Heirs to the Kingdom

I can’t talk about the material culture of religion without, at least sometimes, talking about homeschooling. Of course, all stereotypes aside, homeschooling is not exclusively a religious phenomenon; when we began homeschooling, it was not for religious reasons, but because our oldest daughter was failing to thrive in school.

What we discovered, however, especially upon our conversion to Catholicism, was that the rhythms of home learning, which had become the pattern of our life already, lent themselves to a kind of formation which had as much to do with the life of the soul as with the life of the mind.

In the pursuit of this formation, I have been happy to discover Ye Hedge School, about which I’ll have something to say in a minute: it’s noon, and we have to say the Angelus and eat lunch.

All right, I’m back. See what I mean about rhythms? School a little, play a little, write a little, pray a little . . . That, at least, is how our summer schedule is going. My aim from now till mid-August is to school lightly three days a week, partly because I don’t want us to lose headway in math, and partly because when we’re not schooling, we fall into slovenly habits, including habits of prayer.

But I was talking about Ye Hedge School. They aren’t actually a school but a purveyor of homeschooling curriculum resources. “They” aren’t even really a “they,” but one person, Mary Daly, whose fascination with structure and order in the physical world and in language drives Ye Hedge School.

We’ve loved Mary’s resources for sentence diagramming, which oddly enough have proved to be a crucial key to my eleven-year-old’s ability and willingness to write. If I say, “Write a story” — well, your favorite “reluctance” image here. Blood, turnip. That kind of thing. But if Mary provides a page of blank diagram forms and says, “Maybe you would like to make up a story to diagram,” sentence by sentence, that’s a whole nother writing planet. Sentence by diagrammed sentence, he can produce a piece of writing that does not read like drops of blood wrung from a large and obdurate root vegetable.

This reinforces my fanciful notion, by the way, that it’s easier for a novice writer to write a sonnet than a free-verse poem. But I digress.

Another Hedge School resource which we are currently enjoying is Chemistry 001: Introducing the Periodic Kingdom To Its Heirs. Here’s what the Hedge School website has to say about this program:

. . . a book that introduces all the commonly known the elements of the periodic table, one by one. At the beginning of each period, the concept of electron energy levels or “shells” is considered, along with a few other concepts relevant to introductory chemistry.

The material is suitable for the middle-school child, or even younger in some cases, and is a very attractive and engaging vehicle for learning the names of the elements. All of the original students memorized substantial amounts of the Periodic Table. High school students of chemistry have also enjoyed this friendly presentation of the periodic table which they must master, the sooner, the better.

I bought the book and chart for the aforementioned eleven-year-old, but as it turns out, my five- and six-year-olds have taken the lead in memorizing the elements and identifying examples when we run across them: the beryllium in my aquamarine ring, the noble gas which enables the balloon’s escape through the branches of the pecan tree and across the moonlit sky.

Our study of the Periodic Table has given rise to some hands-on experiments of, it must be said, dubious educational value sometimes, though I suppose that what you learn when, for example, the plants in your study of light and chlorophyll all die is as important in its own way as whatever it was that you expected to learn.

I haven’t yet used every single Hedge School resource, so my rating will be less than 100/100, but my experience is that these materials stand head and shoulders above many other homeschooling curricula in terms of sheer thoughtfulness. I also like that they lend themselves to open-ended use; I’ve never been comfortable with teaching from a script — which is maybe why the plants in my experiments die, now that I think about it . . .

And now I have to go and read Swallows and Amazons with the short people, and one of them is asking whether we can make paper . . . she’s waving a sheaf of already-made loose-leaf paper at me, which leads me to wonder why we need to make more, because we seem to be drowning in paper as it is . . .

Anyway. Ye Hedge School. Highly recommended.

[Rating: 96/100]