Outdoor Walks

We are still taking walks as often as we can. The same scenery is always changing.  The fronds are unfolding a little more each day. We decided we want to learn the names of the trees along our path. They are beginning to interest us. We started to notice the differences, especially in the various barks. We often sit and watch the stream from the rock wall above. Now that the birds are back, they will flit back and forth across the surface of the water, apparently skimming the surface and getting a tad wet. We're guessing this is their way of bathing. To drink, they will hop along the edge and find a spot where moss or leaves allow them to get close enough for a safe drink. We've noticed some birds we don't usually see in our yard, so now we want to learn to identify those, too. My goal is to take 100 walks this year for my health. I am still building up my fitness after getting Lyme disease the year before last, so these walks are quite challenging, especially since our neighbor has hills. I'm up to 24 walks at this point. 

Field Day Preparations

Our Classical Conversations group is having a Field Day soon. 

I'm running the organized games. 

We're planning the three-legged race, potato sack race, tug of war, and the parachute games. 

One of the parachute games is called "scramble the eggs." 

Everyone holds and shakes the parachute, causing ripples, then I add the eggs to the middle and if we shake hard enough, the eggs really fly! 

The colors are awesome! 

Every Easter, I just save the Easter eggs the girls bring home from egg hunts and/or gift baskets or church to replenish the stock. 

But to get the eggs to fly really well, they have to be put together. This makes them "lighter." Otherwise, the separate pieces tend to stick together and get "heavier." 

So it was a labor of love, but we matched all the egg tops and bottoms. 

We also did away with broken pieces and the parts that didn't have mates. 

Our Robin

 It started last spring-summer. 

This robin would flutter up to our front window, hitting its beak on the glass, knock-knock-knocking every morning. 

At first, I'm sure the robin thought he was attacking another bird in its reflection. 

But eventually, since we'd always come running to see the robin and say, "Hello!," we trained the bird to expect us, even want us. 

He'd knock until we'd come to the window, then he'd fly a little ways away into the yard, and forage until we came to another window looking for him. 

This routine was repeated fifty or more times last year. 

Just a few days ago, I heard the same knock-knock-knock on that same window. 

The robin was back! 

Now, daily he comes to say, "Hello!" 

I asked Avril the other day, "Which book was your favorite this year of Challenge A?" 

She said without hesitation, "The Secret Garden."

That makes our robin friend even more special.  

It's like we're in the storybook.  

Looking Back at Old ANIs and Essays

I saved her big sister’s Lost Tools of Writing ANI charts and essays from when Norah, now Challenge 4, was in Challenge A. All year, Avril, in Challenge A, doing her first year of Lost Tools, has been quietly taking them down and reading them as she works through her own issues and essays in all the same books. It’s almost like she’s been time traveling back to talk to Norah when was twelve-thirteen. Sometimes she laughs at her big sister’s thinking and writing. But I warn her that Adele will be reading her ANIs and essays someday, too. This has been a fun, unexpected, sweet, special part of this school year.

Challenge 4 Final Weeks

Today my Challenge 4 class drew a mural on the church chalkboard-wall during their lunch break. I snapped a pic before we headed back to class for the rest of the day.

There are so, so many events coming these final weeks of Challenge 4.  There's Protocol, Blue Book, Thesis Presentation and Defense, and finally, Graduation! There's lots of planning and preparation going on. We all feel a bit anxious about all that's coming, but we're also excited.  

The Lord bless and protect us through the coming weeks!

A Defense of Rote Memorization

A few days after all the Memory Master testing was complete, it was Sunday morning, and the Pastor mentioned the countries in the Bible passage we were reading in church. 

He said something like, "If you are familiar with the Mediterranean..." 

Adele's eyes lit up and twinkled as she looked and me and we shared a moment of recognition. 

She had grown very familiar with the Mediterranean from reviewing geography facts for Memory Masters testing. 

On Wednesday, she ran into the kitchen, breathless. 

She's reading Anne of Green Gables right now. 

"Mom! This book is set in Nova Scotia! Nova Scotia! I know where that is!" she panted. 

She laughed in delight, and I laughed, too. 

She put hundreds of facts to memory and those facts keep coming to life for her. 

But there are leading homeschool voices who continually condemn the rote memorization of hundreds of facts, and they do so earnestly.

But I earnestly have to disagree with them and speak as I actually find after almost ten years of using rote memorization in our homeschool.  

This is not a complete and total Grandgrind situation. 

And that is never the case where the Holy Spirit is involved. 

Dead, dry facts we take real trouble to actually memorize never stay dead or dry or merely fact for long. 

Our healthy, active, imaginative minds go to work on the material we give them, making connections with what we've merely memorized for the moment and what we already know and understand and love. 

What works with poems, Psalms, hymns, and stories, also works with mere facts. 

By memorizing these, we give our minds a term or a phrase or a statement or a series of statements or images or symbols to hold onto. 

Then our minds, naturally, go to work upon this content from all sides. 

Understanding comes gradually usually, but sometime it comes all at once. 

Once understanding comes love grows exponentially. 

Do you know how many times understanding will flood my mind as I stand at the kitchen sink washing dishes, because my mind has made a connection about an abstract math formula stored inside my head?

I memorize formulas by rote with my kids. 

And this is just as dreadful and awful as it sounds... but only at first.  

Experience keeps demonstrating that memorizing a fact means I can think about it at leisure, because I carry it with me everywhere, because it is stored in my mind. 

I can consider the relationships of variables in a formula and even rearrange the variables... 

And understanding comes gradually sometimes, but sometimes all at once! 

And understanding is followed by wonder, awe, and worship. 

And I find that I begin to truly love math. 

This may actually be because now that I have memorized enough math, I can study math artifacts in my mind at my leisure.  

Putting dry, dead facts into an already living, active mind does not snuff out a mind's fire. 

On the contrary, I find it is more like strategically throwing aged wood on a fire already burning.

It only burns hotter and brighter!  

The person who memorizes hundreds of facts in every subject and grows in constant understanding of those facts can care about even more in the end of their education than they ever would otherwise. 

Why can't a faculty of memorization be built deliberately? 

Why can't human beings strategically furnish their minds with all manner of beautiful artifacts, not just Scripture or poetry, but also history dates and timelines?

My oldest daughter loves translating Virgil, but she could not have gotten to the point of so much love of Latin without actually memorizing those meaningless (at first) noun endings. 

She hated Latin because of all the drilling, all that dry, boring, tedious memorization of facts.  

She was exactly like CS Lewis's schoolboy learning Greek grammar in The Weight of Glory.

She hated it at first and only worked because she was compelled to do so. 

But, slowly, joy crept in on the "mere drudgery" of her Latin studies, and just as Lewis describes, "poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience." 

Now I do not have to make her study Latin. 

She plans her own translation projects, builds her own language, makes her own plans to learn Greek. 

Adults know from experience that reading the same poem every morning for a month may seem, at first, routine, rote, meaningless, and they read the poem on purpose to memorize it. 

They know that gradually or even in a flash, the content will come alive for them. 

A phrase jumps out or comes to them as they pray or as they speak with a friend or as they behold a landscape. 

It is the same with hundreds of mere facts. 

No facts stay lifeless long in this world where the Holy Spirit is constantly at work. 

God breaths Spirit into the form of the words or symbols and the words, even the words of merest fact, come alive and we behold God's glory!   

Memory Master Cycle 1

Adele passed her tutor and director proofs! She's an official Memory Master for Cycle 1! 

You can see the cards her friends made and her director gave her on the morning of the final tests. 

I'm very thankful for the people who helped us make this possible, especially our children's pastor Greg, who gave Adele her second proof.