kweitz

Great question! In addition to the Scarlet Letter and Huck Finn, we use a good number of short stories by Hawthorne (Young Goodman Brown, The Minister's Black Veil, Earth's Holocaust), Cooper (Eclipse), Melville (Bartleby Scrivener), Poe (Pit & Pendulum, Tell-Tale Heart, Purloined Letter, Gold-Bug, Masque of the Read Death, Fall of the House of Usher), and others like Twain, Harte, Bierce, London, O Henry, etc. We always read Moby-Dick (yes, every word of it – I have been surprised how much the students come to love it). We read many American poets from the Oxford Book of American Verse (edited by Mattheissen). We also include quite a few American hymns along with our primary source reading. We actually do To Kill A Mockingbird with our Modernity year, as we follow a Great Books approach. I am planning to include Wendell Berry in our next Modernity rotation as well; perhaps Hannah Coulter or a collection of his short stories like A Distant Land.

I have wrestled quite a bit with this. I actually wrote an entire paper on this for my MACCS class on Augustine, and it includes the main resources I use when I am asked this question. These are: Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book I.40 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.ii.xv Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?,” Weight of Glory Lewis, Prince Caspian If you want to read my paper, I posted in on my blog.

Plutarch's "Demosthenes" has some interesting thoughts on education drawn from his study habits. Also, you probably already know/have this, but The Great Tradition by Richard Gamble is a very good anthology of ideas about education through the ages.

Hi Jenn! This is a great question. I think there is definitely a place for giving students some ownership of the daily routine, and this should increase as they get older. On the other hand, there are times when you explain the new thing, listen to and respond to objections, and then calmly persevere with your plan. This is a great opportunity to model the idea that "education is repentance" for your students. "I am learning right along with (or just ahead of), and as I have studied and learned more, I understand that this new way of doing things is going to serve our family better." With all that said, when you are making a radical change to your daily routine, it might be wise to just change one thing every few days until you get closer to your ideal, recognizing that even that will change as you go. But there might also be some merit in a clean slate approach: declare a week's holiday for your students, take that time to get your new routine plan in order, and then come back from holiday to your new routine. I have done both of these things at various times over the years, and both can be effective. If you have more specific questions about implementing particular facets of a liturgical approach, please ask!

@Shannon Iverson, I am a huge fan of Berry's fiction, as are my kids (college-age and young marrieds). We have collectively read a good bit, and even hosted a summer study series here in our home to discuss his ideas of community as they relate to our church community. So fruitful, and such a lovely bit of summer scholé! I began reading Berry about 10 years ago, and just enjoyed the books, but then began to realize how important his ideas are to the recovery of a classical education in our families and communities. My youngest is 18, and he is the resident Berry scholar. He began reading the books on his own initiative about 2 years ago, and he spurred on his older siblings to read it. I do not think I would read it with younger children, though; I think the value of the stories is enhanced with at least a bit of life experience. I agree with @JTB_5, the community aspect is the thing that resonates; also he explores some really important ideas about education in all of his books. I just purchased his essay "The Loss of the University" to complement those thoughts, and try to contemplate them a bit more deeply. So...my first foray into Berry non-fiction is now in my (towering) to-be-read stack. There was a discussion about Berry on the Close Reads facebook group a while back, when someone posed the question about whether Berry wants everyone to move out of the city to a farm (short answer: NO way. He will actually tell you in person that you will probably fail if you try to do that). Here are some thoughts I shared:

Scholé Muse and Director @COLLEEN LEONARD has written a beautiful post about virtue formation and its connection to liturgy at the Scholé Groups blog. You can also see her brief presentation on The Cultivation of Virtue, and a discussion on virtue formation with the Scholé Muses. Check these out, then come back and let's talk about it! What does virtue formation look like in your home or Scholé Group?

I am very interested in reading Berry's essay, as a big fan of his fiction. This topic of higher education has occupied many family dinners. I just came across this article from Circe which I found so interesting; it has many of the ideas we have discussed as a family. https://www.circeinstitute.org/blog/hannah-coulter-hard-questions-education

Our main source of geography study is incorporating maps and geography into our four-year rotation of history and literature studies in all levels, and particularly in Jr. And Sr. High, where we do not have a separate geography course. For our younger students, we do preparatory work to make this more fruitful, with beginning geography skills embedded in our English Studies for Primer students as part of nature study. We also take a living book approach to the formal study of geography for our Primer (K-3)students; we read one of the the Holling C. Holling books over each academic year: Paddle to the Sea, Tree in the Trail or Minn of the Mississipi, Seabird, and Pagoo. We enhance the readings sometimes with activities from the Beautiful Feet Geography Through Literature guides. These are geared toward slightly older children, but there are some good activities for this age! If you have a range of ages at home, this is a great way to study geography with kids up to jr. high. Our Grammar (4-6) students have the most formal program: a 2-year rotation, so that map skills get covered pretty thoroughly. Years 1 and 3 complete a curriculum we have developed, based on Charlotte Mason's Elementary Geography and C. C. Long's Home Geography for Primary Grades. Years 2 and 4 are devoted to map memorization; we focus on the United States when we study American Culture and the world maps when we study Modernity. (We link to all of these books on our Humanities Bookstore pages at Providence Prep.)

A few years back, Carolyn Baddorf posed this question to the forum: I thought I'd throw it out there again for crowd-sourcing. We'd love to hear from families, teachers, and directors! I have some thoughts, and will post them here in a few days!

This is so true! We actually focus our co-op on the highschool, and let everyone else fall in line with what we are doing. You could take a look at our website: providenceprep.net. I'd be happy to answer specific questions about what we do.