How the House Works

A verse: “Run, John, run”

From the library to the vault, by way of the commonplace book.

Run, John, run, the law commands, But gives us neither feet nor hands; Far better news the gospel brings: It bids us fly and gives us wings.

1. Armarium. Search the chest. For a line that is in the library (try “Who would true valour see”), select the words and tap Keep: it goes to your Florilegium with the book, the place and a link back. For this verse, the search turns up nothing, which is your answer about Bunyan.
2. Oratorium, the capture box. Type the four lines into the one capture surface, choose quote, give the author line above, and hand it off. It is written straight into your Florilegium, public or private as you choose. (Or keep it in the Florilegium's own form; either door lands in the same book.)
3. Florilegium. It is now a flower: quote, source, your note, and the great ideas it touches, if you tag them. Tap Learn it by heart.
4. Promptuarium. The Add form opens already filled in, and you press Save; the house never moves a thing into your bank for you. Now it is a piece: review it by first letters, line by line, or full text, and grade yourself. Record it in your own voice and loop it in the car. Tag it gospel and it joins a collection you can drill before Sunday.
5. Recitatorium hidden. Say it from memory into the booth, keep the take, and come back in a month to hear take one beside take four.
6. Memoria. When you hold it word-perfect, declare it in the vault. Prove it one week later and one month after that, and it is kept: visited at three months, at six, then as often as you choose. The ruling that mastery in the Promptuarium graduates a piece to the vault automatically, with a notice and a one-tap undo, is decided and not yet built; today you walk it to the vault yourself.
7. Back in the Oratorium. Drop it in the basket for tonight's evening and it prints on the order-of-service sheet. Offer the flower to the Society's commonplace book, and the members read it at the next meeting.
8. Atrium. The week it was kept for good turns gold on your child's grid of weeks, with the title under it.

A riddle from The Hobbit

User-added memory work: something you typed in yourself, because you wanted it.

Take the one about thirty white horses on a red hill. Tolkien's riddles are still under copyright, so no public shelf of the house may keep the words; but your own card may, the way your own notebook may.

1. Promptuarium. Add a piece, type the riddle and its answer in the notes, category riddle, tag hobbit, source “Tolkien, The Hobbit, ch. 5.” It is on your bank, or on a child's card if you were holding that one. Review it on the schedule; record it so a younger child hears it in your voice; loop the whole riddles tag at bedtime.
2. Flash cards. Make a deck: riddle on the face, answer on the back. Study it flip-and-grade, or let it run: timed flips, or read aloud at a pace you set.
3. Oratorium. Capture a note, “ask the horses riddle at supper,” and it waits in the basket for the evening.
4. Recitatorium hidden. A child recites it from memory; the take is kept on the child's card, entered by the parent's hand.
5. Memoria. Riddles are short and the vault is not fussy about genre. Declare it, prove it, keep it.
6. The Mnemonicon hidden. If you found a tune or a hand-sign that makes it stick, publish the aid (never the text) to the commons for other adults to fold into their own banks.
7. The Riddle Hoard hidden. Tolkien's riddle is on its shelf under Find it in the book: chapter five, Bilbo's first riddle, and nothing more until you say you have read it. Then it opens: the answer, how the disguise works (a whole night scene, every piece consistent), and the public-domain riddles behind it, which Tolkien himself named in a 1947 letter: “Thirty white horses” is a nursery riddle older than The Hobbit, and that one is kept whole, with its answer, its move and its source. Every public-domain riddle there carries a Learn it by heart link into the Promptuarium. And when a child wants to make one of her own, the Riddle Forge walks her through it: pick the answer, list true things about it, disguise each one, plant one clue that seems impossible, and check it is fair. The house riddle, number one in the hoard, was made that way by Adam's daughter. The room has no address yet, and the Armarium does not index it.

A fable: the tortoise and the hare

A story small enough to carry a truth, and a game that proves the truth was carried.

1. The Fable Pantry hidden. Open the tortoise and the hare. The tale comes first, Aesop's, in a public-domain translation. The moral is under a cover. Before you lift it, say the lesson in your own words; a child under eight will retell the story instead, and the page tells you to ask “why did he do that?” Then open the moral and compare. Under it: how the fable works (a contest between two traits, and the world, not the author, decides), and the same fable in sixteen other tellings, from a Cherokee terrapin to Thurber's tortoise who read about it in an old book and lost. Thurber's words are not kept, because they are still his; the page says where to read them.
2. Promptuarium. Learn it by heart opens your bank; add the tale, or only its moral, as a piece. Record it in your voice for the youngest; review it on the schedule.
3. Oratorium. Capture a note, “tell the tortoise at supper and ask for the lesson,” and it waits in the basket for the evening.
4. The Fable Forge. When the children want their own: choose one lesson, cast one trait per animal, set the situation, let the trait make the choice, let the world deliver the consequence, then cover the moral and test it on a listener. The Forge keeps the family's fables in its own book. That book is tied to the Forge's old home and does not yet write to the library card.
5. Recitatorium hidden. A child tells the fable from memory; the take is kept on the card.

A song

The Songbook is a door of the Oratorium, and a song is a text with a tune attached.

1. Songbook. The book ships with sixty-odd public-domain hymns and psalms, numbered after the Trinity Hymnal. Open one: every verse, the chord chart, a transpose pad by half steps (capo or re-finger, your choice), verses you can mark skipped for your household's singing, lyrics-only or chords, a listen bar for the links you keep per song, next and previous. Print one song, or choose several and print a set.
2. Your own song. Add a song of your own. It belongs to your household, private, unless it is cleared for sharing: the site is public, the song data is private, by rule.
3. From the capture box. Keep a song title during the day in the Oratorium's box; the hand-off writes a stub into your Songbook, numbered after the last song.
4. The Tune matcher. Lay any text (a catechism answer, a Latin paradigm, a poem) over a tune a syllable at a time and see where its stresses land on the strong beats. Ask which tune in the book wants the text. Check a text against a metre grid before it has a tune at all. Save the pairing with your songs.
5. The evening. Tonight's hymn sits in the order of service and prints on the sheet.
6. Promptuarium. A verse worth holding by heart goes into your bank from the Songbook's hand-off as a deck file; then it is a piece like any other, reviewed and recorded.
7. Catechesis, sung. If the song sets a catechism question, the Sung tab of the six-catechisms page links the recording beside the question.
8. The Mnemonicon hidden: the tune as a memory aid for a public text, linked out, with its artist's preferred link.
9. Conspectus planned: the hymn of the month on the household's calendar.

A spelling word

A word has three fields on your card: can you read it, do you know it, can you spell it. No room writes a field it does not test.

There are two ways a word arrives, and the house keeps them apart.

1. A word you met. Reading in the Armarium, double-click a word: the definition opens, and a looked up line goes on your card. In the Vocabularium, My words lists every word you looked up anywhere in the house. From there, Send to the Promptuarium makes an import file of pieces for your bank (a second import adds nothing twice), and Download gives the list as CSV.
2. A word you were given. A spelling list is the given rung: assigned, dated, not yet yours. The house calls the list a pensum, the day's portion of wool weighed out to a spinner, and its table is live on the card. The Spelling Room that drills a pensum by the rule beneath the words (six misses of -tion are one lesson, not six) is designed and prototyped inside the Vocabularium's folder, with the phonogram and spelling-rule data prepared, and is not served yet. Photographing a list off the kitchen table and turning it into a deck is planned on the same design.
3. Vocabularium, the measure. The range test places you against twelve thousand graded words and finds your frontier, the place where reading starts to strain. The Society's books each get a word page: the rarest words of Heretics, glossed in Chesterton's sense, with his sentence.
4. Promptuarium and Ludus. A deck drills the word; the ten-at-a-time drill in Ludus is the same engine, with a typed answer, and is the natural home for a spelling deck once the Spelling Room makes one.
5. Climbing out. A given word leaves the working set only by choice: you keep its sentence in the Florilegium, or learn a line that carries it by heart. Homework buys practice; it never buys a rung.

A recitation

Saying it aloud, to someone, is the whole point of memory work. Several rooms listen.

1. Recitatorium hidden. Choose Recited from memory or Read aloud, pick a piece from your bank or type a title, record, listen back, and Keep this take. The recording goes on the card, in private storage, and the takes of one piece line up on the shelf so the progress can be heard. Built from a school's recitation bench and opened to any reader; merged, not yet at an address.
2. Promptuarium. Record & loop keeps one recording per piece for practice; the recitation that counts is the one you grade yourself on.
3. Memoria. A proof is typed and checked word for word (missing words underlined, extra words struck), or attested on your honour; the ledger records which. A parent can hear a child's recital and the vault says heard by.
4. Armarium, read-along. A child reads a chapter aloud and the highlight follows the voice, with the hearing done on the device so the audio never leaves it. Or an audiobook plays on another device and the page keeps up.
5. Pinacotheca hidden. A telling is a recitation of a picture: look, turn it over, tell back what you saw. It goes on the card as a recited line with the words.
6. Atrium. A parent's hall lists each child's tellings waiting to be heard. Read it, press I've heard it, and a heard line goes on the child's card beside it.
7. Kansas City Classical Society. Recitation night, in company.

The catechism

How to get it into the Oratorium, and what it does once it is there.

Go to the Oratorium and open Catechesis. The Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647, 107 questions, with proof references) is already there; you add nothing but your household.

1. Learn. Pick the learner: you, or a child's card. The question shows; the child says the answer aloud; you show the answer and grade it Again, Hard, Good or Easy. New questions come in order, a few a day, because a catechism is an argument and Q1 comes before Q2 for a reason. Graded questions come back on a spaced schedule and are never retired: the longest gap is two years, and an answer keeps coming back for life. No streaks, no percentages.
2. Read it. The whole catechism, searchable. Print it as a sheet, or as 3×5 flash cards, question on the face and answer on the back.
3. Our edition. Leave a question out for now, or write a little answer for the youngest beside the full one. The edition drives the cards, the evening and the print. It is a selection, never a rewrite: the catechism's text stays the catechism's.
4. Household. Catechism only turns the whole Oratorium into just this room, for a family that wants nothing else on the screen; and sets how many new questions a learner meets each day.
5. The evening. The order of service has a catechism movement, “Father asks, children answer,” two questions a night at the household's place in its own edition, printed on the evening sheet.
6. Six catechisms compared. At /catechisms: the Heidelberg, Luther's Small, the New City, the Boys and Girls, the First Catechism and the WSC side by side on the WSC's spine, with a ladder from a child's answer up to the full one. A Sung tab lists the sung settings of each question, album by album. Adults' notes are signed and shared. Build ours lets a church walk the spine and assemble its own catechism, then Lead it one question at a time, full screen, or Learn it as flash cards that run four ways: answer and grade; auto-flip at any pace from a twentieth of a second to ten minutes a side; read aloud, from half speed to ten times; and record, your own voice on each side of each card. Those recordings stay on the device until one database change lets them onto the card.
7. Where the cards live. The flash cards are written into the Promptuarium's own tables, one deck per learner, so the same deck shows in the Promptuarium beside the child's poems. Two doors, one record.
8. The Catena planned: a reading index on the same spine, inside the Florilegium, that links each question to the proofs, one hymn from the Songbook and a few public-domain passages from the Armarium. And planned: a church's three-year walk up the spine, families following the congregation by theme, from the first of January 2027.