Four Weeks Down and Our Time with Tolkien

We've finished four weeks of school. It feels wonderful to say that. We've had a good year, our subjects are flowing smoothly, and we made it four weeks with only one minor delay for lingering illness.

We are spending time with Tolkien this year. We're working through Literary Lessons from Lord of the Rings, which is a literature study. You can see the details at homescholar.org. So far we've finished five chapter of Lord of the Rings and finished the Tolkien biography by Humphrey Carpenter. We were both intrigued by the biography. As a yet unpublished writer, I found some great gems to hold onto, some details of a writer's life to work into my habits.

We're fans of Lord of the Rings, more in the movie sense at this point. We've watched the extended versions of all three movies. We have brought the Ring culture into our house with all the silly little asides from Ring lore. Z thinks someone should stand on the corner in a Gandalf costume holding a sign that bears YOU SHALL NOT PASS! I can't convince him that he'd have fun doing just that. In a way I'm glad we have the movies to refer back to, which isn't always the case when I read a book. I'm a visual person, we both are picturing the movie characters as I read. Yes, we are doing them as read-alouds, although he is joining in with the readings. We enjoy the sharing of moments, reading being one of them.

Although we are only five chapters into the books we've already referred back to the movies. Z and I are great movie critics (grin). Our observation so far is that Peter Jackson has condensed the movies, not changed them. I am excited to see where else our wanderings take us this year.

We've already touched on two very individual men, Tolkien and Leonardo daVinci. We studied daVinci's art and read a short biography on him as well. Z then wrote a report on da Vinci. Writing is one of the skills we are focusing on this year, so we walked through the report phases together. He did a wonderful job. He's also learning how to cite sources, which has me learning the new ways as well.

In math we spent the week working with prime factors. This required a lot of thought on his part, he did excellent. I stretched my brain this week as well. Yesterday he asked if you could actually hurt your brain by thinking too hard. This was in math class, of course, all of the the weird random comments come during math class.

Aside from that did I mention he is now taller than me? Just by a smidge, but he is. He turns fourteen next week. Next week is also our first week off break, planned to coincide with his birthday. Overall I am very impressed with how our year is proceeding. Our schedule is working wonderfully. We're only behind in one subject, logic, but that is because we're taking longer in each lesson and we skipped a few days when neither of us were feeling well.

I believe we are going to enjoy our journey this year, and for that I am most glad.

Week One: All Said and Done!

We made it through week one, and we started on time everyday. That in itself is an accomplishment. We had a huge storm last night; big enough water was leaking around some windows. There were high winds, branches down, almost hurricane force winds. All of it started about eleven p.m., right after we had all tried to go to bed.

I also have a really sore throat, and spent part of the school day in bed. Thankfully Z has elevated himself to be able to work independently. In fact he's pretty awesome so far this year. We had grand plans for academics over the summer (insert vile, evil laughter here). None of it got done. We had a family illness that took most of our focus and time. The only academic thing Z was required to do was read every day for thirty minutes. Since he is engulfed in the Keys to the Kingdom series by Garth Nix, getting him to read is not an issue. His reading level has increased over the summer. His reading aloud has greatly improved. We accomplished a lot of reading this week, much of it aloud. He did so well.

Our schedule has been a hit. Doing less subjects per day has been wonderful. We have time to chat, discover, not worry about the clock, and still finish well. The real test will be next week with math.

Our biggest joy this week has been delving into the Tolkien biography. We're only on chapter five, but I can already see Z's appreciation for the author increasing. We start into Lord of the Rings on Monday. I myself have never read the books (insert audible gasp!) and I can't wait to start our journey together.

We've also implemented rising interests into our ways to build skills. The other night we watched a show called Legend Quest. The episode was about the quest for the location of the Holy Grail. We stayed up long after the show discussing our knowledge of the grail (minimal), our own speculations (wildly so), and how he wanted to research this issue further. The next day at school we used this as a opportunity to learn how to research online. I could not have planned the task better. The chapter we read in Rulebook for Arguments that same day discussed how to find and use sources. We did not find too much on the grail, but we stoked our imaginations and built skills at the same time.

I'm thrilled with my student this year. His growth through a trying summer has been remarkable. I can't wait for next week when we start back into algebra; math always garners a few interesting conversations, mostly nothing to do with math.

One Literature Study to Rule Them All

My copy arrived today, thanks to another WTMer! I've been looking forward to doing this study for the last two years, we'll start our journey next fall. You can check them out for yourself at HomeScholar.org

Alice's Adventure in Wonderland

Today Z and I discussed Alice. It was an awesome conversation. I didn't follow a literary analysis script, we didn't do busy work. I simply wrote out in marker three pages that held five questions. Then I copied the pages and handed a set to Z.

The first thing I did was draw a circle with 19 circles in a spoke around it. The center was obviously Alice and the nineteen circles were the characters in the story.

We discussed major and minor characters and I had him pick what he felt were the five major players in Alice's Adventure. Amazingly he picked the same five I did. He originally added the Mad Hatter to the list, the stopped and changed his mind. Excellent. Although I felt the Hatter was important I don't think he was in the top five.

This led to a discussion about Alice in Wonderland, the movie of earlier this year. We talked about creative license and pondered whether Lewis Carroll would have been impressed with the movie. We both agreed that he might not. Although we both enjoyed the Tim Burton movie it wasn't the book. It didn't hold all the play on words that permeated the book, it wasn't mocking the children's etiquette of today. We still enjoyed the expanded role of the Mad Hatter.

We also discussed the power and confidence Alice felt while growing and her diminished demeanor when she was small. We even discussed the way the use of drugs has been applied to Alice's trippy experience. He brought up The Matrix and pills used by Neo. I had Grace Slick running through my head.

We discussed the role of the Caterpillar and how the Cheshire Cat seemed to think the whole thing was nonsense.

We've started using Figuratively Speaking as one of our resources (great resource btw) and used the obvious one of personification while we read Alice.

All in all we had a great discussion for one of our first forays into literary analysis. Z had points to bring up, he defended his position well, and brought an interesting perspective to several topics. We enjoy a good play on words, he told me the book was very (T. close your eyes and ears) punny. I'm loving our conversations in school this year.