An air and a roast

He's playing Danny Boy right now, and an old Welsh air, and we're studying the late middle ages, so that at any given moment the house feels like it's beckoning to our British forebears. I made a roast the other day just to complete the circle, although if you ask the Renaissance Fair people they might have suggested a turkey leg with a wizard as companion instead.

When we first started homeschooling, our focus was on thematic units, usually launched by a deep interest in a book. I fell back on Five in a Row a lot, and, with enough tweaking to fit our unique needs, we both really loved the program. It's a holistic curriculum that spends a full week with one book, exploring the story and connecting it to a full array of subjects. It was our earliest foray into math, history, geography, art...everything. We immersed ourselves in the culture of whatever was the book of the week, consuming it for meals, dressing in it for clothes, celebrating its holidays, its customs, its beliefs.

A part of me misses the all-encompassing nature of those early studies—they certainly made it easy to plan the week's meals—but clearly our later methods were informed by those early days. Even though we don't often plan a week of well rounded, holistic learning, we often find connections between the subjects we're studying. So when we're studying the crusades and reading Robin Hood and suddenly Calvin is playing a Welsh air, we find that connection, and then we make a roast and eat it while watching the best movie of all time—Disney's animated Robin Hood.