I have a 9-year-old son who, like most boys his age, loves doing anything the computer.  We have homeschooled for the last three and a half years, and when it came time to plan his fourth grade year, I decided I was really tired of struggling through ”school at home” as I had done the last few years and I wanted to do something new.  Switched-On Schoolhouse, a Christian computer-based complete curriculum published by Alpha-Omega, sounded ideal.  We got the 3rd grade package SOS off of eBay for about $150, brand new.  

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I am thinking of putting together a “Shakespeare for Homeschoolers” kind of web site or blog or possibly a WinterPromise-style curriculum.  Many people think Shakespeare is too far above young children, but I don’t think so at all. I mean, obviously one would want to start with something child-friendly like A Midsummer Night’s Dream or A Comedy of Errors or Twelfth Night. For example,  I have a great prose collection of about a dozen Shakespearean plays that I got off the bargain bin at my local Borders.  It includes snippets of the real dialogue in between the straightforward prose and the beautiful illustrations. 

When we study Shakespeare, we read through that first, and then we make paper cut outs of the characters and act out the real play, act by act.  I wasn’t sure my son would be into that, but he really has fun with it and actually does more or less understand what’s going on. Currently, we’re working on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is very kid-friendly and very funny, so that helps.  The paper dolls we ordered arrived a few days ago and we’ve been having a ball with them. PJ wants to build a stage and everything. We read Aliki’s William Shakespeare and the Globe as well, which helped to give the play a larger historical context. At the very least, when he gets a bit older, he won’t find find Shakespeare to be quite so alien.

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I have been thinking a lot about the differences between the ideals of classical education, Charlotte Mason and unschooling. All three methods can be looked at as a spectrum of academic rigidity, with classical education on one end, unschooling on the other – and, as I have discovered, with Charlotte Mason falling happily in the middle.

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