Its a snowy day, so we’re having lots of time to read! I’ll update it later once we’ve done all of our reading for the day. Here’s our list so far:
Homeschool
Our Book Diet – Day 1 (10/25)
As many of you know, I am working through Trelease’s The Read-Aloud Handbook. It has really inspired me to make sure that I am not just reading to my kids at bedtime, but rather making read-aloud time a big part of our day. I have decided to focus from now until Thanksgiving on making sure that my kids are getting a healthy “diet” of great books. We’ve slacked a lot due to our impending move, and this is something that I don’t want to see fall by the wayside.
Feel free to join me! I’m going to try to post at least 10 books a day that we’ve read. That’s my minimum. My kids would probably read 100, but 10 is a good goal for me, as it is a reasonable amount of my day to spend on reading to them without it being too overwhelming for us right now. 🙂
Yesterday was almost all chapter books (Winnie the Pooh especially), so today is lighter fare 🙂
Today’s picks: (2 of these were read to me by my 4yo…)
Are we failing our boys?
A woman on one of my email lists suggested this book, and I am loving it! I’ve already found a lot of things that I want to discuss and ponder.
I am especially interested in his assertion that families in our country, and especially fathers, are doing a disservice to young men and boys by giving them the idea that reading is a “girly” thing to do.
…one place where there is never a shortage of males is in our remedial reading classes, where boys make up more than 70 percent of the enrollment. In American remedial classes, that is. Boys don’t constitute 70 percent of remedial students in many other countries. In Insraeli remedial classes, there are no gender differences. In Finland, England, Nigeria, India, and Germany, the girls outnumber the boys. It can’t be genetics.
I would’ve guessed that India would’ve had that statistic, and I honestly wasn’t too surprised about American boys being behind girls in reading. I’m trying to figure out why I just accept that though. I obviously don’t think it is genetic. Trelease has his own ideas about why this is. We’ll get to that later though. Back to the statistics:
According to… research, boys are more likely than girls to repeat a grade or drop out of school, suffer from more learning disabilities, are three times more likely to be enrolled in special-education classes, are more likely to be involved in criminal and delinquent behavior, are less likely to be enrolled in college-prep classes, have lower educational expectations, lower reading and writing scores, read less for pleasure, and do less homework. Even those males who eventually reach college are less likely to graduate than females, largely due to their macho-male behavior while they are there; as Riordan notes, “while in college they spend more time than women exercising, partying, watching TV, or playing video games.”
When it comes to schooling, its been long known that girls were better in the early years, but boys passed them in the later years. This is no longer true.
Thanks to concerted social and academic efforts, girls’ high school and college scores have risen for the past two decades. But during the same period, the boys’ scores have taken a nosedive.
An immediate measure of the downshift among young males in the last decade can be seen in the number of students taking the Advanced Placement exams. AP courses allow achieving high school students to gain college credit while still in high school… The girls’ rate of AP courses has shown a steady climb, while the boys rate has taken two dips and allowed a wide margin to grow between the sexes.
In 1970, males outnumbered females in college enrollment by a ratio of 59 to 41. By 2000, that ratio had been reversed to 57 to 42 in favor of women. Granted, the women’s movement raised the bar for female achievement in the classroom, but what’s been going on with the guys?
I was thinking about the women’s movement as I was reading this section. I’d love to see an egalitarian movement take hold for men where they could be encouraged to be smart and excel without a bunch of machismo and chest beating. That’d be nice.
So now Trelease talks about his theory on what is happening, and it has a lot to do with a larger emphasis on sports (24-hour channels, etc) for men and a deeper encouragement (or at least modeling) that focuses on engaging athletics rather than academics. Regardless of education level, the average was the same for families: fathers read only 15% of the time, mothers 76%, and others 9%.
The right call for fathers is to be involved intellectually as well as athletically with a child. If a child must wait until junior high or middle school before encountering a male in the act of reading, the idea that reading is for girls will already have taken deep root in his mind. We have to short-circuit that dangerous thinking and convince American males that it is not only possible but preferable for fathers to be athletically and intellectually involved in their children’s lives. A father can play catch in the backyard after dinner and, on the same night, read to the child for fifteen minutes. He can take him to the basketball game on Friday night and the library on Saturday morning.
My dh is wonderful at this. He reads with the kids all the time, and they also see him reading. I feel so very thankful. There are some days when he reads to my kids and I don’t ::ducking my head::. And its not that I’m not a reader (obviously!), but that is something that dh makes sure ALWAYS happens at bedtime. I’m saddened to hear how rare this is 🙁
Toddler tutoring gains in popularity – Nightly News with Brian Williams – MSNBC.com
Toddler tutoring gains in popularity – Nightly News with Brian Williams – MSNBC.com
Now, there’s even a precursor to preschool. It’s called “Junior Kumon,” a spin-off of the popular tutoring program, but for toddlers. Three-year-old Giana is enrolled. With the help of an instructor, she can identify common objects like twigs and presents.
Here’s an idea: Why not teach your kids about twigs by actually letting them go outside and see a twig? Its crazy, but it works!
Large tutoring companies that have long helped high school students prepare for the SATs are now helping three- to six-year-olds prepare for kindergarten.
Responding to the demands of parents, Junior Kumon was launched in 2003; today, about 40,000 children are enrolled, at a cost of up to $220 a month.
How horrifying is this?! I was watching the nightly news and saw this and just had to post it. Parents are sending their 3-year-olds to tutoring to learn their ABCs. Um, my kids both knew them before 2 – no tutors needed. How has our society convinced parents that we need to hire experts for every aspect of life?! How sick!
Giana’s mom wants her daughter to have an edge. “My main goal is to have her ahead of the class,” says Gina Moreno. “I don’t want her to be the kid that needs [an] after-school program, that needs help.”
I probably shouldn’t even point out that the mother made a grammatical error during the interview. Even aside from that, how does it ever make sense that in order to stop your kid from needing help during their school age years, you instead decide to suck away their childhood and force them to go to tutoring during a time in their life when they need to be outdoors and learning about the world around them?
When did our country become so assinine?
The Beatitudes
Matthew 5
The Beatitudes
1Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, 2and he began to teach them saying:
3“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
5Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
6Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
7Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
8Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
9Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called sons of God.
10Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.11“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. 12Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Confession time: I’ve never really gotten the Beatitudes. I mean, I understand them, but I don’t think I’ve really strived to live them. Much on the contrary, I’ve used the more to help myself feel better in bad times. For example, when I was mourning, I thought “‘Blessed are those who mourn’, so this isn’t totally a bad thing.” I did NOT think “‘Blessed are those who mourn.’ I should mourn more in my regular life!
Right now I am reading through Dr. Teresa Whitehurst’s How Would Jesus Raise a Child, and her chapter on the Beatitudes is making me think. She says
If you want to become more like Jesus as a person and a parent, the Beatitudes are a wise and easy place to begin.
So then she gives some examples of the way Jesus lived the Beatitudes and the way that the world lives. She says, for example, that Jesus tells us that when you’re gentle (meek), not harsh with others, you will inherit the earth. The world’s view is “Show ’em who’s boss. You gotta be cruel to be kind.”, etc.
OK, so I understand what she’s saying there. Like I said, I don’t think I’ve done much striving to live them, but I get her point. I’ve always thought more about the Love verses or the fruits of the Spirit, etc.
Then she starts talking about exactly the same thing as Charlotte Mason. I discussed it in my Trains of Thought entry. She says that humans have a hard time with change and are actually immune to it. The same thing CM said! Go figure
…it short-circuits our goals. We want to lose weight, but can’t seem to overcome our immunity to change in the area of eating habits. We want to be more patient with our toddler but our “immune system” kicks in, preventing us from trying a new, calmer method for handling fussiness.
So now I’ve read this twice in two weeks. Maybe God is trying to tell me something 😛 She goes on to give a great example
When I was getting used to my laptop, it took me several days to unlearn the placement of the keys on my familiar old desktop computer. Some moves were so ingrained that I actually had to cover certain keys with tape so as not to hit them accidentally, erasing my work each time! So it goes with the challenging internal changes for which Jesus promised blessings and rewards in the Beatitudes. They will require that we “tape over” certain habitual ways of thinking and behavior so that we can begin to learn and use what Jesus taught. It may feel awkward at first, but if you inhibit your usual ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, eventually you will find that Jesus’ teachings are not impossible to incorporate in your life after all.
I like the way that she built on the same ideas as CM. I like her example. I’ve experienced the same thing with a new keyboard, and I’ve also experienced that same difficulty when trying to change a bad habit. The fact is that you get used to the new way of life if you just stick with it.
This also reminded me of when I first bought my new glasses. My dh is going through the same thing right now, so I can really empathize. I have progressive lenses. I have the strongest prescription at the bottom for reading, a moderate prescription for mid-distance (like the computer), and hardly any prescription at all for distance. For the first week or two, I felt terrible with these glasses. I kept getting dizzy. I was getting stabbing pains in my brain. It seemed bad. Then one day I could see and my brain had figured out which part of the glasses to look through for different activities. Now I can’t live without them!
I think I need to apply some of these same principles in my life.
So the last point that I wanted to discuss is her interpretation of Matthew 5:48 (“You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”. This is a tough verse. We know we can’t be perfect. That’s why we need God. So what gives?
I used to worry about this instruction. Then, after further study, I realized that Jesus didn’t say, “So be as perfect as God.” To say this would be to imply that we are on equal footing with God, with equal powers of perfection. Rather, what Jesus was urging his listeners to do was to take his teachings seriously and strive towards the ideal that God represents.
I’m off to digest this some more. I’m sure I’ll write about it again!
Trains of thought
From Home Education by Charlotte Mason (from the chapter “Habit is Ten Natures”)
…it is as if every familiar train of thought made a rut in the nervous substance of the brain into which the thoughts run lightly of their own accord, and out of which they can only be got by an effort of will.
I’ve been studying a lot about habit training and discipling recently. I really love Charlotte Mason’s descriptions of habits. Here she speaks of an older child who should “know better”, but was never trained properly and as such his brain now naturally functions in the other way.
And to correct bad habits of speaking, for instance, it will not be enough for the child to intend to speak plainly and to try to speak plainly; he will not be able to do so habitually until some degree of new growth has taken place… whilst he is making efforts to form the new habit.
Any sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated, tends to perpetuate itself; so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel, or do, under like circumstances, without any consciously formed purpose or anticipation of results.
I know how true this is as an adult, even when we “know better”. If we have trained ourselves to habitually perform a bad habit, it is an effort to behave differently. I am just now considering how early these habits are formed and how much easier life will be for my children if they are already used to the good habits rather than having bad ones they have to break.