Our High School Archaeological Studies

The Ring of Brodgar, Orkney

Gods, Graves & Scholars: The Story of Archaeology by C.W. Ceram

I’ve used this book in the past with my older ones and it’s very good. Ceram, a journalist and not an archeologist, traces the development of a highly specialised science in a way that the ordinary person can read it with genuine excitement as they would if they were reading a detective thriller.
The book was originally published in 1949 and was later revised and substantially enlarged. We have the 1971 edition and it is well-illustrated with black & white photographs, pen drawings and maps. There are 32 chapters, an appendix with chronological tables and a bibliography for the topics he covers.

The Folio Society have published the book and of course it's lovely, but expensive. Here is what they say about it:

'From Pompeii to the Rosetta Stone and from Nineveh to Chichén-Itzá, this hugely influential book was the first to tell the story of archaeology. First published in German in 1949, it was translated into 26 languages and became an international bestseller. More than any other book, it helped stoke a passion for archaeology in the imagination of the post-war world, and remains one of the world’s most widely read books on the subject...
Ceram tells us that ‘the great Palace of Minos was as large as Buckingham Palace’, that the bronze statues of Pompeii ‘rang like bells’ when they were first struck by the workmen’s shovels, and describes how our modern superstition about a black cat crossing our path stems from ancient Babylon.'

We're using Ceram's book as our main 'text' for the year and this term I'm adding in some fiction that is centred around archaeology. 

The Boy with the Brown Axe by Kathleen Fidler

This book is geared towards a younger audience (around 9 to 13) but I included it because it's a fictionalized account set in the Neolithic village of Skara Brae on the Orkney Islands which dates back 3,000 to 5,000 years ago. It describes how the village may have been destroyed and weaves in some geographical detail such as the Bay of Skaill, the Standing Stones of Stenness and Maidstowe. One of the characters in the book is a stone mason who is working on the Ring of Brodgar. Both my daughter and I enjoyed it even though it was a quick read for us.
Thanks to Sarah @delivering grace for suggesting this book.

The Rediscovered Village of Skara Brae

Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters (1975)

This is the first book in the author’s Amelia Peabody series and it was a delightful read. We've both read this and my daughter loved it. While her characters in these books are fictitious, historic figures do make an appearance from time to time. For example, in Crocodile on the Sandbank, a well-known French Egyptologist plays a small part in the story. William Flinders Petrie, the famous archaeologist, is referred to a number of times, as well as a some other Egyptologists.
Amelia Peabody had lived a quiet life with her father, a scholar and antiquarian, generally supporting him and keeping house as he got older. The story takes place in the 1880’s. Amelia is 32 years old, single, and very sure of herself. 
When her father dies he leaves her his considerable fortune and she decides to leave England and travel to see all the places her father had studied: Greece, Rome, Babylon and Thebes.
She engages a companion, a Miss Pritchett, to go with her. Miss Pritchett contracts typhoid while they are in Rome and is dispatched back to England. Amelia, musing whether or not she should find a substitute, comes across Evelyn, a young English woman on the street near the Roman Forum. She had been heartlessly abandoned by her false lover when he realized she had no fortune and had fainted from hunger and exhaustion. Amelia rescues her, nurses her back to health then two of them take a boat up the Nile to an archaeological site to embark on their Egyptian adventure.

I looked into this series of books for my daughter to read alongside her Archaeology studies this year, for enjoyment mostly, but the settings bring archaeology to life and certainly give a feel for antiquity.
Elizabeth Peters earned her Ph.D in Egyptology and her archaeological knowledge comes through into her mystery writing which adds an authentic touch.
The author writes well and there’s a good dose of humour in her writing. Both my daughter and I think this first book has some similarities to Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit, which we both really enjoyed.
I've started reading the second book in the series, The Curse of the Pharaohs, and while it's a great read, I think it may be just a tad mature at the moment for my daughter. Fortunately our library has a good number of the Amelia Peabody books so I'll check them out to see if they're suitable. I think once you've read the first one it's not necessary to read them in order. But do read Book 1 first if you decide to try them out!

Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie - a murder mystery set in a Middle Eastern
archaeological dig.

Appointment With Death by Agatha Christie - set in Petra. When Christie was 40 years of age she met her second husband, Max Mallowan, an archaeologist who was assisting Leonard Woolley in Ur. Christie worked alongside her husband and became an invaluable aid to him in his work. 

Ur from the air, 1927 - about a year before Christie visited

Fearfully & Wonderfully Made

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made is told from the perspective of the pioneering researcher, world-reknowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist, Dr. Paul Brand and is co-authored by Philip Yancey.
I wrote about how we used this book in a couple of different posts but this one will give you an idea of the unusual nature of this book.
The book is scheduled as a health option anywhere between Year 7 and 11 in the Ambleside Online curriculum. I've read it aloud to my 14 year old son while his 9 year old sister listened in and I did some editing on the run as it does have some mature themes. It's probably best as a read aloud for that reason, but also because it presents some wonderful opportunities for discussion.
It's a unique book in many respects as it explores the design and intricacies of the human body, its patterns and unity, and what happens when parts of the body malfunction, then and provides insights into the Body of Christ, the Church.

I have a spare copy of this book to give away to someone who will be at the Mum Heart Conference in Newcastle in June. For a chance to win this excellent book, check out my original Giveaways in the Merry Month of May post and leave a comment here and/or on my Facebook page.

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering. 

Saint Augustine

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin - 'a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again.'

Dystopian or anti-Utopian literature is a genre that has always interested me. I can't really describe this type of reading as enjoyable but I'm attracted by the ideas and thoughts suggested by these types of books and the implications there might be for today's society.
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin was completed in 1920-21 before Stalin's rise to power so it was quite prophetic for the time but it also feels prophetic nearly a hundred years later with its themes of a technological and utilitarian world.
We is written in a first person narrative and is fragmented and oblique in places because of this. It wasn't until I was about three quarters of the way into the book that I really began to connect with the story and I think that was largely due to this intentional device the author used. It suited the overall theme of the story but it wasn't an easy read.

I'm not going to attempt to 'review' this book as I don't think I'd do it justice, but I'd like to focus on some of Zamyatin's ideas that stood out to me as relevant to our present culture.

A quick, very basic outline of the story:

It is the twenty-sixth century A.D. Many years ago, there was a two-hundred year war between the City and the Country and only a fraction of the world's population was left alive. Since the war, OneState, ruled by the Benefactor, and overseen by the Guardians, has vanquished Hunger and Love, the previous rulers of the world, and established a regimentation of mankind where everything is mathematically precise, each citizen functioning like a machine.

D-503 is the narrator of We. He is a mathematician and the builder of the INTEGRAL, a technologically advanced space ship that OneState is going to use to spawn the perfect society through the rest of the solar system.
Through D-503 we are introduced to the citizens of OneState (identified only by Numbers) and their collective society as he documents his thoughts in a diary. D-503 becomes infatuated by I-330, a leader of the Mephi, an underground group of revolutionaries. This messes with his rational, precise mind and he becomes sick. In fact, according to the doctor, he seems to be developing a soul:

"You're in bad shape. It looks like you're developing a soul."

A soul? That strange, ancient, long-forgotten word. 

We sometimes used expressions like "soul-mate," "body and soul," "soul-destroying," and so on, but soul...

"That's...very dangerous," I murmured.

The Mephi have plans to get control of the INTEGRAL. A revolution is brewing and D-503 is instrumental in allowing them to achieve their aim.

Some ideas expressed in the book:

A rigidly controlled society
Conformity - the victory of all over one, of the whole over the part
The individual personality is subjugated to the collective
The mathematical precision of life in a controlled environment
The regimentation of mankind

 ...the Table of Hours - it turns each one if us right there in broad daylight into a steel six-wheeled epic hero. Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the very same hour and the very same minute, we get up, millions of us, as though we were one. At the very same hour, millions of us as one, we start work. Later, millions as one, we stop. And then, like one body with a million hands, at one and the same second according to the Table, we lift the spoon to our lips...

Scientific utopia
The Benefactor is all powerful, a god-like being who desires sacrifice
The State was above everything - loved ones, friends, the individual
The total surrender to Technology and Utilitarianism

The mechanism has no imagination.
When you were at work did you ever happen to see a distant, idiotic, dreamy smile spread across the physiognomy of a cylindrical pump? At night, during the hours designated for rest, did you ever happen to hear the cranes toss restlessly and heave sighs?
...But you are not to blame. You are sick. The name of your illness is:
IMAGINATION.

Controlled & selective reproduction
The idea that the natural world is ugly and the technological society is pure

Man ceased to be a wild animal only when he built the first Wall. Man ceased to be a wild man only when we built the Green Wall, only when by means of that Wall, we isolated our perfect machine world from the irrational, ugly world of trees, birds, and animals...

A belief that everything in the past was primitive and absurd
Happiness and freedom are incompatible
Freedom is regarded as 'disorganised wildness'

At the same time as I was reading this book, I'd started reading through Norms & Nobility: A Treatise on Education by David V. Hicks. He observes that:

'The ancients, unlike us, expected science to enhance the their understanding of the material world without particularly helping them to transform it. Their real interest was man, and wherever possible, they tried to turn Science away from matter to man...
Because the ancients regarded man as free...and not as determined by a material universe, there was little reason to turn science and mathematics into tools with which to mold nonliving matter and man's future...
But modern science...would change the world and, if we accept the dominant ideological creeds of the nineteenth century, it would change man...
A fundamentally political ideology dedicated to the reform or the anticipated progress of material conditions uprooted the ancient insistence upon a personal ideal.'

Hicks goes on to say that the modern world has rules of analysis that 'increasingly govern our understanding and appreciation of art, poetry, history, and even religion.'

It is not concerned with what ought to be done, but what can be done.

Taken to its extreme, the end result of this way of thinking is the starting point for D-503's world.

'There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The difference lies only in the fact that one stick of dynamite explodes once, but one book explodes thousands of times.'

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Further reading

George Orwell's review of We

Short biography of Zamyatin - interesting that he was a naval engineer and had a technical  background.




Linking to Russian Literature Challenge, Back to the Classics: Russian Classic and The Classics Club.

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1903-1969)

John Wyndham's novel, The Day of the Triffids, which was published in 1951, is one of the early science fiction novels. The author called it a logical fantasy and it is a very interesting work of speculative fiction. Written in the first-person, it is a reflective and well-written look at the 'what if' of a post apocalyptic world where the majority of the population suddenly goes blind.

Bill Masen chances to be in hospital swathed in eye bandages when the spectacular green meteor showers lit up the sky. When he awakens the next day - the day his bandages are scheduled to be removed - it was to find that everyone who has witnessed the meteor shower has lost their sight.
In the ensuing chaos, bioengineered plants - the venomous, mobile, and carnivorous triffids, already adapted to a sightless existence - use the opportunity to assert control.

'It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that 'it can't happen here' - that's one's own little time and place is beyond cataclysms. And now it 'was' happening here.'

The Day of the Triffids has been on high school reading lists in Australia and New Zealand, even quite recently, and I can understand why. In many ways the story is timeless. Genetic modification, biological warfare, and environmental concerns are even more relevant today than they were in John Wyndham's time, but the author's penetrating observations of the human psyche, morality, and social structures is what I found most compelling.

An essay comparing Wyndham with another British science fiction author, H.G. Wells, said of the former:

'...by fastidiously shrinking back from the sensational, Wyndham found a unique literary voice. He described the odd rather than the fantastic, the disturbing rather than the horrific, the remarkable rather than the outrageous. He dealt in menace, not terror. This quietness of tone was to prove effective and likeable.'


On order & civilisation:

'I was not yet ready to admit, after nearly thirty years of a reasonably right-respecting existence and law-abiding life, that as long as I remained my normal self, things might even yet in some inconceivable way return to their normal. Absurd it undoubtedly was, but I had a very strong sense that the moment I stove-in one if these sheets of plate-glass I should leave the old order behind me for ever: I should become a looter, a sacker, a low scavenger upon the dead body of the system that had nourished me. Such a foolish niceness of sensibility in a stricken world! - and yet it still pleases me to remember that civilised usage did not slide off me at once, and that for a time at least I wandered along past displays which made my mouth water while my already obsolete conventions kept me hungry.'

'I think we'll all have to try to see ourselves not as the robbers of all this, but more as - well, the unwilling heirs to it.'


Some classical allusions:


'In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.'

'Oh, yes, Wells said that, didn't he? - Only in the story it turned out not to be true.'

'The crux of the difference lies in what you mean by the word country - patria in the original,' I said. 'Caecorum in patria luscus rex imperat omnis - a classical gentleman called Fullonius said it first: it's all anyone seems to know about him. But there's no organised patria, no State, here - only chaos. Wells imagined a people who had adapted themselves to blindness. I don't think that is going to happen here - I don't see how it can.'


On loneliness:

'Now, for the first time I began to feel the horror that real loneliness holds for a species that is gregarious by nature. I felt naked, exposed to all the fears that prowled...

Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative - an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary...That day I had learned it was much more. It was something that could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary, and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time it's chance to frighten and frighten horribly - that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do...'


On leisure & knowledge & utilitarianism:

'...from my reading of history, the first thing you have to have to use knowledge is leisure. Where everybody has to work hard just to get a living and there is no leisure to think, knowledge stagnates, and people with it. The thinking has to be done largely by people who are not directly productive  - by people who appear to be living almost entirely on the work of others, but are, in fact, a long term investment...'





 Linking this post to Back to the Classics 2016 - fantasy, science fiction, or dystopian classic.

Ambleside Online Year 6 with a 13 year old

Where to place students in the Ambleside Online curriculum is a question that comes up repeatedly and seems to cause much angst. I think the problem is we look at the year number and think our child is a certain age and therefore needs to be in a year that would correspond with the year they would be in if they were going to school.

When my older sons were doing Ambleside Online Year 8, one of my daughter's friends was in college doing a liberal arts degree and was reading books such as Utopia and the essays of Francis Bacon, books my two sons were using in their AO reading .

I took awhile trying to figure out where to place my just turned 13 year old son, Bengy, and decided Year 6 would give him an opportunity to cover Modern History, which he was keen to do. In previous years we'd worked our way through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance & Reformation and then he had a year of a combination of AO books from various levels as I worked out whether to place him in year 6 or 7 and got my two older boys going with Year 8.

Looking at the books for Year 6, I decided they would work for a 13 year old and that I could add extra reading for World War 2 to beef it up a bit and make up for some books he'd already done.

We basically followed the AO schedule but omitted books we's used in previous years i.e. Genesis: Finding our Roots; It Couldn't Just Happen; Age of Fable and a number of the free reads.

We added in to the weekly schedule:

The Book Of Marvels (Geography) - an AO year 5 book.

Bush Days by Amy Mack (Australian Nature Study)

The Mystery of the Periodic Table by Benjamin D. Wiker (Science)

Exploring the History of Medicine by John Hudson Tiner (Science)

I made out a list each week and allowed him to space out his readings and work however he wanted. He had to work around the times when we did devotions, read aloud, Plutarch and Shakepeare as a group and our weekly trip to music lessons. About half way through the week I would ask him how he was going and make sure he was on track to finish everything by the end of the week and in return he'd remind me that I needed to do his dictation with him.
This is a sample of the weekly schedule he followed:

 

Favourite scheduled books:

The Hobbit, Never Give In, Albert Einstein and Galileo & The Magic Numbers.

Grammar 

Easy Grammar Plus by Wanda Phillips. I just bought the reproducible teacher's text. It's huge and has the worksheet on the right hand side and the answers on the left, which you could cover up if you wanted to write in the actual book. He did about 3 pages a week. Abebooks may be the cheapest way to get it.

Latin

We've used a few different resources for Latin in previous years but this year I gave him Getting Started with Latin by William Linney. Some of it has been review for him but he likes the way this book explains things and it has solidified and made sense of what he'd covered earlier.

If you have a boy who doesn't see the point of Latin, this video I posted a couple of months ago might be helpful for him to watch, especially if he's into computers. 

Science 

Oral narrations are required after each reading and a written narration with illustrations explaining about something he'd read once a week in his science notebook.


 





           























We used a number of online videos to supplement his science reading. I posted some that we used with  Secrets of the Universe here.
I also put a number of other science videos we used on Pinterest  including The Birth of an Island which lined up with the 7th chapter of The Sea Around Us.


Life Skills/Manual Work/Handicraft

Bengy continues to enjoy baking. His forte is pies and this was an experiment where he adapted an apple pie recipe by adding a packet of frozen berries (thawed before use) to the apple filling. The experiment was a ripping success and I barely had time to take the photo before it disappeared. I make sure my children know how to work the oven & are safety conscious but I leave one of them in charge & vacate the room if possible - it's better if I'm not looking because it often looks crazy & gets messy but as long as it gets cleaned up afterwards & nobody gets hurt I'm happy. I'm very blessed to have two sons who are very competent in the kitchen! I did try with the other two...






Sound system - my husband is involved with sound production and the boys help out. Bengy has learned to set and pack up and operate the sound system and has assisted at live productions.

Volunteer work - leader at children's holiday programme; projector at church; piano/keyboard in church band; helps lead weekly kid's ministry with his older sister. My children have gravitated to kid's ministry and/or music ministry, areas both my husband and myself have been involved in most of our adult lives. It's very encouraging to see them keen to serve and develop the gifts God has given them.

Life skills

This year I taught him to use the sewing machine and he made a wheatbag.
Computer - picked up skills from his dad and older siblings.
Cleaning the bathroom, cooking.

Written Narrations

Poetic narrations would be the first choice for this young man but I try to get him to try other variations. One he enjoyed was a science quiz. He asked a series of questions, to which he knew the answers and tested everyone else. Here's one of them:

 

Poetic narration from his Ancient History reading and Shakespeare's The Tempest

Read Alouds

Ourselves by Charlotte Mason


The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle

The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss

Otto of the Silver Hand by Howard Pyle

Additional Free Reeds

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers - a pre WW1 espionage type novel. 
Bengy didn't enjoy it too much, 'way too much detail and not enough story; might have been interesting a hundred years ago......' - a couple of his older brothers enjoyed it though.

 Beau Geste by Percival Christopher Wren- an old classic adventure novel of the French Foreign Legion written in 1924.

Hereward the Wake by Charles Kingsley - free read in AO Year 7; set around the time of the Norman conquest.

The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson AO Year 7 free read; War of the Roses & Richard the Third before he becomes king.

The Sledge Patrol by David Howarth - Greenland, WW2. Howarth has written some good non-fiction WW2 books we have enjoyed.

Greenmantle & The Island of Sheep by John Buchan. We love this author's books.

Heroes of Asgard by A & E Keary

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Message From Malaga by Helen MacInnes - espionage, set in Spain during the Cold War

The Unconquerable (also known by the title, Why Still We Live) by Helen MacInnes - Poland, WW2

The Guns of Navarone by Alistair MacLean - WW2; set on a fictional island in Greece

Bear Island by Alistair Maclean - a thriller novel set on an island in the Arctic Ocean about a search for stolen gold from WW2.


Economix by Michael Goodwin - my husband read this book and suggested I give it to the boys to read. Although it's American its general comments are applicable to other areas of the world. You can see sample pages here.

Plutarch - Dion, Pericles

Shakespeare - The Tempest; A Midsummer Night's Dream. I have a Pinterest board with some resources we've used for Shakespeare.


Timelines - weekly entry

Typing - we use this free online typing tutor; I like it because it uses sections from decent books such as Pinocchio for typing practice.

Geography - free download from Seterra

Maths - completed Saxon Algebra 1 this year - we've use Art Reed's Algebra 1 DVD this time around and Bengy really likes the way he explains concepts. We've used Saxon Maths from 5/4 to Calculus in our family, partly because that was what was available years ago, but we've continued because they've worked well for us, mostly. Two of the boys struggled with Saxon around Algebra 1 & 2 and both of them had a break from Saxon for about 9 months; one did Geometry & the other Khan Academy. If I'd had the DVDs it would have been easier.

Some people hate Saxon and think that it only teaches them to pass tests and they can't transfer their knowledge and don't understand the 'why,' but that hasn't been the case for us otherwise I would have looked  at something else. Others say there are too many problems per lesson but that can be worked around. Our older children were well prepared for the SAT exams they did and have had no trouble when they did science requiring maths or maths at university.

Earlier this year I found Bengy was taking so long to finish a lesson even though he understood everything and enjoys maths so I told him he only needed to do 3 lessons a week. He's been splitting the lesson into two: one day he views the DVD and does the practice from the book and about half the problems; the next day he does the second half of the practice problems.

The beauty of home education is that we have a choice and we can use whatever works for a particular child and we don't have to allow someone else's opinion to push us to change something that is working well for us.
I also think having a good solid foundation in the early years is so important to understanding highschool level maths.
This site gives some help for working out how to record Saxon on a transcript.

Other

Swimming, squash
Piano & theory lessons

Ambleside Online Year 8 with a 17 year old late reader

Una and the Red Cross Knight by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale  (1871-1945)

                                                                     Hosted on Fotki

We've just finished a slightly modified AO year 8 with our 17 year old son, affectionately known as Hoggy.

A bit of background first: this is our 4th child whose learning style was so completely different from his 3 older siblings and who didn't read well until about 3 years ago. He sort of clicked with reading when he was between 10 and 12 years of age but it took a few years for him to read fluently.

About a year ago, 3 months before he turned 17, I took a deep breath and started him & his younger  brother with Ambleside Year 8. We had previously been reading about famous men of the Renaissance & Reformation so I decided to continue with this time period. I also began to read the Original Charlotte Mason Homeschooling books beginning with Volume 4, A Philosophy of Education. You can read my comments about it here.

One of the beauties of a home education is being able to tailor the education to the child rather than squeeze the child into something that is ill-fitting or inappropriate. 

Here is a summary of what we covered with comments/explanations and family read alouds added. He works one full day a week so his schoolwork is over 4 days.

Bible 

He plans his own daily reading and joins in with family devotions in the evenings & memory work a few times a week with me and his 3 younger siblings.

Devotional

 Saints and Heroes, Volume 2

The following three books are different to the AO Year 8 schedule.

*The Screwtape Letters – C.S. Lewis - enjoyed this and could narrate it quite well.

**How to be Your own Selfish Pig – Susan Schaeffer MacAulay - Not a difficult read and very good for discussion.

***Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis - This was a little difficult for him to narrate but he enjoys Lewis's writing and thinks he explains things really well. This book is scheduled in AO year 9 but I wanted to give him another C.S. Lewis book to read.

Plutarch - I read aloud Poplicola, Brutus, and Dion over the course of the year with all 4 children.We've had some great discussions especially with the suggestions from the study guides.

Shakespeare - Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing - we all followed along with the BBC audio recordings and Shakespeare written guides and then watched the Kenneth Branagh movies with slight editing in Much Ado.

History

Churchill's New World - Plodding through untold G.A. Henty historical fiction novels really helped with Hoggy's grasp of English history in general and Churchill's book in particular. He told me the plot in G.A. Henty's books is always the same: young lad gets caught up with some famous man in some famous battle and in the end marries the young lady also caught up in the plot and lives happily ever after - but he enjoys the different history scenarios.

* Voyage of the Armada - worked well for written narrations

Biographies

** ***Oliver Cromwell, epilogue only

** ***A King Condemned - C.V. Wedgewood (this is the same book as AO suggests for King Charles I, but with yet another different title). Both boys complained that this was overkill as they had learned about Charles already & they'd had enough of him - but they finished it.

Johanne Kepler - John Hudson Tiner; easy read.

*** Galileo - the chapter from The Great Astronomers

Literature

** ***The Betrothed

The History of English Literature - Marshall - we started from the beginning with this book, doing 2 chapters a week until we'd caught up to the time period covered in year 8 and then did one a week.

* **Westward Ho - I made this a  free read

Age of Fable - this is scheduled in the earlier years but Hoggy hadn't read it so I included it.

***The Holy War - started this a bit late so it's still to be finished.

Speeches

Read Martin Luther & Queen Elizabeth but omitted John Donne.

Francis Bacon essays

A Man for all Seasons - the play

Utopia - the boys read the book but the link is to a free audio to listen to online or download.

Whatever Happened to Justice? - I didn't get the book until the middle of the year so he hasn't finished it this year.

William Harvey and Circulation of the Blood - went a bit over his head I think and his oral narration was a bit scattered.

Our Mother Tongue - one lesson a week

Grammar of Poetry - one lesson over a week or two depending on time available.

How Should we Then Live - DVDs - we'd started viewing these the year before and continued this year with volume III & IV, The Renaissance & The Reformation. The older 3 had read Francis Schaeffer's book of the same name but I thought the DVD's would be better for our current situation. We watched them together and then talked about the ideas presented. The footage is a bit dated as the original videos were done in the 70's I think, but the ideas and truths contained in it are accurate & contemporary.

Poetry

Read a poem a day

* A.B.Patterson - Australian poet
*  Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves

** Shakespeare Sonnets: XVIII & CXVI

**George Herbert: Redemption, Love, Colossians 111, The Elixir

***John Donne, Holy Sonnets I & XIV

***Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Geography

Kon Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl - we'd just finished this as a read aloud at the beginning of the year. It was a great choice and worked well for our children aged 6 to 16 yrs of age at the time.

Picture Study

Durer

Australian Artists: Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin

 Jansen's Story of Painting

Composers 

Schubert, Chopin, Prokofiev, Gershwin.
I read relevant chapters from Lives of the Musicians by Kathleen Hull aloud - everyone enjoys the humour in this book.

 

Handiwork & Life Skills

This year it has been home renovations - removing tiles, painting and small plumbing jobs.
General home and car maintenance, gardening, some electronics.
Setting up and operating the sound system at church.
Stage management work at an outdoor Christmas Carol's event.

Passed his driver's license test on the first attempt.

Natural History

I scheduled some books from previous AO years.

*Wild Animals I Have known - Ernest Seton Thompson

** School of the Woods - William J. Long

And added an Australian author

*** The 10 Bushcraft Books by Richard Graves

Free Reading

Northanger Abbey (AO year 9)

DonQuixote - James Baldwin

Folk Songs

This post has three of the suggested AO year 8 songs for this time period. We also added in a couple of Australian folksongs.

Read Alouds

Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan

The House I Left Behind by Daniel Shayesteh - I'll post about this important and excellent book at some time in the future. It's difficult to put it in a category - a combination of cultures/geography/biography/history/apologetics.

Ourselves - chapters 1-4.  I think this book by Charlotte Mason is excellent but for some reason all I get is groans when I take it off the shelf. I read it aloud regardless and try & get some discussion going. 

I get my children to narrate every single reading that they do - I think this has helped Hoggy in particular  with retaining what he has read and also with understanding and writing about it.

I expect 2 written narrations at least per week also and studied dictation twice a week.
His spelling has improved so much in the last year. I've always done dictation with him but I never used to give it to him to study beforehand and I see now that it makes sense to do it this way - it avoids him making mistakes and reinforcing the errors by having them visually before him.

I have written some thoughts on Narration in this post with some examples from Year 8 books.

For older struggling readers, finding decent books that can entice them to keep reading when they're not yet at the fluent stage is important. A prolific author such as Alistair Maclean can help to fill the gap for a boy. Hammond Innes (for older readers) and Helen MacInnes (Above Suspicion, The Salzburg Connection, The Snare of the Hunter and Agent in Place are some I've read) are two other authors that have similar spy/adventure books.

Some added thoughts:

We've always done Bible memory work but I couldn't see any evidence that Hoggy had remembered any of it. I am so grateful I didn't give up because even when he couldn't articulate what we'd done regularly & consistently for some years, it was actually in there somewhere and it came to the surface eventually. One day after a Bible study with some friends, he told us that they'd named him 'the walking Bible' because he knew so many verses. It was the same with poetry and now he can rattle off long sections quite easily. 

Maths was easier for Hoggy - he wasn't a whizz but we plugged along and he now has a good understanding of maths and has coped well with advanced maths concepts and happily, for me, he can help his younger brothers! It was good for him to be doing well in something else while he was struggling with other areas of learning.

Reading aloud + + + + + I had a toddler, a newborn and 3 other children to homeschool when I started out with Hoggy but he couldn't read at all for ages so we all did our work together so that he could be a part of things. Good quality audio books helped out from time to time also but I mainly read to him and made efforts to include a varied diet of good material.

Finding a musical instrument for him to learn & enjoy was a big plus. He started out on the violin, then piano and finally we were given a drum kit which was what he had wanted to learn all along. It's been a great vehicle and confidence builder for him and a blessing to others.

I've always believed that the Lord would make a way for each of our children, and although I've struggled at times with how that would work out, He has been faithful.

Update:

Comparative Chronology 1600's

1602. Abel Tasman born.

1603. Death of Queen Elizabeth.

1606. Voyage of Quiros; finding and naming of Austrialia (sic) del Espiritu Santo.

1606. First charter to the Virginia Company.

1620. Pilgrim Fathers found colony of New Plymouth.

1642. Tasman's first voyage; discovery of Tasmania.

1643. Death of Louis XIII.

1644. Tasman's second voyage; exploration of northern Australia.

1649. Execution of Charles I.

1652. Birth of William Dampier.

1655. English conquest of Jamaica.

1658. Death of Oliver Cromwell.

1659. Death of Tasman.

1682. Penn founds Pennsylvania.

1683. The French found Louisiana.

1686 to 1688. Dampier's voyage in the Cygnet; anchorage in Cygnet Bay, Western Australia.