Logic Stage History Assignments - part 2

Putting the Focus on Cause and Effect

The central premise for studying history during the logic stage years as I understand it is to understand the connections between events in history. Why did things happen the way they did? What caused certain events to happen? What were the results of the events? While I realize that not all 5th graders are ready to begin that level of critical thinking on their own, I can see no reason why the basic idea cannot be modeled for them. To that end, several of the writing assignments Jessie has completed this year were focused on cause and effect. Here is where we began with...

I. Explain the Causes of the First Intermediate Period

This was one of our most basic attempts at cause and effect. I provided Jessie with specific questions to answer with her text...

Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt p. 64-79
1. How did Cheop’s successors compare to him?
2. How did the priests assert their power?
3. What two important claims did the nobles make?
4. What pharaoh succeeded in reuniting Egypt? Where was he from?

Once the reading was completed, I provided Jessie with the topic sentence (similar to what she was familiar with in R&S) and told her to write one paragraph for me.

Topic sentence: After the death of Pharaoh Cheops, the power and influence of pharaoh declined leading to the chaos of the First Intermediate Period.

Here is her output...

After the death of Pharaoh Cheops, the power and influence of the pharaohs declined leading to the chaos of the First Intermediate Period. Pharaohs hacked Cheops' character, strength, and dignity. As a result, the priests of Ra (the sun god and Pharaoh's father) said that they represented Ra and steadily became more and more behind the government choices. Pharaoh also had lent out land to his favorite nobles on the condition that it would be returned to the royal family when the noble died. But now the nobles claimed the land was theirs and willed it to their families, while the pharaohs were unable to get their land back because there was no army. The lords also claimed that after a man died, he was tested to see if he had committed even one of forty-two mortal sins. If not, he was allowed to pass; but if he had, a strange creature (part lion, part crocodile, and part hippopotamus) would slither out of the shadows and eat him up. Finally a Theban, named Amenemhet, conquered Egypt and ruled it as one land again.

My reaction: This was not exactly what I had expected, but I took it as a good first start. We left the paragraph as written but discussed the importance of the change in the view of life after death.

I'll post a few more examples as I get a chance.

Logic Stage History: A Follow Up - part 1

I blogged back in September concerning some of the changes I wanted to make regarding Jessie's history related writing. Basically my goal was to try to start moving beyond the confines of basic narration (at least as I see them) by slowly introducing more of a research driven writing format. After a full semester of using Jessie as my writing guinea pig, I'm pleased to see a lot of progress in both her confidence and her writing ability. I have also gotten several comments and some questions regarding exactly what we are doing for history writing this year, so I though I would revisit the topic and lay out some more specific examples, if for no other reason than so I don't have to reinvent the wheel in two years when Violet reaches this stage.

This week, I'll answer the question of where do I come up with my ideas. I'd love to have a magic resource or curriculum to plug in here and tell you it only takes me five minutes to glance through a list of suggestions and pick one, but sadly I know of no such resource (although I'm considering creating one). Instead, every weekend I gather together all of the resources I'm planning to have Jessie read for the week and try to find a quiet corner in my house to think. Some of the material, I've read before so I can just skim back through the pages to refresh my memory. The rest I read through and jot down some notes regarding the content.

Once the reading is finished, I ask myself a two questions. 1. What do I want her to learn from the material? I consider what topics are presented, how much information is available on each topic, whether to combine topics of keep them separate, etc. I also try to consider the amount of time we have each week. While I'd like her to write about everything, I sometimes choose to focus the writing assignments on only a portion of the reading and leave the remainder for discussion or just exposure. 2. What's the best way to write up the information? Basically I play student. If I was presented with this material and assigned to write a paragraph, essay, etc. what would I write about and what steps would be required. Then I consider the best way to break it down for Jessie and write up her daily reading and assignments. Sometimes I can just tell her to take notes and write a paragraph. Other times I provide her questions to help focus her attention on a certain area. Overall, it generally requires an hour or an hour and a half, but I consider it time well spent since she can then work fairly independently during the school week.

Calculating Grades & First Quarter Results

Thinking back to when I was in school, I remember getting grades for homework, quizzes, and tests mainly. (Sure there were the dreaded team projects with presentations and the subjective class participation components, but I try to forget those.) In coming up with a parallel for homeschooling this year, I've settled on a method for Jessie's core subjects this year.

Math:

• 25% daily work (This is based on completion, so she always gets a 100. Of course, I also always make her correct any mistakes until the work is correct so it ends up being a 100 either way.)
• 25% CWP (She can earn 10 points a day, so regular problems are 5 pts each and challenging ones are 10 pts each. I deduct points for errors in calculation or for setting up the problem incorrectly.)
• 50% tests (These are the practice pages in the textbook and the review pages in the workbook.)

Final Grade for the first quarter = 97.5 A

English (Grammar, Spelling, Writing, Reading)

• For grammar, 50 % worksheets and writing assignments & 50% tests
• For spelling, 1/3 for completion of daily work and 2/3 for tests
• For writing, 25% analysis, 25% rough drafts, 50% final drafts (My grading for writing is fairly lax so far. I only deduct for spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Truthfully though, so far I haven't seen much subjectively that I would change either.)
• For reading, 50% for narrating/discussing the material with me, 50% book reports
• The final grades in each area are weighted equally for a final English grade
  

Final Grade for the first quarter = 97 A

Latin:

• 25% completion of daily work
• 25% Latin worksheets (free from website) and quizzes in Primer
• 50 % tests

Final Grade for the first quarter = 99.5 A+

That's all I'm grading currently. My plan is to start grading science when we switch over to the anatomy text. I haven't settled on a final grading method for that. I also haven't figured out how to grade history yet. Her mapwork is always excellent. If I only grade her writing based on spelling, grammar, and punctuation, then she would end up with an A+ based on what I've seen so far. I begin to understand why teachers like homework questions and tests. We may try an oral test at the end of our first history term along the lines of the CM tests on Ambleside and see how it goes. I have another month or so to decide.

Sometimes she makes me laugh...

Jessie's book report for God King. For the record, I wasn't very specific about the last paragraph. I just told her to write a few sentences about what she liked or didn't like about the book.

The God King begins with Taharka, an Egyptian prince. While a young boy, he goes out hunting crocodiles. When the boatman falls into the water and the crocodile attacks him, Taharka kills the crocodile and binds up the wound, using the cloth that was his clothing, which was against the tabu. When he arrived home he was chosen to be Pharaoh by his father instead of Shabataka, who Taharka thinks should have been Pharaoh. Taharka goes to Thebes to marry the High Priestess Shepnuset. Three days before the wedding he learns of a plot to kill him and runs away with Amos, a man from Jerusalem. They go toward Jerusalem and are captured by the Assyrians, whom they escape from later. The day after they escape, the Assyrians leave because there is plague in their camp and they are all dying like flies. Taharka and Amos go to the camp of Shabataka (whom, it turns out, was the one that wanted to kill him). The boatman whom Taharka had saved so long ago (see fourth sentence) remembers him. Taharka becomes Pharaoh and exiles Shabataka after warning him that if he returns he will be killed. Taharka rides around camp in his chariot and is proclaimed Pharaoh. He looks forward to seeing the Priestess (whom he is in love with) again.

(Say what you may, I don’t like this book. I think it is a little to bloody. But then, that is just my opinion. Oh, and I would not recommend this book for child reading until sixth grade. And mom, you can laugh as much as you want to at this paragraph. I think it is a little on the humorous side myself, but I don’t care because it is MY book report. All my own, and I wrote it on my own. So there!)

Logic stage history - researching and writing, part 2

9So in researching and writing a paper, I remember doing 5 basic steps back when I was in school:

1. Pick a topic
   
2. Read and take notes
3. Organize the notes into an outline
4. Write a rough draft
5. Write a final draft

Simplifying the steps for Jessie to get her comfortable with the process, I came up with the following plan of action:

1. Assign a topic.
2. Provide questions to be answered based on reading & discuss answers.
   
3. To start, I'm providing the outline with topic sentences for each paragraph.
4. Jessie writes the draft independently. We edit it together.
5. Jessie creates the final draft to go in her notebook.

Here's how it played out this week.

Step 1: I assigned Jessie the topic of hieroglyphics.

Step 2: I gave her the following list of questions organized by book based on her assigned reading.
Usborne Encyclopedia of the Ancient World (124-125)
1. Where did the name hieroglyphs come from and what does it mean?
2. What are some of the different ways hieroglyphic symbols are used?
3. What is a cartouche?
4. What directions can hieroglyphics be written?
The Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt (3-19)
5. Describe how the Rosetta Stone was found.
6. What was on the stone and why was it so important?
The Riddle of the Rosetta Stone
7. What did Champollion believe that the hieroglyphs represented?
8. How did he prove that theory and work out the Egyptian alphabet?

Step 3: Outline: I gave her the following directions for her essay. I gave her topic sentences for each paragraph because that is how the paragraphs have been handled so far in R&S 5. I hope to move to her organizing the questions and coming up with her own topic sentences over the course of the year.
Paragraph 1 should discuss what are hieroglyphs and give some reasons why they are so complex using questions 1, 2, and 4. Topic sentence: Deciphering the writings of the ancient Egyptians was necessary in order to learn more about this culture, but the task was not an easy one.
Paragraph 2 should discuss the Rosetta Stone and its importance using questions 5 and 6. Topic sentence: The mystery of the hieroglyphs might never have been solved if it were not for a very important discovery in August of 1799.
Paragraph 3 should describe how Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphics using question 3, 7, and 8. Topic sentence: The final breakthrough in understanding hieroglyphics came in 1822 by Jean Francois Champollion.

Step 4 and 5: Here is the essay that resulted. I though it was a good first try.

My Summary About Egyptian Hieroglyphics

Deciphering the writings of the ancient Egyptians was necessary to learn more about this ancient culture, but the task was not an easy one. Hieroglyphics were not the Egyptians only means of writing, but they were very hard to understand for a good reason. Hieroglyphics were written left to right, right to left, or top to bottom. Pictures stood for words or sounds, and extra symbols beside or below meant that the hieroglyphic had a slightly different meaning. Determinatives were hieroglyphics that explain somewhat the meaning of other hieroglyphics.

The mystery of the hieroglyphics might have never been solved if it were not for a very important discovery is August of 1799. A French soldier was digging a trench as preparation for a war against England. While digging, he found a large stone upon which three languages were carved. After bringing Major Bouchard, it was taken to Cairo where it was discovered that the languages were Egyptian hieroglyphics, a strange language that nobody knew, and Greek (which almost all of the scholars knew and thus was easily deciphered). The story upon the stone was repeated once in each language, as later deciphering showed.

The final breakthrough in understanding hieroglyphics came in 1822 by Jean Francois Champollion. The most repeated word on the stone in Greek was Ptolemy, so Champollion figured out the most repeated hieroglyphics stood for that. Then an old colleague sent a hieroglyphic copied from an inscription found in a temple on an island called Philae on the River Nile. He compared the hieroglyphics and discovered the second hieroglyphic was Kleopatra, wife of Ptolemy. He deciphered cartouche after cartouche, the list of hieroglyphics and their translations getting longer and longer till at last he had deciphered all the cartouches. After he died, he had not deciphered every hieroglyphic, but he had left a firm path for others, and it was a little easier for others to finish the deciphering.

Logic Stage history - researching and writing, part 1

To date, the vast majority of Jessie's writing has involving simply narrating stories or information based upon what she has read. This works extremely well for writing a biographical sketch of a historical figure or covering a sequence of events such as the story of the battle of Marathon. It falls short of reaching the goals I have for analysis of history during this next four year cycle. While I agree with The Well-Trained Mind that "logic-stage history involves both synthesis (fitting information into one overall framework) and analysis (understanding individual events)", I find myself differing a bit as to how I wish to achieve the latter goal. As many times as I've reading the chapter on history in the logic stage, I just don't get how the notebook setup that they use and the student-led choice of topics to research really achieves the goal of analysis. To me it seems like a great way to learn researching skills, but I can't see it producing a lot of the connections that students are supposed to be making to this point.

Analysis in my mind should include examining cause and effect, how events are connected, how an individual's beliefs impact his way of life, what role geography plays in the development of a civilization, the goals of individuals and how they achieve them, etc. Basically, I'm interest in why things happened the way that they did. While I could simply highlight some of this information in my history discussions with Jessie, I believe she will be far more likely to learn and remember the information if she discovers it on her own. It's a simply a question of how to reach the goal. I'm sure we'll make a lot of adjustments as the year goes on, but in part 2 I'll share my basic game plan with examples of what it looked like this week in our history studies.

Logic Stage History - the Outline

This is actually only our second week of outlining for history, but Jessie is doing extremely well. Here is her outline from this week completely independently.

Early Empires
1. Sargon was the king of Akkad, but he wanted to rule Sumer too.
2. Soon he had conquered a lot of land.
3. But war struggles continued until, a few hundred years later, Ur conquered both Akkad and Sumer.
4. For a while, the empire prospered.
5. Then the Amorites entered the country, and it started to become divided.
6. Finally, Elam demolished Ur.

I had forgotten that we had done similar outlines with some of the longer CW Aesop assignments where I thought the keyword outlines would be too cumbersome. Last week when we did the first outline, I gave her an example using the first paragraph on the page. She nodded and said, "OK. Like we did with CW." Now I'm wondering what to do. Should we go ahead and start working on two level outlines? Should I be happy that the outlining is easy and focus more on researching skills?

History in the Logic Stage - my rationale

After two great years with TruthQuest American History for Young Students series, I was bit perplexed as to what direction to take with history this year especially with Jessie. While I purchased and will use some of the books and commentary from TruthQuest's Ancient Egypt & Ancient Greece as well as Ancient Rome guide, it wasn't the perfect fit that it has been for the past 2 years. I wanted to incorporate Biblical history, revisit the other cultures mentioned in the Old Testament, and try to shift from learning what happened to making connections as to why things are happening. To that end, I have pulled together resources from TruthQuest, Greenleaf Press, Miller's Classical Homeschooling website, the Tanglewood Education website, All Through the Ages, and The Well Trained Mind; mixed them together; and created our own version of history for this year based on the following goals for Jessie.

1. To establish a strong foundation of Biblical history.

To meet this goal, I have chosen to separate Biblical history into its own course for the year. I didn't want to cram Biblical history in between the history of other cultures and rush through portions of it to cover everything in one year. Jessie has assigned daily reading from her NIV Bible, which we are discussing using The Greenleaf Guide to the Old Testament. When we get to the NT, she'll be reading primarily from Luke and Acts. For maps, I have a copy of The Holman Bible Atlas to use as a reference.

2. To focus on depth rather than breadth.

I've decided that it is more important to cover a few civilizations well than try to give an overview of all of the civilizations as many of the available programs do. The bulk of our studies will be focused on the three largest western ancient civilizations: Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The four main spines for this effort will be The Pharoahs of Ancient Egypt, The Story of the Greeks, The Story of the Romans, and The Usborne Encyclopedia of the Ancient World.

3. To use history as a means to work on research and writing skills.

Outlining skills - She'll use the Usborne book to complete one 1 level outline a week.
Summaries - She'll write 1 paragraph summaries on all the important people or events that we encounter. My goal would be 2-3 paragraphs a week.
Research - still working out the kinks here, I'll post more as we settle into something workable

4. To improve mapping skills.

Last year, I found that to get the girls to create accurate maps, I had to make the map using the blank line map that I was giving them. They couldn't take a map from a book and translate the information onto a blank map when they didn't exactly match up. This year, I want to teach Jessie at least how to take one map from a book, compare it to a blank line map, see how they match up using similar features like rivers, and transfer the information to the blank line map.

5. To keep it fun.

I'm trying for one activity each week. We'll use all the lessons from our two Draw and Write Through History books. Other weeks, I'm trying to fill in with one craft or activity.

Starting Grades... Why now?

Realizing that for the first time, I have a logic student this year is still a bit mind-boggling to me. (Where did all the time go?) I know that 4 years from now when she reaches the rhetoric stage I'll probably still be wondering the same thing. Anyway, as part of ramping up the work for the logic years, I put a lot of thought and prayer into whether or not to start grades with Jessie this year.

Pros:

• practice for me - This gives me a couple of years to establish a fair system and work out all of the kinks
• motivation - Jessie is a perfectionist so simply knowing that the work is graded will result in a better effort than just trying to complete an assignment well enough for me to call it done
• record keeping - While it is unlikely that anyone but DH, Jessie, and I will see her grades, there is always a chance that if something were to happen to me Jessie would need to go into public school. Since middle school classes are leveled based on ability, I think the grades in combination with examples of her work would make it easier for her to be placed correctly should it ever be necessary.
  
• constructive feedback - I'm hoping that by quantifying her work that we can constructively discuss where any given assignment can be improved to really start seeing improvements in her writing and other more subjective areas of schooling. The goal is to have things done well not just completed so we can move on.

Cons:

• motivation - Motivation for Jessie is a two way street. Since she will naturally expect herself to score a 100% every time, I'll have to make sure that she doesn't become overly discouraged when that happens.
• time and effort - I know that grading will take more time and effort on my part than reading a paragraph and saying, "That's fine," but I'm hoping I can keep it simple enough to stay on top of it.