http://educationnorthwest.org/resource/464
Internet friend pointed me here – guidelines for how to evaluate a student paper. (Thank you Sue.) Apparently “re-write until it is publishable or I get sick of it, whichever comes first” is not the best way to run a homeschool. Haven’t looked through the whole site, so don’t have an opinion. But figured if I stuck it here, I wouldn’t lose it. And could be of interest to others.
This is for Dorian, who asked very nicely in the combox.
Here’s the story on ADVENTure day: Two years ago, our then-new DRE went with a new VBS program. (Pre-packaged.) Instead of dividing the kids into grade-level classrooms, the kids were grouped into mixed-age crews that traveled from station to station through the morning. Crafts, snacks, games, music, Bible story room (that was me), all that. It worked very well. We volunteers didn’t have to be jacks of all trades (an actual music teacher teaching music!), and there was more intensity and liveliness to each room.
So she finished VBS #1 resolved to do more of the same during the year.
There was a living rosary in October (on the playground, visited by a pack of stray dogs, oops), but the real big invention was ADVENTure. Instead of running K-5 classes on Wednesday evenings in December, we would host one school-day-long VBS-type Advent program on the first Saturday of Advent. Parents could have free babysitting from 9-3, and catechists would have off the rest of the month. [6th grade and up have regular classes all month.]
Here’s what we do, and I’ll describe this year’s program, since she made a few tweaks that helped it run more smoothly.
Students are sorted into mixed-age crews of 15-20 kids. Not random: 5th graders with K5, 4th with 1st, and 2nd & 3rd. I noticed this year the 2nd/3rd groups were boys in one crew, girls in the other. (Oh my. Those boys. Had to take the markers away. Fast.) Youth from grades 6 & up volunteered to lead the crews from class to class. 2-4 youth per team. They helped with the kids, and also managed potty breaks and other crises.
Catechists paired up and we manned several lesson rooms. This year it was St. Francis & the Nativity, Our Lady of Guadalupe, St. Nicholas, and Church Year Calendar. In each room we were issued a story book or similar educational prop, and then a craft to go with. Our DRE gives us a fairly free hand to adapt the lessons to our teaching strengths. I ended up subbing out the story book with a different St. Nicholas book from the library, and running more a discussion-style lesson with tidbits from the book, rather than just reading the story. It worked well.
(Last year in the St. Nick room my co-teacher and I alternated teaching at each class period. This year, different co-teacher, I taught the first class, and she never let me quit. She did all the support work with getting supplies queued up and helping manage kids.)
Our DRE conscripted her grown daughter as slave labor to get all the craft supplies organized and do necessary prep-work so that everything was ready to go and in the classrooms Saturday morning. I brought along my own sets of coloring sheets, wordsearch and crossword puzzles just in case I needed to fill time, and I ended up using them a bunch. (For those 2nd/3rd grade boys, I fully subbed out the worksheets and sent home the craft, because the craft was.not.happening. Just not.) Some of the classes that finished early just sent the kids out to the playground with their crew leaders. That was good.
Kids were each issued a bag with name-tag and grade affixed in which to collect all their papers and artwork. [But, this year’s crisis: a bunch of the bags split open. Note for next year: sturdier bags.]
Class periods lasted aproximately 30 minutes. Additionally there were two movie rooms running double-period movie viewings. The Knights of Columbus served lunch (hot dogs or bring your own) in two or three lunch periods, plus our resident snack lady (the one whose kids have the very worst food allergies — she is a master at making sure no one dies of peanut exposure) oversaw a snack period in the afternoon. Students brought juice boxes (boys) or cookies (girls) to provide for the snack. There was a nicer snack cart in the catechist supply room for grown-ups.
Having the movie, lunch and snack periods meant that each teaching pair got three break periods through the day. This is essential.
At 2:45 we brought the kids out to the car line per our usual dismissal process, and parents picked up kids between 2:45 and 3:00.
***
So there you go, Dorian. Ask away if you have any questions.
And FYI last year our DRE also put together an Eggstravaganza on the morning of Holy Saturday — so fleshing out the long-established egg hunt with on-topic crafts and lessons. Unfortunately I was out sick (it was either rest up or skip the Easter Vigil — pretty obvious choice), so I can’t report. This year I firmly resolve not to catch any ailments. Ha.
PS to Dorian: See how I am making a category name that is a tribute to your Catechist Chat series? So that everyone will know I am truly your disciple?
So the truth is, the number 1 thing I’m going to steal from Christian LeBlanc’s religious-ed snapshots is the line “Stop guessing like monkeys and think!” But there’s good info, too, about you know, the bible and saints and religion and stuff. Plus how to use the gross-out factor to keep your 6th graders captivated. Did I say that out loud? What I meant was, how to use Q&A within a lecture format, to help the kids pay attention and think through the material, and cover lots of details without everyone getting lost.
(I would never, ever, pick a saint to cover in class just because she was depicted with her eyeballs on a platter. That would only be a coincidence. Since her feast day came round. Then, you know, it would be practically an obligation. If I were teaching a room full of 12-year-old boys.)
Imagine you are a catechist. Imagine that tomorrow from 9am – 3pm you’ll be manning the “St. Nicholas Room” for your parish’s ADVENTure Day. You might want to visit here. Soon.
Or if you just want coloring pages, crossword, word-search puzzles, and the like, click ahead to here.
The Saint Nicholas Center. Our friend.
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Three things you might be wondering:
This post is an answer to Dorian Speed’s question here, since as usual I have more to say than reasonably belongs in the combox.
The topic is: When you are waaay behind schedule teaching class, how do you handle year-end? And then, what is a fair testing method, that reflects realistic expectations? My answers:
Re: Behind Schedule
At the beginning of the year, I asked my DRE what she preferred. Our class always gets behind schedule, so I knew this was coming. So I asked her if she preferred we move quickly, per the syllabus, but with less depth, or allow ourselves to get way behind, but cover the topic more thoroughly. She voted “I’d rather they learn a few things well than many things hardly at all”, so that’s what we do.
–> I do try to keep the class moving forward, but there is no year-end race to quick cover twenty topics in twenty minutes.
In my opinion, the slow-is-okay method can work, for several reasons:
First of all, our curriculum tends to be front-loaded. Hits all the essentials in the first few chapters. So if the students only make it part way through the book, they’ve still covered a lot of high-priority stuff.
The second reason go-slow works, is that as I teach I’m naturally making lots of connections. Dorian, I’m going to bet your bible study class is doing the same thing. It’s impossible to teach a chapter in the bible without naturally referring to ten other scripture passages, three doctrines, a sacrament or four, and maybe a few good pious customs and a personal story about the love of God thrown in for good measure. The reason class goes slowly is because you are covering more than what is one the page. So you aren’t actually teaching less than planned. Just different than planned.
–> There are times when this is a disaster. Any kind of technical class, such as “how do I receive communion” for the first communion class, needs to cover the core of the topic, all the way through. So it’s important to know whether the class topic and the class goal are the same thing. The topic might be “the bible”, but if the goal is, “teenagers engaging in the scriptures and developing confidence in their ability to study the bible”, your class has a lot more flexibility than if the goal is, “memorize the key theme of each book of the bible”.
And then the kids ask questions. At the start of class, our opening prayer always includes “help each student learn what they need to know”. Now if I’m on the Trinity and you ask me about the reason we use paper money, I’m going tell you that we will discuss that during the car line after class. But if you have a question about ‘what is a mortal sin’ or ‘do I really have to go to mass on Sunday’, I’m probably going to answer you then and there, not wait until we get to that chapter ten weeks from now. Kids come into the new year with a whole summer of questions about God and the faith stacked up, so the first few weeks will rabbit trail.
If I’m teaching my students what they need to know — evidenced by the fact that they a) don’t know b) want to know and c) it’s essential to the faith– then I’m doing my job. I’m not behind. I’m at the right place and the right time.
And then the final reason we tend to run behind is that we get interruptions in the program such as “Father will hear confessions for all 5th graders during class next week”. So we stop and review the sacrament of confession ASAP, rather than waiting until it shows up in the curriculum next spring. So again, not behind so much as skipping around.
(Dorian, this last one may not apply to you. But I’m sure my parish isn’t the only one that inserts special events into the schedule. And then there’s my saint’s party. Guilty as charged.)
Re: What Makes a Fair Test?
I’m still working on this, but here’s what I do:
I write a study guide for each chapter. It’s a fill-in-the-blank outline of the material from the book that I want the students to learn. (And sometimes, one or two additional notes if they are relevant.) As we study the chapter, the kids fill in their answers. This both helps them to learn the material, and it keeps me accountable to make sure that I taught them everything I meant to cover.
The week before the test, I send home study guides with answers filled in. I did this for the first time for all students this year, though I’ve made completed guides in the past to give to kids who missed class. So I send them home with exactly what they need to study. All answers to the test are on the page and in their hands seven days in advance. And I tell them to study.
The week before the test, we do a quick review session. In particular, this year I went over questions that tripped up students in the past. I also take open Q&A on anything that students might not understand.
When I build the test, I customize it to the class. I pull up the previous year’s tests, and nix any questions that maybe we didn’t get to this year, or that were a flop last year. And I try to match the difficulty of the question to how well I want students to know the material. For example, this year I made my saint questions a matching exercise — I’m happy if you can just figure out who’s who by me jogging your memory plus a little process of elimination. In contrast, my nasty tricky trinity question that weeds out the heretics? I keep it mean. If you can’t keep straight St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, not the end of the world. If you can’t keep straight the Trinity, we have a problem.
I also use my tests to teach. I design them to reinforce more ideas than what they test, and to toss out ideas that are going to come up in later years or later chapters. For example, given the choice between three different saint facts I could use to describe St. Augustine, I pick the one that reinforces something else we’ve been studying. On a multiple-choice question, the “wrong” answers are never random. They are either common errors related to the topic, or correct answers to questions they will see another day.
–> The test is going to cost me a whole class period, when you count the review session, the test, and then going over the answers. By tweaking my test design, I’m not losing that hour, because the test itself is building up and reinforcing their education.
I also have a productive handout for the kids to work on when they finish the test. So they aren’t sitting there coloring while they wait for the other students to finish. The one I used last week was a look-up-bible-verses worksheet. (Not my own — a really fun one.) Something like that helps equalize the class, because everyone can do as much or as little as they have the time to manage. My super-fast kids aren’t bored and they are learning new material, and my need-more-time kids aren’t keeping the rest of the class waiting.
After-the-test worksheets, by the way, are great for teaching skills that don’t lend themselves to testing. It’s a handy way to manage class time, because you’re using an otherwise unusable time slot to cover material that would have sucked up lecture minutes if you did the work during a regular class. So it helps with the time crisis.
***
Anyway, that’s what I do. Or try to. I pull from the resources in the back of my teacher’s manual as much as I can, but I do ending up putting a fair bit of work into making my own tests and study guides. I’m fortunate that I’ve been teaching the same grade and same book for three years now, so I can recycle my work from year to year.
–> I know other catechists in my program don’t do this, and I wouldn’t expect them to. This is where my strength is. Other teachers have completely different teaching styles, and I think that over the cycle of the religious ed program, the students benefit from that.
No, I have not resumed blogging. Pretend you don’t see me.
But I got a tip on how to post my timeline spreadsheet as a google doc.
Here is the link to c&p if need be: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Asn_1d0UfHx-dG5nTEJSYWpsQWF2SjV4bm5iVXpvLVE&hl=en
I will tell you that in the original Excel file on my PC, it worked great. Makes a classroom or hallway-sized timeline, to fill in with whatever it is you want to study. Whether I successfully exported it to google, remains to be seen. But it’s there if you need such a thing, so someone let me know if it works for you.
Jen. <– still on typing ban. Did I type this? Shhh.
PS: I do not love google’s spreadsheet software.
PPS: I originally made this for my Religious Ed class. But I chose the “Before Christ” and “Anno Domini” labels mostly because kids never seem to know what B.C. & A.D. stand for, so I thought posting it on the wall all year might help that. You can of course (I hope Google lets you) save a copy of spreadsheet to your own computer, and then play with the labels and centuries all you want, per your preferences.
The big news first: I’m out of the hole! Yay. I can do things like check my e-mail, or water the garden without getting out of breath. Actually the mowed the lawn Monday, which involves more miracles than we need discuss here. (But, note to self: When in doubt, marry a man who can maintain heavy machinery. One more reason we call him the SuperHusband.) Was back to fighter practice yesterday after about a month off — won’t say I was 100%, but wow it sure cheers me up, getting out and trying to stab people for a little while.
***
Now for our topic: Mater et Magistra magazine. My first issue arrived right when the baby was up with croup — she and I went out in the early morning hours to fetch the newspaper, and look, I’d forgotten to check the mail! New magazine! Which said 3-year-old immediately claimed, and for the first few hours I was okay with that. Until she hid it in her room someplace to keep it safe.
But we eventually cleared up that little misunderstanding, and wow, I had no idea. This is a great magazine! Written by actual homeschooling parents (as the better homeschool magazines are), the tone is very practical and honest. When you read an article encouraging you to respond to God’s grace, or persevere through a struggle, it is written, you discover, by a person who openly admits to dirty laundry.
The articles in this issue ran the gamut — encouragement, general practical tips, specific study ideas, and lots of reviews. The style is Catholic Lay Intellectual — this is the place where all the catholic nerd moms gather to compare notes. So think of articles a little longer, a little deeper, than what you find about anywhere else in the publishing-for-parents industry.
The Catholicism seems to me to be just normal catholic Christianity — I didn’t detect a particular strain to one extreme or another, other than a sincere desire to follow God. In my opinion, a non-catholic who was comfortable with Catholic-y stuff might also enjoy the magazine.
The format is small — half-size, like a Reader’s Digest — and very reflective-feeling. Lots of words, smallish print, no hype, a few pictures, mostly traditional artwork. Interior is all black-and-white or black-and-special-color-for-the-unit-study-insert. (Curiously: the color scheme and general format remind me a bit of this blog . . . I suppose if you hate this place, you might hate looking at the magazine, too.)
This is a small, low-budget production. But a really nice magazine. If you like to read here, or places like Darwin Catholic, Eric Sammons, or anything by Amy Wellborn, and you homeschool, you will probably like Mater et Magistra. Highly recommended. Maybe ask someone to give you a subscription for Mother’s Day?
Book review yesterday in the journal about the growing incidence of plagiarism among students. The problem being that it is woefully easy for students to copy and paste off the internet and into the term paper; like most crimes, catching the guilty is time-consuming and always a step behind.
After pondering the problem, I’m thinking that this is our cue to make the proverbial lemonade. Here’s my thought:
If the paper is just to help you memorize, who cares? Say I assign my students to each do a report on a topic related to the course, and the goal is really just to broaden and deepen their knowledge of the subject. In that case, I’d grade the paper in two parts.
Part one would be the student’s ability to present a logical paper, properly cited. I don’t care if you copy and paste the entire thing, as long as it makes sense (in other words: you actually read the stuff) and you put quotes around the copied stuff and cite it appropriately. It’s not so much an academic paper as a factual memo.
Part two would be a test question. After reading each paper, I’d write down a test question for that paper. For example, if the paper were about “The Three Main Causes of the Civil War”, my test question would probably be something like, “What were the three main causes of the civil war?”. And then I’d either go through the class and give the quiz orally, if I wanted the other students to hear the information, or else I’d tack each student’s personal quiz question to the end of the next exam I gave.
–> In essence, the personal test questions would be the students’ chance to put the material into their own words.
Suppose I really did want a good paper, though. Then what? I’d take advantage of the ease and inexpense of modern printing and copying technology to work through the research and writing process together. Rather than asking for the finished paper in the usual citation format, I would require that every sentence of the paper be cited. Is it your idea? You put an endnote on that sentence saying “I thought this up myself”. Are you paraphrasing someone? You give me an endnote saying “I am paraphrashing . . . .” and cite the source. And I would have the student enclose a copy of the texts used — not the whole book or article, but just whatever portion is being cited.
–> My goal would be that rather than fighting the temptation to plagiarize, I push the students to develop an awareness of their sources and of how they build their ideas. Where does someone else’s idea end and my idea begin? Where did I get my information, and do I think it is a credible source?
Given the amount of work involved for both student and instructor, I’d adjust the overall workload in light of the new approach. In a five-paper class, I might have the students take only one of these super-cited papers and polish it into traditional academic format.
I think in this way you could move students’ writing to a new level. The sordid truth is that a lot of what gets written by grown-ups is a bunch of blather — the repeating of ideas that don’t really hold up. Now we have students who can easily access and compile other people’s ideas; let’s grab hold of the capability to teach our students how to critically evaluate what it is they are assembling.
Darwin Catholic makes a pointed Thanksgiving observation about how far removed most Americans are from the source of their food:
. . . we modern Americans would do well to recall that food comes from somewhere — and indeed that it either comes or it doesn’t. One may talk of rights to food and shelter and medical care and such all day long. But at the most basic, human level: our existence and comfort depends on those who till the soil . . .
And what I would like to observe is this: Farming is skilled labor.
When I read about the history of education, it seems like what usually gets published is the history of literacy. The underlying assumption is that if a child isn’t taught to read and write, he isn’t taught.
Don’t mistake me, I am enormously in favor of the widespread practice of literary skills, and have the bookshelves and the blogs to prove it. But at the end of day, I know two things:
-I can’t eat books.
-I don’t know how to farm.
And from this, I make two further conclusions:
– Farming is, on the list of human pursuits, priority #1*.
-Farming is a skill that needs to be taught.
This in turns tells me that all those generations of people who taught their children how to grow food, but never did get to the business reading and writing, these were people with their priorities in order. People to whom the rest of us owe an enormous thanks, for it is their diligence that gave us our existence.
I am concerned that my generation knows so little about the growing of food. The SuperHusband & I both have grandparents who grew up on farms; as adults though they practiced other professions, they continued to grow a significant portion of their own food. The same can be said of several of my neighbors — like my grandparents, they either have very large gardens in the yard, or else own a second parcel of land they cultivate for food.
But this skill and practice has not been handed down. My parents gardened occasionally — they knew how — but not so much that they taught us. Our generation wants to have a garden, and we’re pretty happy if we get a few tomatoes out of it. It is a skill we never learned as children, and don’t integrate into our lives as adults. We seem to always be finding some other activity is more important.
We aren’t starving as a result. Specialization of labor has done what it promises: those of my generation who do know how to farm, do it amazingly well — well enough to feed the rest of us with no apparent difficulty. And I’m all about specialization of labor — I haven’t got the body for farming whether I wanted to do it or not. (And I like doing other things anyway.) But still, I think we are, as a society, over-specialized to the point of being a bit impoverished by it. It’s a poverty we don’t notice, but I think it is there all the same.
*Alongside the worship of God, of course. The two seem to go hand in hand rather naturally . . . wow, almost amazingly joined as, say, the body & soul that make up a human being. Go figure.
2nd Friday so we’re back to history again, and it looks like this month you’re getting a book bonanza – next week I’ll post my review of The Fathers, which leaves me this week to toss out a handful of childrens’ history books we’ve enjoyed over the past month.
Despite our passion for medieval history, a certain mother has determined one must, nonetheless, study other eras. So our official topic for this school year is American History. We started out with reading about various renaissance-era European explorers; whipped out the timeline notebook and determined that Christopher Columbus followed right on the heels of Joan of Arc. I think in the usual method of studying history in American schools, we tend to lose some of that sense of continuity: Chris C. belongs firmly to the course called American History, St. Joan belongs to another course in a different year, called European History or Medieval History or some other thing, and we never quite grasp that the events of the Hundred Years’ War would have been part of the renaissance explorers’ heritage, much the way the legacy World War II is still felt today.
Anyhow, we’ve since slipped into the colonial era, and I’ve got three nice books concerning the Revolutionary War era to share with you this month:
Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride by Stephen Krensky, illustrated by Greg Harlin; the topic is exactly as it says. Harlin’s watercolors elegantly capture the mood of the night’s events – so brilliantly done I’d recommend this book to aspiring artists and photographers. I can’t do them justice, so just go look. The text is clear and effective – you learn the technical details of the ride, and also the real danger, urgency, and excitement – but spare enough that it won’t be overwhelming to a competent but young reader, or to the parent charged with the read-aloud. A map at the start of the book shows the route of the ride (you will need a larger US map of your own to put the location into context), and an epilogue summarizes in three paragraphs the rest of the Revolutionary War and it’s ultimate conclusion.
Can’t recommend this book enough – interesting to adults who never had a chance to learn more about this famous event, and engaging to children who like a little adventure with their history. Frankly, if I had a student of any age who was history-resistant, I’d put this book in front of him, and mine it for all it was worth.
By the Sword: A Young Man Meets the War by Selene Castrovilla, illustrated by Bill Farnsworth, tells the story of Benjamin Tallmadge’s first foray into battle in August 1776. This is a more demanding text than Paul Revere’s Ride, and focuses as much on Tallmadge’s inner life as a new recruit in the colonial army as with the outward adventure of the Battle of Long Island. The intentionally-hazy oil-painted illustrations support the feeling of inward reflection, and of a man looking back on a turning point in his youth.
[Does introspection make good history? At our house, mothers were unanimously in favor of this exploration of the danger and emotional turmoil of warfare; a certain boy complained that the story ended just as it was getting to the good parts – I suppose he wanted to read the rest of war while he was at it.]
At the end of the book is a detailed timeline of Tallmadge’s life, a list of relevant historic sites to visit around modern-day New York City, a page in which the author explains how she researched her book and how she made certain literary decisions, and then a very detailed bibliography. There is also a brief note from the illustrator about his art research techniques, and from the typographer about the choice of fonts. Good stuff — really helps the student catch on to the study of history.
I’d say this book is more appropriate for older children – third grade and up. The level of detail and discussion of historical research could be helpful even for much older students, as this is the same kind of work that would go into better term papers for highschool and beyond — perhaps more effective than a lecture from the instructor, and would be a quick, easy read for the teen who must be plagued with this lesson. (Okay, let’s be frank: your average college history TA would give anything to get to grade an undergraduate history paper as well-researched as what the author models here.)
Finally I wanted to mention Welcome to Felicity’s World, 1774: Growing Up in Colonial America. Written by Catherine Gourley, though you will be hard-pressed to find the author’s name in this publication, which is part of the “American Girl’s Collection” as something of an accessory to that popular childrens’ historical fiction series. Not a bad book though – there’s a reason the American Girls franchise has done so well. The concept is something like DK’s Eyewitness Series, exploring colonial life and the Revolutionary War through many illustrations, photographs, short captions, moving stories, and sometimes more detailed narrative explanations, all divided into topical sections and subsections. It therefore makes a good browsing book – you can pick it up anywhere and look through just the bits of special interest.
This is most definitely a girl’s book, but subtly so – Mr. Boy has been reading it enthusiastically, and so far does not seem to have noticed the feminine bent. Maybe some month when I’m scrapping for a history topic I’ll walk you through the differences between girl-books and boy-books in more detail, to show you how it’s done; for now I’ll just say that it nicely combines social history with the usual names-‘n-dates type outline of a traditional textbook. Good reliable backbone for an elementary-years history program, and probably fairly easy to get hold of, since it is part of such a well-known brandline. Felicity lives in Williamsburg, VA, by the way, for those who are looking for a text to coordinate with a field trip.