A Medieval Mish Mash in English Class
Dear friends, My English class at our home school co-op was a bit of a mish mash today. My assistant Dawn (who is actually now my co-teacher) presented a grammar lesson on conjunctions and interjections, and then I took over for the rest of the class. In their history class earlier in the day, my seven students are learning medieval history, with lessons on St. Columba, St. Gregory the Great, and Japan in their assignments this coming week. I decided to put my laptop computer to use to turn their history lessons into English lessons too. (I love to integrate the school subjects with related literature!) For poetry, we read "The Prayer of St. Columba." The chants and prayers of the early church were passed down from century to century, a potent form of devotional communication. While reading this prayer, we talked about the use of repetition ("Let me...") and parallelism in the first four stanzas. We also talked about the historical context (the ...