A BANNER HANDBOOK FOR HOMESCHOOLERS

This handbook for all families follows A Banner Experience, Elinor’s description of her founding The Banner School in Frederick, MD, in 1982, the rapid growth of the school and the unique and highly successful curriculum she devised that earned the school many awards. A long-time teacher with a M.Ed degree and thirty years of classroom experience, she integrated her math and vocabulary materials into all classrooms. In this book, she builds on the incomparable curriculum she devised which involved extended periods of students’ immersion in interdisciplinary science and social studies. She describes the surprising results that arose when she engaged her former students in learning architectural features, the beginning of which today she calls “The Awakened Eye.” She perpetuates these interests for children but takes it to a more wide-ranging level by suggesting that students’ awareness should include recognizing the various geometric shapes of their visual world, whether they be cacti, a hip roof, city cranes, or a factory silo. Elinor uses her expertise with mathematics to stress the essentials of frequent drill and to expand mathematics beyond textbooks by increasing students’ mathematic wisdom and ways to amuse themselves with math games. Oh, yes! Grammars’ tenacious traps, remedies for persistent spelling errors, and a synopsis of the mechanics of English cover English’s essential elements, while eleven science topics range from birds to weather and thirteen social studies subjects cover general ancient cultures, along with their antiquated devices for measuring, through to today’s elections and government. Elinor says her favorite examples of figurative language are the activities she suggests for Joyce Kilmer’s poem, Trees. Although this book’s objective is to provide parents and teachers with many helpful materials including 101 Ways to Prepare For a Writing Assignment; The Big Sit®, an unusual study involving several field trips; memory gems for families; how to decode product codes and become a smart shopper, she says, “I am most proud of Word Web Vocabulary® which I created after my retirement from Banner. This three-volume program is now in use in many classrooms throughout the United States, as well as other countries. I am currently developing Volume IV, along with learning the ropes of online networking with users of Word Web.” Elinor now lives in Charlottesville, VA, where she enjoys freelance writing, marketing Word Web Vocabulary, and blogging about education and bird watching.