Archive for July, 2007
July 6, 2007 @ 9:24 pm | Filed under:
Poetry Poetry Friday was at Farm School this week, and I’m squeaking in with just a few hours of Friday left. And I’m wracking my brain, because earlier in the week I had a poem all picked out for today, and now I can’t remember it. Whitman, I think it was Whitman. Hang on, it’s coming to me. The girls and I were reading—OH THAT’S RIGHT! The grass.
The older my children get, the more children I have, the more Whitman means to me. He understands about wonder.
Leaves of Grass, Section 14, Poem 6
A child said, *What is the grass?* fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say, *Whose?*
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic;
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white;
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you, curling grass;
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men;
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people, and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps;
And here you are the mothers’ laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers;
Darker than the colorless beards of old men;
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death;
And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses;
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
So that people like William Kamkwamba could inspire the entire rest of the world.
This is awesome both in the "too totally cool" sense of the word I absorbed into my pores as a teenager in the 80s and in the old, non-slang sense of inspiring awe. William is a 19-year-old in Malawi, and this is his windmill blog. He grew up in a village with no electricity, in a house lit by pungent paraffin candles. He had to drop out of school for five years because his family couldn’t pay the fees. But just because William couldn’t take classes didn’t mean he stopped learning:
During that time I decided to try to get as much education as possible
by reading as many books as I could find. An organization called the
Malawian Teacher Training Activity (MTTA), a project of USAID
contributed a large quantity of books to the primary school library
near my home. I read many of them. One of the books I read was called Using Energy,
a primary school textbook about how energy is made. Inside the book
there were plans for a windmill. I decided to build a windmill to
provide power for my family.
Read the rest to find out what happened—and how it came to pass that William is now writing a blog.
July 5, 2007 @ 7:10 am | Filed under:
Film Look at this list! I’m going to put in bold the films we’ve already seen ("we" meaning my kids, really, since I’ve seen many more titles on the list than they have).
Heidi (Sarah wants to know which version?)
Charlotte’s Web
Homeward Bound
Beatrix Potter Collection
Peter Pan, Cathy Rigby version (look on eBay)
Little House on the Prairie, Disney version
Frontier House
One Night with the King
Bridge to Terebithia
Secret of Roan Inish
Anne of Green Gables
Anne of Avonlea (1975 BBC version)
IMAX movies like the one on beavers (This one is going at the top of my queue!)
Night at the Museum
Bringing Up Baby
Cars
Finding Nemo
A Bug’s Life
Darby O’Gill and the Little People
You Can’t Take it With You
Building Big with David Macaulay (a few scary scenes for more sensitive types)
The Pacifier
Cheaper by the Dozen (1950s version)
Akeelah and the Bee (slight language issues)
I Remember Mama
Pride of the Yankees
Spirit of Saint Louis
Emma, both the Kate Beckinsale & Gwyneth Paltrow versions were recommended (I’m partial to the Kate one, myself)
Pride & Prejudice, BBC version (but of course!!)
Sense & Sensibility
Nanny McPhee
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
National Velvet (old one with E. Taylor)
Fairy Tale: A True Story
Born Free
Iron Will
The Black Stallion
The Iron Giant
Boy’s Town
Yankee Doodle Dandy
Captains Courageous
Miss Potter
A Little Princess (not Shirley Temple version)
BBC Planet Earth series
Yours, Mine, & Ours (Lucille Ball/Henry Fonda version)
Pollyanna
Lassie (2005 version)
Natl Geographic Inside the Vatican
Life with Father
Martha Stewart dvds
Mr Blanding…
Railway Children
Connections w/ James Burke (This is available online, too, did you know? I saw a link at Sandra Dodd’s site.)
Hayley Mills movies (we’ve seen Pollyanna, Summer Magic, The Parent Trap)
The Sound of Music
Matilda
Mary Poppins
1776
and this list by Colleen, with this caveat: "…some
have language and/or mild sexual content that others might be
uncomfortable with. Some would definitely be more appropriate for
older, mature children. We tend to worry much more about violence at
our house…"
The Snow Walker
Mad Hot Ballroom
The Ron Clark Story (unique chance for my homeschooled kids to get a look at inner city New York schooling)
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
Rabbit Proof Fence
Follow Me, Boys!
The Apple Dumpling Gang
Eight Below
Song Catcher
Children of Heaven
Series wise, we’ve enjoyed The Waltons, All Creatures Great and Small,
and the early years of Monarch of the Glen. My kids also liked As Time
Goes By, although mainly this was a treat for their parents!!
Thanks, and keep ’em coming!
July 3, 2007 @ 8:55 am | Filed under:
Film In the comments of yesterday’s post, Faith mentioned Netflix and Ana mentioned the movie version of The Railway Children. That reminded me that I’d been meaning to mention that video myself—we were given a copy as a gift a few years ago, and we watched it again last weekend, and ohhhh I do love that movie. It’s one of those rare cases where I like the movie version just as well as I like the book—and I like the book a lot. It’s my favorite Nesbit novel.
Anyway, Faith and Ana reminded me that I keep meaning to stack our Netflix queue with some good movies for the girls and me to watch this summer. What are your family’s favorites? Hit me!
UPDATED! A reader reports that the Loftus Store shipped her one of the old (unabridged) books, and one of the new (abridged). If you order from these sources and you want the unabridged editions, be sure to request the versions with the illustrated (painted) covers. The photo covers are the abridged editions.
Alicia, aka Love2Learn Mom, has just returned from a trip to South Dakota. One stop on her route was De Smet, the town Charles and Caroline Ingalls settled in during By the Shores of Silver Lake. Alicia writes that she found
two gift shops that still had quite a few copies of the [unabridged] Little House
prequels available for sale (and were willing to ship telephone orders).
Here’s the info in case you’d like to pass it along…
The Loftus Store
www.loftusstore.com
1-866-335-3271
Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society
1-800-880-3383
This one had at least five copies of most of the books
They have Caroline books as well as my Martha and Charlotte novels.
I expect this list will keep growing throughout the summer…
• A subscription to Moo Cow Fan Club magazine—a terrific kids’ magazine which comes out in themed editions, each issue focusing on an interesting topic like bugs, the weather, Scotland, Egypt, wagon trains, or dinosaurs. I had the opportunity to check out several issues of Moo Cow, and to be frank, it was WEEKS before I could wrest them away from the kids long enough to peruse them myself. The themed format means each issue is sort of like a little unit study. My gang loves this immerse-yourself-in-a-topic aspect. The cartoons and zany Moo Cow characters have also been a big hit.
• A subscription to Muse Magazine, which I wrote about in this post on our favorite children’s magazines. I think if I’d been keeping a list of all the interesting conversations Jane and I have had this past year, a whopping majority of them would have begun, "So Mom, I was reading Muse and…"
In fact, so central has Muse become to our family discussions that not only am I now reading it cover to cover myself (and catching up on back issues, because quite frankly, Jane has learned so much interesting stuff from this magazine that she is leaving her mother in the dust), this year I am spending a chunk of our Fun Learning Stuff budget on some more magazines from Muse’s publisher.
Cobblestone (the educational arm of Carus, which publishes Muse, Cricket, Spider, and a host of other children’s magazines) is currently running a special offer: buy four subscriptions and save up to $54. I looked for information about whether this offer definitely applies to homeschoolers, didn’t find it, placed an order anyway, and got the discount.
I’m trying:
Ask (like Muse, but for younger kids—should be perfect for my 6- and almost-9-year-olds);
Odyssey (like Muse, but for older kids);
Dig (about archeology! How cool is that?);
Cobblestone (about U.S. history).
I’ll report back on those in a few months.
Now back to my list of stuff to buy instead of curriculum…
• Board games. We just got Clue. How did we not have Clue? I LOVE Clue!
Others we enjoy:
Settlers of Catan. (You know this. I’ve raved about it before.)
Rummikub.
Yahtzee.
Monopoly. (Who doesn’t love Monopoly?)
Caves and Claws. (Such a simple little game, but it has been popular here for, gosh, at least five years, maybe longer.)
• Origami paper.
• Good paintbrushes and watercolor paper. There is just nothing quite like painting on real watercolor paper.
• Family memberships! You know about our zoo membership. We recently bought an aquarium membership too. It was cheaper than two visits’ worth of admission would have been. The girls want to live there.
I have to go make breakfast, but as I said, this list will probably keep growing.
*UPDATED ALREADY! I asked Jane what else she’d add to this list, and she said:
• all of Hilda van Stockum’s
books
• all of E. Nesbit’s books
• the entire line of unabridged Puffin Classics. LOL!! (It looks like many of the newer editions of Puffin Classics have been abridged. Bummer.)
