Little Green Leaves
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Posts posted by Little Green Leaves
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Just now, Not_a_Number said:
Remind me, do you speak French?
I speak French, but it's a deeply imperfect French. So, I can read literature and argue about politics, but I also make simple mistakes with things like gender and prepositions. That's why I'd like a book to lean on.
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10 hours ago, SereneHome said:
I am guessing Amazon doesn't have any preview either?
Yeah, I am not a fan of buying anything unseen....
I wrote to Cherrydale and asked for samples. I hope this works out. I've been wanting to teach my kids French, but I almost never do anything about it. Maybe it'd be easier if I had a book to use.
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1 hour ago, SereneHome said:
Yes, I saw youtube video and it made a lot of sense to me, but they don't have the language that I want. May be I'll try emailing them...
Ambleside Online has some links to free foreign language resources, I think. Maybe someone on their message board would have ideas.
I wish the Cherrydale site had samples up. I am really tempted to just buy the French book but I hate paying for something that I can't see at all.
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2 hours ago, SereneHome said:
I really like the idea of doing series approach. Cherrydale press only has 4 language study books, does anyone know where I can find other language study guides that use the same method?
thanks
Sorry I can't help, but thanks for posting this -- I didnt know about this method and it looks very sensible. I guess you mean this?
https://simplycharlottemason.com/blog/teaching-foreign-language-subject-by-subject-part-8/
Maybe it's worth emailing Cherrydale press?
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I'm wrapping up The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. This is one of those books which I feel almost as if I've read already -- I guess because the ideas in it are very much a part of how we talk about cities today. It's very closely-observed and full of great details, and a lot of it holds true today. Not all of it, of course.
Jane Jacobs lived in New York and drew most of her examples of city life from NYC, so it's a lot of fun to read about specific blocks and neighborhoods and of course, to consider the ways they've changed in the past 60 years.
Next I'm going to read "Silence, Joy" by Thomas Merton. Really looking forward to that.
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1 hour ago, MissLemon said:
Oh, I was just being silly with my response. A lot of New Yorkers have the perspective that NYC is the greatest city in the country and that it is a wide expanse of dullness between NYC and LA.
How I actually break it down: Alaska/Hawaii, West Coast, Southwest, Texas, Midwest, Deep South, Florida, the South, East Coast (every state North of NJ). New England is a subset of "East Coast".
I do admit that I feel conflicted about where to place Maryland and DC. Not exactly the South, but not really East Coast in my mind.
Yes, New Yorkers are awful in this way.
I guess that's just big city life, right? I've met Brooklyn residents who hardly ever make it into Manhattan. Londoners who can't conceive of the world beyond their little neighborhood. It's so dense that it kind of takes up all your mental energy 🙂
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Are you looking specifically for books about nature, or just for a good read aloud?
For nature, my kids also liked the Burgess animal book, and the Burgess bird book. And there are lots of story books by the same author which are fun. I think we read Happy Jack and some others.
Also on nature -- my kids liked Pagoo, by Holling Holling. We've read a few of their books and that's the only one that they really loved.
Curious to see what others say!
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1 hour ago, MEmama said:
Ummmm..New England, the South (aka everywhere south of Massachusetts), the Far West and the West Coast?
Just kidding! New England, the Northeast, Mid Atlantic, the South, the Southwest, Northern Midwest, Midwest/plains, Mountain states, West Coast, Pacific Northwest. Alaska and Hawaii get their own designations. Of course it can be broken down further, but those are the basics to me.
Haha "everything south of Massachusetts ".
In NYC we tend to call everything north of the city "upstate." "Upstate" is huge and includes the city's suburbs. My extended family cannot get over how provincial we are!
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I've been thinking about what I really need for French. Vocabulary, idioms, and verb tense are all things I can practice by reading books and listening to the radio. But I wish I had an easy way to practice gender and prepositions. I make a lot of little mistakes when I speak, and I dont think that just exposing myself to French is enough to correct that. Does anyone know if duolingo has that kind of specific practice?
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What a cool question. I like the discovery method when it's genuine -- when I'm truly left free to explore and come up with my own ideas.
I think socratic questioning is often done badly. It can easily be used as a rhetorical device, a power play. Yeah, I use it sometimes with my kids, but it's not my favorite. My favorite is when we're figuring things out together, or when I'm helping them get somewhere.
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I don't have any links, but I'd say the Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and Firebird all have kid-friendly plots. I took ballet lessons as a little girl and I remember that we put on productions of each of those.
They're all a bit long, but maybe you could get a picture book to explain the story, and then show your kids clips of the ballet? Sorry, I don't know if your kids are past the age of picture books. I guess I'm thinking out loud about what I'd like to do for my kids! Thanks for starting this thread.
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I read almost nothing this week. I probably chose my book badly -- let's face it, I am busy these days and it's probably not the best time to read revisionist history books about the crusades, in French. Luckily the library came to my rescue and brought me Jane Jacobs -- The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Let's see how much progress I make!
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3 minutes ago, mumto2 said:
I just finished Love in Amsterdam by Nicholas Freeling https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53053950-love-in-amsterdam
A few years ago we asked @Loesje22000 for a list a Dutch mysteries.......I thought this was one of them as it is the Van Der Valk detective series! 😂 When my library added it to overdrive I put myself on the hold’s list thinking World Detectives 10 x10 and as a bonus a translated book which I keep track of. Ummmmm, I finish, look to verify it is translated. Not! British author...........I probably would not have stuck this book out to the end if I hadn’t thought I was reading a Dutch dectective mystery! It is set in the twenty or so years post WWII in post war Amsterdam.
A bit grim.....sort of free thought. My formatting was poor because I had to read it in the browser which I dislike and normally only do for a book I love. A woman is murdered with her former lover apparently gazing at a canal outside her home. The detective VanderValk does not believe he did it........the decade long affair is rehashed extensively so adult content. The lover, his wife, and Detective V all work together to solve the case. The justice system in Holland now interests me.....I am looking forward to some conversations to understand better when we hopefully return to England next summer with our many Dutch friends.
They made a TV show based on Van der Valk! I actually didnt know it was a book first. A few episodes aired on PBS (Masterpiece Mystery) recently.
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8 minutes ago, bolt. said:
I think Person B, while justifiably irritated, can simply let the conversation go, even though it feels incomplete. It's not *very* badly incomplete: each person had their 'first say' and Person B expressed an emotion about it. That's okay. It doesn't mean that Person B is in charge of whether Person A is "allowed" to have opinions. It's more just that the conversation ran aground in Person B's emotional territory, and came to an end at that point. It can be a dignified conclusion, if Person A has the good manners to let it be one.
The early ending doesn't have anything to do with Person A's perspective, really. Person A's perspective still exists and was still expressed and heard just fine (earlier in the conversation). Person A was asked for input once, gave input once, and then (once disagreement became evident) it was over. It's not awesome, but it's fair enough.
If Person A does this a lot, Person B doesn't have to engage with them in the future. If they see signs of the pattern starting, s/he could say something like, "That's not something I really want to chat about..." (Then change the topic to something else.)
And, yes, it impedes deep intimacy in friendship. It reduces the people to polite friends not soulmates, but if that's what Person B wants -- why would Person A be willing to make them both uncomfortable in a fight for more intimacy? Especially with someone they consider manipulative? Is being extremely close with manipulative people high on the list of anybody's life goals, really?
I love the way you put this. I both agree and disagree.
Obviously I agree that we shouldn't push past each other's clearly-expressed boundaries. That helps nobody.
At the same time, I often feel frustrated that I can't talk to people about politics without it turning into an emotionally-charged conversation. I wish that it was possible to have more argument and debate. These days, it so often seems that when we talk about politics, we're either whole-heartedly agreeing with each other, or we're a bit frightened by our differences and need to retreat behind our fences.
It seems to me that when I was younger, talking about politics (at least on the left) meant talking about the economy, foreign policy, war, wages...whereas now, talking about politics often means talking about personhood and being erased. I don't know. I'm aware that these are important things to talk about, but I also think it's inevitably going to create strong emotions and make debate really hard. Disagreement can easily be taken as insult.
I think I might be missing out on something. I often wonder why I'm experiencing this frustration; I do find it frustrating. It's not a generational thing, either; I'm finding this with people (not my closest friends, but people who are somewhere between friends and acquaintances) who are either my age, or 5-10 years older or younger.
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42 minutes ago, SereneHome said:
I have not read a page this week....not one!!
I am half a page ahead of you!
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Coming at this from a slightly different perspective...
I live in an area where there is virtually no political division. Almost everyone votes the same way. Almost everyone I know is upset about politics and is angry at the other side...but there's no other side to talk to, or to argue with, or anything.
Unfortunately, one result of this is a lack of self-criticism. It is way too easy for people to think in terms of us and them, and to put all the blame for everything on "them." Easy to have straw men take the blame for things.
I'm not on Facebook, but even some of the chats I'm in are getting really shrill. People are upset but there's no way to work out the anger.
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2 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:
I love “Math with Bad Drawings” in general, and this post is great:
This is very cute but as a not especially mathy person I resent being compared to a broken futon...
I mean, maybe I am not a futon at all. Maybe I was always a chaise longue.
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@Dreamergal I thought of you this morning because I ordered some of the Amar Chitra Katha books for my kids -- thanks for recommending them!
@Violet Crownsending you best wishes and I hope things get better soon.
None of my library books have arrived so I had to raid my own bookshelves for a new reading project. I settled on Les crusades cues par les Arabes (the crusades from the viewpoint of the arabs) by Amin Maalouf. I've tried this one in the past but never got far, mostly because of the French being tough for me. Still it feels like a natural choice after Saint Catherine and her support for the crusades. I found that unsettling.
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Double post...I quoted myself
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I finished Catherine of Siena, the biography of St Catherine by Sigrid Undset. I think what I loved most in this book were the little insights into medieval life and thought -- the treatment of prisoners, for example, or the relationships between family members -- and the connections Undset made to her own time. She was writing just a few years after the end of WWII so her mind is very much on the horrors of war and the holocaust. There are just a few places where she refers to this, but they're memorable. She says that the horrors we've all been through should make us all draw closer to the medieval viewpoint, in which sin and goodness were shared by the whole community; this is instead of the modern model of personal success and personal effort. This way of looking at things struck me as so lovely, and also the polar opposite of, say, post-war existentialism.
Anyhow. I'm waiting for a few books to arrive and I don't know what I'm reading next!
@aggieamyI'm totally jealous of your trick or treat experience. For us it was a flop. Most people in my neighborhood are in apartments, but usually most stores and home owners do give out candy, and in a normal year the streets are full of happy kids in costumes. This year, well, all the stores had signs saying they didn't have candy, and all the houses were dark...we walked around a little so that the kids could show off their costumes, and then we went home and made cookies. Fun, but definitely not the usual Halloween.
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We were listening to the British History Podcast-- which I really recommend -- and I thought of this thread because vampire stories came up! Apparently a 12th century Welshman known as Walter Map produced the first known written vampire tales in English. I've requested it from the library. Wish I'd known about this earlier in the month, in time for Halloween!
Editing to add that sorry, I keep clicking on everyone's profile by mistake!
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26 minutes ago, Familia said:
Old trigger, because I am long done with homeschooling, but I found it internally disconcerting when dc did not get what I was trying to communicate in lessons - lessons in which I was doing things differently or trying a new technique. I felt criticized.
For example, at the beginning of narration or dictation or outlining, (any subject could be a problem) if dc wasn't getting it, I became very frustrated sometimes. Subconsciously it was at myself. Outwardly, I was only conscious of the child first not doing it 'right', then their escalating frustration. Hence, sometimes things got to a point where I saw a 'bad attitude' in them and blamed the child for that. If I had been more attuned to the real fact that I felt, irrationally/internally, criticized, I would have had more understanding and patience.
Overall, things went well, so dc say, but if I could change anything about our homeschooling, it would have been to realize this was going on sooner. Instead of feeling criticized and questioning every method, I would have stepped back and asked myself what I was really trying to teach in a given circumstance, and, at times, abandon the 'method' for simply communicating the facts of what they were trying to learn. I don't think I am wording this well. Anyway, I wish I had been more patient and lighthearted more of the time, especially with eldest.
I love the way you worded this 🙂 and I completely relate. Thank you!
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I normally take a little break after school time, or else right after lunch, depending on our timing. I usually use that time to read or write or just to fiddle with my phone. It makes all the difference in the world to me. Otherwise, I get drained, and being drained makes me cranky.
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Charlotte Mason method for learning foreign language
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
Yeah, eventually. I have also tried to get my parents (both fluent speakers) on board, so we'll see. But I think for the early stages we'd be fine with me and a book.