More on Aesop

The Circe Institute drew attention to my post "Aesop's Fables at Table."  Here are a few more ideas to make this work with a range of age levels (we have ages 3, 6, 7, 10):

1. Parents and older children can serve as models for the younger children in both the narrations and the formulation of the moral or lesson of the fable.
2. Younger children can narrate with the older children providing the lesson or moral.
3. Take your time before looking at the editor's moral - its very tempting to want to look immediately - it might even be good to ruminate on the fable for a few hours or a day, though it is hard to wait
4. Discuss the fable before formulating the moral, asking basic questions about the characters or repetitive elements in the story
5. Discuss the differences in the morals formulated - could more than one be correct?
6. Have a competition for forming the best moral - it should be short, memorable, and demonstrate some art at language (this is for the advanced Aesop scholar)

Questions or further suggestions are welcome in the comments.

Thoughts on Teaching History - Middle School

In my last installment , Regine Pernoud, gave some suggestions on teaching history to young children.  Her overall goal was to get children to actually do the work of the historian in later years.  She says,

"Around nine to twleve years, any educator can greatly stimulate the social sense that is awakening and also show his students how to see what surrounds us by having recourse to local history.  The study of history could then be mixed with that of the environment.  This is, moreover, what the masters formed in active methods have long called "the study of the milieu".  In order for this to be done well, it demands a reference to history and also some explorations that could be extremely beneficial: visits to museums, of course, but also to archives, even if merely those of the town mayor, as well as the study of land registers, of the civil state, of the census ...  Finally the study of monuments of the past, of people and events that marked the locality, eventually of excavations that might exist nearby - all that should be subject matter of a history course and would obviously be more educational than having to learn a textbook summary."  from Those Terrible Middle Ages (pg 165)

Thoughts on Teaching History - Young Children

Regine Pernoud closes her book on the middle ages with a chapter titled Simple Remarks on the Teaching of History.  Combined with my own teaching experience and now a familiarity with the approach of Charlotte Mason the suggestions seem better than ever.  Here is her advice for teaching young children:

"Why not teach history in small classes through the use of anecdotes, solely through anecdotes, destined to leave great names in the memory and unimaginable facts in the imagination, as only history can furnish, well beyond any fictitious legend.  And do so, of course, without any concern for chronology:  everyone knows that up until the age of nine or ten years, even later for many children, succession in time means nothing; it is thus completely useless up until that age to encumber the memory with dates, quite as useless as to persist, as was done for so long a time, in making it do "analysis" at a stage when intelligence is precisely incapable of analyzing.  On the other hand, there is not a child, no matter how young, who does not love stories, especially when they are "true".  Now at an age when what is recounted takes root for the whole of one's life, it would be of first importance to fill minds with a historical repertory whose human interest is inexhaustible."

What Students Like

The students, indeed, were happy; all students are when they are being given the facts, any facts, which they may later recite singly or in combinations on examinations.  Unfortunately, it is often that class which concentrates on data, regardless of how extensive it may be, which the student feels “he got most out of.” Bright students  are keenly aware that when a professor opens a lecture with a statement like, “Lear has often been accounted Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, but without some knowledge of the Elizabethan Playhouse its triumph remains obscure,” they are being told the answer to an examination question which reads: “How is some knowledge of the Elizabethan Playhouse necessary to an understanding of Shakespeare’sLear?” Intelligent students suffer from this abuse more than others because they are not only responsive but singularly adept at memory games. They are, however, capable of a much more demanding and exciting kind of education.

The Darkling Plane of Poetry by Frank Nelick