Archive for February, 2006

Preparing the Fairgrounds

February 11, 2006 @ 1:24 pm | Filed under:

No new post this morning because I’ve been getting the Carnival ready for Monday. Last call for submissions, folks—get them in by 6:00 (Eastern time) this evening (more or less). And if you’re running late, no worries; Susan at Chicken Spaghetti has kindly offered to host the second Carnival of Children’s Literature in March. Hooray!

Children’s Book Meme

February 10, 2006 @ 2:58 am | Filed under:

A whole year of blogging, and this is my first meme! Saw it at Semicolon, Big A little A and Mental Multivitamin yesterday.

Like Kelly at Big A little a, I went with my childhood favorites. The Betsy-Tacy books would make the list of lifetime favorite series, but I didn’t discover them until I was an adult.

What are your three favorite children’s series?

1. The Anne of Green Gables books by L. M. Montgomery.

2. The Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. (Surely this comes as a surprise to no one.)

3. The The Chronicles of Narnia books by C. S. Lewis.

What are your three favorite non-series children’s books?

1. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I still reread it every spring.

2. Little Men by Louisa May Alcott. (Hard to decide whether to put this under ‘series’ or not.) I loved Little Women but Little Men enchanted me even more; I used to write stories in which I went to school at Plumfield.

3. Little Witch by Anna E. Bennett.

What are your three favorite children’s book characters?

1. Anne Shirley, absolutely. Oh how I wanted to be Anne!

2. Menolly.

3. Puddleglum.

Scheduling Read-Alouds

February 9, 2006 @ 3:10 am | Filed under: , ,

My Mr. Putty post prompted a flurry of emails from readers wanting to know how on earth we fit so many read-alouds into our day. By chance, a recent discussion thread at the 4 Real forums focuses on the same issue. I’m going to crib from my forum post to answer those of you who have written me privately with this question. And to those who wrote—be encouraged by the knowledge that you are not alone! I think I’ve had more email about read-aloud time than any other topic except “So when is the next Martha or Charlotte book coming out?”

Around here, it sometimes seems as though read-alouds are all I do! For several months now, I’ve been having some pregancy-related mobility problems, and I’m not up to nature walks (a pity with the gorgeous weather we’ve had this winter) or big messy art/cooking/science projects. Right now, the kids are on their own for that kind of thing. But what I can do is read. Since I’m in one of my high tide phases, we’re doing a fairly structured Charlotte Mason-style reading and narration thing.

Between 9:00 and noon every day, the children and I gather in what I jokingly call our “sitting room.” It’s supposed to be a dining room, but we don’t have the furniture. For our first couple of years in this house it was mostly empty: Scott’s beat-up old bachelor computer desk in one corner—that’s where I’m sitting right now, as a matter of fact—and in the middle of the room, a big Brio train table we inherited from his sister. Then a friend’s father had a sofa he wanted to get rid of, and I jumped at it, and now that big blue couch is where I spend my mornings.

Wonderboy bops around the room, playing with Wedgits (my best toy purchase ever) and Playmobil, and the girls perch in various locations: on the arm of the couch, the back of the couch, the edge of the train table…(I guess just plain curling up on the couch isn’t interesting enough.) Their hands are busy with Sculpey or yarn. I have a basket of books at my feet and a mug of tea on the windowsill beside me. And I read.

I read from the Bible, a book about saints (currently 57 Saints for Children), a book of poetry (right now it’s either Longfellow or Frost, alternating), Our Island Story (twice a week), This Country of Ours (twice a week), D’Aulaire’s Norse Gods, Famous Men of Greece (twice a week), 50 Famous Tales (twice a week), a picture book for Beanie, and a chapter from whatever novel we are currently reading. I finished The Penderwicks last week (did I mention we adored it?) and now we’re giving recent Newbery Honor medalist Whittington a try.

In between the various books (and oral narrations following many of them), we sing (very badly), do our German & ASL lessons, do picture study, maybe do a little math, take run-around-the-house breaks (inside the house or out, depending on the weather), change Wonderboy’s diaper, draw pictures, watch birds at the feeders, clean up juice spills, and so on. The morning passes in a flash.

After lunch is a two-hour period of quiet time. Wonderboy naps, I read a picture book to Beanie and she naps, and then I take a half hour to eat my own lunch and check my email. Yes, it is a blissful half hour. Then I spend one-on-one time with the two older girls. I’m reading Old Yeller to Rose, and then she likes me to sit with her while she works on her pet project, ancient Greek. Jane and I do lots of different things together during her one-on-one: science projects (okay, she does and I watch); play Settlers of Catan or other games; write notes back and forth to each other in her Redwall notebook (I have been requested to read the whole-entire-really-really-long series and report my thoughts back to her in writing); stuff like that.

At 2:30 we all gather again for Shakespeare-and-snack time. Right now we’re reading As You Like It. After that, Scott comes up from work, and the kids go out to play for the rest of the afternoon, and it’s time for me to go down to the office and write.

At bedtime Scott is the read-aloud guy. Usually he reads to all three girls together but right now he has separate books going with each of them. Which, yes, makes for a very long bedtime routine, but Daddy deserves some one-on-one time too.

In many ways my pregnancy hip troubles have been a blessing for our family, because without the option of doing lots of active stuff (art projects, field trips, nature hikes) I had to rethink our routine, and despite many rounds of illness—Wonderboy has had pneumonia twice, and that ain’t the half of it!—and other challenges, our days this winter have been rich and fun. We have traveled all around the globe with Mr. Putty; we’ve picked apples in New England and fought Saxons in Old England. We’ve encountered frost giants, one-eyed monsters, woodland bandits, and a host of other strange folk. We’ve journeyed in hot-air balloons and dragon-headed ships. Not bad for a woman who limps like an injured duck.

Have voice, will travel.

Left-Brainers, Beware

February 8, 2006 @ 3:57 am | Filed under:

Scott’s pal Tom, a teacher and mighty fine writer, blew me away with this story about author Daniel Pink’s visit to his school. I thought I saw where it was headed, but boy was I wrong.

Coincidentally, I shared a booksigning table with Daniel Pink at a homeschooling convention a couple of summers ago. We exchanged books; he autographed a copy of Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself for me and I signed Little House in the Highlands for him. He was interested to hear that Scott and I were just the kind of people he describes in his book: freelancers working at home, connecting with our (short-term) employers (in our case, editors) via computer and phone. What, he wanted to know, was our biggest challenge in maintaining this free-agent lifestyle? I didn’t have to think hard about that one: health insurance, I answered. He nodded. Yup, that’s a biggie.

I enjoyed his book. Wish he’d brought that film Tom’s school watched to the convention, though. I’m dying to know what I would have seen….

Everybody Loves a Carnival

February 7, 2006 @ 5:58 am | Filed under:

Check out the new Carnival list in the left sidebar! (Right below the Recent Comments.) I’ll be updating daily. This week’s Carnival of Homeschooling went up yesterday at Why Homeschool. And don’t miss the latest Carnival of Literature!

Submissions for the next Carnival of Education are due today, and you may submit a post to the next Carnival of Unschooling through Feb. 9th. Saturday is the deadline for submissions to the first Carnival of Children’s Literature. Some great posts have already come in—this is going to be fun!

I Know that School; It’s a Good One

February 7, 2006 @ 2:52 am | Filed under:

I wonder if Chesterton had read any Charlotte Mason?

…the French have an incomparable idiom for a boy playing truant: “Il fait l’école buissonnière”—he goes to the bushy school, or the school among the bushes….How admirably this “bushy school” expresses half the modern notions of a more natural education! The two words express the whole poetry of Wordsworth, the whole philosophy of Thoreau, and are quite as good literature as either.

—G. K. Chesterton,
Charles Dickens: The Last of the Great Men

A Great Day for Birthdays

February 7, 2006 @ 2:46 am | Filed under: ,

Wilderlauraingalls
You just know I had to mention this today! It’s Laura Ingalls Wilder’s birthday. She was born on February 7, 1867, in that famous little house in the Big Woods near Pepin, Wisconsin.

As it happens, Charles Dickens was born on the same day, 55 years earlier, just a few months before the U.S. reached its boiling point and declared war on Great Britain, launching the War of 1812. Laura’s maternal grandmother, Charlotte Tucker, was not quite three years old when Dickens was born. Dickens died in 1870, when Laura was three. Jane finds this to be an interesting symmetry.

Click here for more famous folks born on February 7th. Among them are John Deere of tractor fame (1804), the German composer Ernst Franck (1847), novelist Sinclair Lewis (1885), and Hrafnhildur Hafsteinsdottir, Iceland’s 1996 Miss Universe winner (1976). (Okay, so I’ve never heard of her before. Who could resist that name!)

Peeping at Spring with Poetry

February 6, 2006 @ 3:27 am | Filed under: ,

061813547201_aa_scmzzzzzzz__1 We’ve been reading the recent Caldecott winners just as quickly as the library can get them to us. Marjorie Priceman’s Hot Air : The (Mostly) True Story of the First Hot-Air Balloon Ride, one of the Caldecott Honor Books, has been a huge hit with five-year-old Beanie, who is enchanted with the sky-high adventures of the hapless sheep, duck, and rooster in of the basket of that famous balloon.

Another of this year’s Honor Books caught the fancy of the whole family, whetting our appetites for the spring days that are just around the corner. Song of the Waterboatman and Other Pond Poems by Joyce Sidman, gorgeously illustrated in a palette of greens by Beckie Prange, is a collection of poems from the point of view of small pond denizens: spring peepers, caddis flies, cattails, a rather belligerent diving beetle. (“…if it moves, it is mine./ If it’s anywhere near me, it is mine./ If I’m hungry (and I’m always hungry),/ it is mine, mine, mine.”)

Naturally (no pun intended) these fascinating poems called to mind some other collections of nature poetry we are fond of. Funny how these books suddenly appeared in my read-aloud basket beside the blue sofa:

All the Small Poems and Fourteen More by Valerie Worth;

Joyful Noise : Poems for Two Voices by Paul Fleischman;

I Am Phoenix : Poems for Two Voices, also by Paul Fleischman.

By the time we’ve savored every poem in these books, it really will be spring.