Investigate The Landscape: An education blog: April 2014

Saturday 26 April 2014

Religious Calendar Curriculum- January

1st

- Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God

*This occasion began yesterday at dusk, and is not just a holy day of obligation, but a Solemnity, which is the highest ranked of all occasions, according to the Roman Catholic church. This day is also observed by some Lutherans and Anglicans.

*This day honours Mary as the mother of God and the Queen of Peace. Catholics are obliged to go to Mass unless that obligation has been waived in their diocese.

*Read suitable sections of 'Mary' by Demi

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- Day of St Basil the Great

*This Saint's day is observed by the Eastern Orthodox church today, though the same man is celebrated by other denominations on other days.

*Also known as Basil of Caesarea, he attained the rank of a Doctor of the Church (which means he was a very learned man,) was a Bishop, did a lot of charity work and is the Patron saint of hospital administrators.

*http://catholicplayground.com/basil/saint-basil-coloring.html

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4th

-Jewish Shabbat (begins at sunset the night before)

*Observed by all observant Jews, this is a day of rest to commemorate all the work God put into making the universe. How much resting and avoidance of work depends on the family culture. Yesterday, of course, lots of work went into preparation because no one can take a full day off running a house unless they have already done the needed work. Otherwise, what would everyone eat?

*Read one of the Shabbat books we have or play with Shopping for Shabbos http://www.amazon.com/Shopping-for-Shabbos-Memory-Game/dp/B004C9QQOO, or the Shabbat Felt Playtime, or colour pages from the Dover Jewish Holidays and Traditions colouring book. http://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Holidays-Traditions-Coloring-Holiday/dp/0486263223/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386971799&sr=8-1&keywords=dover+jewish+traditions+colouring+book

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5th

- Sunday Church services- Holy Days of Obligation for Catholics, encouraged for nearly all other Christians

- The Epiphany of the Lord (Roman Catholic) aka The Feast of the Theophany (Orthodox)

*This day is a Solemnity in the Catholic Church. Both the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox are celebrating "the revelation of God the Son as a human being in Jesus Christ" to quote Wikipedia. The Catholics focus more on the Magi (Three Wise Men) visiting baby Jesus, and Jesus' appearing to the Gentiles, whereas the Orthodox focus more on his baptism in the Jordan river.

*Read 'The Theophany of the Lord' by Sister Elayne

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11th

-Jewish Shabbat (begins at sunset the night before)

- Sunday Church services- Holy Days of Obligation for Catholics, encouraged for nearly all other Christians

*Read a picture book, colour a colouring page from The Mass Colouring Book http://www.amazon.com/Coloring-Book-about-Catholic-Publishing/dp/0899426832/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386972341&sr=8-1&keywords=about+the+mass+colouring+book or something printed out from one of the Catholic sites online.

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-The Baptism of the Lord

*This is a Catholic feast day which commemorates the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River by St John the Baptist. Remember the Orthodox celebrated that last week?

*http://www.catholicplayground.com/baptism-of-the-lord-coloring-page-january-9th/

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13th

-Beginning of the first season of Ordinary Time

*The Catholic calendar has a season dedicated to Christmas, one dedicated to Easter, and in between are the seasons of Ordinary Time. The liturgical colour is green, which means the priests wear green and the church is decorated with green hangings unless there is an extra special occasion- then they'll use the colours appropriate to that occasion instead.

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14th

-Makar Sankranti and Pongal

* These are Hindu celebrations. They usually fall on this date, but sometimes the day before or after and in some areas it is celebrated over several days.

*This is a harvest festival and also marks the arrival of Spring. It is celebrated almost all over India and Nepal, sometimes under different names, though Makar Sankranti is the most widespread name. In the south of India, many people worship the sun god on this day, wear new clothes, eat a pudding called Pongal which can be either sweet or spicy, honour the role of cattle in their lives and women decorate their houses with designs made of rice flour and red clay. In the north people clean out their houses, wear new clothes, give gifts, make offerings of food to ancestors, pray, decorate their homes with colours and flowers, play games, and eat special foods.

*Colouring page http://www.studyvillage.com/resources/ViewAttachment.aspx?AttachmentId=939 and perhaps make some Pongal to eat.

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15th

-Tu Bi-Shevat

*This is the Jewish "New Year for the Trees" and many Jews plant trees to celebrate the occasion. Like Jewish observances in general, it begins at sundown and will continue until sundown tomorrow night.

-*Read 'Good Night, laila gov" by Laurel Snyder http://www.amazon.com/Good-night-laila-Laurel-Snyder/dp/0375868682

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16th

-Tu Bi-Shevat began last night and ends at sunset tonight.

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-Full Moon (Neo-Pagan)

*Some Pagans, particularly Wiccans, observe the full moon as a special time or shabbat.

*Read 'Aiden's First Full Moon Circle' by W. Lyon Martin

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18th

-Jewish Shabbat (begins at sunset the night before)

- Sunday Church services- Holy Days of Obligation for Catholics, encouraged for nearly all other Christians

-Jewish Shabbat (begins at sunset the night before)

*Also known as Gregory of Nazianzus, though that was his dad's name too, he was another Doctor of the Church and one of the Orthodox Church's Three Holy Hierarchs, along with St Basil and another chap, St John Chrystostom whose feast day is later in the year.

*Colour the only thing resembling a colouring page I could find of him individually. http://wwwdelivery.superstock.com/WI/223/1899/PreviewComp/SuperStock_1899-20176.jpg

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26th

- Sunday Church services- Holy Days of Obligation for Catholics, encouraged for nearly all other Christians

*Read a picture book, colour a colouring page from The Mass Colouring Book http://www.amazon.com/Coloring-Book-about-Catholic-Publishing/dp/0899426832/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386972341&sr=8-1&keywords=about+the+mass+colouring+book or something printed out from one of the Catholic sites online.

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Rose-Marie was one of those enthusiastic planners who began researching when she was pregnant with her first. She wanted to homeschool because it sounded like an affordable adventure, then she met her kids personally...

Her young daughter has Echolalia and some processing issues so isn't speaking fluently yet. Her young son has retained primitive reflexes and autism. While there may be a deity somewhere who knows what's going to happen with this kid, he/she/it hasn't chosen to inform us. They live on a hill in rural southern Australia without enough solar panels and like it there.

February 2013- Late Summer

(First published at Sandbox to Socrates http://http://sandboxtosocrates.com)

I decided to start our nature study journalling with the beginning of Daughter's first year of school, which began around the end of January here in Australia. Naturally, it took a month to get around to it. Since I can't remember the truth, I'm going to pretend that was deliberate, as I had come up with a brilliant idea to visit each of the major terrain types in our state, once each season. We live in 'dry woodlands.'

I need to get another pet hate out of my system, if you'll bear with me. I think it is silly the way Australians whinge about the seasons not conforming to an inverted Northern Hemisphere system, when the Indigenous people have perfectly good and, unsurprisingly, more accurate calendars of their own. I am on a one-woman crusade to try and make people notice this and post a link featuring our local indigenous calendar (which seems true to the Melbourne area and a fair chunk of central Victoria) whenever it comes up in online conversations. Which it just has. Heh. http://www.herringisland.org/seasons1.htm (If the link is broken, google 'Aboriginal seasons Melbourne' and something suitable should appear.)

Just so you all know, I have great plans for my daughter's handwriting to end up better than mine. I do my best to encourage her to narrate the captions for her pictures, but as I said in the previous post, her learning challenges (Echolalia) get in the way a bit. So, for the foreseeable future, any writing in the journal will be a team effort.

This is the one hand-drawn picture she did about our first round of nature study tours. We went to the Hattah-Kulkyne National Park (would link if I could find a site with decent photos) to see the Mallee and Inland waterways terrain types. Lovely scenery, nearly went insane with the flies trying to climb into our eyes, ears, and noses. What you see below is an ant hill.

Her contribution to the notation was "the sand was orange and the ants were black."

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Sunday 20 April 2014

Religious Calendar Curriculum Intro

The trouble with being in a religion of one, is there is no off the shelf RE curriculum to buy. One day I had a brilliant (yay!) but horribly expensive (not so yay) idea to make a religious calendar curriculum, rather along the lines of 'we are one, but we are many.' It's supposed to be a sort of way to connect my kids to the rest of the world without attempting to make us part of them. I'm not into cultural appropriation.

I haven't been able to include every religion and every denomination out there. I've picked what I consider the major religions to know about that I was able to summarise into a format for this project that would leave adherents nodding their head approvingly, rather than spitting at me for pretending to know things. I hope the project will evolve as the kids get older, but for now it is directed towards my 6 year old and intended to take not more than 15 minutes first thing in the morning.

Info was gathered from various sources, some books, mostly the internet and a number of helpful people on the Well Trained Mind forum.

Please note: I am not suggesting you ought to spend all your pocket money the way I have or that my priorities ought to be yours!

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"Quran Stories for Little Hearts"

(First published at Sandbox to Socrates- if that link is broken, you can find their excellent and useful work by searching Google)

This series was compiled by Saniyasnain Khan and is available from Good Word Books, Amazon, and all the usual places one may buy books. If you are Australian and particularly from Melbourne, I recommend purchasing at IBC http://ibcshopping.com.au since they are such a friendly bunch.

Unfortunately, this series is not sold in order. I thought this was very silly, but was comforted when the chap in the book shop said the Sura (chapter) and Ayat (verse) numbers were included in the footnotes so it wouldn't be a huge job to sort them out. Murphy's Law of Homeschooling struck when I got home and found that less than half of the books are drawn from one chapter only, so putting them in order was going to require significant collaboration between my non-Muslim self, Wikipedia, http://quran.com and a few others. Plus, the Quran makes no attempt towards chronological order. Who knew? (Apart from the billion or two Muslims out there!)

So, here is the series put into Quranic order to the best of my ability, just in case someone else ever needs it:

The Morals of Believers

Life Begins

Allah Made Them All

The First Man

The Builder of the Kabah

Uzayr's Donkey

Ramadan and the Quran

How to Pray Salat

The People of the Book

The Two Brothers

A Unique Miracle

How Ibrahim Came to Know Allah?

Allah's Best Friend

The Ark of Nuh

The Prophet Hud and the Storm

The Prophet Shuayb and the Earthquake

The King's Magicians

The Pious Man and His Sons

The Prophet Yusuf and the King's Dream

The Travels of the Prophet Ibrahim

The Sleepers in the Cave

The Story of Two Gardens

The Wise Man and the Prophet Musa

The Iron Wall

The Old Man's Prayer

The Miraculous Baby

Allah Speaks to the Prophet Musa

The Prophet King

The Most Patient Man

The Light of Allah

The Ant's Panic

The Queen and the Bird

The Treasure House

Luqman's Advice to His Sons

Love Your Parents

The Gardens of Saba

The Angel's Prayer

The Brave Boy

Tale of a Fish

The Travellers Prayer

The Rivers of Milk and Honey

The Honoured Guests

The Prophet and the Blind Man

You might ask why a Pagan would spend so much money on a series of Quran stories, particularly when she has most of them at home in a book called 'Bible Stories for Children,' retained from her upbringing. The chap in the Muslim shop did! As I explained to him, all these stories are important for cultural literacy, and it is my hope that my kids will read the Jewish, Christian and Muslim versions and *notice* they are all the same stories. That might not sound like an in-depth analytical exercise, but I only have very small children at present. What I didn't tell him, because he didn't require the long version of my education philosophy (especially an hour after the shop had closed), is that I think an education is supposed to teach us about people and their motivations. After all, we spend our whole lives with and/or avoiding people! Religion is one of the largest forces that shapes the way people view and interact with the world and its other inhabitants, so a lot of my time and "pocket money" will be devoted to the subject.

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Introduction to my Nature Studies series

(First published at Sandbox to Socrates- if that link is broken, you'll be able to find their excellent and useful work by searching Google)

Virtually everyone thinks nature study is a good and healthful thing to do. Most people think nature journalling is a good thing to do as well, but many find it hard to get enthusiastic enough about it to actually go out and *do* it.

One problem people have is knowing where to start. They want some kind of method to follow to feel like they are doing it properly. Looking out the window, I expect all of us would agree that there is some kind of "method to the madness" but it may not be humanly possible to sort it all out so we'd better not allow that to stop us! I must admit though, I felt a need for guidance when I was dithering about beginning nature journalling with my daughter. For several reasons, personality and language disorder among them, "draw something" was not something she'd respond to. I wasn't even sure "draw this" would work, so I purchased some journal pages to get us started. Being in Australia, I purchased mine from Downunder Lit but I have it from a reliable source that North Americans get excited over The Handbook of Nature Study. Apologies to the rest of you, you'll have to look on Pintrest!

The other problem people have with beginning nature journalling with small kids is, well, it looks like it was made by a small kid! There is something about nature journalling that can make a person feel like everyone else's kids were born proficient water colourists while your kids' drawing looks like a dog's breakfast. What I hope to do in this series is show the evolution of my daughter's nature journal, right from her first entry. Obviously *my child's* nature journal could never look like a dog's breakfast, not even to the unenlightened out there, but I must confess, it does look like the work of a small child. I would like to invite you to keep us company as we journal on...

But first, let me get my pet hate out of the way. I know it'll come out sooner or later, so better to get it over with.
*There is no such thing as "fake nature" unless it really is made of plastic, ok? Weeds growing through cracks in the footpath are not very interesting in the scheme of things, but they are are as real as anyone else's farm, mountain or coral reef. If you live in a concrete jungle and all the nature you have to look at is weeds and the neighbours' hanging baskets, look at them. Seasons affect them. Bugs munch them. They are real! If you don't even have that, look at the clouds. Everyone has weather and weather is real enough that people spend careers studying it.
*I quite agree that grass isn't all that thrilling, but learning how to find the grass in your front yard interesting is a valuable lesson. A more valuable lesson than seeing a bear or a swamp wallaby, cool as they are. If nature study was only about the cool factor, we could go to the zoo once a year and call it good.
Ok. I've got that out of my system. Moving along...

What a grand beginning...

I think I said she could cut out the picture or stick the whole page in. I guess she wanted to do both.

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Saturday 19 April 2014

Introduction to Our New Blog!

I would like to be able to write a nice, neat introduction introducing ourselves and our mission, but we are a varied crew. We are united by an interest in the world and drive towards education. Some of us are homeschoolers, some have kids in public school, some don't have kids at all. We hail from several continents and religious traditions and our articles will reflect that.

Articles may well range from our children's nature journals to a syllabus on gay cinema to commentary on the Communist Manifesto. There's a whole world of thought out there!

Anyway, please try this at home!

(I don't know how RSS feeds work and all that, but I do know how to set up a Facebook notification page.)