Since we have been living out of 4 suitcases this past year, we obviously haven't brought with us our stacks and stacks of books that surround us at home. We have worked very hard at our schooling but in different ways than normal. Perhaps I will go into more detail about that in a later post, but here I just want to illustrate 1 example.
We have discovered a wonderful site called Baldwin Project at www.mainlesson.com. This is a site that is attempting to collect and make available online books for children in all sorts of genres. For example, in the ancient Greek section there are approximately 40 books which cover biographies, histories, mythology, fiction.
We only managed to read 3 of these - The Story of the Greeks by Helene A. Guerber, The Wonder book for Children by Nathaniel Hawthorne and an autobiography of Alexander the Great by Jacob Abbott. We also read a story of the Greek War of Independence by G.A. Henty. With the Story of the Greeks, we would read 2 (short) chapters and then Jacob and Zachary would each narrate one. At first they were dictating and I was typing for them and then about half was through they switched to typing for themselves. This practice of written narration was promoted by a teacher named Charlotte Mason, who is well known to many of my homeschooling friends. This promotes good reading comprehension and summarizing skills as well as the mechanics of spelling, punctuation, sentence structure. If you read their narrations, you can see that we still have to work on that!
The Story of the Greeks has approximately 125 short chapters, so to read and narrate/summarize it took a considerable amount of work. Here is a link to the manuscript if you are interested.
We spent 3 months in Greece and it took all that time to work on the Story of the Greeks; when we went to Italy, we also wanted to read the Story of the Romans, but in the interest of time (since we only spent 2 weeks there) we read Story of the Romans but did not narrate it.
You can find the BALDWIN PROJECT at www. mainlesson.com
Story of the Greeks
Story of the Romans
We have discovered a wonderful site called Baldwin Project at www.mainlesson.com. This is a site that is attempting to collect and make available online books for children in all sorts of genres. For example, in the ancient Greek section there are approximately 40 books which cover biographies, histories, mythology, fiction.
We only managed to read 3 of these - The Story of the Greeks by Helene A. Guerber, The Wonder book for Children by Nathaniel Hawthorne and an autobiography of Alexander the Great by Jacob Abbott. We also read a story of the Greek War of Independence by G.A. Henty. With the Story of the Greeks, we would read 2 (short) chapters and then Jacob and Zachary would each narrate one. At first they were dictating and I was typing for them and then about half was through they switched to typing for themselves. This practice of written narration was promoted by a teacher named Charlotte Mason, who is well known to many of my homeschooling friends. This promotes good reading comprehension and summarizing skills as well as the mechanics of spelling, punctuation, sentence structure. If you read their narrations, you can see that we still have to work on that!
The Story of the Greeks has approximately 125 short chapters, so to read and narrate/summarize it took a considerable amount of work. Here is a link to the manuscript if you are interested.
We spent 3 months in Greece and it took all that time to work on the Story of the Greeks; when we went to Italy, we also wanted to read the Story of the Romans, but in the interest of time (since we only spent 2 weeks there) we read Story of the Romans but did not narrate it.
You can find the BALDWIN PROJECT at www. mainlesson.com
Story of the Greeks
Story of the Romans
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