Just curious if anyone has any ideas for Math curriculm for Visual Spatial learners. These children do not learn well by rote so the typical repetitive drills do not work well for them. I think most of the Laura Berquist recommendations will be fine for my son, but I'm not so sure about Saxon Math. Any other curriculum to recommend??
FYI, my son is 9yo and going into fourth grade.
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?
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.