Tricotomania and more

I was reading Sheila’s post about writing poetry with her kids and realized that I forgot to update you all on my own poetry challenge.

First, I now read the poem that Becky posts on Fridays instead of skimming over it or skipping that post altogether. Sometime’s I need to force myself to do it because my instinct is still to skim or skip. I discover that “it will not kill me” (as I say to Tigger about eating the odd raisin/bit of zucchini/etc) and that it isn’t even painful. I need to keep doing this until my instinct shifts a bit.

Second, I am hosting Teatimes when it is my turn with our homeschool group. My first session of that was this past Tuesday. I went to the library on Monday and grabbed a few things off the shelf to add to the collection of poetry books that we have. The kids each brought something. I made tea and fruit punch. Tigger made cookies and picked flowers from the garden for a centrepiece (and chose a tablecloth). Some of the kids were more enthusiastic than others. Some read more fluently aloud than others (2 speak German at home and are less confident about their English, I think). But everyone read. I said it was okay to choose short things. I also said we all had to choose one poem new to us. Baby steps challenges. It was fun. Some of them were practically begging to read another one. After an hour or so I dismissed them to go play.

One thing I noticed is that Tigger likes what might be called grown up poems. The stuff I find vaguely scary.  I don’t know what the other kids thought but I noticed a real difference in style between what she chose to read and what others chose to read. She also like Shel Silverstein and John Hegley but she chose to read other stuff. This is clearly an area where I need to take a lead from her and not be scared of this stuff.

So the book Sheila mentioned about how to write poetry sounds like something we could maybe do in our December meeting or next term or something. Though apparently Tigger wrote some poetry when she was on holiday in the Gaspésie recently.

Becky put a good link in her comment on my recent lament about poetry. (Was it a lament? Perhaps not.)

So on the principal that a long journey begins with a single step, I have been listening to a few poems while cooking dinner. Apart from the annoyance of having to walk across the room to choose the next one, or pause it when the phone rings, it is rather a pleasant discipline.

The Poetry Archive has lots of recordings of poems read by the poets themselves. Always nice to see how they meant that to sound. And possibly one of my issues with reading it. I can never work out how the rhythm is supposed to go or if there is supposed to be one. (Does the line break have any aural function? Or is it merely visual? How does punctuation relate to the line breaks?) The trickiest part is figuring out where to start. Once you’ve listened to one, there seems to be a “where to next” link at the bottom of the page for something related somehow.

This is not a Poetry Friday post. I love the idea of Poetry Friday but I freeze completely at the thought of posting something. And I have to admit that I tend not to read the poems folks on my regular blogroll post on Fridays. I have some kind of aversion.

Literature is one of those subjects that I never “got” in school. You know how some folks say that they got good marks in math but feel like they don’t know anything about it? That’s me with literature. I read voraciously. But I never understood what was going on with literature class. Still don’t. I love Deconstructing Penguins but have absolutely no confidence I could guide that kind of a discussion about a book that isn’t already in there. (Seems I was going on about similar concerns this time last year.)

So. Poetry. Not sure how I didn’t get clued into it. I read a lot of A.A.Milne as a child and enjoyed it. I remember enjoying Dennis Lee as well. But I never really moved beyond kids poetry. I’ve had occasional forays into contemporary poetry — Jackie Kay, for example. And Mat got me interested in Attila the Stockbroker. But mostly I don’t know where to start and find that reminder that I haven’t got a clue to be kind of paralyzing.

One of the things I like about homeschooling is the ability to learn along with your kid. I didn’t know anything about art until Tigger got interested in it, either. So I figure this is my opportunity to figure out poetry. Or at least learn to be comfortable with it. I love Julie’s idea of teatimes. But having a teatime when you have only one child feels a bit weird. I’ve hosted one before with a few of Tigger’s friends and everyone loved it but that never became a regular thing.

No more. Our homeschool group has just had a meeting to work out what we’re going to do this term. I said, I’d like to do a teatime about once a month. So that’s what I’m doing. We each host 3 sessions between mid-September and mid-December and mine are pretty evenly spaced (and in the calendar). My plan is to go to the library and stock up on poetry books from the kids section so that I have a selection of things on hand when the kids get here. And bake. And make sure we have some nice drinks in (even for those who don’t want tea). And then we’ll just see what happens.

My first teatime is September 23. I might get some fall themed stuff. And I need something that our one lone boy might like (he brought a hockey poem the last time) so he isn’t overwhelmed by fairies or something. And I need to think of something to read to them while they have their tea…

Writing blog posts seems to send me off on internet research trips. Here are some of the things I’m finding. Some will be suitable for Tigger directly (age 11) and some will be more for my own learning. I’d never read any Dickens until Tigger and I read A Christmas Carol together last year. And my historical knowledge is generally woeful.

BBC animated biography of Dickens: This looks good. Basic. And just the sort of thing Tigger likes. Links at the bottom of the page to other kid-friendly resources.

BBC History Victorian England: Lots and lots of relevant historical information. And a Victorian history trail, with activities, games, etc. I suspect, our whole study could be based on materials found on these two pages.

Some interesting looking links from Web English Teacher to resources for teaching Dickens, including detailed lesson plans and vocabulary guides that I probably won’t use.

And another link-fest from the Innovative Teaching News.

There are some very useful things available as supplements to the Broadview Press Anthology of British Literature. Most of the links associated with this are secured to people who own the text but (under Extra Materials in the side bar) there is a useful article on British money, and a slew of short audio clips that give a sense of the sound of British literature. They obviously don’t go back far and the Florence Nightengale one is pretty scratchy, but still… There is also a very handy chronological chart available for Vol 5 (The Victorian Era). It is presented in two columns with literary works on the left and historical events on the right.

I like to listen to In Our Time while doing things in the kitchen that don’t require much intellectual engagement (it is not the sort of radio that works well if you are distracted). The following programs from the History archive are relevant to the period: Victorian Realism (about novels and the reaction to romanticism), The Riddle of the Sands (on English-German relations from Waterloo to WWI), The Enclosures, The Charge of the Light Brigade (Crimean War), The Opium Wars, William Wilberforce, The Great Exhibition, and The Peterloo Massacre (and it’s relation to the Reform Act of 1832). Two programs that cover a longer period but address very relevant themes are The Aristocracy and Slavery and Empire.

This reminds me that we have touched on this period before. Tigger has a biography of Florence Nightingale from the Usborne Famous Lives series that she enjoyed so much she dressed as FN for Halloween a couple of years ago. We also have The Villainous Victorians from the Horrible Histories series. And Mill Girl from the My Story series of fictional diaries is also relevant. It looks like there are also volumes in that series on the Victorian Workhouse and the Irish Famine though we don’t have those.

And that reminds me that we have read about the Irish famine in the past, mainly historical fiction: Nory Ryan’s Song and Maggie’s Door by Patricia Reilly Giff. But Myra Zarnowski recommends the non-fiction account Black Potatoes by Susan Campbell Bartoletti (which is in our library system). I suspect we won’t go into that in great detail at this point, except to point out that it was happening at the same time. Maybe now is the time to get the whole time-line thing going around here.

I am running into a bit of a periodization issue in this search for resources. The Very Short Introduction uses a long 19th Century — 1789 (French Revolution) to 1914 (WWI). The literary material and the BBC site use The Victorian Age (she reigned from 1837-1901) and thus a short 19th century. I might have to think more on this and talk to Mat about the possible consequences of each approach (since he actually studied history at university, though perhaps not this period). Any thoughts from readers about this would be most welcome. I have access to, and am happy to read, academic journal articles. So if there was something you read as a student that addresses this issue, do let me know.

My approach to any topic is increasingly to consider my own education alongside Tigger’s. As such, I am interested in good books for myself as well as books accessible to her. I’m not going to read all of this stuff. But I like to have a sense of the shape of the terrain before deciding on the particular path we will follow.

My planning is often serendipitous. Finding good books. External activities going on. Taking a 3 month trip to Europe. That kind of thing drives the kinds of subjects that we might study around here.

This year’s serendipitous activity is that Tigger is auditioning for the Junior Performance Company at the Ottawa School of Speech and Drama. We have a back-up plan in case she doesn’t get in, but Mat and I have been thinking about what topics that might suggest if she does. They will be performing Dickens’ Great Expectations. So we’ve been thinking that 19th Century British history would be a good idea.

When sorting out the books from my former life as an academic recently (did I tell you that I took a whole bunch to a friend who is a recovering 2nd hand bookseller?) I found Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction which I must have got as an inspection copy from Oxford University Press.  I’ve skimmed it a bit and think it might make a good read aloud and general survey spine. (I also had their Sociology book from this series which I’ve sent to a good home. To see what else is available in this series, check the Very Short Introduction page at OUP.)

Mat and I are reasonably knowledgeable about some of the origins of social science in this period and have been thinking about introducing Tigger to early sociology and political economy alongside the more general history. I’m going to see if I can find copies of Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy, which was also serialized and actually sold more copies than Dickens at the time. They are an attempt to educate the masses in the principles of political economy using fables. (It appears that they are available online. However, some have been reprinted with an introduction and other supplementary material. The reviews of that Broadview edition suggest that it makes direct connections to the literature of Dickens, which might be quite handy. For me, anyway.)

There are also some very famous large-scale surveys of living conditions in this period, including Engels survey in Manchester and Booth’s in London. (In the US, there is an excellent study of Philadelphia around this period by W.E.B. DuBois titled The Philadelphia Negro that is a similar scope.) I’m not sure how accessible this stuff is or whether there are good books about it that we could read together but just finding links for this post has revealed some interesting possibilities. (That Booth link looks fabulous.)

My goal would be to give some context to Dickens commentary on social change, social status, and living conditions at this time. He used fiction to address these issues, but there was plenty of debate going on at the time with which he must have been engaged. Right now, that sounds like a pretty hefty goal for an 11 year old but I just want to get a sense of the range and then choose some items to explore throughout the year.

So here is my request to you: do you know of any resources about this period that would be suitable for a bright middle-schooler? They don’t have to be things she would read herself. Our preference is for well-written, engaging non-fiction. I’d also be interested in video resources if you know of any. Thanks.

Tigger is loving Shakespeare camp. They work really hard and she comes home pretty tired but she is very happy. Last week they did a lot of fight training. And they each learned a passage as an audition piece. The younger ones (of whom Tigger is one) all learned the “All the world’s a stage…” piece. (They are doing As You Like It.) She does a pretty good job of it. They performed it for the director on Friday and will find out their parts today.

On Friday evening we went down to Prescott to see a performance of As You Like It at the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival.  That link has a great photo of the stage and amphitheatre, facing the river (with NY State on the opposite bank). It is less than one-hour drive and we had a picnic first and then watched the play. It was great. And I think the kids got a really good sense of how the whole thing works together. And I won the 50/50 draw! Quite the surprise.

This week might be a busy week for Tigger. They get their parts today and have to have their lines all memorized well by Friday. The guidelines that came home at the beginning suggest planning 1 hour per day for memorization this week. She’s pretty motivated, though, so it’ll probably be fine.

We are going to go to see the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream tomorrow evening. And we’ve been invited to a friend’s for a barbecue on Wednesday evening. That’s Tigger’s birthday so we said we’d bring cake. I guess I need to get on that. She’ll have a party with her friends on Saturday. We’re just going to a local park that has a wading pool and play structure. She’s made loot-bag gifts for all her guests all ready. (If you want to wish her a happy birthday, she blogs here.)

I think this Shakespeare camp might become an annual event for her. It is pretty clear that lots of the kids come back year after year. And they learn lots. Unlike other day-camps, it is not really designed as child-care but rather as an intensive theatre production.  We’ll have to work out what that means for drama stuff during the year in relation to the budget.

On the other hand, there are worse ways to learn about English literature. Having that kind of deep engagement with the script at her age might provide a really good foundation for more critical engagement later (in high school years). She doesn’t seem to be bothered at all by either the language or the font. They have scripts in old-fashioned fonts where the “s” looks like and “f”. I hadn’t even thought about the potential impact of that until some of the other moms were talking about it on Friday evening. And we had a reasonable discussion of the reasons why the other company might have staged it the way they did on the way home from the performance.

Remember how I said that any book Becky recommends is probably worth it? Well she recommended a book blog the other day. Interesting Non-fiction for Kids (I.N.K.). Given my view that a well written book is as good a reason to study a topic as any, I figured this would be a good idea.

Well, this blog is now testing my resolve regarding going out and buying new books every time I see a good review. Todays post has some very good selections. There is the book about Alice Roosevelt that Becky already reviewed. But also a very interesting book about Ida B. Wells and lynching.

We are doing the Boomerang with Bravewriter and this month’s book is Crispin Cross of Lead. The first discussion question was about being declared a “wolfs head” and what that meant. The book is set in 14th century England but it seems that lynching would tie in with that discussion a bit — popular justice, not being considered human, etc. Not the kind of discussion everyone wants to have with their kids, but something that might make sense for us.

Thanks for the helpful comments on my earlier post. Just to reassure you, I have no intention of analyzing anything to death or turning my daughter off her love of reading. But some folks obviously enjoyed some of that analysis and so there must be some way of doing it that enhances rather than quashes all love of literature.

For those of you who haven’t read the comments, Becky quoted exactly the line from the Goldstones that makes me think their approach might be worthwhile:

The real danger of turning kids off from reading and hurling them
permanently in the direction of electronic media, we were convinced,
was in making books too superficial. Restricting children to pop
culture denied them the excitement of discovering the beauty of
language and the power of meaningful ideas. We felt certain that
engaging children in a sophisticated discussion was only a matter of
the way in which the dialogue was structured.

Wisteria puts this another way:

What I think is wonderful about their method, based on the tidbit
presented in the article, is that you are starting a conversation about
books. With children, the conversation is important. It tells them that
their views are valid, gives them a reason to look beyond the words,
encourages them to find valid support of their views, and keeps them
interested in books that do indeed have themes, symbolism,
protagonists, and antagonists rather than the drivel that seems so
popular these days.

As far as my musings on how this relates to literature as a discipline, Shaun helped a bit with the confidence issues when she said:

I would see the goal of literary study for younger children as getting
them to recognize that words and meaning aren’t transparent.

And then, almost serendipitously, Julie at Bravewriter blogged about the classics in a way that hit some of my concerns, albeit from a different angle and for a different age group. One interesting point that she makes is that she, personally, has developed her ability to see the layers in a piece of writing through mastering the craft of writing whereas her husband has developed that skill through reading. This suggests to me that while I might use the tools the Goldstones offer to help start interesting conversations the help Tigger see that words and meaning aren’t transparent, that she may also come to this through her own development as a writer.

And I think the Bravewriter program, which we are using and liking, is going to help with that. It already hits some of the things that other mentioned in the comments, like paying attention to the musicality and rhythm of language. And I also really liked Duffy’s suggestion about imagining other ways you could have constructed a particular story.

So I’ll keep muddling through, finding ways to have interesting conversations about at least some of the books that Tigger reads. The thing I like best about homeschooling is the opportunity to learn along with my daughter. So maybe I’ll come to “get” literature over the next few years.

I might be getting carried away. Too much planning is bound to backfire. On the other hand, I’ve got ideas floating around in my head that need some discussion to become properly formulated. So I’d like to do that now, while they are fresh. If I end up not using them right away, at least they will then be sitting there in some usable form when an opportunity arises.

To begin, some background. Lots of folks admit to math anxiety or hating science or whatever and how, as homeschooling parents, we try to teach this stuff anyway without passing on those negative feelings about particular subjects to our kids. Math seems to be the most common of these subjects but I’m sure folks have other ones. Mine is literature. I was an early and prolific reader. But I never “got” literature. As a discipline. I clearly worked out how to do what needed to be done, but I never really got comfortable with literary analysis. Consequently, I have avoided it as an adult (an adult that spent the better part of her adult life in and around universities so that isn’t as obvious as it seems). I became comfortable enough with literary texts more recently, but only if I could analyze them as a sociologist. I still don’t get what literary theorists do.

Now most of you are probably thinking, “Who cares? What difference does it make?” Particularly since my kid is only 10. But I think maybe it does. My kid is a strong a prolific reader. And I want to help her do more with some of what she reads. I’m fine with the using good literature to teach writing (including grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc.). I know how to do that. And I’ve got Bravewriter to help. But all the “literature guides” for kids books contain questions that make my skin crawl.

A while ago I picked up Deconstructing Penguins in the bookstore just because it looked interesting. I loved it. The authors argue that you can do proper literary analysis with kids as young as 7 and they can have fun doing it. You can have deep and interesting conversations about good quality children’s literature. Their approach is to treat literature as a mystery — What is the story really about? They introduce the concepts of protagonist and antagonist and help kids discover the underlying themes of a book.

I’ve found a short article by the authors that gives you a flavour of their approach.

They give lots of excellent examples. And if we are reading one of the books they talk about, their example gives me enough confidence to talk about it with Tigger. So when she and her dad read Jack London’s Call of the Wild, I talked about these ideas. I even explained the protagonist/antagonist thing using the Charlotte’s Web example from the book because I knew she was very familiar with that story. Tigger was very open to this sort of discussion.

Recently we’ve been reading Poppy. It’s the August book for The Arrow so we have lots of spelling, grammar, punctuation and literary elements stuff to do with it. But we also really like the book. And it has some interesting themes in it. I’ve googled to see if there are any guides to help me out with discussions but all I find are the questions that make my skin crawl. Questions that just hit the surface or only hit on the most obvious stuff. And way to many questions about how certain things make you feel. Shudder.

I think I have a handle on the protagonist/antagonist thing. And I’m going to have a go at this. But my lifelong failure to “get” literature is creating some confidence issues. So if anyone wants to chip in with some confidence boosting advice, I’d love to hear from you. Also links to useful discussions of this particular book or resources that take this kind of approach to books that I could use to help me guide Tigger as we read stuff together.

And because I’m the kind of person who has a PhD and used to work in a (possibly “the”) Cultural Studies department, I’m also interested in what all those of you with degrees in literature (and I know you are out there) think of the approach the Goldstone’s propose. I’m not planning on introducing poststructuralism or anything but I’d love to know where this kind of thing fits in those bigger debates in the discipline.

Somewhat inspired by GuiltFree’s article on learning to write, I started mulling over how we should approach English in the coming year (or so). While the article made me feel much better about how little writing Tigger does, it also mentioned the importance of a good grammar program to ensure that kids have a solid understanding of what is going on in the good writing that they read.

Becky had posted about Growing with Grammar so I had a look at that and a bit of a chat with her about it. I was thinking that maybe a workbooky program like that might be okay if only for a couple of subjects. But in our discussions she came up with some other suggestions that I will share here, because something clicked and I ordered stuff based on them. Thanks Becky!

I decided that Simply Grammar: An Illustrated Primer by Karen Andreola might work rather well with our fairly unschool-ish lifestyle. It is an oral program with lots of drawings. I have found what little I’ve read about Charlotte Mason style homeschooling to be quite interesting and while I am unlikely to do it ‘properly’, I think borrowing what I need from it is probably a good thing. Also, Tigger is very into pioneers and late 19th and early 20th century stuff right now and so the ‘old-fashioned’ quality of this might appeal greatly. For those reasons, I also decided that Emma Serl’s Intermediate Language Lessons would be a good companion.

The spine of our English learning is reading. Tigger reads voraciously. In fact, she would read all day if I let her (and I sometimes do, though she gets a bit grumpy and down). Like many of us she sometimes reads light stuff and sometimes heavier things. We are reading some children’s classics together at bedtime as read alouds, which I am enjoying, too. There are a lot of things that I didn’t read as a child that we can enjoy together. Sometimes we read to each other during the day, too. One thing I liked about the Emma Serl book was that it uses extracts from classic literature. Tigger has enjoyed reading bits of Shakespeare and T.S. Elliot’s cat poems and I think that if we are to do ‘lessons’, something that links directly with things she wants to read anyway or introduces her to things she might enjoy would be good.

But I also started thinking a bit more about the importance of reading “good writing”. Quite a while ago we discoved Stone Soup, a magazine which publishes children’s writing and artwork with the aim of improving children’s writing and art work. It is worth reading the philosophy of this magazine, described in an article one of the founders wrote for the BBC over 10 years ago. I decided to buy a subscription for her. The 3-year rate is a pretty good deal and since it has been around for over 20 years and is receiving 10 thousand submissions annually, I don’t think it is at risk of going out of business any time soon.

Our local library has an “Eager Readers” book club for 9-12 year olds that Tigger has been attending. I am hoping that this will continue despite the fact that the particular librarian who has been running it (and running it rather well) is moving. They are taking a break for the summer but have been meeting once a month in an ‘after school’ time slot. It has been a good incentive to try new books and a great opportunity to talk about them with other kids who love to read.

If more good writing is going to happen, we also need to have good reference books around. We have some but I checked out some of Becky’s suggestions and decided to purchase Woe Is I by Patricia O’Conner. I supplemented this with a Canadian style guide since we are, after all, Canadian (or some of us are. Some of us are English and Tigger is both but that just provides more opportunities to discuss language without it seeming like ‘teaching’).