with anxiety are tricky. Abby is done though. ADHD-PI teens aren't tricky, just either ON or OFF. Today, she was ON, which she usually is. She runs out of mental energy and flakes off, but she never has trouble actually starting.

They have selected their other project, or, well, they are supposed to have done so. We'll see. And they keep forgetting to take notes as they read, so they have to go back. That's more a feature of a really good book, I think. Which it is. HOuse of the Scorpion had a bit of a slow start but then it got going like mad. Good read.

Paddle-to-the-Sea, Chapters 1-4

Gilbert, Trixie and Gloria are all reading Paddle-to-the-Sea with me. So far, we're up to Chapter 4, just barely in the water. They all want to put a little boat in the river now.

I'll document this with photographs, of course. I think it will mesh well with OM4, which we'll be starting in about a week!

Hero's Journey Lesson 4: Essay (Compare and contrast)

Here is Faith's essay for Lesson 4.

"Write a comparative essay about the roles Tom and El Patron play in Matt's life. Do you think they are both equally dangerous to Matt?"

In Nancy Farmer’s novel House of the Scorpion, the main character, a boy named Matteo Alacrán, lives in a very sheltered environment. He mostly only interacts with the same few people and hardly ever meets anyone new. Two of these people are Tom, a boy Matt’s age, and El Patrón, the elderly drug lord whom Matt was cloned from. Matt hates Tom and loves El Patrón, however, both characters seem immoral, and even downright evil, based on what we, the readers, have seen and what other characters have said about them, and both seem quite dangerous to young Matt, and a negative influence on his life.

Both characters act charming while hiding a more despicable personality on the inside, Tom slightly more so than El Patrón. Tom acts like a sweet little boy on the surface, but underneath is a lying, evil, and all around horrible kid, attempting to drown a dog in a toilet, nailing frogs to the ground by their feet, and constantly taunting Matt with insults. He’s an “unnatural little weevil,” as Matt’s bodyguard, Tam Lin, put it. El Patrón might seem like a jolly old man at first glance, but in reality is commanding, greedy, possessive, and even slightly sadistic. He doesn’t love in the traditional sense, instead treating people like objects in his possession. “Once El Patrón decides something belongs to him, he never lets it go,” as the character Celia said.

However, there are several differences between these characters, one being in their relationships with Matt. Tom and Matt have a mutual animosity for each other, while El Patrón treats Matt as one would a prizewinning pet, even referring to him as his “little fighting cock,” and Matt seems to hold El Patrón as a sort of role model, despite other characters’ warnings about the old man. Matt also only sees El Patrón once a year, on the celebration for both of them on the elder’s birthday, while living in the same house as Tom and seeing him nearly every day. Other differences lie in their general personalities, as El Patrón only seems to care for himself, with little thought of other people at all, while Tom acts almost exclusively out of jealousy, specifically wanting all to himself the object of both his and Matt’s affection, a girl named María.

In conclusion, I believe that both Tom and El Patrón are quite dangerous to Matt, both with their behaviors influencing Matt’s and things they may do to physically harm him. However, since Tom is more active in Matt’s life, interacting with him almost every day as opposed to El Patrón’s only seeing his clone once a year, I believe that Tom would have to be the most dangerous person in Matt’s life.

Hero's Journey Lesson 4: Part 2

Still working on Lesson 4. We got sick, probably from the visiting godparents. Next week we will have unexpected houseguests as well, so I don't expect much progress. But stilll, forward is forward.

Faith and Abby are very different in their approaches. Abby just plows through at a steady pace. Faith either gets it all done in a flash or flails about in anxiety.

Gloria read an Inch and Rolly book today.

Hero's Journey Lesson 4

We took a week off for the Fourth, a birthday party, and visiting godparents. Now back to it!

Faith and Abby are rereading the parts of The House of the Scorpion that they read ahead to, a few weeks ago. One of the things I wanted them to learn this year is how to follow instructions in an academic setting, and to learn what they can disregard and what they need to pay attention to. It's kind of a pain in the butt to have to reread because you've forgotten the material. It's also hard to stop reading a good story because you're at the end of the week's assignment. They've never had to do things like that because I've never held them to external rules academically.

Our geography book is sure a mess! So visually noisy. We will probably just go through a world atlas and supplement with Wikipedia. Or do world history this year instead, so much more available as far as a spine. The girls have never formally gone past the Middle Ages, so we could skim a bit and skip to the Renaissance. I'm thinking it over.

General update

We're progressing with Hero's Journey, still n track. We're taking this week off, planned, for the Fourth. But we've completed Week 3 with almost no stress.

Gloria is still reading. I just bought a whole slew of I Can Reads for her. She's spot-on for age.

I got Oak Meadow 4 for Gilbert and Trixie, but haven't really looked at it yet. I hope to get them started in about a month.

Abby got a Learn To Code subscription for her birthday, and plans to make a Minecraft mod soon. I'll be posting that here as well.

Faith will be reading and summarizing The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr, about how the Internet rots the brain.

Hero's Journey Main Lesson Book 2: Faith

Faith's illustration from "The Buddha's Last Instruction"

Hero's Journey Main Lesson Book 2: Abby

Abby's MLB page for the week, inspired by the poem "The Buddha's Last Instruction."





And the final product, added 6-22:

Hero's Journey Lesson 2

The girls are working on question 1 again today. Abby is almost done. We discussed personification.

Tomorrow we'll finish the question and work on the MLB assignment.

Hero's Journey Lesson 2

We have started lesson 2 of the Hero's Journey, the first poetry unit. I don't think we'll write the essay this week. I think the program is a bit writing heavy. We'll discuss it instead. I did ask the girls to do the questions though.

Hero's Journey Lesson 1 Student Essays

Both girls finished their essays, more or less.

Abby wrote about how her father and I put her at ease over theological concerns, and she started her essay last week, and finished it today. Pretty straightforward, well written essay.

Faith was just stuck. She couldn't think of any examples from her own life of a mentor-helper relationship to write about. That had her very upset after churning about it for a few hours. Then I suggested she write it from the perspective of her own characters. No dice. Then Sean (brilliantly) suggested she write it from some other fictional character. So she did. And then she dawdled on writing it, and then she finally got a rough draft in about an hour ago.

One of the points of this curriculum for us this year is letting them learn to hold to deadlines. So, so far, so good.

Here's Abby's essay, posted with permission.

I have been told I am ‘a tough crowd’, ‘deadpan’, or ‘Spock’. However, I hardly ever think of myself that way. I think of myself as, and am, someone who has suddenly gone into an existential panic in the middle of the night and had to come to my parents for help. Fortunately, my mother and father know how to comfort a Vulcan.

 I think I was about ten when I first started really having philosophical thoughts. (I’m pretty sure my first was either ‘Why are managers in cartoons never women?’ or ‘Humans are weird.’) When I was about twelve, I started questioning God.(‘How do I know He has a plan?’ ‘How do I know He even exists?’ ‘I’m not really eating Him, am I?’) And when I was thirteen, I took an RE class to get these questions answered. In this class, our teacher was telling us about the afterlife. She told us that we really don’t know what Heaven will be like, but we do know that it is a place where we will be perfected. That sounds great, but it made me rather nervous. A few days later, it made me sitting-on-the-bathroom-floor-crying nervous. What’s ‘perfected’? Will I still be me? Will I be different from all the other souls? The ability to be vastly different from everyone else is one of my favorite parts of life. If I can’t have it in death, then...well, I didn’t know what I would do. That’s what scared me. I knew my parents were awake, but for reasons I can’t remember now, I was reluctant to ask them for help. Maybe I didn’t want to disturb them? Maybe my tired brain thought it could find the answer debating with itself? Heck, maybe it was pure Satanic influence. Anyway, I finally did go into their room, and I asked this question: “Will I still like writing stories in Heaven?” My mother told me to come sit down on the bed. She said that Heaven is a place where we will be happy, and if anything about it sounds terrible, then it won’t be the case, or it will be okay in ways we can’t perceive now. Then my father said that the ability to create worlds and people in our heads is a way we are like God, and in Heaven, we’ll become more like God, not less, so it wouldn't make sense to lose this.

I don’t remember what happened afterwards. I’m sure thanked them, and I hope I went straight to bed. This is not the only time my mother’s emotional support and my father’s logical reasoning have greatly helped solve a problem. I’m thankful for them, and I can very much see their logical purpose.

Hero's Journey Main Lesson Book 1

"Your first MLB assignment is to create your own visual representation of the archetypal hero's journey."

(Click to embiggen.)

Abby's MLB:

Faith's MLB: