Our first block of the year is done. Norse Mythology and Grammar have filled my head and the children's books for the last four weeks, and I am ready for a change. This year, I tried something new. Rather than have the children put their work into one book, and merge the grammar and writing lessons in that way, I had them keep two Morning Lesson notebooks, one with compositions and dictations on the Norse myths we had been hearing, and one with grammar rules and explanations. I found this to be moderately successful, but it was a lot of work for the children. Nearly everyone had to take home his or her book to finish copying their work from their rough drafts, and it meant their spending about 40 to 60 minutes of each morning engaged in writing, rewriting, editing, copying, or illustrating. Add in 20 minutes for opening rhythmic and action activities and ten to fifteen minutes at the end for the story, and my time for review and presentation of new material were cut very short.

Part of this came from my trying out Else Gottgen's practice of "free rendering". In its pure form, free rendering gives the children an opportunity to bring forth out of themselves their own response to the previous day's material through artistic expression, be it sculpture, drawing, movement, or writing. I tried having the children write short compositions during this time, but found that while some of them could crank out a three-paragraph retelling of the story from the day before with little or no problem, others couldn't get beyond the first sentence. This is a cue to me that we need to work on our retelling skills, as well as organization of a paragraph or compostion. I'd like them to be putting the following into their books each week of a language arts or humanities block:
1. A dictation
2. a composition they have written on their own
3. a full-page illustration or diagram
4. a class composition copied from the board.

This average of four pages per week has held true -- we have nine pages of work in the Norse book and seven in the grammar book.

Things to remember for the next block:
-- take time to walk them through the instructions in more than one way -- don't just tell them what to do!
-- have an example of good work up for them to view -- I need to create my own lesson book to show one way of doing the work well. They are past the age of needing to do all their work in a guided, step-by-step way. They just need to know how high I've set the bar.
-- plan out the work for each week in greater detail.

So, we will start our local history and geography block on Monday. I'm calling it, "Where are we, and how did we get here?" We will start with our bodies, orienting ourselves to the movement of the sun, finding the four cardinal directions. We will branch out to our classroom, school, and community as far as each of our homes. Meanwhile, our history work will address the question, "what is history? How do we relate to our past? How did we come to be here, together, now?"