Mt. Pleasant Classical Academy

Last evening the boys went out shopping for items using their gift cards while I stayed home to go through mail and to watch Dead Poet Society. It is filmed at a school near here and I wanted to see how they filmed it. Part way into the movie I read the movie summary over at Wikipedia :-(( Sad ending! Too sad for my emotional state at this time so I turned it off mid-way through. I saw how they filmed the school and enjoyed the scene of the one boy riding his bike through the flock of geese. I know they filmed that scene here since we have hundreds of thousands upon thousands of Canada and Snow geese here all winter long.

Robin Williams was quite the inspirational teacher to me, at least until I turned it off. It also got me thinking about our school days several years ago. We used to start our school day reading poetry, the boys so loved it. I don’t know WHY I dropped it, other than ‘other school work’ got in the way. So I decided that we need to add an afternoon poetry reading into our school day; one day a week is what I think we could handle. Now, which day? Tuesday and Thursday afternoons are taken up with swim team practice, Friday afternoon is either roller skating or some other fun event. Hmm, Monday. Monday sounds good then if we miss it there’s always Wednesday! Maybe we should try for both Monday and Wednesday. Great idea!

Funny thing happened when ScienceKid and I were going over all his work; helping him find his stuff or discovering that it was truly lost; and reviewing his goals for the next 6 months. He asked why he couldn’t just take a few days and read all the art history books I had listed as part of his Art History Course, instead of dragging it out and reading just a few pages every week? Sure, why not. If that’s the way he wants to handle the subject, why not?

And then why couldn’t we go to art museums in the area to finish up his art history course?. Of course where we live there’s only all the art museums in DC, Baltimore, Philly, NYC; just enough museums to keep a person busy for quite some time. Yea, why couldn’t we? So we decided to do just that. I love it when ScienceKid and I have these talks, he is such a neat kid, with such great ideas when it comes to how he wants to learn. He would never have picked studying Art History as a course at the start of the year but has found artists whose work he enjoys, has gained an understanding of art that far surpasses my understanding, and is enjoying the subject. What a nice success, and he’s now going to study the topic the way he wants to study it. Oh the joy and freedom of homeschooling!