Tress
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Posts posted by Tress
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Depends on the parish, or maybe the country? I'm in the Netherlands and certainly did not have first reconciliation when I did my first communion as a child. My children now, also do not have first reconciliation before first communion.Your assumption about "most Catholic parents" seems very bizarre. Most Catholic parents have their children do their first Communion. Part of this process includes first reconciliation. So Catholic parents are very aware of this process. Whether or not they continue is another thing.
There usually is a reconcilliation mass in the Holy Week, but no individual confession.
Not saying it is right!
I think it's because the great lack of priests. We have one priest for 18 parishes.
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I have read almost all of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series and I love them! Kareni, do try this book! But I have to warn you, it is an epic fantasy series, but nothing like Wheel of Time for example. It's a lot darker and way more difficult. At the end of the first book, you will probably still have no clue what it is about. Second book, idem. Erikson doesn't explain anything, no infodumps, no helpful older wizard who explains :D.This is the first volume in the Malazan Book of the Fallen epic fantasy series about which I've heard good things. Has anyone here read it?
Regards,
Kareni
Hello to all my BaW friends :friendly wave:
I hope everyone is doing well.
I'm trying to come back to this thread, but I don't know if I will have enough time.
Love,
Tress
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Bookdepository shipped mine yesterday. But....it usually takes at least 2 weeks for books to get from the UK to the Netherlands. Don't ask me why! I'm waiting.....
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Yeah, I would love to buy their Iliad guide and I'm on the fence about Cindy's book, but the shipping doubles the cost and then I have to pay custom taxes too. I wish their books were available through bookdepository. Circe's books and AoPS.It's really unfortunate that it's only available from CIRCE. I'd love to buy a copy, but the shipping to Canada is $15, doubling the cost of the book. :(
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I requested to be added. I would like 2 memberships.
Thank you for arranging this, Jennifer.
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It works out to just over 3 hours a day of teaching, which is more than I'm doing now. Through high-powered analysis of possible reasons for this discrepancy, it occurred to me that I'll have more students, and they'll all be doing more work. :001_rolleyes: So, no room for wasted time, or clutter getting in the way of a smoothly running schedule.
I haven't had a 3 hour teaching day in years, sigh. Reading and rereading EFL did help me shave off an hour each day, so now I no longer need to start at 6:15 with dd12. Which is good, I can use the time for self-ed.
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Great plan!
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My kids love prodigy as well.
If someone puts together a group buy the 1year membership drops to $14-$15 per child.
That would be awesome! I currently have 2 kids begging daily for a membership, but it's too expensive at the moment.
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Fascinating discussions!
But I have a more practical question :).
This is our third week doing EFL style lessons. It is going very well with dd5 and dd7. But..... for my dd9 it feels like I have only *added* EFL style work, while retaining everything else. I didn't even try adding those lessons to my dd12's schedule.
How do I make sure I'm not just adding stuff? ElizaG, how do you get your oldest to only have schoolwork for 12 hours a week? If I remember correctly, you are doing school 6 days a week, so that would be 2 hours a day, right?
Is that only possible if you push all sciences, history, geography into high school?
In the Netherlands we do the sciences simultaniously, dd12 is studying Biology and Physics, next year Chemistry will be added. She studies Dutch, English, Latin and Greek, due to health reasons we dropped French. AoPS Math needs a good bit of time. No way, she can do all this in 2 hours a day. And don't even get me started on History and Geography, and next year we need to add Economics.
I had been thinking that those short days would be over, when a child becomes 10yo and starts 'book lessons'. I don't think my dd-9-soon-to-be-10 is really ready for full on book lessons, so I envisioned some kind of gradual easing into that. But still it's going to be more than 2 hours work. And for my 12yo it's going to be a lot more. But maybe I'm making a mistake?
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As I understand it, EFL's suggestions -- which built up to "Evangeline" in 8th grade -- were meant as a possible route to the level of literacy that would prepare the student to read any good English book (looking up obscure references as needed, of course). They were the key to the door, not the library itself.
That sounds quite...ehmmm...I'm not really sure about the right term...utilitarian, maybe. Like, it's the end goal that counts, not the books read on the way.
I did talk about something similar with my dd12. She can read any book/website she wants in English, but that are mostly popular current novels and blogs. She is certainly not at the level of reading Dickens or Austen for fun. I told her we needed to find a way to get her to that level of English reading. But I have no idea how to do that.
To find other older standard works of English literature, you could look in the upper grades of school anthologies, such as the "Everyday Classics" series that's available on archive.org. Some of these anthologies also have a section called "Extensive Reading," which listed books that might be made available, but wouldn't be studied in depth. Kfamily also posted a helpful list that she put together, and there's a large graded list of books that was put together by a New York City public school principal. I'll try to find those links.
Are these "Everyday Classics" comparable to Journeys through Bookland or My Book House? Better, worse?
I own both Journeys and Book House, but I'm obviously not capable of judging their differences :D.
And of course, we can use that judgment of ours. :001_smile:
I might be able to do that with Dutch literature, but certainly not with English literature :001_smile: .
Were there Dutch school textbooks that would have done the work of finding suitable passages from the 19th century writers? Or critics who wrote about these works from a Christian perspective? Those seem like two possible avenues to explore.
I have to think about that some more. We don't have digital archives like in the US. So I have no idea how to even find books from that periode.
Depending on the author of the book, this might be true, or it might reflect anti-Christian bias.
Yeah, I was actually less worried about the moralizing (because I can see how from a modern perspective even a small bit of ethical guidance can be called 'moralizing'), as I was about the general opinion that the literature of that time was shallow and mediocre (with the exception of 'Max Havelaar").
Thanks for writing down the contents of the Prose and Poetry books!! Interesting.
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Then, downloading page by page is what I'm going to do! Thanks!As far as I can tell, that's the only place. You can download it one page at a time, which might be better than nothing. It's certainly easier than copying it by hand.
I wonder... maybe we'd be better off if all books about education were this inconvenient to obtain? I'm sure I wouldn't have spent so much time and attention on mediocre ones...
Oh, can you explain some more about those 'good books' in English? Just like I have trouble understanding what classical children's books are (if you ask someone in the Netherlands what a Dutch classical children's book is, they will name Narnia/Roald Dahl/Secret Garden/Heidi....which are all translations!), I don't have a clear idea what those 'good books' are in English. Or how to locate 'Dutch good books'.
EFL is very fond of Longfellow, who is a Fireside Poet according to my American Literature book. But she never mentions the other Fireside Poets. Why? Her other selections are also all over the place, as far as I can see.
If I want to read comparable 'good books' in Dutch, what are the criteria to select them? Just grab the most famous 19th century writers and call it good? According to my Dutch Literature books, the Dutch literature from 1840-1880 was mediocre and focused mostly on moralizing. Between 1880-1894 there was a very highly regarded new movement, a literary awakening.....by mostly classically educated writers.....who rejected Christianity. I'm not sure I want to use those books as a major part of our studies.
Should I go further back? Dutch spelling and language in general have changed a lot, books from the 18th century are very difficult to read. (While I don't have a problem reading Defoe/Swift/Richardson.)
EFL mostly recommended books that were at that time half a century old, I think. Can I just use the best literature from 1900-1945?
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Is Donnelly really only available through Hathitrust?
I really need to highlight and scribble to really get it. I'm -finally- doing that with EFL and I'm getting so much more out of it.
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I had the exact same experience with Bookless Lessons. Strange, isn't it?I finally printed off Bookless Lessons and I'm discovering that it's very different than what I remember reading a few years ago.
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This is great news! I had no idea! I don't know much about Montessori, but after a quick google for 'Montessori record keeping'.....wow, checklist heaven :D. (Although I'm really glad I don't have 30 students to keep notes on!)One thing I do know, though, is that old-time school teachers did make a "schedule of recitations." It was an essential part of their equipment.
Also, even though Montessori directresses didn't have a set schedule of lessons (except perhaps for some group presentations), they did keep detailed records about each child's progress, using a clipboard with checklists. They still do it this way, unless they've switched to an electronic app. I've made a couple of feeble attempts at modifying Montessori record-keeping materials to suit us, but it seemed better to start from scratch.
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Yes, yes, can we talk about how to practically do this with multiple schoolage children? From EFL's books and articles, it looks like she always talks about one schoolage child and maybe several little ones? Obviously, she did have a lot of experience with teaching multiple children and schoolclasses. Did I miss her articles about that?Getting down to brass tacks...
We clearly need a "recitation room" for individual lessons, and a "study hall" for everyone who's doing written work. (They don't need to be separate rooms; I just find these terms helpful.)
The recitation room can be small, is only required for short periods, and needs the mother's attention 100% during that time.
The study hall is larger, is used for longer periods of quiet work, and needs some supervision.
The littlest ones also need a play area where they won't disturb the reciters or the studiers. Or some sort of Montessori-ish area, but one that doesn't require a directress on a regular basis. Or an older child can be assigned to work with them in their area. Or they can stay in the study hall, and be given "busy work" or "seat work." (Which was actually invented to save the teacher's sanity, in situations like these.)
We don't have anything like the above arrangement, which I think is one reason why our routine is so easily disrupted. The children's main work/study area was set up when we were still in that "early childhood" stage. It doesn't have enough room for all of the children to work at the same time, and it's cut off from my preferred cozy recitation/video/read-aloud area, so the younger ones end up being unsupervised for too long. I just found a large patch of red paint on one of the older one's notebooks. "I'm sorry, Mommy. It was an accent." Yes, I guess it was! At least red is a good accent color. ;).
I can totally see letting one of my dds recite her poem while peeling potatoes with me, but we don't need *that* many potatoes for all my dds to recite :D. And I'm afraid that when I just at random through the day pull one child to me to recite, I'm going to forget things. I could make a checklist with boxes and put that on my clipboard :lol: but somehow I don't see EFL doing that.
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Not to derail your new-old-new plan :D, but you do know that there is an ecclesiastical audio to go with Orberg, right?
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I think you will have better luck asking at Textkit.com about an errata sheet and audio.
I own 'Reading Course in Homeric Greek' and have been drooling over it :D.
It does assume you already know Latin, so you might need to make sure that your Latin knowledge is enough.
I didn't feel brave enough to use an English Greek course, so for now we are using a Dutch Attic Greek course, but I very much hope we will have time to work quickly through 'Reading Course in Homeric Greek' too.
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You are blessed to actually have daily Mass! I'm seriously envious.
The only Mass we have is on Sunday and we are blessed to be the designated 'liturgical center', which means there is always a priest to celebrate Mass. Most cities/villages around us do not have a priest every Sunday. (Our parish priest is responsible for 16 churches.)
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I too hate reading pdfs on a screen and I don't want the children to see me at a computer too much. I do have an e-reader but the epub files of EFL's books are really bad.Did you guys ever have a discussion here about Fr. Donnelly's methods? You're referring to the priest who wrote Model English, correct? I've seen it referred to in this threads but don't recall a thread where it was discussed.
I've seen the PDF of Model English but haven't read it yet. I really hate reading PDFs on my computer.
How do you guys read these vintage texts? Do you print them? Can you send them to Office Depot and them printed there?
I finally caved and ordered both of EFL's books from Forgotten Books Classical Reprint Series. Bookless Lessons arrived today....and it is aweful. :crying: Counting quickly, at least 20 pages are only partially printed. So now I'm sitting here with a book that's missing page 10, 32, 34, 82, 88, 130, 138 etc. Grrrrrrr.
I canceled my second order and I'm going to send a pretty angry email asking for a refund.
So whatever you do, don't order from Forgotten Books!
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Yeah, being on a different schedule feels weird.LOL. We always take our family vacation (a month) in early spring, which means we tend to work through the summer. So while everyone around me is winding down, I'm trying to wind back up. LOL. I do at least feel refreshed, but I always get jealous of everyone getting ready to STOP in the summer. :-)
We still have *8* weeks to go, Dutch school year, and then a 6 week summer break. I usually manage just fine, except when I'm spending too much time on this American forum :lol:.
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Praying for a successful surgery! :grouphug:
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Starting with :grouphug:
To answer your questions: yes, yes and yes. I'm in the same situation with my dd9.But I am curious if anyone else has experience the sense, with a younger child/sibling, that they aren't where their older sibling was at the same age. And I'm wondering if anyone found *themselves* feeling like taking a really different path with a second child, for whatever reason. And does anybody else feel like their rising 5th grader maybe isn't ready for a sudden step up in expectations between 4th and 5th grade?
I don't have a solution, but you do sound very, very tired and I think you need to get some rest before making decisions. From reading your posts all these years, I don't doubt that you are able to give both your dds an excellent education.
:grouphug:
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Praying :grouphug:
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I recently started my own home based cooking business and it has fulfilled that need she talks about to have something that is just mine. Not my husband's and not my children's. Plus I'm writing a book. It's shaping up to FINALLY be a year about me (as awful and selfish as that sounds!)
That doesn't sound awful or selfish, that sounds AMAZING! Keep going! :hurray:
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Bringing concerns to other parents
in The Chat Board
Posted
In the Netherlands, the rule is 'a minimum of *5* words at the second birthday'.
I guess Dutch children are just slow, compared to American children ;).