General Remarks
Emma manages her own schedule at this point. Each week I print off a checklist of her work for the week, and then she takes that and schedules it all out, using time blocking. She doesn't have a planner or a binder or anything, each week is planned on a piece of paper I print with a grid on it, marked in 30 minute increments. She uses iCal on her iPad to track commitments and to be aware of the family's activities.
This year, her main outside activities have been working about 4 hours a week as a mother's helper for a neighbor and helping teach the 3rd/4th grade religious education class at our church. In the second half of the year the lead teacher had surgery, and Emma ended up taking over the teaching for the rest of the year.
She published her first book, Genevieve of Alea, this year, and is working on a second book with a friend she met at CM West :: Retreat in Old San Juan.
She's a huge help with her younger siblings, and I couldn't have done all that I did this year without her to make dinner, console Charlotte, and keep her younger siblings heading more or less in the right direction when I was unavailable.
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| Photo Credit: Emma Vanderpol |
Subject Areas
Bible/Faith
All during Emma's high school, I've had her spend 20 minutes each day with a different category of Bible or Faith based reading. The areas are:- Bible - Old Testament: Joshua, Ruth, Judges
- Bible - New Testament: Romans and other letters
- Saints: Fathers of the Church
- Catechism of the Catholic Church
- Summa of the Summa
I've continued to use the Ignatius Study Guides for the Old Testament (although at this point we've used just about all of them!) and I also started Emma on the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture series. It is perhaps a little too meaty for this level, but the one on Romans is still readable, interesting, and not so scholarly that it doesn't feel applicable to life anymore. The Fathers of the Church is one I read years ago, and remembered appreciating because it pairs a short biography of each father with a couple excerpts from that person's work.
Language Arts
Emma is a great writer, especially in fiction, but still needs some more polishing in her essay writing. We set out a plan of monthly papers and term papers, as well as the usual daily written narrations and weekly short essays so that she could get more practice. While we could have kept to the schedule better than we did, it still helped her writing a great deal and and she's on much better footing in that area than she was at the end of the year last year. She's more comfortable with it, her writing is better and clearer, and a lot of progress has been made.Her written narrations and short essays are published on a private WordPress blog, which she's been keeping since 7th grade. It has become quite a record of her development as a writer, as well as the breadth of her studies.
Emma has such a good grasp of the mechanics of writing that I have her proof my writing if I'm working on something I want to make sure is correct. (I should note that she did not thoroughly pre-read this post, so any errors are all my fault). Because of this, she does not do dictation, grammar, or any sort of mechanics of English study.
Mathematics
Emma has been using the Life of Fred books since we bailed on Math-U-See back at Delta. They've been ok, but I'm not planning on using them for other students. She's completed Algebra (9th grade) and Algebra 2 (10th), and has been working on Geometry this year. She hasn't finished the book, and is struggling with the proofs. My husband and I aren't exactly a lot of help in this area, so it has been a slog. She's hoping to get this book finished this summer so she can have the full school year to complete Trigonometry.Literature
Emma read the Aeneid, Tale of Two Cities, a selection of 19th Century American short stories, The Red Badge of Courage, and Silas Marner this year along with her parents and her 13 year old brother. We had weekly discussions about the readings and also watched the Roman Roads lecture series about the Aeneid.The Aeneid was stretched out over most of the year since the videos counted as the week's reading, and the other selections were read in turn, about one per term, with the short stories and Red Badge of Courage sharing a term. The short stories we read were The Birthmark, Young Goodman Brown, The Cask of the Amontillado, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Gift of the Magi, and The Necklace.
Having the family discussions around the book and reading it together added a lot of enjoyment and interest for everyone, and we plan to continue this in future years. We found that dinnertime worked well for these discussions, and it had an added bonus of helping the younger children to practice their ability to sit quietly and listen even when they weren't involved in the conversation.
Emma and I also read Les Miserables this year, at a pace of about 25 pages per week. Here's her response to one of her exam questions about Les Mis, which I throughly enjoyed.
History
This year we were studying the 19th Century in European and American History, and Ancient Rome in our Ancients stream.American History
She started the year with Paul Johnson's A History of the American People, but as Emma listened to Gregory and I discuss his history readings from Morison's Oxford History of the American People, she asked if she could switch. I agreed with her that Morison's book is better and we made the change. The only downside to Morison is really a positive and a negative: the book is more thorough and therefore a lot longer. Both of them didn't mind the extra pages because it is so interesting and well written.
Emma also had assigned:
- Arguing About Slavery (long, so she has continued to read it after the end of the term as an evening read)
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Reflections on the Civil War (I particularly enjoyed this thoughtful book by Bruce Catton)
- Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
- Continental Ambitions (a few chapters in the time period)
European History
I also switched spines in this area too. She started the year with Dawn to Decadence but ended with Medieval and Modern Times. Dawn to Decadence is a great book, but she was starting to feel like she wasn't really getting a good grasp of what was actually happening in the 19th Century in Europe because DtD is a social history, not a political or military history. Med&Mod is a much more straightforward history book, and probably would have benefited from some supplementation from DtD, but I didn't think of that until now.
I also had Emma read from the appropriate chronological sections of The Catholic Church Through the Ages and Church History in Plain Language. I included the second one so that she could have a better understanding of the development of the various Protestant churches during the 19th Century.
Ancient History
I used the Roman Roads Media series about the Roman Historians and created a one year schedule for the lectures and readings. She also was reading History the Ancient World by Starr at a rate of 5 pp/week. We added the Starr book (which she had read in previous years) a few weeks into the school year to have a better overview of the whole historical period.
We wanted to like the RRM series more than we did. As much as I admire and respect Wes Callihan's knowledge of and experience with the texts, we felt like he did too much narrating during the lectures. And as a Mason household, we know that narration is the work of the student, not the teacher! He did have background information, additional connections and thoughts to share, but we felt like the bulk of the videos were him telling us what was in the readings we just read.
Citizenship
In addition to reading Plutarch as a family one night a week, Emma also started Roots of American Order, reading it at a rate of about 7 pages/week. This was a favorite of the year, and a book well worth reading. It has added so much to all of our historical studies, as well as given us many new thoughts about political theory and the development of government. She read half of it this year, and will finish it next year.Geography
This is a subject area that just didn't really happen this year. I had picked a book in this area, but it wasn't a good fit for the subject so we dropped it after a few weeks. But then I didn't find anything to put in its place.Natural History
I've had Emma following a multi-stream approach in her natural history studies, where she has an area of focus each term, then some additional natural history readings. I had planned to spend fall with physics, winter with chemistry, and spring with biology, but we ended up splitting the year between physics and chemistry.For physics we used Conceptual Physics, reading various selections from the text based on her interest. We also used Drawing Physics. Both books were great and I look forward to using them again.
Since we had already spent two terms with the Sabbath Mood Chemistry study guides in the last two years, we decided we would go ahead and finish it out this year. Emma never liked the text that goes with this study guide, and I think she liked it even less this year. I think she felt it was too dated, and not really at the right level for a high school chemistry text. She did appreciate that she could pick her own, more involved, chemistry experiment in this study guide, and made soap for the family.
For her general natural history reading:
- The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs (started last year - definitely recommend)
- The Invention of Air
- Krakatoa
- Science Matters
- The Island of the Colorblind (initially assigned, but moved to evening reading)
Latin
Now this is an interesting one... Emma had switched from Henle to Lingua Latina in 10th grade, and started to really enjoy Latin. But then we spent several days at Wyoming Catholic College in February and Emma got to participate in an immersive Latin class where they also use Lingua Latina. Since all the students at WCC have to take that class anyway, and because the way it is taught at the school is so much better than what we can do at home, Emma decided she's done enough Latin for now and she'll pick up Latin again in college. She's looking forward to taking Latin in college, and she still confounds her siblings by speaking to them in Latin.
Spanish
The first 2/3 of the year went really well with Spanish, with Emma studying Spanish through weekly lessons with a tutor from iTalki. Emma narrated to her, had her correct her writing and exam questions, had conversations with her... it was great. Then the tutor started to argue passionately that Shakespeare was gay and Emma was trying to defend the Bard with her limited Spanish abilities. The tutor suggested that they prepare for further argument in the next session, and we both felt like this was really inappropriate. I should have stepped in and done something, but I didn't, and instead Spanish just dropped off a cliff.I'm really not quite sure what to do for next year. Talk this out with the current person, even though it has been a couple months? Find a new tutor? Try a different online approach that isn't quite so open-ended? Decide that she has enough foreign language credits and not go any further?
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