10 years in and homeschooling can get a little stale. It's largely become a matter of picking curriculum and then finding time in the day to do it with the kids. Or rather, with Harry, since Catherine works, by and large, independently.
But we departed from the norm this week when I chucked aside all of Harry's English stuff and started winging it. I had bought one last writing/grammar program, Story Grammar, a few weeks back and as I read it I realized there was nothing in it I couldn't do on my own now. If Story Grammar has kids chunking and rearranging model sentences, why couldn't I? And why couldn't I take it a bit further?
So on Monday, Harry and I talked about a sentence I had printed in his English binder.
"The Big Friendly Giant took out a book, very old and tattered."
We discussed it, rearranged it, parsed it. He copied it. Then he wrote an imitation sentence.
"The Huge Angry Troll took out a club, very large and bloody."
A little gory, yes, but not bad. And the troll was interesting. So we took the sentence and had an impromptu art lesson. He designed the monster, I drew the basics and he did the details.
Yesterday we had a sentence that, in his imitation, turned out to be excellent for introducing a troll-defeating hero. In the sentence the hero is carrying a dagger so in the afternoon Harry and I worked on designing and building a toy dagger. It's still in the process of being built but should be done tomorrow so I'll be sure to post pics.
I'm sort of wondering if we can't keep the theme going and slowly build a larger story.Or maybe fold more subjects into the Fantasy theme. Or maybe make the homeschooling itself a story or roleplaying game with his subjects as elements of that. I'm trying not to get ahead of myself with this because I tend to get carried away with an idea, go off the deep end and end up burning out. So I'm holding back and trying to take it a step at a time to see what evolves.
Hopefully, it will be fun.
