We recently bought Audubon’s Birds of America Coloring Book published by Dover Publications - magnificent stuff! Looks like someone took Audubon's paintings and reduced them to line art for coloring, and they did a great job.
One problem - once it's colored, it's done. So I've brought this book and others in the series to work and made 4 copies of each page so the kids can color the things til they're drunk on crayon fumes. The nice thing about Dover products is that they're no longer under copyright.
I got the new Catholic Heritage Curricula catalog. Nothing like getting a curricula catalog in the mail and not being able to find a highlighter so you can go through it.
This brings a question to my mind. Where do you order curriculum from? Any websites you want to share?
The Well-Trained Mind website lists a large number of links to homeschooling blogs. Not all Catholic, not all classical.
A vice of which Catholic homeschoolers need to be wary:
Self-righteousness: seeing myself as better than others in the sight of God because some aspect(s) of my life seem (to me) to be well-ordered or aligned with what I think God wants. People who try to follow the Lord can fall into this trap of pride if they don't pay enough attention to humility, mercy and self-giving love. They end up believing that they are the best judge of what other people should be doing in their lives.
The remedy:
Humility: the acknowledgement of our total and absolute dependence on God for everything (Jn 15:5b); to grow in it requires the diminishing of one’s selfishness and self-centeredness. Humility is critical to growth in holiness, because it paves the way for growth in other areas of virtue.
A few years ago we attended a homeschooling conference in Peoria, IL, sponsored by a local hsing group, where one of the featured speakers railed against using pre-Christian Greek and Roman literature in Catholic homeschooling. Contra that view, we have Saint Basil advocating the very thing in his Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature and, of course, the long tradition of classical education that recognizes in their achievements the intellectual foundations of our civilization.
I'm all for it. What comes to mind are the brilliant scenes of filial piety in Homer's The Odyssey in which men venerate their fathers and worship their gods with a virile tenderness that's made visible by Homer in a way that I haven't found anywhere else. As always, of course, we must be careful to reap the grain and leave the chaff, as Saint Basil cautions.
My wife and I have been homeschooling our children informally since the first one was born 7-1/2 years ago. We arrived at a homegrown classical curriculum based loosely on Laura Berquist's Design Your Own Classical Curriculum, but we're finding now that we need more structure than our homegrown system provides. Now we're taking a close look at the Mother of Divine Grace curriculum, also designed by Mrs. Berquist, to provide the daily structure we need.
Why classical education? Dorothy Sayers' essay on The Lost Tools of Learning converted us.
As we draw near to the Solemnity of the Ascension, I'm wondering if there are many homeschooling fathers who take off work on holy days of obligation to celebrate with their families all day, or if this is not a very high priority. Since I've now been with my employer long enough to have earned three weeks vacation each year, I think I'd like to do that. Or would it be more important to save those extra days and string them together in order to have another little family vacation in which I could have some extended contact with my family, instead of just one day? Any thoughts?
I wanted to introduce myself before I dove in and started tapping the keys on the keyboard. So here goes!
I am Sondra, a Catholic Homeschooling mom to 8 kids. Our children are 12, 10, 7, 5, 4, 3, 20 months and 7 months. Four boys, four girls. We have homeschooled from the very beginning! The story of how we started will be sure to come. It goes hand in hand with my conversion story and my husbands reversion. We live in Sunny Arizona, where the bugs are bigger than...well...maybe you don't want to know that.
We live in a smaller town north of Phoenix that is growing at rates much faster than I would like to see it. We are getting a Super Walmart and a Home Depot! Hitting the big time!
We are embarking on a new road with our homeschooling. Our #7 child is undergoing testing/screening for a developemental disability, most likely autism. While this has been really hard on our whole family, we have learned more in the past few months than we have in years. Maybe not all in "book knowledge" but in ways I never dreamed the Lord would teach us. I am sure I will be sharing lots more about this adventure.
For now I will leave you with this:
Proverbs 22:6 (New American Bible) Train a boy in the way he should go; even when he is old, he will not swerve from it.
A few websites really inspired and educated me about the world of homeschooling. They are:
Alicia of Fructus Ventris fame has pointed her readers to our blog, and G. Thomas Fitzpatrick (of Boston, I believe) over at Recta Ratio has added our blog to his permanent list of links. Many thanks! Who'd like to join our little band?
One area that my son has really struggled in is memorization of Math facts. Knowing that I want to work on this all summer, I ordered and just received the Calculadder program recommended by Laura Berquist.
I feel a bit like a kid. I was so excited to see the box in the mail. Everything is on a CD ROM and there are very good instructions with it. I can't wait to start!
I ordered this at Emmanuel Books.
Good night!
Hello, this is a test post and an introduction. I am joining this blog to chronicle our start as a homeschooling family. I will be homeschooling my 9yo son next year. We are very excited about it.
I plan on using most of Laura Berquist's recommendations to start off with. I have several friends who recommended this after trying other things first. I have ordered a few things to get started with in the summer and plan on ordering more little by little so as to be ready to start full steam in September.
Hopefully this will be a happy tale, although I'm sure there will be ups and downs.
God Bless, Johnna
Looks like an interesting book: Daycare Deception.
The Catechism on parenthood and evangelization:
Through the grace of the sacrament of marriage, parents receive the responsibility and privilege of evangelizing their children. Parents should initiate their children at an early age into the mysteries of the faith of which they are the "first heralds" for their children. They should associate them from their tenderest years with the life of the Church. A wholesome family life can foster interior dispositions that are a genuine preparation for a living faith and remain a support for it throughout one's life. Education in the faith by the parents should begin in the child's earliest years. This already happens when family members help one another to grow in faith by the witness of a Christian life in keeping with the Gospel...Parents have the mission of teaching their children to pray and to discover their vocation as children of God. --The Catechism of the Catholic Church 2225-2226