I Was, in Fact, an English Major . . .

. . . so it stands to reason that I would be excited about teaching Lorelei English this year.  And I’m especially excited about this:

This book is sort of vintage and sort of not.  What do I mean?  Well, it’s a reprint of a book that was published in 1962.  I would rather have an actual copy from 1962, but those are harder to find and more expensive.
The Voyages in English series is a relic of the golden era of Catholic education.  The textbooks my kids used in their parochial schools were devoid of religion, except, of course, for their religion books.  Not so in the 60s and earlier, when English texts and readers presented our faith alongside academic concepts.
But I wouldn’t pick a textbook just for that.  This series is acknowledged as an excellent one.  This will be my first time using the fourth grade book.  For William and Teddy, I used a third grade book because I couldn’t find the fourth grade book at that time, and it was plenty advanced for fourth grade, believe me!  Sadly, it was lost in the fire.  Jake did pages from my own third grade English workbook, which was from a different, but still Catholic, series.  I also used to have the eighth grade grammar book, which I used for homeschooling Jake in seventh grade.  That book was AMAZING.  There were grammar concepts in there I had never even heard of.  Jake and I both love grammar so we thoroughly enjoyed that book.
Besides the Catholic content, this book is full of old-fashioned concepts like courtesy and citizenship.  While the presentation may seem a little dated, the concepts aren’t–or at least they shouldn’t be.  And explaining “vintage” ideas to Lorelei will make English a mini-history lesson as well.
The first chapter is called Fun with Our Pets, and it begins: “St. Francis of Assisi was a friend to all the animals and the birds.  They raised his thoughts to God, who was their Father as well as his Father.”  I love that!  One of the first things Lorelei will learn in this chapter is how to write a letter correctly.  I’m not sure that’s something they teach in schools anymore, but we are going to do it, and we are going to write actual letters to people and mail them! [Update: Once or twice, anyway.]
Chapter Two, Adventures in Bookland, starts thus: “All of us have many friends . . . There are also other friends whose companionship means much to us–the books that we read.”  Isn’t that awesome?  This is where we start learning how to write good paragraphs.
I won’t go crazy and tell you about every single chapter but there’s one that focuses on courtesy, and boy does Lorelei need that after a steady summer diet of the brats on the Disney Channel.
Anyway, I’m excited.  And I’m going to teach her how to diagram sentences too. 🙂 [Update: Maybe this year.]