I thought I would get back in the saddle here by posting a report about our first six weeks of “third grade.” We’ve done lots of reading and learning. Our new thing this year was adding Science, while continuing Nature Study that we’ve been doing since the beginning of time. We chose Physics and are working through the lessons from Noeo Science Physics I. Many in my circle of educational philosophy would say it was too soon for formal Science, but I decided James was ready for it. There is no textbook for this curriculum, but a series of books and bios to read and experiments to do. James loves the experiment part, of course. We have learned about forces, gravity, friction, laws of motion, resistance, light, shadows, colors, the spectrum. I did not know that the primary colors of light were red, yellow and GREEN. Did you? Didn’t know there were any other primaries but the ones they taught us in school. And when it comes to paint, you don’t have yellow, blue, and red. You have yellow, cyan and magenta. Cool, eh?
We have continued to learn cursive using the Getty-Dubay Italics method. And we have begun to do our Copywork (copying beautiful sentences and passages from our readings) in cursive. We are ever so gently working our way through Spelling Wisdom from Simply Charlotte Mason and doing no more than one lesson a week from Simply Grammar. We’re just trying to get a handle on those two parts of a sentence and those 8 or 9 (depending on who you’re talking to) parts of speech. The most excitement I see from James when it comes to our “language arts” studies is with English from the Roots Up. He gets a kick out of remembering the pronunciation and meanings and then remembering English words from those roots and making up his own words. Do you know what “telephobia” is? Don’t bother googling it because they got it wrong. James’ definition is better.
Now that I’ve confessed to my Ambleside friends that I’ve gone beyond and started formal science, grammar, and spelling/dictation before the proper time, let me share what we have read from the suggestions at Ambleside Online. For Literature we are reading four William Blake poems a week and memorizing “Spring.” Blake has not been our favorite poet. We are thoroughly enjoying The Princess and the Goblin. As with most stories of this type, James likes to figure out what is going to happen next. My favorite line so far is from Chapter 15 where the great-great-great…grandmother (who is “older than you are able to think”) tells Princess Irene, “it is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs.” Isn’t that great? That’s the kind of old lady I want to be. Strength…mirth…courage…clear eyes. James says his favorite character from the book is Curdie. “Do you know any boy as brave as that? And he wants to work extra hours to buy his mom a red petticoat! What boy would do that?” (I didn’t even remember the red petticoat deal until James mentioned it. It must have made an impression on him — a boy working longer just to buy something for his mom.)
We have also read the stories of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill from American Tall Tales. I probably don’t need to tell you that those tales are quite entertaining to an 8 year old boy and not too hard for him to do his narration of them. We have followed the life and times of Perseus in The Heroes and we’re anxious to find out if the prophecy given to Perseus’ grandfather comes to pass. We continue to read Parables from Nature which we began two years ago. In this 6 week period we learned that you ought to purr when you’re pleased and that one should not just look only at the bad on earth, but see the good too. James tells me that he doesn’t want to just see the good because he doesn’t want to forget the bad because he wants to change the bad. We have continued on the journey with Christian and now his friend Faithful in Pilgrim’s Progress. We made it halfway through last year and will hopefully see Christian into the Celestial City by next spring. James likes the way that characters and places are called by exactly what they are. He gets very excited every week when it’s Pilg Prog day and is disappointed when the reading is over because they are so short. We are reading from the original version and James has had no problem following the old language. We read “The Merchant of Venice” from Tales from Shakespeare. This is the 13th play of Shakespeare that we have read about since beginning two years ago. We love reading these stories and by now, of course, many of the plots are becoming predictable. Women disguised as men, shipwrecks and bodies washed up on shore, and romantic entanglements and twists and mistaken identities. Our method of keeping all the people and plottings untwisted is to draw stick figures and maps and draw arrows to who goes to who and where. We’ve also enjoyed watching BBC’s Animated Shakespeare of any of the plays that we have read.
I’ll finish there for this post. I’ll continue in the next with our History and Geography readings, as well as our art and music studies. It’s been a good year so far and I for one am looking forward to all that I have to learn in Third Grade.
