Thursday, February 5, 2015

Justice ~ 10th Grade

   Why, yes, it is halfway through the school year. But late is better than a gaping hole on that curricula page, right?

Justice ~ tenth grade
2014-2015
English
        Literature: homegrown middle ages, a few Great Courses lecture sets, Invitation to the Classics, How to Read Literature Like a Professor
        Booklist: The Discarded Image (C.S. Lewis), Augustine's City of God and Confessions (with GC lectures), Song of Roland, Beowulf (Heaney), Divine Comedy by Dante (all three, with GC), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Tolkien), Canterbury Tales (GC), Utopia (More), The Prince (Machiavelli), Don Quixote (Cervantes), and he'll finish the year with a Shakespeare unit, probably covering 6-7 plays
      Composition: Cover Story Writing (from the One Year Adventure Novel author) - This was written for grades 6-9. The instruction is topnotch and engaging. He is doing it at a much faster speed, getting some fiction instruction that he craves along with some solid nonfiction writing instruction, and when he finishes it we'll spend the rest of the year working hard on essays.

Math
      He is about ten lessons from finishing Math-U-See's older, combined Basic Algebra & Geometry.  He works with a retired STEM professor nearly daily. He's moving forward stronger than ever. Wahoo! This math course won't adequately prepare him for algebra 2 however, so we'll use the chapters he can't pass the reviews for in Aufmann's algebra 1 (with the generic Chalkdust DVDs) and Serra's Understanding Geometry. Even if this takes halfway through 11th, that leaves him 1.5 years to get through algebra 2. He's going to make it! 

History - middle ages
      Great Courses lectures: Early Middle Ages, High Middle Ages, and Late Middle Ages
      Human Odyssey textbook by Spielvogel, just the middle ages chapters
      World Religions
      Church History
    This amounts to about half a credit time-wise. His middle ages literature is meaty enough it counts as half his history and the literature portion of his English credit.

Science
      Biology by Miller/Levine, with the workbook, and occasional help from his math tutor
      This is going far better than Apologia did last year. He still greatly dislikes science in general, and his scores aren't great, but he will at least get through biology. :)

Spanish
      -Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish was his introduction, which is a fabulous introductory book.
      -We added a Practice Makes Perfect workbook, that used some very dated pop culture that irritated Justice.
      -Switched to a Practice Makes Perfect Beginning Spanish workbook/CDROM combo that he is doing better with.

Elective: Tolkien inspiration, European Mythology, Story Evolution, Inklings, or, the unnamed, homegrown literature course that we affectionately refer to as T.E.M.S.E.I.
       -Guerber's Norse Mythology
       -Tolkien Professor's Faerie and Fantasy 14 week course (this is the primary story evolution part)
             includes: Sir Orfeo and Sir Launfal in Middle English, Sir Gawain, The Wife of Bath's Tale (Chaucer), several selections from Lang's color fairy books, The Princess and the Goblin, Smith of Wooten Major, The Lion The Witch and the Wardobe, The Last Unicorn, and Sabriel
       -The Road to Middle-Earth by Thomas Shippey will continue the story evolution and add a hefty dose of philology. I carefully went through the text and made a reading list syllabus to go with it. He'll work through it much like he does the lecture courses with primary readings and then reading that portion of the Shippey book. This will cover a very sturdy amount Euro mythology.
       -Inklings - We haven't written this part yet. The plan is to read some bios on the men and some of what they wrote.

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