Yesterday after I dropped the kids off for Grandma time, a little voice told me to visit the other crack dealer Educational Wonderland. Sure enough, they had cool little wipe-off books of math facts games and drills for the little guys (yes, I gave my daughter math books for her birthday — she was thrilled), and these:
So today I was thumbing through the new history books, and a certain rising 4th grader comes along and picks one up. “Oh. Those are the terrible KOLBE books.” Disgust. Horror. How could your mother do this to you?!
“No, darling. Those are the books I got for you to do instead of the Kolbe book.”
“Oooh!” Picks up book again. Actually looks at it. “Hey, this looks fun!”
Yes dear. After enough years of living with you, I begin to have a clue, thank you.
–> I found this year that I really like having all four kids on the same subject. Not necessarily the same books, just the same general topic. So for the coming year, I signed up both big kids for Kolbe’s Ancient Rome study, which the boy has already started reading for fun, and the girl is determined to hate, on account of it being called Famous Men of Rome.
Emphasis on Men. She is not interested in Men. Plus it is Kolbe, and we all know that Kolbe is Evil. Even though we have never ever tried it, and plus it looks eerily like what we already study. But it is to be hated.
Anyhow the plan is for the boy to whiz through the set plan, which he will complain is too easy and plus he already read the book this summer and why does he have to do the dumb workbook, blah blah blah, and look, here’s an Osprey book, let’s read that instead, yes dear on your free time you may. (And he will.)
The craft-loving 4th grader I’m going to let do the Pockets books first. Q1 she gets to be the teacher and take the littles through Ancient Civilizations. That’s only 7 pockets, so 7 weeks, and the last two weeks of the quarter she’ll do some timeline work and then write me a report, which will bring up the grade-level to more her age. Q2, littles will work through some other ancient Rome / Greece items with me, and my Kolbe-hating darling will do the Ancient Rome Pockets book, which will fill the quarter.
Q3 & Q4 she will finally have to buckle down and be serious, and do Q1 &2 of Famous Men per the Kolbe course plans. Which should be easier having had the intro in the fall. If she wants she can read the rest of the book in her free time. Yes, I will totally let a 4th grader master only half of the history of the Roman Empire. She’ll see it again one day. Plus she’ll have the motivation of trying to get a higher score on the test than her brother did. Which will definitely motivate her.
Went ahead and wrote up next year’s plans for the littles, who are still on the library-book method (not Kolbe — I do too much subbing out at that age, we’d only go crazy). For science, sticking to my ‘everyone studies the same thing’ approach, I went through the 4th grade science course plans from Kolbe, and assigned the littles to study each week whatever topic the 4th grader will be covering. So that will be a double bonus, in that they can sit in on her science experiments, and she’ll have a bunch of easy library books sitting around that cover the same thing she is learning in her horrible no-good very bad science book. (That I think she will like.)
–> If I weren’t worried about the good of various eternal souls, and plus having told the whole internet that lying is wrong, I’d just tell her it wasn’t the Kolbe book, and then she’d love it for sure.
[Mr. Boy will be happy to do science all on his own. I didn’t try to rope him into the coordinating thing for that.]
So we’ll see how that goes. I’m hopeful.
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I’m off tomorrow for ten days of Momcation, visiting the nieces who have the good sense to go to school. Assuming my abandoned children don’t hack into the blog to show the world their atrocious grade-level spelling, expect blog silence here. If you are desperate for goofing off in my absence, you can check my side bar links and tell me which ones have gone bad — I found one already, and no I haven’t fixed it yet.
Otherwise, enjoy the quiet. That’s what I’ll be doing. And have a blessed Memorial Day.
Oh, I thought someone didn’t like Max Kolbe.
Kolbe books I don’t know, but I sure have myself some Osprey! Not sure if that bodes well for your son or not. There’s lots of Osprey on ebay, BTW
More BTW, my wife went to school in Scotland with one of their authors, Angus Konstam.
Hehe. No, she hasn’t gone that far. :-). Though if the saint were to propose a change of curriculum himself, she’d definitely give him a talking-to.
Yes, Osprey books are in fact much better than Kolbe books. Our library has ten bazillion of them, and the child knows which branch has which ones, and where to find them, and he’ll give me the guilty-puppy look at the check out line, and meekly ask if he can have quite so many all at once. If he misbehaves at home, I take away Military History privileges for 24 hours, and that pretty much straightens him up.
(Panic not, we only go to such extremes for serious transgressions. For small infractions, push-ups are the miracle cure.)