I love Shakespeare. In high school, our English class took a trip to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland to watch Taming of the Shrew in the Elizabethan Theater there, and I took an entire term of Shakespeare in college. Ahhhh, linguistic deliciousness.

Now I have a swarm of small swarm of children swirling about, whom I have been tasked with educating. This term’s lessons for the girls included Shakespeare (Georgie is in 7th grade and going to school this year). Hmmm, how to introduce Shakespeare to a ten year old and a nine year old. As soon as Georgie found out what we were doing, he decided he wanted to do it to, so we waited until he got home to do anything.

Our studies have been such a success that the kids all beg to do Shakespeare class and are all excited about going through Hamlet this week and Henry V. So, with no further ado, is how you con your children into enjoying Shakespeare:

1. Love Shakespeare Yourself (or at least fake it really well). This pretty much applies to everything. If you hate it or groan when you have to read/watch/listen to it, you will have a much harder time getting them to like it. If you are enthusiastic and carry on about how fabulous Much Ado About Nothing is and how much they are going to love it, your chances of passing that attitude to them will improve.

2. Read Them a Short Prose Version of the Play You Are Going to Watch Beforehand. I’ve been reading to the girls from Beautiful Stories From Shakespeare by E. Nesbit because I am a cheapskate and that book is online for free at The Baldwin Project. Several of the most popular plays are contained in the book, and each prose version is maybe four or five pages long. Reading the story first lets them track the film (or play) much better since they don’t have to be trying to wade through both the plot and the unfamiliar dialogue all at the same time.

3. Pick the Most Accessible Film Versions That You Can and Watch the Easiest First. We started with the Emma Thompson/Kenneth Branagh version of Much Ado About Nothing. Since we had read the prose version already, the kids understood what was going on, and as the movie progressed I translated the more complicated pieces of the dialogue. They seemed to think it was hilarious! Georgie, who is twelve, particularly thought it was funny and understood much more of what was going on with less explanation in all the movies we’ve watched so far.

After Much Ado, we watched Romeo and Juliet (the 1960’s Franco Zefferelli version) and The Taming of the Shrew (Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor – brilliant!). Next we are planning to watch Mel Gibson’s Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, Marlon Brando’s Julius Caesar, and Orson Welles’s Macbeth (we’ll probably do a brief review of the history of for those last two as well).

Romeo & Juliet and Much Ado both have a little nudity in them. I just told my kids to cover their eyes until I told them not to, which they did. If you’re concerned, preview first.

4. Don’t Go Too Fast. I’ve been shooting for one to two plays a week (usually one). The last few weeks have been insanely busy around here, so we’ve stalled a bit but that’s ok. There is no time limit by which the children must be introduced to Shakespeare.

5. Put on Your Own Production! This really is the very best way to get the kids excited. Let them pick their favorite and look for an abridged version or kids version that retains the Shakespearean dialogue. I must admit, this is probably the most difficult part of the entire endeavor.

When I started looking, I found many children’s versions which completely rewrote Shakespeare’s fantastic dialogue in modern verse or prose. I see no advantage to this. A large part of the beauty of Shakespeare is the beauty with which he wields the English language. Why in the world would I want to trade that away instead of teach the kids to relish it?

Having said that, an abridged version is a necessity. The plays are far too long for small kids, many of the plots complicated, and much of the language uses metaphors and idioms that refer to common items or events in the 16th century but which have no cognate now.

I went with the Shakespeare in a Box version of Taming of the Shrew. This comes with ten copies of an abridged (45 minute) script, character cards for the cast, a director’s booklet, and a few props. It is designed to be read (as opposed to memorized) and done cold with no rehearsal. We decided to keep the reader’s theater aspect and have the adults we were pressing into service do their parts cold, but the children and I practiced their parts and blocked out the whole thing prior so that they could get a firm handle on what all of their lines meant and basic stagecraft items like speaking slowly and clearly and making sure to face the audience.

Also, I decided to edit even further for time and clarity, so I cut out all of Bianca’s part of the plot and just focused on Kate and Petruchio. For some reason, the Shakespeare in a Box fellow cut out the scene on the road where Kate changes from being a Shrew to being a dutiful wife; and since the last scene makes no sense without that one, I added it back in.

We borrowed costumes from our church’s costume closet and utilized half a dozen props we had around the house. Family, pizza, and Shakespeare made for a delightful evening. Here is the video of our production:

It came out so much better than I ever would have imagined! The kids were wondrous, the adults delightful, and the entire evening so much fun. Now Trinity wants to know when we are going to do the next one. Ack!

Have you done Shakespeare with your elementary/middle school students? How it go? What did you do? I’m always looking for good ideas.

Rachel

As the school year winds down, I find myself mentally pondering the highs and lows and trying to figure out improvement strategies for next year. Overall, I’ve been pretty happy with how the year went. We went with Tapestry of Grace for history/Bible/literature/church history/geography. It’s a lovely classical, integrated curriculum that winds all those things around each other as they are in life and so far seems to produce a strong understanding of how history all flows together.

Tapestry actually has such a massive amount of possibilities that the problem is picking and choosing what you want to really focus on and not making yourself (or your children) crazy by wanting them to do everything. The Tapestry people themselves don’t even recommend trying to do everything lest you turn into psycho people.

After probably biting off more than the kids were able to chew (hmm, sounds kind of gross when you say it that way) this year, I’ve decided that for next year we are going to be a lot shorter on the written questions and things. Instead, I am going to supplement the history with Hold That Thought pages. These are excellent notebooking pages on a whole bunch of historical people and events that we will be studying. We’ve been pretty sloppy on writing this year, so I’m planning to gear a bit more in that direction next year and see how it goes.

Hold That Thought has notebooking stuff for many different subjects. Several years ago I bought their My Bible Book and Beginners Bible/Church History notebooks and have printed them off several times for the kids and even for my niece (made a church book for her to do during the sermon). In addition to the Advanced History ones for next year, I am picking up Advanced Church History to go with our studies. We are going through Trial and Triumph (read aloud) and Church in History (Georgie) over the next year or so, and the HTT printables with dovetail perfectly.

If any of you are interested, Hold That Thought is running a word-of-mouth special right now. If you tell two other homeschoolers about HTT or write them up on your homeschooling blog, you will get a free notebooking CD of your choice with your order. So, I am now off to go place my order and get my freebie.

Rachel

Happily, today is one of those together days. Georgie got a 96% on his grammar test, and all three of the girls got 100% on their spelling tests. Yay! I teach good. Yeah sure, I suppose they may have had something to do with it.

This is Kyra’s first year of school (she’s five, turns six in July), and I’ve switched curriculum with her. The other kids I taught to read with TATRAS; and while it was okay, it just seemed to take f-o-r-e-v-e-r and the phonics didn’t always translate to the spelling side. Georgie didn’t pick up any reading speed until he was at least eight despite having been through all of TATRAS and several years of school. Trinity read right off the bat but was was an atrocious speller.

This year I switched everyone over to Spell to Write and Read and started Kyra off with it. I also decided to be bold and teach her cursive right from the start instead of printing. Okay, so that’s not bold like jumping from moving aircraft or engaging in hand-to-hand combat with an armed assailant, but it’s educationally bold. For me.

The basic philosophy of SWR is to skip the whole teaching them to read thing (which I loathe doing anyway because it is painfully slow and repetitive and awful) and just teach them to spell. After they hit a certain point, all the stuff that they can spell they will also be able to read and the reading will sort of organically occur.

Kyra and I have been faithfully practicing her 70 phonogram cards all year (which she only forgot two of today and she’ll have completely down by the end of next week), and guess what? It seems to be working. She’s starting to pick words off of things like the Amazon box and wants to read her readers more often. Learning cursive right away hasn’t seemed confusing with reading things in print. Here is today’s spelling test:

Awesome, huh? Go, Kyra! In case you’re trying to figure out the marking system (which I’m sure you all are), the double underlines are silent ‘e’s, and the single underlines are for double letter phonograms.

The other children have all had a marked improvement in both spelling and penmanship except for Georgie whose penmanship remains borderline terrible despite my best efforts, death threats, and blackmail. Hmmm, blackmail. Maybe I should tell him I’ll post his stuff on the blog. He’s almost to the age where parental embarrassment becomes an effective disciplinary tool. Hehe. His spelling isn’t too bad though. I guess in another year or two I should teach him to type.

In other, unrelated news that also falls under the “School” heading, I now know where the Duero River is, which until two weeks ago I had never even heard of. Yay, geography! Oh, I’m supposed to be teaching the kids school? Right. I knew that. Learning all this stuff myself is just a happy byproduct.

Rachel

Wow, it’s been five months since I last posted. Grandpa, I’m so sorry! (My Grandpa regularly comments on how much he likes hearing all the family news since they live in AZ). So, here’s the quick update for the three of you who don’t know:

Thanks to el crappo economo, my website business started tanking in August 2008. By January I was in full web redesign mode to try to breathe new life into a dying entity. By April, we were offloading expenditures, such as the kids’ school (I started homeschooling). By June the hit was hard enough that we moved in with my parents who graciously decided that they would rather we lived with them than in our van. By July, the website was costing more in payroll than it was bringing in, so I shut it down. It was weird for about a week and then I recovered. I don’t miss it at all. Kinda miss the money though…

Most of my summer was spent trying to figure out school for this year, which now seems to be humming along rather nicely. We’re on Christmas break at the moment, but the kids generally are enjoying their studies and I like teaching. We’re doing ancient history this year and I’m thoroughly enjoying learning all of that since somehow that part sort of got skipped in both high school and college (and I took a whole year of Western Civ at Portland State! So depressing.).

Our Egypt studies were a huge hit, and Georgie has begun to develop an appreciation for ancient literature. He thought the Epic of Gilgamesh was great (it was a young person’s version that sort of glosses over that whole part with Shamhat taming Enkidu). I read the full version myself for the first time and loved it! Now we’re going through stories of Greek heroes in prep for next term’s ancient Greece studies. They keep pointing out that they’ve heard half the names and other references from Harry Potter. Brilliant!

Georgie and I have had several conversations about worldviews and how the cultures we’re learning about differ from what we believe and why we believe what we do. He’s starting to recognize this stuff in reconstituted form when he watches television now, which has prompted some interesting discussions. Bwahahaha! My evil plan to make him aware is beginning to work even at eleven years old. Awesome!

George has been working himself to oblivion trying to make up for my lack of income generating-ness. He’s doing quite a good job, too. A couple weeks ago he was off on a shoot from Tuesday until Friday in Buffalo, NY and Cleveland, OH. That was the week there was a horrible storm in that part of the county. I worried about him the whole time he was gone, and after the story I heard when he returned I felt totally justified!!!!

His outgoing flight was from here to Newark and then they took a prop plane from Newark to Buffalo. George and his business partner guy Tim sat in the front of the plane right next to the flight attendant and Tim’s a pretty chatty guy so they spent the whole flight talking to her.

About fifteen minutes before landing they hit some pretty choppy turbulence due to high wind followed by a loud BANG at which point the flight got much worse. George spent the rest of the flight trying not to have to use the barf bag but Tim noticed that all the color drained right out of the flight attendant’s face and she suddenly got very quiet. The plane felt like it was listing with the pilot fighting to correct for it.

After they disembarked, Tim had to return to the plane to retrieve a forgotten item. The flight attendant was there and furtively confided that the plane had lost an engine. As in losing one of the two engines on the plane. In a windstorm. The flight got in around 8 or 9 am. By then end of that day both the Buffalo and Chicago airports were closed due to snow and wind respectively.

But by 3pm George and Tim had finished their work in Chicago and were headed down the interstate to Cleveland. After checking into the hotel and having what George described as a “terrible dinner,” they hit the proverbial sack (or hay depending on which part of the country you are from). By this time the interstate they had driven on to get from Chicago to Cleveland was also closed due to foul weather. But wait! The fun just never stops!

Around 11pm my time I received the following phone call:

George: Hi.

Me: Hi. Isn’t it one in the morning there? And what’s that weird noise in the background?

George: We’re at the hotel. That’s the fire alarm. Everyone’s out in the hall in their pajamas.

Me: Umm, sweetie, if the fire alarm is going off in the middle of the night, don’t you think it might be a good idea to get out of the hotel?

George: No, it’s minus ten degrees and blizzard conditions out there. Besides, I think it’s a sewage leak. There’s a bunch of water down the hall. The fire department is coming. We’re on the second floor. It’s fine. Oh hey, I think the alarm finally shut off. Oh, nope it’s back.

Me: George, sewer leaks can have fumes and weird things that are flammable. I think you should go out of there. Like now!

George: I gotta go. They’re sending us all to the lobby. Bye.

Charming! So after two hours of standing in the lobby, it turned out to be someone’s fire sprinkler went off and sent water gushing down the second floor. George and Tim got moved to the third floor where they got a couple more hours of sleep before heading back to work.

The rest of their trip was uneventful although even more sleep deprived since they went to a late movie, didn’t go to bed until midnight, and then had to get up at 3:30 to catch the red eye back home. I didn’t find out about the whole airplane engine debacle until I picked George up and Tim spilled the beans. I don’t think he was planning to tell me that part at all.

Considering the fact that I was worried already and the weather got so bad while they were there that every airport and road they used got shut down within hours of them being there, it was probably good that he didn’t tell me about the airplane when it happened. Then neither of us would have gotten any sleep. And now my January plans involve reinstating our life insurance and getting on LegalZoom to set up a will.

I think that’s all for today. There is one more story from this summer that I want to write down before I forget it entirely and then I’m hoping to post with a little more regularity, so I hope you four readers feel extra special now! Stay tuned tomorrow for Georgie and the Amazing Escaping Snakes!

Rachel

Church softball season has started up and I’m on the team again this year. Two years ago was my first season since high school (and we won’t discuss how long ago that was), and I had soooo much fun. Last year Henry was just a teeny tiny so I sat the season out. Last Thursday was our first game, and we won 18 to 4. I’m pretty sure it was my best game ever! I scored three runs (didn’t even strike out or get out at first! How’d that happen??), and got three people out from my post as second baseman. One of them was by catching a pop fly. Yay!

Then last night was a lovely jolt back into reality as we got slaughtered 22 to 3 by one of the best teams in the league. Even their girls hit way out past our center fielder. Plus, their pitcher was pitching short balls that seemed to find the plate at the last moment. The first time I was up, I let three strikes whiz on by without even swinging because they looked like they were going to be balls. Duh!

Also from yesterday, now I have a beautiful two square inch purple bruise adorning my left shin right below my knee. It matches the one and a half inch bruise on the same shin just above my ankle that I got last week (and yes, I did measure both bruises, ’cause why wouldn’t you??). Apparently I need to work on catching grounders on grass. Those tend to pop up at all kinds of weird angles because the ground is uneven, and they seem particularly fond of hitting me in the left shin. At least they aren’t popping me in the eye! Since I play infield most of the grounders that come my direction are on dirt which is much smoother. Good thing too! My next ball-related purchase is going to be shin guards because hey, me = wimp. I don’t really mind having purple lumps on my legs (when I was in Jr. High I played touch football with the boys on the blacktop every lunch break for two years and had permanent scabs on both knees for that entire time), but I don’t like not being able to sleep because my leg hurts any time anything touches it. Kind of obnoxious.

Otherwise things are going pretty well around here. We’re starting to settle in nicely, and I’ve been working on school curriculum for our next term which starts next week. In addition to our usual coursework, we’re starting two new subjects, Botany and Drawing, both of which I’m pretty excited about. The Botany book is put out by Apologia and is awesome. I come from science nerd people (like sand people but without the sand and the Banthas), and Apologia’s stuff is just as in depth as any science person could hope for when teaching their nine year old. When a book explains in Chapter 1 the term binomial nomenclature including the breakdown of the Latin roots of each word, you know that the book is going to be great.

Okay, well I’m off. You guys have a lovely holiday weekend, and may your 4th of July partying be safe and include lots of nice weather.

Rachel

Our church has the coolest Sunday School classes ever! A month or so ago Georgie came home all excited because he had homework from his Sunday School class (!!). He had two weeks to build a complete tabernacle out of whatever he wanted, so naturally he decided to make his from Bionicles. In case you are having trouble envisioning this, I have pictures.

This is the whole covered Tabernacle

And here are the individual pieces:

The Golden Lampstand (left) and Table of Showbread (r) with all the bread, of course.

Sacrifice (l) and Altar of Burnt Offering (r)

Ark of the Covenant

Altar of Incense

High Priest (l) and the Bronze Laver (r)

The whole shebang minus the tent top.

I’m particularly fond of the altar of incense and the High Priest. Georgie seems to have all the pieces of the tabernacle down now, and they seem to be glued to his brain cells pretty well. So great idea, Mr. Nieman (the SS teacher)! And awesome job, Georgie!

In other news, this week I started homeschooling Georgie, Trinity, Anika, and Kyra (well, and sort of Faith). It’s going pretty well! The kids are enthusiastic and have been working hard (a couple of them have even decided to get up early and do their half hour of reading before school starts at 8:30).

We’ve been pretty close to on schedule, and I’m nearly done figuring out all the curriculum for the term. It seemed better to start and finish figuring things out as I go along then to wait until everything’s perfect, which will happen in about never. Today I made the mistake of having the kids each make a set of sea animals flash cards during science. They colored and I glued the pictures onto 3×5 cards.

Math pop quiz: 5 sets (one for each kid) of 17 flash cards, each with an animal glued to the front and facts for that animal glued to the back means Mommy gets to glue how many pieces of paper to index cards? If you guessed 170, you have won the fabulous prize of coming to be my helper next time I have a stupid idea that should be spread over a few days instead of all done at once. At least science was the last class of the day.

Anyway, here’s my cuties on their first day of school:

Today Georgie and Trinity had a blurb in history about the clothing that people wear in the desert, and it was talking about the aba, which is a long bathroby-looking thing that gets worn over your long flowy shirt, and about the head coverings, which I can’t remember the names of (bad teacher!). This seemed like a good excuse to torture my children (not that I really need an excuse, but when the opportunity presents itself…):

No, actually they were quite pleased with themselves. Georgie took the stuff off his head but left his bathrobe on until I made him remove it to go to choir practice at 7:00.

This one just made me laugh because it’s amazing how expressive Trinity can be with just her eyeballs.

Okay, well that’s it for today. Is the weekend here yet?

Rachel

Okay, so I am officially starting homeschool with the kiddos this coming Monday (4/20/09). Yikes! Actually, I’m feeling pretty ok about it. Got the schedule all sorted out. See?

What, you can’t read that? Well, click on it and it will take you to the bigger version. For term study this time we are doing a unit on sea life. That way when we go to Family Camp at the end of the term, we can have an excuse to go to the excellent Oregon Coast Aquarium (like we need an excuse).

Even better, the aquarium has a whole bunch of downloadable curriculum for homeschoolers, which will make organizing easy for me (big plus). Yay! So now I’m all excited.

I went through what I have and need yesterday and am hoping to make it out to Exodus Books tomorrow or Saturday to finish picking up class materials. I think I need to clean off one more bookshelf today so I can finish setting up the classroom and then I’ll be ready-ish. So yep, feeling pretty good!

Oh, were you wondering what the heck Resurrection Term is? We are running our school year according to the church calendar and days of creation. So instead of having three or four terms of school and then the summer off, we are having seven terms that are seven weeks each.

The first week of each term the kids have off of school as a reflection of Sabbath rest the first day of each week. The school year starts mid-November for Advent Term, and that entire term of seven weeks is off of school (first term of seven, also reflecting Sabbath rest on the first day of the seven day week).

There are several advantages to doing it this way.

1. Your children’s brains don’t leak out their ears over a long summer holiday.
2. The longest break comes around Christmas when everyone is swamped and wants to do family stuff anyway.
3. If you don’t like the schedule or get behind on something, your term is only six weeks of actual school time so it’s not going to screw the kids up too much to just wait and revise next term.
4. For summer, we do a bit lighter load and the schedule is flexible enough to allow for that.

If you’ve been calculating in your head as I’ve been explaining, you’ll notice that seven terms of seven weeks makes 49 weeks but there are 52 weeks in the year. That leaves three floating weeks to take elsewhere as vacation.

We’re taking two in June, before and after Family Camp which is the start of the Apostolic Age Term and then the last one probably in August somewhere during the Church Age Term. No doubt this will come up again in a later post, but if you’d like to do a bit more reading on your own, this idea was developed by my friend Melody at Solis Ortus.

Oh! Also, I’ve decided not to bore all of you with our day in, day out homeschooling details so I have started a dedicated blog for that in order to better bore only those of you who wish to be bored. It’s at HomeschoolSandbox.com. My friend Lana who is currently homeschooling her two school-aged kids has joined that blog as an editor, so she’ll be posting her homeschooling life on here as well. I’m excited! Should be fun.Welcome, Lana! This should be fun.

Rachel

Today Amy emailed me these pictures that she took of the kids at school (Zera Hall) over the last few months. They’re so cute!

Apparently the blue frosting was very blue.

Studying India.

The schoolroom.

Anika being her usual charming self.

Trinity loves school.

Georgie loves Dragons (and school). I think he bought the book from the school store.

Thinking hard.

Thinking less hard. This picture cracks me up. Trinity is the queen of goofy faces.

Three of our happy children. Amy printed a copy of this for me and sent it home with the kids. It’s sitting on my desk so I have my children smiling at me all the time. Hmm, I think I need a frame. I love this picture.

Due to financial restrictions, the kids will no longer be attending Zera Hall as of the end of this term (April 10th) and I will be homeschooling them from then on. Amy has been extremely gracious about the whole thing, but this has been a frustrating time for me. The kids have been with Amy for three years now, love school, and have been flourishing there. Taking them out is a great grief to me, and although I am starting to look forward to homeschooling them here, I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing.

The children themselves seem to be reacting fairly well. The girls are excited about not having “the long car ride” home before they can start on their homework (we live seven minutes from school). Georgie is a bit more suspicious of the whole notion, but he pretty much starts that way when you tell him he will be doing anything new or different. I think once we get going, they will probably all miss Mrs. Hayes whom they love very much.

Amy is actively looking for new students now, so if you have daughters in the K-4 age range and are looking for all the benefits of homeschooling without actually having to do the schooling yourself, Zera Hall is the place for you. Amy is a truly wonderful teacher, and you will be delighted as we have been. It has been our great joy and honor, Amy, to have you teach our children. Many thanks.

Rachel

Kyra’s educational voyage began today, and boy was she happy! She’s been asking me to start doing school with her ever since her nap schedule dropped from every day to every other day a few months ago, and as I was browsing through my computer stuff today I discovered a whole stash of old alphabet printables that I had made up ages ago when I got started with the older kids.

After rummaging around downstairs for a binder and printing off all the tracers, Kyra and I put together a school book for her and she sat down next to me in my room and did school while I worked on my computer. She’s four and a half. School at this age is not terribly consuming, and I’m pretty sure I can keep her busy with tracers for a few weeks until I get going with the big kids next month.

We started today with tracers for her name. As soon as she can do that, we’ll move on to the alphabet. Here’s a couple of pictures of my happy new student:

Yes, fancy desk and materials, I know. She seems thoroughly happy to be sitting on my bedroom floor right next to Mommy with the bathroom stool for her desk. So congratulations, Kyra, and welcome to school!

Rachel