Oy, three year olds. My best trick is having another three year old move in next door and send them out to play in the backyard together, ha - they can't spoil each other, and they also just seem to totally understand each other in a very charming way. It's quite entertaining to watch them interact and negotiate their plans. I too find that activities only ever entertain them for short periods - every once in a while they get really engrossed in something for 20 or 30 minutes, but I've never found that there's any way of knowing what activity is going to provoke that kind of concentration when. Now that I've got older kids, it's (relatively) easy to assign one to read to or play with the 3yo when I need to work with another child one-on-one, but until we got to that stage it was just muddling through in spite of and over interruptions. I did have some luck last year with keeping the toddler in my lap with her own little white board and marker. I also keep my eye out for ideas for simple activities that can be put together with stuff we mostly have around the house already. My mom had a whole book of these when I was a kid (the 80s version of potato creatures, lol), and I wish I could remember the title and look it up, because I feel like a lot of current suggestions that allege to be along the same lines are less "activities for little kids with stuff you already have around the house" and more "activities for little kids that require a ton of junk from the dollar store." Though the "busytoddler" feed on instagram is one of the better versions of this that I've found, for what it's worth. I got some mileage for a few weeks out of all the variations on putting-stickers-on-a-big piece-of-paper-taped-to-the-wall. I've also gotten marginally better at what EFL I think calls "drill in obedience." Somewhere between two and three, for example, is when I stop taking things from babies that they aren't supposed to have and expect them to hand over contraband on their own. And I am very much up for a read along! I ordered Bookless Lessons from a bookstore with an Espresso Book Machine, and it turned out very legible, though the dimensions are those of a smaller paperback (what is that? 5x8.5, maybe?). It might have been possible to get it printed to a different size, though, I can't remember off the top of my head. My husband's workplace just got a coil-binding machine, so I'm contemplating printing it out with big margins for easier marking-up and asking him to bind it for me. Update: JK, I just got my copy off the shelf and actually the margins aren't too bad. I was thinking of my "Forgotten Books" copy of Educating the Child at Home, which is a larger paperback, but with smaller margins.

Welcome, GracieJane! I think this is the column Eliza is referring to, and there are many follow ups (two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten) that give a fuller picture. Pat sounds like an unusually independent almost-six year old. If you have a laundry line, I've found that 5 year olds often enjoy helping hang laundry - we have one line hung low so it can be reached by the shorter children. My current 5yo also works with an older child on sweeping: the older child makes piles and the 5yo sweeps them into the dustpan and empties it in the trash. Personally, I have found it requires too much attention to detail for a 5yo to sweep on their own, but that could also be partly due to the layout of my home (a few very big rooms - I would imagine if we had a small porch to sweep that would be much easier for a 5yo). He also LOVES taking out the trash and recycling, feeds the hogs, helps fold square- and rectangle-shaped laundry, and works with the 7yo to unload the dishwasher. He also brings the dishes to the table for meals, but I need to spend some time working with him on actually setting the table as well. Re: summer schedules, we are doing a full school schedule through the summer because it is so hot here. We took a long, Easter-season spring break and are about to ramp back up just in time to need the air conditioning (sorry, John Senior). We'll take a longer fall break again in October. And actually, my husband has been doing some light lessons with the kids in the morning while he's been working from home - things that he can do without prep, like reading a page or two from the Primer with the 5yo, reading some LLPSI with the older two, music lessons (he's a former band teacher), and reading and discussing their catechism, but nothing that would require any prep time, which for him is stuff like math (the 11yo has continued to work on that independently) and EFL-style lessons. I have been grateful that he has been able to do this, because I didn't have the bandwidth for it at the time, but our days tend to be better when the kids don't have whole days of free time for weeks at a time.

mms, this is the book I came across with sample recitations in it. I don't know that it's necessarily any better or more useful than the several other recitation-related tabs I have open in my browser right now (all from slightly different points in time, too, so I'm sure reflecting different pedagogical trends - the later ones seem to discuss "written recitations" as well as oral), but it happens to be the only one I've had time to skim through so far. I am also a sucker for anything addressed specifically to "country schools." Although I did notice, for what it's worth, that in one of the other links the author contrasted the recitation method with the German university method in which the student never recites, but just listens to lectures, studies on their own, and eventually is individually examined. I also discovered that there was a whole genre of "question books" for teachers - here's one example. They seem to be kind of cheat sheets of recitation questions, although this particular one claims to be meant for review of previously recited material. This discussion has me thinking about the only teacher I can recall giving us any guidance for our study outside of class. The class period itself was in a pretty standard seminar-discussion type format, but at the very end of every class, she would remind us of the reading assignment for our next class and then would orally dictate maybe ten study questions. Only about half of the class would bother to write them down. 🤔

Ha, The Joy of Chemistry arrived in the mail today. Yes, mms, I think you exactly spoke to what I am trying to figure out. Some sort of book lessons are okay for this age, but we don't want to import university methods, and so how do I tell one from the other, lol. I was actually looking for more information about conducting recitations last week and had come across a few interesting things, including a book that had sample recitations in several subjects - maybe I will keep looking around in that direction.

Yeah, I definitely hear this, and just a month or two ago had resolved to not worry about it for a while. But then my almost-12yo asked if he could study chemistry this year. So here are the options I've thought about: I could just check a bunch of chemistry books out of the library and let him do whatever he wants with them. I could set him up with some kind of formal curriculum, like McHenry's Elements or whatever. Or some third thing that would involve teaching him how to learn from a chemistry textbook or how to keep a simple lab notebook. Okay, actually I did the first one already, and he quickly got bored of the kiddie kitchen chemistry type books, but spent hours for several straight days carefully drawing his own giant periodic table of elements, which he has posted on the wall and refers to frequently. He's asking for more, he wants to do the demonstrations from the home chemistry labs book we found, and he wants more to read, so I have to figure out something to give him. I guess I never learned good study skills myself, so I'm not sure when I should have. And I guess I'm thinking about them more broadly than how to study for a test, but more like your example of the gardening notebook - just how to approach any undertaking with a certain discipline and focus. I suppose a well-EFLed child could naturally just mature from the kind of notebooking she talks about to knowing how to study, but I'm not sure. If so, I guess this circles back to Eliza's question #1. Maybe his homemade periodic table is enough, is the equivalent of his notebook at this stage. But it just seems to me that it would be more respectful of the level at which he seems to want to engage with the material to teach him a little bit how to really study it and not just kind of dilettante-ishly consume chemistry-related information, as his mother tends to do with her interests because she never learned any better. I don't know, maybe this is even a question about "study skills" and more a question about how to help our children start to discern and pursue their particular interests as they get older?

mms, as you know, I'm pretty much in the same spot as you with similar questions. I have been thinking about teaching study skills for my "7th grader." In my imagination, this would be a way to start to move towards more formal study of the content subjects, but somehow without me having to do a lot of work teaching the content subjects, lol. In reality, someone has to teach him said study skills, and that someone is me. So, yeah, not sure about that one yet. After spending too much time trying to work up something on my own, I've decided to use the Aldine Language Books this year for my 10yo and 12yo, probably supplemented with the Baker/Carpenter Language Readers or the Everyday Classics series for more reading. The Aldine books seem to finish in a pretty good spot from which to start Model English in 9th grade.

I've been thinking about how I want to handle this next year. I will have a 3yo, 5yo, 7yo, 10yo, and 12yo to manage. What I would like to do is meet with the two oldest children to go over their assignments for the day, then dismiss them to work independently, then have them come back and go over their work with me when they are done. What I have actually always done in practice is that we have morning prayers and usually some group work, then I send the older two to do some independent work (copywork, math, that kind of thing) or take turns occupying the littlest one, while I work with the two littler ones first (the 6yo got some assigned independent tasks this year - mostly copywork and then he just started EFL math towards the end of the year). Then I dismiss them for the day, and work with the two older ones, usually, again, youngest to oldest. I can generally get through everyone except the oldest before lunch. I'm not sure if that will be true this coming year, though. We usually spread out over two large connected common areas in our house. Some kids are more sensitive about noise than others, so we kind of wind up with a (relatively) quiet room and then the room that I'm in working with whichever kid. I would only trust the almost-12 to work in his room by himself, although he usually chooses to work out in the common area with us.

My oldest two have done a weekly zoom with some friends since the lockdown - I've been struck by how much sillier they are than when they are socializing in person, similar to how my six year old spends all his facetime with his grandparents watching himself make faces. Maybe that's just the novelty of it, though, since they're all homeschooled kids mostly from families that have pretty limited screen time. Ordinary Shoes, I think you are right about John Senior's approval or not often corresponding to what was around in his boyhood, but I do still think there is something to this idea that exposure to un-real images that are more exciting and stimulating that children's experiences would otherwise be can have some kind of lasting effect, at least at certain dosages. And there are other things I'm sure we'd all agree that aren't developmentally appropriate for children to be exposed to - shielding them from those isn't manipulating them. So it's a question of whether certain types of media or maybe certain amounts of it fall into that category. We visited the Grand Canyon this year and met a couple on the trail who were surprised by our children's enthusiasm and said that their kids had chosen to stay back in the car. I just can't believe that's a natural response - you have to be taught somehow not to be impressed by the Grand Canyon! Maybe not by special effects alone but something did it, and I think it's right to be concerned about it. That being said, I have to hope the dosage does make a difference, because I just don't see us giving up all movies and shows here, even some of questionable value, at least not until I have a nanny to occupy the toddler when I am under the weather or certain relatives that we want to spend time with decide to take up other hobbies. And you know, I was a pretty Star Wars obsessed kid, but I was still awestruck by the Grand Canyon. Although I did also have slower childhood experiences of natural reality, too, which seem to be less and less the case for children today. So there was the galaxy far far away, but also the Milky Way, which I saw every summer at camp. And maybe it was even all the more striking to me because I could not see it in daily life. Actually, wasn't that also kind of true for John Senior? Didn't he grow up in suburbia on Long Island but spent his summers working on a ranch in Montana or something? So apparently that's how you create sentimental idealists, lol, although I suspect being the mom forces me into contact with other concrete realities that Senior's own experience of was more...vicarious. Anyway, I think we are stuck muddling through this one for the most part. I think most of us can tell when our kids have had too much of various kinds of media and different kids do seem to be sensitive to greater or lesser degree. I have one kid who cannot tear himself away from any screen whatever and another who really could take it or leave it. Staggering exposure to some things has helped here - for example, only my eldest has seen Star Wars yet (he watched it on a solo outing with his grandfather) so his interest has waxed and waned without taking over the other children's interest. For our family, any show or movie totally crowding out other interests would also be a signal that some kind of change is needed. I always have better success, though, when I put my energy into making sure there are other interesting things to do (preparing the environment, you might say) and only then cut back on screen time or disappear a particular show from our family's viewing options or whatever. And sometimes I don't have the energy to do that and well, that's life. You said it, OS, things can't always be "just so." It does help that my husband and I are pretty much on the same page about screen-based media, I think largely because his family watched stuff like Married with Kids and Hellraiser when he was a tot, so he has no nostalgia for Thomas or Star Wars or whatever, ha. Although he probably makes up for it in the overstimulating recorded music that he plays all the time - so. much. prog rock. 😆 One last thought that I've been mulling over recently, but more in the context of computer technology: I'm not sure how far this can go, but it might be helpful to think of some types of media as analogous to toys. EFL, unlike Montessori, isn't really opposed to toys, though she strongly advocates for home-made ones over boughten. So another thing to consider in evaluating our family's media consumption might be whether it promotes any kind of self-activity or not. Maybe giving kids access to (real) tools so they can be creators and not just consumers of some types of media would be another way to handle this issue.

So very good to see you, ElizaG! Something must be in the air? water? because just this weekend, I was toying with the idea of starting EFL Thread 3.0, and I have many of the same questions as you. I like to reread at least one of EFL's books annually, and I am actually overdue, so that's one thing I'm going to do to try to get myself back in a better mindset. And renewed EFL-related conversation here on the boards would be wonderful!

I've learned a lot from Elementary Mathematics for Teachers.

I found Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education by Donald Lemen Clark very helpful for getting my mind around what the progym was and how it was meant to work in the ancient world. He goes through stage by stage with examples and discusses the way they were meant to build on each other. It's not exactly a how-to, but composition teachers were the intended audience, and I found Clark's suggestions for making use of the progym in current writing instruction more practical than some of the modern adaptations I've seen.

forty-two's linked comparison of the Athenazes above is very good - as she said, the gist is that it's formatted more like LLPSI and has more readings. Along those lines, a fellow named Seumus Macdonald is slowly working on creating a Lingua Gaeca Per Se Illustrata - another classics teacher has started to format it nicely like LLPSI here and he also has audio of it on youtube. I mostly use vintage materials to get us more reading practice - my kids have independent reading time daily in all the languages they are studying. There's a list of some Greek readers more or less along the lines of Rouse's A Greek Boy at Home here (if these interest you, I have a few more links saved somewhere I could dig up). The Greek Ollendorff is an interesting approach to the grammar, and someone has also helpfully made audio recordings of the whole thing which are available on archive.org. I also use the exercises in Yenni's Greek Grammar for extra grammar drill. Lulalu, if your son is interested in Greek, I don't see why you couldn't go ahead and start learning the alphabet. It doesn't require the abstract thinking that tackling the grammar will, but it capitalizes on his current interest and can only help with English derivatives and their spellings, and then you will have that done if/when you undertake more serious study of the language.

Well, I'd love to tell you that my approach is yielding brilliant, linguistically-gifted students, but honesty compels me to report that my experimental subjects are still too young to yield definitive results. 🙂 What I will say is that I think it's interesting that there is, relatively speaking, a lot of discussion around how to teach math (conceptual vs. procedural, the student's movement from concrete experiences to abstract representation, etc), but very little conversation like that around language arts, particularly grammar. I see the concrete work with the Montessori materials as somewhat parallel to having your students use base-ten blocks to add multiple digit numbers before teaching them an algorithm.

My goals are different from yours (I want our language study to improve our use of language and enable us to read classical literature, and am less interested in the "brain-training" or logic side of things, which I even think is actually a little bogus), so take this with that in mind, but here's a bit about what we do. We study both Latin and Greek - all my kids get some exposure to Latin from birth because we use it in liturgy and family prayers. We do a lot of our studies family-style, so the littler kids get some exposure to grammar in the primary years, but I haven't found that they are really ready for the abstraction that formal grammar study involves until about age 10. I am not there yet, but my highly aspirational goal is for all our language arts (grammar, composition, etc) to be fully integrated across all three languages. Part of what I'm hoping to achieve there is a deeper sense of the actual meaning and function of different grammatical structures - my own grammar-translation style education in Latin resulted in the idea that there is an equality between certain Latin structures and certain English phrases: eg, you always and automatically translate the future less vivid "should/would" or "ne + subjective" as "lest" even though no one says either in English much these days - this is not the skilled and sensitive use of language I am going for. I'm using a lot of Montessori-style language works across all three languages to help with this, because that approach helps us focus on the function of grammatical structures rather than merely their identification, classification, and conversion into some allegedly equivalent English. I took an immersion Koine Greek course last summer, and that experience sold me on the value of that approach for classical languages. It's not really possible to duplicate at home, of course, but even if your goals do not include being able to speak the language, I think there is a good argument for including an aural/oral component to your studies: you can just get a lot more exposure to and practice with the language in the same amount of time. There is an interesting presentation by the former president of SALVI here that talks about the valuable bits of both a grammar-translation and an active approach to Latin. Accentuation (important for vocabulary, not just pronunciation) is also much, much easier to get the hang of when you hear the language used. There are many Latin audio resources out there now, and a slowly growing number of Greek ones, too. For Greek, we use the Italian edition of Athenaze, the textbook and audio from the course I took last summer, and some vintage materials. I've never looked at MP's Greek stuff, but would imagine they are good for a traditional grammar-translation approach. For Latin, we use LLPSI with various supplements, including lots of extra reading material.

Our homeschool is literature-centered. I see the ultimate goal of general education as being the cultivation of the arts of linguistic expression. I moved in this direction not so much because of Circe-related stuff, but after reading more about the actual history of classical education, its revival in the Renaissance, and also the work of more recent Jesuit educators like Fr. Francis Donnelly. I haven't found any curriculum that matches my goals or the methods I'm hoping to use (not that I've looked at absolutely everything out there), so we're making it up as we go! For our formal studies, I tend to rely on classic authors because my goal is for us to learn how to use the English language well from those who have mastered its use (that being said, I am happy to hunt around to find something that engages the kids and move on from something that doesn't even if it's what's on book lists or whatever). For this coming year, I'm planning a big grammar push, but I'm using resources that focus on the rhetorical impact of grammatical choices, not grammar rules or diagramming. And we're going to do a lot of comparing how grammar works in the different languages we study. I'm using short stories for most of our literature selections, so that we can look for similarities and differences in how authors use language and also get exposure to many different styles.

You might look at the Oxford Book of Narrative Verse or the Oxford Book of Ballads and just try some poems out until you find one you like the start of enough to keep reading. For Christian sacramental poems maybe look at the Metaphysical Poets. John Donne's holy sonnets are a great place to start, "Batter my heart, three-personed God," "Death be not proud," etc. Reading Donne in high school with a wonderful teacher was a hugely formative experience for me. You will probably want a good dictionary for those, to get at some of the archaic meanings of his language, or at least find an edition with good notes and a substantive introduction. The poems are short so it's easier to put in a little work. There's also a nice edition of Shakespeare's sonnets with short facing-page commentaries by Helen Vendler. In general, one suggestion I have is to think about whether a poem moves you and how - think about how it hits you emotionally, in addition to what it "means."

The National Council for Social Studies has an annual list in an awkward format.

Have you seen this thread?

Mater Anserina has Mother Goose rhymes done by two excellent Latinists.

After taking a lot of time off reading about education to try to make myself focus on educating, I'm back in the books to try and figure out what to do with my 10yo, and I wanted to drop by here and especially recommend Fr. Donnelly's book The Art of Interesting, which, as he says somewhere else, articulates his theory of rhetoric, and in a very accessible way. Between that and studying Model English some more and also reading Donald Clark Lemen's Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education, I'm starting to feel like I have enough of a tenuous grasp on this to try it. My 10yo is NOT ready for Model English, and I think I want to do a brief overview of grammar first anyway, so I'm wading in with some sentences pulled from books my 10yo knows very well with the Model English teacher's manual as a guide to preparing lessons. If it's progress when you try something and it doesn't go that well but immediately makes apparent some of the things you need to work on that you were never going to figure out from just reading old books, then I'd say we are making progress. I also wanted to share an interesting article I came across when I was poking around some Fr. Donnelly-related item: After Rhetoric - I think this might be the best brief summation that I have seen of what exactly happened to the college curriculum in the last 150 years or so. I've also been looking a bit more at other contemporary neoclassical writing curricula that claim to follow the progymnasmata or be a variation on it. I'm just not sure what to make of these, or what exactly we should be taking from the progymnasmata at all. I think I want to read more about the Renaissance to early modern period - Lemen has a book about Milton's education and the use of the progym in that era, and the early Jesuits produced their own edition for use in their schools, so it clearly "worked" beyond the classical age, but... I don't know, I'm not sure what my question even is. I think I want to understand better how this tradition did or did not develop across time after Aphthonius? Or maybe I actually need to read more about composition in women's education?

That is a fairly odd misreading of EFL. My hunch is that permissive parenting and other confusions must stem as much from ruptures in actual lived experience as new and bad ideas, although untangling that particular vicious cycle would be difficult. At this point, it seems like people have a very limited repertoire of parenting moves they can imagine, mostly relating to how one does or does not respond to individual acts of naughtiness, because they have only experienced a very limited repertoire of parenting moves (I know that as a younger mother, I had hesitations around correcting my child because I mostly had a fairly harsh picture of correction). Other aspects of teaching, training, and guiding are at best taken for granted and thus invisible to those who have the good fortune to have experienced them. For example, a couple of years ago I very excitedly told my friend that I had figured out an amazing technique for keeping my kids calm, quiet, and still when we have to wait somewhere: telling them a story! She looked at me like I had just arrived from Mars because doesn't every one know that? Of course, it turns out that her mom told her stories when they were waiting places when she was little and mine did not, nor had I ever seen another parent engage a child this way. This most recent Kathleen Norris novel I read actually bears a little on this question. The spoiled adolescent heiress has been subject to periods of complete indulgence alternating with ultimately ineffectual management by a very strict "Victorian" governess (I thought of your comment, Eliza, that earlier writings often seem more relatable to you than things from Victorian times) - a cycle that seems to be mirrored in many families even today. The heroine, having just disentangled herself from a very bad situation of her own making, has to take an entirely different line of influence, trying to win the girl's affection while simultaneously drawing the line about somethings - no more lunchtime cocktails! - and introducing some new more wholesome activities and then gently trying to awaken an innate desire for self-improvement (by appealing directly to her vanity). Norris shows her thought process at a few crucial moments trying to decide what will be the most effective course of action - I found it very interesting and realistic. Progress is slow-moving with periods of regress and no satisfying resolution (for the young heiress - the heroine gets her man, of course), just the prospect of all her choices, for good or bad, continuing to play out with various consequences. Which seems like how life is.

Shoes, thanks for the book recommendation - I remember when it came out and all the horrified denunciations of Chua's allegedly authoritarian parenting, but I never did get around to looking at it myself. The point about enjoying things we are good at, but it often taking a fair bit practice to get to that point is such a good one - I think it applies to parenting, too! The weather is currently gorgeous here, so I've been sending the kids out more and starting to think about next year. My eldest is turning 10 this summer, so we're finally slipping into the EFL black hole - I need to spend some time poking around our older discussions of this period and figure out what I'm going to do with him. He's pretty motivated around languages, including, weirdly and with no prompting from me, Greek, so I think we're going to forge ahead with a classics-heavy plan for him. Eek. I'm still pretty unsure of how to work in English and the content subjects for him, though. Oh, and I may have a new favorite Kathleen Norris novel - The World is Like That, about an office girl who narrowly misses a really bad course of action and then winds up the companion to a very spoiled young heiress. The ending is maybe not her strongest, but I really enjoyed most of it - some serious examples of tact, too!

It's dense and a bit of a slog at times, but I got a lot out of Bruce Kimball's Orators and Philosophers.

Eliza, I don't have any deep insight into the grammar question, but EFL does say somewhere that the time to teach a child something is when they need it (or does she say ask for it? well, it's something along those lines) and not before. That suggests to me at least a much lighter, later grammar course than one often finds around these parts. I'm still not sure I understand what is meant when people talk about "mind-training" and "mental discipline" (I've been looking back at Barbara Rogoff for something recently, so I'm tempted to say it's merely the skill of reproducing apparently useless knowledge out of context), so I don't know how to assess how much of it we might want at which ages. In any case, now I'm tempted to hand my kids Artes Latinae and spend my new-found leisure mastering sourdough baking or reading Nassim Taleb. :laugh: Actually, I really like that Junior Latin book, which Gummere and his co-author originally planned to title "Five Declensions for the Age of Ten" - the introductory material is worth reading. One other poorly articulated thought I've had rolling around in my head for a few weeks now, on this question of how tight of a ship to run. EFL does say somewhere (it must be in Educating the Child at Home, which I can't currently find my copy of, because I've looked through Bookless Lessons and didn't find it, but I'm sure I'm not making this up) that you shouldn't always be on top of your kids. That they need some freedom to even be a little naughty once in a while because true virtue is developed by resisting evil. And I thought of Kathleen Norris's mom burning up those Nick Carters. On the one hand, she upheld a certain standard, but on the other hand, she never blocked up the Nick Carters at their source. We live in a trickier era, I think, because it's harder to give our children an appropriate amount of freedom to test their developing powers of judgment - it seems that it's easier to allow either too much or too little freedom. But I've allowed some Redwalls on the shelf as the price of vetoing most of the other books at the library. It may not be ideal, but I'm finding that I need to conserve energy for the creative work of developing a positive family culture rather than using it up keeping every Nick Carter from sneaking in.

Admiral of the Ocean Sea by Samuel Eliot Morison - it is hefty, though!