Chatting Through History

Here's how we "do" history these days in the AI Elementary School: after an all-too-brief lunch and recess period, we scramble into our places, the kids with sketchbooks or Thinking Putty in hand, and I read aloud to them from the Mystery of History, Volume 1.

It may sound a bit dry, and I've considered, a time or two, whether to chop it in favor of one of the other things that we'd love to squeeze into our day. But in reality, this short block of our day seems to yield so many delightful rabbit trails. Usually one of the kids volunteers to be the Researcher, which means that he or she has their Chromebook open and ready to Google any photos or definitions we need. (What does the Great Pyramid at Giza actually look like? What are the other Seven Wonders of the Ancient World? What is the official definition of a desert?)

We almost never stay strictly on topic, and I'm seeing the kids become increasingly comfortable with that. They look at me when a discussion strays, to gauge whether this is a valuable tangent or whether we've been sidetracked into silliness. As time goes on, I hope their own internal meter registers that kind of discernment.

This week we got only a few paragraphs into our chapter on the Ten Commandments and the Tabernacle when we had to stop to discuss what the Ten Commandments tell us about God and why He would give His people a bunch of standards He knew they wouldn't be able to live up to. (Can we in our class even live to our 4-item Covenant one hundred percent of the time?)

In the course of the discussion, during which Camryn pointed out that God wanted His people to figure out that they needed Him, I asked why God didn't just tell them that they weren't capable of keeping the law. Why did He make them find out for themselves? Aliya remarked that that was "very Acton" of God.

Maybe we're all getting to be Acton students after all.