Having less time to spare has forced me to learn to be more flexible. Last year, for instance, I had planned out every book we were going to read for our literature-based American History study down to which chapters we'd read which weeks, all in advance, for the entire school year. I felt sure I'd fall behind or miss something if I didn't.
This year (19th century, with half the time spent on the Civil War) I managed to make a list of books I wanted to use, and to divide them roughly up into topical chunks lasting two to six weeks long, but I didn't get around to figuring out exactly which ones, and which pages of which ones, I would have time to cover in two hours' reading and discussion per week.
To my surprise, the world has not stopped turning, and the children seem to be getting some decent history education.
This is what I am doing now: A couple of weeks in advance I request the dozen or so books I need for the next several-week chunk. Then, the morning that we're doing American History — Tuesdays with Hannah — I frantically flip through the books and find some decent excerpts that add up to the number of pages I can reasonably cover in the allotted time. Then, I read them to the kids and we talk about them.
There's a lot of stuff we never get to. Especially, there are many books that I would love to read in their entirety, but can only afford the time to read half, or a couple of chapters.
For instance, a few weeks ago, I read about half of a wonderful old book by Fletcher Pratt called The Monitor and the Merrimac. Fantastic. Yeah, it covered the Battle of Hampton Roads. But it also contained biographical information about Ericsson, the engineer who developed so many original innovations that became part of the Monitor; a lot of really interesting (to me anyway) technical information about the process of working out the kinks in the boat; detailed explanation of the North's strategy of naval blockade against the Confederacy, including discussions of the implications for international relations, blockade running, and the like; and it gave us the opportunity to discuss the concept of an "arms race" with the fourth graders. But the whole book is 180 pages long; I got as far as the end of the actual battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac itself, and really didn't have time to go on to the second half which went into the rest of the naval campaigns of the war.
Still, it was a great choice. The boys loved it. So did I!
Today was another example. I cobbled together a lesson from:
- 1 picture book, the text of which was the Gettysburg Address, to use with the younger children as their history lesson
- One section of a children's book about the Battle of Gettysburg, for the background leading up to the battle
- A few pages of 1 book for young people called "The Military History Of Civil War Land Battles" written by a military historian, for covering the actual battle, and using its maps to discuss troop movements
- Parts of two chapters from a book about women in the Civil War, for covering hospital work and bread riots
- Part of Daugherty's biography of Abraham Lincoln to cover NYC draft riots, Lincoln's many pardons of army deserters, the famous letter to Mrs. Bixby, and the Gettysburg Address again in more detail.
The whole lesson wound up being surprisingly cohesive, since the chapters about women and the civil war (A Separate Battle by Chang) centered around the time period near Gettysburg.
Next week we begin the wrap-up; all I know is that we'll read one book about Sherman's march to the sea and we'll read part of a book about Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox — a book that is itself 180 pages long. The next week we'll read more of that book and also a book about Lincoln's assassination. Then we cover Reconstruction.
Anyway, my point is that I am learning to wing it. "You call that winging it?!?" says Hannah incredulously, knowing that I have already put a lot of work into selecting the list of books to read from — even if the list is too long and I still have to pick and choose and excerpt the morning before a lesson. Believe me though, this amount of flexibility is new to me. It's giving me so much more confidence that things will go all right, the children will still learn, even when I don't have a super-detailed plan.
Medium-detailed, though, I'm clinging to as long as I can.
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