Challenge A at Charlotte - Mallard Creek: July 2015

Bibliography Help

During the first semester, students will be researching and writing a paragraph or two on various animals and plants each week. This paragraph will include a bibliography of at least two sources. Here is a sample bibliography to help with this task:

Book: Mills, John. My Book. New York: Random House, 1992.

Book with 2 authors: Jeffers, Anne and David Miller. Their Book. London: Pearson, 2001.

Work in Anthology Green, Terry. "His Article." Collected Book. Editor Tim Roe. New York: Scribes, 2005. pp 54-61.

Newspaper: Harris, Tom. "Big News." The Washington Post 14 May 2004, A2

Journal/Magazine: Brown, Alice. "Her Article." Literary Journal 35.4 (1998): 13- 21.

Website with author: Smith, George. "His Web Text." Research Foundation (2005). Accessed 4/14/2015 from [http://www.research.org/webtext].

Website w/out author: "About Science." Science Forum Online (2007). Accessed 7/22/2015 from [http://www.sfo.org/about].

The sources should typed up in the above format and put in alphabetical order using the first word of each entry. So for the above list of sources, "About Science" would come first and Brown, Alice would be listed second.

What do I want to be when I grow up?

I remember taking a "career test" in high school. We were all so excited to imagine the possibilities that lay ahead of us in college and beyond. Unfortunately, I don't remember my results, nor do I have any inkling of where they are now. Probably in a landfill somewhere.

I recently found a website where you can take a FREE test online and they provide a list of the best areas of study for you based on your personality, interests, and talents. I am definitely going to have my kids take this test in early high school to help us all figure out what they should pursue after graduation. It does take about an hour to complete, and it is recommended to not rush through but instead to allow ample time to really consider each multiple choice question.

Interestingly, I took the test and scored fairly low on "education". My top three highest scores were in science, mathematics, and administration. Hmm......

career test

Supply List

Here are the additional supplies your student will need, other than books:

One 1/2 inch 3 ring binder
One 2 inch 3 ring binder
Subject dividers - pack of eight
Dry erase markers (white board supplied by tutor)
Index cards, you choose colored or white
Highlighters, pens, pencils, colored pencils
Looseleaf paper
Blank white paper for map drawing
Clear page protectors

Teaching discernment

So I just read an awesome article by Matt Bianco. He introduces the four types of stories. Every song, movie, book, or tv show will fall into one of these categories. I think it is especially apropos given what we are seeing happen all around us in our world today - even just in this past month! Let's teach our kids to be able to identify what they see and then to discern if it's the best choice of our time. Does it match up with our biblical worldview?

Four types of literature

video fun with LTW

We will be using LTW level ONE this year in challenge A. The first several essays are super short and focused on form and learning the basic model and structure of a persuasive essay. Many parents and students wonder why they are not required to write as they did in IEW in the past. They are used to seven sentence paragraphs, five of them, loaded with flowery adjectives, creative similes, and adverbial clauses. They know how to write well. They've learned it. Keyword outlines can be completed without barely a thought - like breathing or digesting.

But what if we didn't have a text to rewrite? Instead, what if we read a book together and then decided to create a thesis and write an essay? What would we write about? How would we arrange the proofs of the thesis? That's LTW.

We will spend the first couple of months learning the model of the persuasive essay and how to think about and analyze a book in order to create a thesis that is relevant and personally fulfilling. Students will be choosing characters and themes that they are excited about - which always makes writing more fun! Yes, it might seem like we are taking a step backward in our writing and using less creativity. But we are learning the parts of a persuasive essay and practicing them over and over until they are as engrained in our brains as the keyword outline. By the end of this first year of LTW, students will know how to craft and organize an essay from a piece of literature. They will certainly be reading books more analytically. This ability will serve them for years to come: in the writing section of the SAT, any AP tests they take, and any future classes in high school and college.

This silly video shows how even a "boring" and "simple" persuasive essay model can eventually be used to create beautiful masterpieces. It's just under ten minutes long and I think will be encouraging to anyone just starting out with LTW. Enjoy!

the line and the dot - a romance