On a trip a couple weeks back, we visited the Fuji Sengen Shrine near Mt Fuji. It is a magnificent forest shrine. Massive cedars line the processional, dwarfing the stone lanterns that are taller than either my kids or I. This article explains a little about the Japanese thought toward sacred forests and forest shrines.

Looking out from the shrine back toward the entrance torii.

According to the article, it is tradition at the Ise Shrine to rebuild the shrine every twenty years using new timber. Some of the timber used must be hundreds of years old. What is more, facing a decline in timber availability around the shrine, they have started a process of replanting. They plant new saplings and pray that they will grow strong and be ready for use in 200 years.

When I was a kid, my dad worked mostly in the timber industry. So forestry and forest utilization were familiar topics at our house. But the scale of forethought here that goes well beyond the replanting in Douglas Fir forests for harvesting for paper or housing. There is a mindfulness here that is worth noting.

Moon Over Japan

I was intrigued by the post about full moon names at Handbook of Nature Study. Curious to see if there were any similar names in Japan, I found this article all about the moon in Japan. For example, the Japanese don't see a man in the moon; they see a rabbit.



I didn't find different names for different full moons, but I did find a listing of the Japanese names for the different phases of the moon. Since we are having a full moon this week, we may have to have a private moon viewing. Maybe I can serve up some nice round pancakes.

The moon viewing room at Matsumoto Castle.

Homeschool Annual Planning

So I've been working through the process of planning for the next school year. For a couple years, I just had a stack of books. Each day we'd do another math lesson, another reading lesson, another handwriting lesson, etc.

Unfortunately, I found that a couple things were happening. As the kids got better at reading and could do history reading on their own and even grammar exercises independantly, I tended to push back the subjects that needed my supervision. Sometimes I'd realize that I had some wonderful resource still on the shelf (like History Pockets) after we'd wrapped up the studies that it would have fit in.

The Sonlight schedules have helped a lot for the older kids. I'm able to tell them to do the day's work and they will, mostly, go down the list and complete the readings. However, this year I've tweaked the pace for history, slowing it down to linger a bit over the ancients. At the same time, I'm trying to maintain the normal weekly pace for science. Add in the third grader that I've got tagging along in history and making his own trail in everything else and I've got quite the ball of yarn to keep from snarling up.

I'm not the workbox sort of person. I would forget to fill them and wonder why the boys seemed to have so much free time. But reading a long thread at The Well Trained Mind boards about making a file folder for each week in the year, I had an idea that I think will work. I'm taking what has worked for us from Sonlight, the weekly schedules, and adding to each weekly tab the other sheets that I don't want to forget.

First I made a master schedule for Rutabaga and Cauliflower for each week. I'm not going into depth on history and science. I just list which week's work they have to complete.

Then I started on a master schedule for Artichoke. It is easier to have him tag along with history than to try to do two Sonlight cores. So I'm noting which Story of the World chapters his brothers are reading. He will probably listen to these on audio. We have a number of great grammar level books on ancients from the first time we went through with his brothers. I find that I forget to do mapwork with him and never give him the coloring sheets that I have stashed. So instead of leaving maps and coloring sheets in the SOTW activity guide, they are getting filed along with the tab for each chapter's week.

Next I needed to add science for Artichoke. I've printed out a semester's worth of Outdoor Challenges from the Handbook of Nature Study blog. I started with the first ten challenges as an introducation, then picked several that were both something we could complete here in Japan and appropriate for the season we'll be in.

I don't plan to break up anything that is a bound book or workbook. But I do still have quite a bit of scavenging among the bookshelves to do before I'm finished with this.

How You Wish Schools Operated

We aren't directly refugees from public schools. We didn't withdraw the kids after some school or other failed to meet our needs. In fact, shortly after our eldest, Rutabaga, was born, I earned my Masters in Education. I had assumed when I started the program that I would go on and become a classroom teacher.

But it became pretty clear as I completed classes and practicum that the highlights I remembered from my own school days were mostly things that a teacher would not be allowed to do. Some things, like driving a student home, could get them in quite a bit of trouble.

And in addition to what had been lost there were whole new agendas that had been grafted onto the curriculum. Students leave elementary school having learned about Martin Luther King, Jr and global warming. But they may not leave able to competently read any of King's speeches for themselves.

Here is the back to school speech that I'd love to here in schools that were interested in real reform. From Dennis Prager.

H/T: National Review Online.

Reading Digital Barbarism

I'm halfway through reading Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism and I am so loathe to have it end that I've already ordered two of his short story collections from Paperback Swap. Digital Barbarism is on one hand about the assault on the concept of copyright, but on the other hand it portrays what we have lost in trading time and space in which to think and live for the pressures and demands of instant communications.

The sections on copyright combine the logic and self-evident conclusions of Friedrich Hayek with the understated put downs of Edith Wharton. But it is also a book about the writer's life, intellectual freedom, freedom of ideas, and the consequences to culture of an unbridled sense of entitlement. It is a response to those who think that because they can slap a book onto a scanner and upload it to the internet that they possess a right to thus steal another person's work. It also stands as an example of the value of a classical education, filled with demanding reading and reasoning. If you needed encouragement on why it is worth the hard work of reading classics, writing about them and studying logic, this book demonstrates the fruits of such an experience.

I recommend it highly. Though I suspect that you may think twice about copying a workbook or a friend's curriculum after considering his thoughts on copyright.

Beginning German Syllabus Search

I'm trying to pull together a curriculum for German for the kids. The older two still retain quite a bit of German from our years living in Berlin. But Artichoke was still very young when we left, so he needs to learn it from the beginning. I have a lot of books in German and a couple grammars and Deutsch als Fremdsprache materials. I'm just having a little trouble putting it all together.

I found one syllabus for German from the Northside school district in Texas that gives an overview of four years of study, broken down into six week segments for each level. This may be my best bet since it is arranged topically rather than linked to a specific text.

German Steps is a free online beginners' German language course from BBC. You can even sign up for weekly emails with links to each week's lessons. (BBC also has beginning language programs in French, Spanish and Italian.) If you dig even further into BBC's language offerings you can find other readings, videos and even a language test to help place you into the correct program. I've even found German audio available for download on iTunes.

MIT has German courses (and several other languages) in its Open Courseware. (Although the textbook has typically high college text prices, it might be possible to get similar mileage out of a used and slightly older edition.)

This site had a collection of lesson plans and links to German activities.

I'm finding lots of syllabuses for AP level language and even some for college level German, but I'm looking for some guides that are a little more kid friendly. Any suggestions?

I did run into a cache of cool syllabuses for German studies courses. This is from a history list and covers topics that run the gamut from the Thirty Years' War to Cabaret to the Holocaust and on to the Cold War. Mostly at the undergraduate and graduate level, they might still provide a basis for some independent study.

Summer Reading Program

All three kids are enrolled in the library summer reading program. But the one who has really taken off is Artichoke. Even though he's headed into third grade, he is just coming into his own with reading. I has warmed my heart to see him heading for a favorite corner in the children's book room to settle down with a Berenstain's Bear book and not want to leave until he finishes it.

So this morning his brothers suggested that he read a Transformers book that Cauliflower had checked out. They told him they didn't think it would be too hard for him and they were right. Although Cauliflower did provide the useful tip that if he ran into any really long words that he couldn't figure out, it probably meant "gun."

Pomp in the Senate

We don't have the same number of pomp filled ceremonies as some other countries. Which is probably fitting our status as a republic of hard headed, opinionated rugged individualists.

But the death of a sitting senator certainly gives more than a few opportunities for pomp, including the resting of Senator Byrd's casket in the Senate chambers and the draping in black of his Senate desk. The casket is placed on the Lincoln Catafalque. And his desk is a design that has changed little since the desks were replaced after being destroyed by the British during the War of 1812.

Makes me want to spend the weekend reading the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and comparing the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers.

I think that Senator Byrd was a scoundrel, but he was the duly elected scoundrel of West Virginia. They certainly had opportunities to choose differently yet time and again returned him to the Senate. That may tell us as much about American voters as it does about Senator Byrd.

As Winston Churchill observed, "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

RIP

Book Review: Love on a Dime

I just finished Love on a Dime by Cara Lynn James and I have to confess that I enjoyed it. Set mostly in Newport in the summer of 1899, the book's heroine is a young woman of status who is secretly writing dime novels. Unfortunately not only are such books considered trash that is beneath contempt by the society ladies in Newport, but even holding a job is held suspect.

Throw in an entirely unsuitable suitor (with the prerequisite harridan of a mother), a love returned from the past determined to regain her affections, and a heartless gossip columnist set on exposing her secret identity as an author and you have plenty of conflict.

This isn't deeply philosophical book. It actually parallels the dime store novels in the plot in not shying from being an entertaining read while also managing to slide in some commentary about greed and truthfulness (especially to oneself). This is a good summertime beach book and I look forward to others in the series.

(A free review copy was received from the publisher as part of the Book Sneeze program. No other compensation was received.)