Saturday, May 15, 2010

A funny thing happened while curriculum browsing...


A couple of years back I purchased a wonderful curriculum for my girls for them to use for Jr. High and High school. It is Far Above Rubies by Lynda Coats and focuses on preparing girls to become skilled homemakers. This fall is when we will start it with our oldest. While perusing it for the first real time, yesterday, we were making a list of things we need. One of the things was a book on writing style and grammer. I pulled out my old ones that I've had forever and my daughter started looking through them. Up till this point she was very excited for this new curriculum (self-directed unit study) but suddenly she looked glum. "Do I really have to read this book cover to cover?" she asked.
I started laughing! I thought she had realized that these were for reference. I quickly reassured her that she was not going to have read them like a book. Ugh! Cover to cover grammer? What a way to kill a love of learning. (For me at least. I'm sure there are people out there that eat, sleep and breathe grammer. Eats, Shoots and Leaves people.)
It's also time for her to start learning to properly type. Not just hunt and peck. I want a book for her to learn from, not a computer program so I went to the library to see if they had something. They had something alright! Something from 1985. (I took typing in school in 1981.)
I nearly split a gasket when I opened the book. It had pictures of typewriters and old, clunky word processors. The first lesson included learning to identify the parts of the typewriter and how to load and center your paper correctly. Ahhh... the good old days of pre- everyone owning a PC.
This book is just temporary to get her started while I search for something a little more current to purchase. (I've got 4 more- thus far- coming up behind her that need to learn too.) But I'll have to edit some of the lessons for her unless of course I want this to count as history too. Long live qwerty!

1 comment:

kimberlydawn said...

hi there, i just ran across your blog (upon a recommendation from HSTreasureTrove yahoo group), and was so excited to see your post about FAR...did you know they have a yahoo group as well? i'm so encouraged to come across others that are starting with their "younger" daughters, mine is 12yo...we will probably start in the fall~ we school year-round, but i am 'studying' the units/resources right now, trying to 'wrap my head around it all' tee hee...there are many resources Free on-line...i hope to put together a list of links and add it to the yahoo group, check it out the name of it is {Far-Blessed}