Year in Review: Our Book Stack

I love taking pictures of our book stacks for the year! It never fails to make me feel like we accomplished something good. Many of these books are from Ambleside Online Year 2 and Year 4, though we did some substitutions (mostly for Canadian history and geography).

The Books We Read Together

As last year, we read a fair number of books together. We had a rotation going at breakfast, and another at teatime. I have not included the books we read at bedtime because they were not narrated and we don't think of them as "school books". Some of these books are ones we are reading over several years.

The Little Woman 

Canadian Wonder Tales (ongoing)

The Blue Fairy Book (ongoing)

Trial and Triumph (ongoing)

Elementary Geography

The Ocean of Truth

Drummer Boy for Montcalm

The Story of Canada (Brown et al) (ongoing)

Great Canadian Adventures (selections. ongoing)

The Story of Canada (Marsh) (selections, ongoing)

Famous Indians (section about Joseph Brant)

The Map-Maker

Robinson Crusoe

Kidnapped

Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (selections)

Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson (selections)

A Lakeland Anthology: William Wordsworth (selections)

Mathematicians Are People, Too (selections)

SA(9)'s School Books

Since several of the books we read together were from SA's Year 4 (Trial and Triumph, The Ocean of Truth, Robinson Crusoe, Kidnapped), his stack looks a little short! Not pictured are Plutarch and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. We read Shakespeare together with an audio production, and I read Plutarch aloud to him. SA's favourite books this year were George Washington's World, The Map-Maker, and Julius Caesar.

Shakespeare: MacBeth

Shakespeare: Twelfth Night

Shakespeare: Julius Caesar

Plutarch: Romulus

Plutarch: Publicola

Madam How and Lady Why (ongoing)

Bullfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable (ongoing)

The Story-Book of Science

George Washington's World (incomplete)

JJ(7)'s School Books

JJ is a very strong reader, and though I was reading some of his books aloud to him at the beginning of the year, by the end he was reading all of these on his own. You may notice that we left out several of the Year 2 books. This is because we were reading a number of books together (above) and I didn't want to overload him. JJ's favourite books this year were The Little Duke, The Wind in the Willows, and The Blue Fairy Book (not a Year 2 book, but I have fairy tales on constant rotation in this season of life).

Stories from Shakespeare (selections)

The Little Duke

The Burgess Animal Book for Children

Understood Betsy

Robin Hood (ongoing)

The Wind in the Willows

Seabird

The books above do not reflect everything we did. We studied Dutch artists De Hooch and Van Ruisdael, early Canadian artist Thomas Davies, and French artist Jacques Louis David. We listened to music composed by Telemann and Corelli, Copland and Gershwin, and Beethoven. We read French children's books La Chenille qui Fait des Trous, Ours Brun, and Trois Souris Peintres. In the Bible, we studied Joshua and Judges, Mark and part of Acts. The boys also did a number of paper sloyd projects. Outside the home, they participated in a children's choir and took swimming lessons.

SA was well into grade 5 of Singapore Math (Primary Mathematics US Edition) by the end of the year. He started KISS Grammar and did well with it. We did not begin Latin this year, as I wanted him to know more grammar before beginning Visual Latin. Studied dictation also went amazingly well, and we could see definite progress from the beginning of the year to the end. He did well with learning cursive italic handwriting, but did not gain ease with it yet. We did not begin written narrations, as he was just not ready. However, I started to write down his narrations from George Washington's World so he could begin to get used to the feeling of having his words written down. That was hard for him, as he is a perfectionist and it would take forever for the words to come out (a problem I understand all too well!). I ended up teaching him an oral version of freewriting, which is the technique that helped me break out of that paralyzing perfectionism myself. He made progress, and the words started flowing more easily by the end of the year. 

JJ completed book 2A in Singapore Math. We switched from Miquon part way through the year.  He prints with ease, so he began cursive italic this year as well. 

MM(5) started to learn to read, and insisted on doing math while the other boys were doing it. I printed off Year 1 of MEP Math and he completed it. I tried to have some one-on-one time with him every morning before the school day started, and we read Charlotte's Web, Little House in the Big Woods, and part of Little House on the Prairie. Of course, he also listened in on all the reading we did together and enjoyed the pictures, music, and Shakespeare. 

Writing about all we accomplished makes me feel good, even though I dropped the ball on several things (again.). We dropped piano. Once again, we did very little in our nature notebooks after the first term. French was a failure, other than the children's books we read. We could have done more of several things: dictation, poetry, map work, timeline work.  I could have written an entire post on what we missed and what we could have done better, but I'm making a choice to give thanks for what we were able to accomplish. It was a good year.

Enthusiasm for Year 4

I love Ambleside Online Year 4 more than any year so far. I was learning a lot in Years 1-3, but Year 4 is a whole new ball game. We get to read Shakespeare now, and Plutarch! I am learning so much, never mind SA(9). I have to stop myself from starting to discuss things in the middle of the reading.

Don't get me wrong, it's hard work, too. I have never put so much effort into pre-reading and scaffolding the readings for my student. ("Scaffolding" is removing obstacles between student and author before the reading, for example, providing definitions and showing maps. The object is for the child to form his own relationship with the author and his subject without too much talking on the teacher's part.) Strangely, while the books are making my brain work overtime, they do not seem more or less challenging to SA than to me. As Charlotte Mason says, he makes the connections "proper to him" and I make the ones proper to me, and we are both learning and growing. I think it's AMAZING that living books allow that to happen.

Almost everything is new to me. I have never read Shakespeare or Plutarch, and my only exposure to Greek Mythology (Age of Fable) so far has been the Iliad. Madam How and Lady Why is a very interesting way to think of science, and we're having very good discussions over it. I know that I'm talking too much in our lessons (I do try to restrain myself), but at the same time my own enthusiasm for the books is not a bad thing to be modeling. In any case, SA is liking them all. 

My only problem is that I am not giving enough to SA to read independently in his lesson time. He reads The Storybook of Science on his own. I know I could easily hand him Robinson Crusoe, but I love that book! So far I can't resist sharing it with all the boys by reading aloud. I could also give him Madam How and Lady Why, but I feel like discussion flows more naturally when we've just read it together. Maybe I need to get over this so he can do more "digging" for himself. I know we need to work towards more independence for him or I'll drown next year, when I will have three students for the first time.

Is anyone else out there having the amazing experience of learning together with your children? Isn't it wonderful?

Linked with Mason for Me at BRC Banter:

Canadian Living Book Review: Into Unknown Waters

Part of my process of finding Canadian living books is to search my library's online database for any title related to the subject I wish to have a living book about. Of course, this results in a huge range of books for many different age levels. But I reserve them all in the hopes of finding a gem. This week I found one!


Into Unknown Waters: John & Sebastian Cabot by Eric N. Simons is part of a series entitled "People from the Past" edited by Egon Larsen. This series was intended to "bridge the gap" between overly simplified biographies and overly detailed accounts written by and for academic historians. This book is out of print, published in 1964 by Dobson Books, but you may be able to find it used or at your library.

One of my "living books" pet peeves is the way people seem to assume that you must turn to historical fiction in order to make Canadian history come alive. I have nothing against historical fiction, especially when it is well-written and well-researched, but living books come in a much greater variety. This is why I appreciated the intent of the "People from the Past" series:

"...while introducing dramatic and colourful figures the authors have a wonderful opportunity of filling in the whole background of a particular time and its political, cultural, economic conditions and developments, without having to introduce fictitious characters or adventures--for truth is more exciting than fiction, and the reader can rely on the historical authenticity of the story."

As I hope to review many Canadian living books over the next years, I will ask and answer specific questions in each case that assess how these books can be classified as "living books" as Charlotte Mason defined them. (For more on how to recognise a living book, see "What's In a 'Living Book'" by Emily Kiser, or listen to A Delectable Education podcast episode 7: "How to Recognize  Living Books.")

Is it written by a single author with a passion for his subject?

Simons' imagination was clearly captured by the story of the Cabots. This is evident from the very first page, where he begins by telling about seeing a ship in full sail one day:

"Suddenly into sight a big sailing ship came, her sails, golden and convex, billowing in the wind --a gallant and now rarely experienced sight. Beautiful were her sweeping lines and curving canvas...

There she was, that day in May, 1961, and hundreds of years ago, there, too, sailed many ships like her, at the mercy of wind and wave, with starvation, disease, fire, piracy and shipwreck ever threatening disaster. In May, 1497, in particular, a ship, which had left Bristol on the 2nd, could have been seen...in the Atlantic, a small speck in a vast circle of water, going out into the unknown, not for days, but for months."

His interest and enthusiasm are contagious, and that is something I look for in a living book.


Does it have ideas, not just facts?

The example quoted above: "a small speck in a vast circle of water, going out into the unknown, not for days, but for months" is a good example of the kind of ideas that abound in this book. The words create a picture in your mind's eye, a feeling of what it might be like to be an explorer. Yes, this book aims at being as historically accurate as possible, but it is by no means a dry recitation of facts, and it certainly never dumbs anything down.

(One thing to note about the facts: scholarship has advanced a bit regarding the route of John Cabot's first voyage, and you may want to compare the map on the inside cover with one in a more current book. However, Cabot's route is still a subject of considerable controversy, including the question of where he first landed...Cape Breton or Newfoundland?)


Is it well-written?

The writing evokes vivid pictures in your imagination. I enjoyed the way Simons wove relevant historical details into the story. On the other hand, I sometimes wished the sentences weren't quite so long, and that some of the excessive commas were removed.


Is it inspiring?

The author highlights the courage of the explorers by comparing it with that of modern astronauts:

"Awed by the courage and determination of men who, calmly entering space capsules, set out to explore the universe, we easily forget that there was a time in history when equally intrepid men embarked in tiny craft to explore the unknown waters of our globe. Their stories deserve to be told and told again, because it is difficult today to imagine the fascination and wonder once aroused by the great rolling waters of the Atlantic Ocean, and equally difficult to appreciate that their knowledge of what they were to meet was as small as that of the first astronauts of the present age." (p. 10)

On the other hand, Sebastian Cabot, whose explorations were in South America and later in Russia, is truthfully portrayed as a less than virtuous character: greedy, deceitful, conniving, and despicable. His intrigues take up a good portion of the second half of the book.


For what age group would this book be a good fit?

This is a difficult question for me, as my eldest son is only going on eight. As with most living books I've come across, this book would be interesting for all ages, though parts might be omitted for younger children. There is also the tangled web of Sebastian Cabot's life to consider.

In terms of Canadian history, the portion of the book on John Cabot is of course the one of the most interest. While the book covers both John and Sebastian Cabot, there is little or no overlap between their stories. Chapters 1 and 2 are about John Cabot (pages 1-57), and chapters 3-8 (pages 58-181) are about Sebastian Cabot. It would be easy to use just the first part of the book if a short and interesting biography of John Cabot is desired for Canadian history.

Personally, I think I would consider using the first portion of the book (on John Cabot) for grades four or five and up. The rest of the book might be more suitable for older students, perhaps grades seven and up.


Please leave me a comment if you have used this book in your homeschool. I'd also love to hear of any other biographies of John Cabot you can recommend!