My grandma used to have one of those. Too bad she doesn't anymore. I'm sure she would have given it to me if I'd asked.

Wow! Thanks for all the resources to start with. I'm so excited! This birding stuff is so much fun. Dh has been teasing me, saying that I'm getting to be even more nerdy, but I've noticed that now he's getting into it and notices and remembers to tell me about new birds that he sees. And of course the kids are all for it too. Even my 19mo likes to point out the window and shout all the bird names she knows: "Bobin! 'ackbird! 'parrow! 'ardinal!"

I've begun to notice how many different types of birds there are around here and it's very fun to see and identify new birds with our field guides, but I'd like to know if there's a way to learn to identify birds by song? I can distinguish between different songs but it's very hard to see which bird is singing, especially when they're really high in the trees and I don't have binoculars handy. There is one song in particular that is driving me crazy! It's so pretty and I'd love to know what type of bird is singing but I just can't see it anywhere. So are there cds or some kind of guide that has songs listed in some way that's easy to find? Any help on this is greatly appreciated!

I didn't really care for it either. I'm not sure I gave it a fair chance in all honesty, but I just didn't want to continue once we started.

A brief explanation from Orthodox wiki: Very soon after Our Lord sent the Holy Spirit to his assembled apostles and disciples, the Church recognized those who had served God as ancestors of Christ and foretold his coming, proclaimed the Gospel, and risked their lives bearing witness to Christ. These people were remembered and honored often through annual celebrations without any formal process that established them as saints. Their remembrance and honor grew from the actions of the faithful until these holy ones were remembered by the whole Church. This manner of recognizing those who were holy among us continues today within the Orthodox Church, except now the recognition of the glorification of a person has been formalized within the services of the Church, an act often referred to as canonization. Today, as more clergy and faithful recognize and honor that one amongst them had led a virtuous life of obvious holiness this veneration becomes widely recognized, and the manner of recognition is formalized. This leads to requests, usually through thediocesan bishop, for the Church to recognize that person as a saint. Then, usually an investigative committee is formed to review the life of the person who is being considered for glorification. When the committee is assured that the person has led a virtuous and God centered life, a process that may take an extended period of time, a report is submitted to the Holy Synod of the local Church stating the reasons why the person should or should not be recognized as a saint. After receiving and considering the report, the Holy Synod decides whether or not to number that person among the saints. If the bishops agree they then have icons painted and liturgical services composed for the glorification of the new saint. If the bishops do not agree, the life of the person may again be considered at a future time after further study. The formal Rite of Glorification begins with a memorial service for the person about to be glorified, after which Vespers and Matins are chanted with special hymns to the saint, and the icon for the saint is unveiled. The feast date for the commemoration of the new saint is established, and the life of the saint is published. Finally, the glorification of the new saint is made known to the other Orthodox Churches so that they can place the name of the new saint on their calendars

I think it is slowly evolving. But there is a long way to go yet, IMHO. I think that my own parish feels pretty American, but only when compared to other EO churches that have a larger concentration of parishioners of a particular ethnic heritage. For an American with no cultural identity outside of this country the Arab, Greek, and even Romanian presence in my parish might still feel pretty foreign.

You might find The Story of the Orchestra to be a good book for your purposes. It gives an overview of the instruments as well as introducing several famous composers. There's a cd that goes along with it so you can listen as you go through the book.

Fr. Peter John's music is great! If you happen to have his Live at the Village cd I'm on there singing with him for one of the songs :)

Oh, and there are songs that are not for liturgical use, but I have only come across a handful of them. But two of them are two my absolute favorite songs.

No instruments beside the voice are used because the voice is the most perfect instrument. :) Traditionally the entire congregation sings throughout the liturgy since the liturgy is the work of all the people rather than just the work of the priest and the choir. But you will find many churches where the choir sings alone and no one else joins in. There are hymns which are variable from week to week and if the people are not familiar then those hymns are usually done by the choir or a chanter. From what I understand organs being used is a very recent development and is really not a universal practice. I'm not sure how they even were introduced honestly. Maybe someone else knows more on that. New hymns can be written but it's not done by just anyone and it's not common at all. If a new saint is canonized, for example, hymns for that saint will be composed, but those same hymns will then be used by all Orthodox who venerate that saint. As far as arrangement of music there is some flexibility and different people have arranged different music for the same hymns however, the flexibility is limited as to style and mode. I am not at all familiar with the Slavic musical traditions (aside from knowing some of the melodies), but at least within the Byzantine tradition there are 8 tones which are used and any composition or improvisation must fit the tone which had been prescribed for the particular hymn being sung. The other thing that chanters and arrangers have to consider is that the music is always subject to the text. Words can't be changed or added or subtracted for the sake of a beautiful melody. One thing I love about Orthodox hymns is that a person can learn all the Church's theology just by attending the services and listening closely to the hymns. They are SO beautiful (and that's a HUGE understatement!).

I almost never come to the chat board so I did not even see this thread until now. I probably won't have much to add since the other ladies do such a great job, but I'll be quietly following along. :)

I agree with this. I really look on Circe and on many other sources as starting points and fodder for things to ponder rather than as a plan telling me how and when I ought to do xyz. I think the best thing I've pulled from Circe and from all the discussion here over the past couple years is that my own education is not over. I am thrilled about that (major understatement)! I feel like the more I learn myself, the better I can help my kids along.

See, I don't really see CM and multum non multa as being at odds with each other. I'm not sure I can think straight enough right now to explain very well, but here's one example that comes to mind. We may have a broad base of "subjects", but it is possible to cover each one of those deeply. For example with geography we follow the idea given by Leigh Bortins in The Core where she describes spending an entire year working on drawing one continent, starting with the general outline and gradually adding in details as time passes. Or for composer or artist study, one could limit the number of composers and artists covered and spend more time with their works and their life stories. I think the whole building history curriculum around historical fiction tries to follow this idea. The problem many people were seeing though, was that it was taken to such an extreme that the historical fiction was pushing out better things. So there certainly has to be balance. We can cover a broad range of subjects perhaps, but we may not get into as many of the details of each subject (i.e. fewer composers/artists, fewer books read, etc). I hope that makes some sense. I'm off to bed! :)

I realize you probably weren't directing this at me specifically, but since you described almost exactly what we currently do, I just thought I would point out that my kids are too little yet for classical languages. The plan is to start Latin when they're ready and hopefully learn Greek later as well. I am currently learning Greek and Arabic myself, and plan to begin Latin next, so hopefully I'll be ready to teach them when the time comes. :)

I don't mind sharing what things look like here, but keep in mind that my kids are all very young so I don't have tons of experience. On the other hand we have been doing things this way since the original Circe thread so it's been a couple years and I've had some time to think this through. For content subjects we have a Morning Basket every day and we work through various subjects based on days of the week. Here's what that looks like: Before breakfast everyone does chores and those taking piano lessons practice piano. Then: Daily: Morning prayers Life of the saint for the day Calendar Bible reading (during advent and lent we have special daily readings, the rest of the year we just read through) Memory work (includes scripture and poetry, I plan to add to this gradually) Phonogram and spelling rules review for SWR (just a few each day) Exercise - usually about 10-15 minutes at the end. It makes a nice break and they are more ready for seat work afterwards. When it's nice we just go play outside for about a half hour. Rotating subjects: Monday- geography (map work as laid out in Leigh Bortins' book The Core, plus read alouds like Holling C Holling books) Tuesday- history. (currently doing an overview of world history using A Little History of the World) and also Shakespeare Wednesday - nature study and read aloud from The Book of Virtues Thursday - art/music including composer/artist study as well as drawing "lessons" Friday - American history and a read aloud (currently Arabian Nights) This all takes roughly 30-45 minutes. Then later in the morning we do SWR and math. In the afternoon we have silent reading time and then I read aloud while toddler is napping. We also do read alouds at bedtime.

:iagree: This is what I was going to say too. But it does depend on your kids. We read Princess and the Goblin for the first time last year when ds was newly 7 and Dd was 5. They loved it and we had to read it twice. If you'd like to try MacDonald but want something shorter you could try The Wise Woman. It has The Wise Woman and a few other short stories that are longer than typical fairy tale length, but much shorter than a book. We had to read all of those at least three or four times each. :)

Our favorite game is math war with all its variations. All you need is a deck of cards. We also like Ken Ken puzzles and tangrams. We just bought this game to practice skip counting and we all love it! Very fun. We like to make up word problems for each other and there are no limits for how crazy the problems can be. Family Math is a good resource too. You might want to check out this thread: http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/499692-looking-to-do-some-relaxed-math-here-want-to-share-ideas/ Lots of great ideas there.

For now the plan is to go all the way through Practical Arithmetic. I have the book for Higher Arithmetic but I'm not sure I'll use it. We'll see. Practical should take us into middle school ages I think and then I'll probably start thinking about algebra and geometry, etc. Of course all this could change. Things don't always work out the way we plan, but for now, that's where I see us headed. I forgot to mention above that Ruth Beechick's Parent-Teacher guide is also helpful. She gives some good examples of how to work through it and what a person's week might look like with various plans.

I've been using it for the past couple years and I really like it. It's very solid and I love how in the beginning the work is oral. I agree with Hunter about the manual of methods being a great help. Cusinaire rods are so great to go along with it and the videos at educationunboxed.com are an amazing help as well. We also use other things but they're mostly for fun and games and the purpose is to cultivate a sense of wonder about math rather than to take us through a curriculum.

I am also reading The Living Page and I really can't wait to begin more notebooks! So far we've just kept a family nature notebook. We've been doing that for a couple years and it's fun to keep it together. I've also begun keeping a commonplace book myself. I'd like to keep a math notebook and a book of centuries as well. You might be interested in checking out the wildflowers and marbles blog: http://www.wildflowersandmarbles.com She is hosting a book club about the Living Page and she is really good about giving easy, practical examples of ways to get started.

That's one of my favorites. I also love The Ethics of Memory, which is one you have to buy, but very very good.

I agree with this. A book that might be helpful for anyone considering how to go about this is Project-Based Homeschooling I feel like this book is a great look at how education as a life could be played out. Another thing that may help is to really dig deep into one topic and stay there for as long as you want/need to. I mentioned in a previous post that we've spent the last couple years reading and re-reading LotR and Narnia and I feel like because we took our time and read them again and again, ds and dds were really able to take them in and make them their own. They have spent hours upon hours drawing scenes from the books, sometimes exactly as written, sometimes varying them with their own touches. They play games like "Gandalf and the Balrog" and "The White Witch" all the time, but all this is also mixed in with other stuff that they're interested in. We read other things while we were reading these books (they were mostly our bedtime read-alouds) and they were able to make all kinds of connections and comparisons. There were even some stories written (or rather dictated to me) and ds likes for his copywork to come from The Hobbit. Now each of my kids is a different person and so all of these things looked very different coming from each of them, but I really think that one of the biggest factors in all this was simply time. Time to let all the ideas soak in and that way there was something there to draw on when they were ready to create.

My favorite is in my signature.

One of my biggest takeaways was to allow time to let things soak in and not be anxious to rush on to the next thing. As a result we've spent the past year and a half or so reading and rereading LoTR and Narnia (I think we've been through Narnia about 5 times, LoTR twice along with The Silmarillion a couple times too). We are only just now gradually behind to move into other books. This has led to amazing discussions and discoveries and hours and hours of drawing, playing, poetry memorization, etc. We also take our time with the basic subjects. The goal is no longer to finish in a certain time frame, but rather to diligently move forward day by day, making sure that each child is doing what s/he is able to do right now. I've really come to value CM's motto that "education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life." Another effect the thread has had for me is in the way I spend our school money. Instead of buying curriculum I look to build our library and fill it with good literature. We have SWR for reading/writing/spelling and Ray's Arithmetic for math and since those are both so solid I've just been doing my best to make sure that the books we have are books that we will be keeping permanently - books that I will be able to pass on to my grandchildren when the time comes, rather than books that will eventually be resold because they've outlived their usefulness. I think though, that the biggest result of going down this path is that my own love of learning had been reignited. The rabbit trails that I've followed because of that initial discussion have led me to Euclid, Milton, Plato and others as well as to the study of Latin and Greek simply for my own pleasure.