The Boston Massacre by Jesse Coe

The weekend had a mind of its own, so this took a little longer to post. I am submitting this exactly as he wrote and turned in. The spelling errors are NOT mine-

The Boston Massacre

The Boston Massacre is one of the things that led up to the Revolutionary War. The British wear not helping the situation. King George sent over some more troops to Boston. The 700 more troops were to police the streets. The British soldiers were became to annoy the colonists, and taking there job’s.

One day an angry mob formed. That day was March 5, 1770, in Boston, Bassahcusets. It was the colonist that fromed the mob. They started to pelt a sentry with snowballs and a chunk of wood. He called for help and 7 more soldiers came.

The results of the fight was death. Five colonists were dead, some wounded. Crispus Attikus was the first African American to fall in the Revolution. The colonists made it into a rally cry, they said it was a massacre. This “massacre” was a big part in the Revolutionary War.

by Jesse Coe

Isn’t that wonderful? It is not without errors, but it was done alone. I am very proud of the improvement in his writing this year. I believe our writing difficulties were twofold: he wasn’t ready to write and I didn’t have this format to help guide him. Between the two issues being fixed, I know there will be no tears in writing.  If you have a reluctant writer, I implore you to try this category method.

~Shannon

Five Finger Paragraph Success and Reverting Back

When I check the stats on this blog, I see a lot of people do a search on this site for the Five Finger Paragraph article. So I think you may find this interesting. Today was our first BIG writing assignment since our holiday break. We have done some little stuff, but this was an “on your own, three paragraph” paper assignment. I was riding the tails of our previous successes and quite honestly thought this was going to be so wonderful. I taught Jesse our history lesson about the Boston Massacre and The Boston Tea Party. I really thought he would pick the Boston Tea Party for his writing assignment. The phone rang off the hook…my husband broke down in the van and I had to go get him….my time teaching and guiding was limited. I said just do the 5 finger paragraph format and write. An hour later, I saw poor little Jesse with red cheeks, head down on the table, eyes glazed over….looking despondent. And his writing was pathetic. Sorry, honey, I know you read this, but it was. Really.  I had to jump in, erase the math from the chalkboard and help him find 3 simple categories. His first trouble was picking categories too specific. When you pick a category to write about, it needs to be a bit general so that you can write three things about it. He had the subject of the Boston Massacre. Here is the new categories we have:

1. British

2. Angry Mob

3. Dead

Ok, something to work with. Now we need three things about those categories. He had to look at the text from the lesson…under #1 he puts  700 (amount of soldiers sent to Boston), King George , and annoying (what the soldiers were doing to the colonists-harassing women, threatening men, taking colonists job for extra money). The things in parenthesis are things we discussed, not written.  Under #2 he added colonists, Boston Ma. March 5, 1770, and attack a sentry. Then under #3 are the words  5 dead several wounded, 1st African American to die in the Revolution, and rally cry.

After such a long turmoil, we ended there. Tomorrow he will have to put those thoughts into paragraphs and sentences. I got a bit lazy and should have done this with him as it was the first writing after such a long time. It would have been less painful for him. But I am sure tomorrow’s writing will be a success as this format really works. I will post his paper as soon as it is done and he makes his edits.  He had tried to write without this format. This format is really the best and easiest to learn. We are back on track now and tomorrow should be a bit less painful! Let’s hope, huh, Jesse??!!

~Shannon

Kingdom Series

I bought this for Jesse for his reading progam this year. I bought books 1-3 plus the audio cd’s. I knew he would benefit from having the story read to him. Their drama and musical score is incredible. These are fantastic stories.

             

http://www.kingdomseries.com/index.htm

Check out the website….worth every penny!  Can’t wait until we are ready to order the rest in the series. Has anyone else read these books?

An Article About Serving After the Children Are Grown

I am over half way through educating my own children. Jake, my 3rd son, is almost done with his sophomore year. Jesse , 4th son, will be in junior high this fall. I have been thinking a lot lately about my years coming without the boys in school. And I have been dreaming: teaching special, fun classes that seem to get lost because I have to do all the formal classes, still buying as much curriculum as I always do because I want to help out other homeschoolers, building a lending library of teaching supplies and books, being a help to moms…..This is all in my heart. Then I read this article by Mary Pride and it said all I had been thinking. I hope to be such a blessing in the coming years. Here is the article I found on the site www.home-school.com

 Older Women Wanted

By Mary Pride
Printed in PHS #40, 2001.

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Sixteen years ago, I wrote a book called The Way Home. An exposition of Titus 2:3-5, it made these points among others:

• A mother’s role in the home is not socially irrelevant; rather, it is the antidote to socialism
• We depend far too much on credentialed experts for schooling and child training advice
• Homeschooling is biblically sound, and may be necessary in the light of what is happening to the schools
• Children are a blessing

Many young, college-educated women read The Way Home. Like most of my generation, they hardly knew how to boil water (let alone cook) or change a diaper (let alone handle a large family). Convinced by the Bible’s reasoning that motherhood was a ministry to be embraced, they nonetheless felt deeply uncertain about their mothering, homeschooling, and homeworking abilities.

I received hundreds of letters, all saying the same thing:

Titus 2 the Apostle Paul tells the older women to teach the younger women: “To be sober [serious], to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.”

Up by Our Bootstraps

The younger women who responded to this call in 1985 found to their distress that few older women were available to serve as mentors and role models. Our parents’ generation had followed the model of a planned family of just a few kids, who were sent to public school. Our own mothers knew nothing about homeschooling; in fact, they were likely to be hostile to the notion. Far from supporting large families, older women in the church were more likely to treat any woman pregnant with her third or fourth child like she was mildly demented. Any women who wanted to stay at home and raise her own kids was automatically treated as a second-class citizen.

But those young women were hardy. They dug in and started learning what they could, where they could. For a while, the newsletter HELP For Growing Families served as a forum where we could all share our questions and answers on child training, family life, and home business. Meanwhile, homeschooling support groups had been forming; court cases were fought to establish our right to homeschool; some of us researched homeschool materials and published how-to books.

Years passed. Our families grew older. The complexion of homeschooling changed. Many more books were published. Credentialed experts began taking an interest in homeschooling and appearing at homeschool conferences. Secular publishers began thinking about the “homeschool market” and how to penetrate it by repositioning their products. Educational software bloomed. The Internet blossomed.

A Farewell to Arms?

And now I’m getting letters like this:

“Years ago I read The Way Home and it changed my life! I’ve had a large family, all of them homeschooled. Your books and publications have been such a big help – thank you! My youngest just graduated homeschool and has been accepted at a good college, and now I want to cancel my subscription, since we are no longer homeschooling.”

When I got the first such letter, I said, “Hmm.” When I got the second, I began to wonder. After a while, I finally figured out what was bothering me. It was not the subscription cancellations – they aren’t exactly a flood, and in fact at first I was trying to convince myself that they were a proof of our success. After all, hadn’t we succeeded in “working ourselves out of a job,” which all along had been our goal?

Here’s what was bothering me. None of those letters said the writer intended to help new homeschooling parents. It sounded like the opposite: “Now that my children are grown, I can forget all about keeping up with homeschooling.” Yet these are the exact same ladies who years ago were writing and calling me, practically in tears, begging me to find them older women who could serve as mentors!

Admittedly, homeschooling is much easier and more socially acceptable now than it was 16 years ago. But that does not mean new homeschooling parents don’t need help. In a way, they need more help, because they are often not as rock-solid in their educational philosophy and reasons for homeschooling as the first generation, whose convictions were forged in the fires of persecution.

You’re Still Needed

If you are one of those “older women” who has been homeschooling for a while, I beg you to consider this. You started homeschooling, not just for the sake of homeschooling, but to serve the Lord. You spent five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years in the school of Hard Knocks learning just what works, just what doesn’t, and what effect it all has on a child’s heart and soul. Your ministry has been certified and approved by the results in the lives of your growing and grown children. Is now the time to drop out of the homeschooling community – just when you are finally able to serve the parents?

You asked where the older women were.

Thou art the woman

Tags of Time…Our newest adventure!

Our newest product is now available for a test run on The Homeschool Estore! Tags of Time are the same sequential timeline for literature, but the approach is more hands on and has a bit of a scrapbook feel to it. For every chapter in a ready, you have a large tag. Every tag gets the following elements to put on: chapter #, chapter title, a graphic relating to the chapter and 4 colored strips to be placed in the order that they happened in the story. It really makes for a fun and different way of accountability and testing reading comprehension. Here are some pictures of the first four chapters from The Courage of Sarah Noble….

The only place we have these available it at www.homeschoolestore.com    We are working on The Little House Series in Tag form as well as Pockets. Some of our previous Pockets may find themselves in Tags too. Please leave feedback if you try these tags. We are interested in making the best and most interesting timelines for story books!

~Shannon

New Pocket of Time for The Littles

Our latest Pocket of Time for a reader book. If you are not familiar with our pockets, let me give a brief explanation. A template is give to make a pocket out of paper. That pocket can fit into a binder or be stored as a booklet. Some Pockets of Time (depending on the reader book) have 1-3 pockets per page. Then for every chapter that is read, there are 4-8 cards given, again, depending on how long the chapter is. The cards have something on them that need to be colored, a border, an image….the color is stated. On the card is an event that happened in the chapter. After all the cards are colored and cut out, then they are placed into the pocket in the ORDER that they happened. All mom has to do is check the color order to see if they paid attention while they read! The cards can be given while the child is reading, or given at the end of the chapter. Cards can be used for copywork, book report outlines, reading…..pockets can be used for art and decorated up. These are very practical and inexpensive ways to give a child who is reading a book a bit more accountability. We love  to read to our children, we  need to make sure they are comprehending and thinking while they read. Pockets of Time make that possible. Be sure to go to our web site to see all of our Pockets of Time, our Copywork line and our Unit Studies.

  

Pockets of Time for The Littles by John Peterson is a sequential timeline of the events in this book. For every chapter, four cards are given with an even that happened in that chapter. The child colors the stamp and the border on the card the given color. When all cards are colored and cut out, they are placed into “pockets” in the order that they happened. Cards can be used to observe reading comprehension, as copywork for the book, or as an outline to a book report. Pockets of Time are a fantastic resource for young readers. The Littles is a wonderful story about co-existence and symbiosis! 

 www.fortunatelyforyoubooks.com

~Shannon

Do You Remember????

Here is a link to an awesome site. It brings back so many memories! Perhaps some of your kids will like to listen to these stories. Would be great for listening skills. Wonderful site.

http://www.kiddierecords.com/

     

These are the old radio programs for kids. There is a huge selection of stories to listen to. I just thought it was an awesome find!

~Shannon

F.Y. I. on Pockets for I Have a Dream

Just a note to let you know that you do not have to read the book for the Martin Luther King, Jr. pockets we made. Sometimes there isn’t time. As this is a sequential timeline of his life, and the answers are in the back, you could use this as your history lesson for the day! While it is a supplement for a book, we have tried to make some products that can be used independently. If time is short, yet a valuable history lesson is needed quickly, don’t forget to look at this Pocket of Time as a possible resource.

~Shannon

Change Can Be A Good Thing

The month of January evokes a desire for change in our eating habits, our exercise patterns, our daily devotions, our de-cluttering of homes and on and on. For some, change comes easy and willingly, for others it is a fearful thing to change the way that is known for something that has no guarantees. When it comes to educating our children, our time off over the holidays has provided us with a look at things we could change. You may not need to look at all these things, but perhaps there is one or two ways that could be considered.

 

C- Communication- Learn to communicate to the child in his/her own language. If what you have to say is important enough to be heard, then it is important enough to learn to say it in a way that the hearer can understand. What adults say is not always what the child hears.

 

H- Hands On- Most children learn by doing and not reading only. The kids will never forget how we made an inner ear under the kitchen table.  It was so much cooler than labeling a diagram. It requires extra effort, noise and a few extra minutes in the schedule. I have never regretted a hands on activity. I have talked myself out of many things that could have been a wonderful hands- on time. Not everything can and should be hands on, but if you do not normally favor this type of learning, perhaps you could change your monthly schedule to try one or two activities with this style of learning.

A-Attitude- I sincerely hope I am not the only one who needs attitude adjustments. That would be humbling AND embarrassing! It can take one long Monday to change the tenor of the week. Sometimes you battle with fears of doing this homeschooling thing all wrong and destroying the kids or you get to a place where you are complacent and forget to engage the child’s mind. The days we homeschool with our hearts are the days that make the difference with our kids. Change is always needed in this area.

 

N- Narration- From youth to adulthood, we need to be able to take in information, muse on it, and submit an evaluation. Narration at a young age is the easiest way to develop this skill. There are benefits galore for learning to take information in and being able to replay thoughts in a verbal way. Many of us veteran homeschoolers wish we had focused more on this area. It transitions so well into writing in the older grades. Change now if you can!

 

G- Generalization- As homeschoolers, we have the ability to see the gifts our children are born with and to focus on those abilities with their school work. Fighting the way we generalize our teaching and curricula is hard to do. It would take extra effort and time. If you see one of your children struggling or losing their joy of learning, focus on the gifts bestowed to that child and change the generalization of their education- even if just for that day.

 

E-Evaluation- How you evaluate your child’s progress may need to change. If we tend to be all about the numbers, a child can be devastated over a test result. They knew Greek Mythology inside and out, yet they bombed the test. Your child takes a standardized test and scores low in an area or multiple areas. Do you evaluate your success based on numbers? Most of us will not see the full effect of our efforts until our children are well grown. Learn to evaluate your children and yourself with a broad scale.

 

Every year brings changes in our life, our health, and our families. Many of the changes are out of our hands. Try choosing an area of your schooling to change for the better.

 

Blessings,

Shannon Coe

Fortunately For You Books

www.fortunatelyforyoubooks.com

www.fortunatelyforyoubooks.wordpress.com

What a Pocket of Time Looks Like

Sometimes it is easier to see a visual. Here is what a completed Pocket of Time looks like. This is with the single pocket template: