Sunbather
September 18, 2009 @ 7:10 pm | Filed under: Nature Study, Photos
Archive for September, 2009
Eight Months Old
Rilla’s Song
September 18, 2009 @ 6:05 am | Filed under: Rilla
(To the tune, of course, of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly.”)
All I want is a cinnamon bear
From that package right over there
With mommy for a chair
Oh isn’t it just loverly
All the red bears that I can eat
A little bit spicy, a little bit sweet
I like to start with the feet
Oh isn’t it just loverly
Oh so loverly eatin’ absobloominlutely all
I have a giant appetite, even though I am very small
Cinnamon bears clutched in both my fists
Cinnamon mouth with a cinnamon kiss
And mommy’s singing about this!
Oh isn’t
This
Just loverly.
Anne Shirley’s Apprentice Goes to Rocky Ridge Farm
September 17, 2009 @ 6:34 am | Filed under: Family Adventures
My friend Joann and five of her children have embarked on an adventure that has me green with envy: they are touring this beautiful country of ours in a motor home. Joann’s husband’s work involves a great deal of travel, and this grand plan is a way for the family to spend more time with dad.
Joann’s nineteen-year-old daughter is chronicling the adventure at the delightfully named blog Anne Shirley’s Apprentice. The family’s blog names—and adventurous spirit—are inspired by Swallows and Amazons. No duffers allowed!
Yesterday’s entry ratcheted up my envy and delight even more: they visited Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home in Mansfield, Missouri.
Immediately inside the museum, so that it is almost the first thing that one sees is a large glass display case with the words “Pa’s Fiddle” written across the top. I was simply enraptured, but very quietly. The kind where you can’t say anything because it would ruin everything, because no one else could feel quite the same, and it’s no use trying to explain because words don’t cover it.
I can’t wait to see where they’re headed next.
Links for Jane and Others
September 15, 2009 @ 8:07 am | Filed under: Links
- Philosophy 101 – Real Simple – HT Mental multivitamin. Short summaries of the ideas of six major philosophers.
- Mount Wilson Observatory – wildfire photos and info. (I flagged this when the Observatory was under threat from the wildfire but forgot to move the autopost out of drafts. The threat is past now—hurray!—but the Observatory site and webcam are worth a look in themselves.)
- The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics – Boing Boing
- Coin-tosses aren’t fair – Boing Boing – “Many statistics examples start with “assuming a fair coin-toss…” But it turns out that coin-tosses aren’t fair; depending on your toss, there’s a small-to-alarming bias in the result.
- “A peach tree grows near Brooklyn « Farm School — “40 years ago, Michael Goldstein, then a young dad, rented the top floor of a building on the corner of Broome and Mercer Streets, and plunked a sandbox and kiddie pool on the roof. Such was the humble beginning of what would eventually become an elaborate, fantasyland garden”
Another Winter Holiday Connection: Morse Code
September 12, 2009 @ 6:41 am | Filed under: Books, Fun Learning Stuff
I didn’t include Morse code in my list of places our chapter of Winter Holiday took us because it wasn’t mentioned in the passage I quoted. But it was mentioned in the chapter, most enticingly. The book opens with the two children, Dick and Dorothea, beginning to explore the farm they’ve come to visit. There’s a big lake, and they see a boat with six children doing intriguing things around a large island in the middle of the lake. Readers of Swallows and Amazons know at once who these children are…oh, it’s so exciting. Dick and Dorothea long to make contact with them but aren’t sure how, until night falls and they figure out that the light in a distant window belongs to some of those nautical children. They signal with a flashlight, flash flash flash, until oh! The window light flashes three times in response. Contact! (With Mars, thinks astronomer Dick.) It’s terribly exciting.
And then the window light begins flashing in Morse code, but Dick and Dorothea can’t read it. Neither can we. This site is helpful, though we spent considerably more than the “minute” it boasts is necessary, and I can’t say we’re anywhere near mastery. Heh. More useful is the trick Jane remembered from Cheaper by the Dozen: words whose stresses match the dot-dash pattern for each letter of the alphabet, like “a-BOUT” for A (dot dash), “BOIS-ter-ous-ly” for B (dash dot dot dot), “CARE-less CHILD-ren” for C (dash dot dash dot), and “DAN-ger-ous” for D (dash dot dot). We began thinking up words for the rest of the alphabet—GARGOYLish for G, luGUbrious for L, and so on. I can now tap out “bad lad” in Morse code. Or “glad cad.” I’m sure this will come in useful someday.
“The Fairy Tales of Science”
September 10, 2009 @ 8:34 pm | Filed under: Books, Connections, Fun Learning Stuff, Poetry, Tidal Homeschooling
What we read today (an excerpt; “the astronomer” is a boy named Dick, who is stargazing with his sister, Dorothea):
“Got it,” he said. “Just over the top of the hill. Come and see it.”
Dorothea joined him. He pointed out the bright Aldebaran and the other stars of Taurus, and offered her the telescope.
“I can see a lot better without,” said Dorothea.
“How many of the Pleiades can you see?”
“Six,” said Dorothea.
“There are lots more than that,” said Dick. “But it’s awfully hard to see them when the telescope won’t keep still. How far away does it say the Pleiades are?”
Dorothea went back to the fire and found the place in the book.
“The light from the group known as the Pleiades (referred to by Tennyson in ‘Locksley Hall’)…”
“Oh, hang Tennyson!”
“The light from the group known as the Pleiades reaches our planet in rather more than three hundred years after it leaves them.”
“Light goes at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second,” said the voice of the astronomer in the darkness.
But Dorothea was also doing some calculations.
“Shakespeare died 1616.”
“What?”
“Well, if the light takes more than three hundred years to get here, it may have started while Shakespeare was alive, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, perhaps. Sir Walter Raleigh may have seen it start…”
“But of course he didn’t,” said the astronomer indignantly. “the light of the stars he saw had started three hundred years before that…”
“Battle of Bannockburn, 1314. Bows and arrows.” Dorothea was off again.
But Dick was no longer listening. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. Sixty times as far as that in a minute. Sixty times sixty times as far as that in an hour. Twenty-four hours in a day. Three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Not counting leap years. And then three hundred years of it. Those little stars that seemed to speckles a not too dreadfully distant blue ceiling were farther away than he could make himself think, try as he might. Those little stars must be enormous. The whole earth must be a tiny pebble in comparison. A spinning pebble, and he, on it, the astronomer, looking at flaming gigantic worlds so far away that they seemed no more than sparkling grains of dust. He felt for a moment less than nothing, and then, suddenly, size did not seem to matter. Distant and huge the stars might be, but he, standing here with chattering teeth on the dark hill-side, could see them and name them and even foretell what next they were going to do. “The January Sky.” And there they were, Taurus, Aldebaran, the Pleiades, obedient as slaves…He felt an odd wish to shout at them in triumph, but remembered in time that this would not be scientific.
—from Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome,
one of the Swallows & Amazons books
Where it took us:
* We read the opening of “Locksley Hall,” a long and complex poem which I enjoyed thinking my way through later in the day. With the kids, I read and discussed the first several stanzas, all of us lingering especially over:
Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.
Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.
* Of course after that we had to see the Pleiades. Discovered Google Sky. Oh. My. Goodness. Truly, we live in an amazing age.
* Spent a long time playing with Google Sky, looking up many constellations including all those mentioned in the Winter Holiday chapter. Rose told me the story of Orion being chased by the serpent, and we read the legend of the Pleiades, those seven sisters, daughters of Atlas. Beanie fetched D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths because both she and Rose wanted to read me several relevant passages.
* Hunted up our copy of Rey’s Find the Constellations and read about the different magnitudes of stars, among other things.
* Rose found Sirius, the Dog Star, her favorite star, says she, because she loves Diana Wynne Jones’s fantasy novel, Dogsbody, so.
“Here about the beach I wandered,” Tennyson’s poem continues, “nourishing a youth sublime / With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time…”
I don’t know about “sublime,” and we’d have to substitute “internet” for “beach,” I suppose, but yeah, it was a pretty nourishing morning.
Want more poetry? This week’s Poetry Friday roundup is at Wild Rose Reader.
This Week in Books
September 9, 2009 @ 6:41 pm | Filed under: Books
I like to make these lists now and then, snapshots of what everyone in the family was reading at a given point in time. Lately I’ve been trying to take note of what the kids are reading and jot the titles down in my notebook. I don’t catch everything, of course; a good deal of their reading happens in bed at night when I’m not around to make notes.
Here are books I’ve spotted in kids’ hands in the past week:
Jane (age 14):
* A Man for All Seasons (the play) — this one at my request, so we can discuss.
* The Screwtape Letters (she enjoyed it and noted the connection to Calvin & Hobbes—Calvin’s teacher is named Miss Wormwood; Wormwood is the demon nephew to whom Screwtape is writing).
* Meet the Malones; Beany Malone; Make a Wish for Me. (These appear on my list too; I’m reading them for the first time; what a hoot! 1940s girls’ fiction by Lenora Mattingly Weber, if you’re not familiar with them: a series as cherished by many as the Betsy-Tacy books are by me & other Maudies; fast-paced, quaint, quirky, charming, choppy, endearingly dated, wholesome, idealistic, fun, decidedly unpoetic, formulaic, lively.)
* Lost by Jacqueline Davies, which I mentioned the other day. I gave her a heads-up about some rough language (accurate for the 1911 New York City tenement setting). It’s YA, meant for more mature readers (teens, not middle-grade children).
* Lots of P. G. Wodehouse, probably some Agatha Christie, and this evening she left my room with The Complete Father Brown.
* Has been passing The Sherwood Ring around to her friends; dunno if she reread it herself this week.
Rose (age 11):
* Warriors books, too many to list, over and over and over again. Jane did the same thing with Redwall at Rose’s age.
* Little Women (just getting started)
* Gypsy and Nimblefoot by Sharon Wagner — pardon me while I gush a little! This was one of my most beloved books at Rose’s age. It’s a horse story, if you can’t tell from the title. Need I say more? Girl finds horse; girl trains horse; girl has adventures in and out of the show ring with horse. Be still my heart. I probably haven’t thought of it in 25 years, but I remembered it recently and knew Rose would eat. it. up. And how.
Beanie (age 8):
* Theater Shoes by Noel Streatfeild. Either you know Streatfeild or you don’t. I didn’t know Streatfeild as a child, poor me. I discovered the utterly delightful Shoes books as a young editorial assistant at Random House—just a few months before I encountered Betsy-Tacy as a young editorial associate (insignificant promotion) at HarperCollins. My boss, Stephanie Spinner, was bringing them back out of print, if I’m recalling correctly. Perhaps it was simply a repackage, but I know for certain that we only had old archive copies of the novels because I landed the freelance job of typing one of them—Ballet Shoes, I think—into the computer for a disk copy. Ballet Shoes is a very fat book. And marvelous to read, and not at all tedious to type for a modest hourly wage when you’re a newlywed with student loans and wedding bills to pay off. I can’t begin to do the Shoes books justice in a hasty little blurb like this, so I won’t even try. One more for the topics-to-post-about file. Anyway, I started reading Theater Shoes to Beanie months ago, but we petered out at some point—not due to lack of interest, but rather to an excess of interest on the baby’s part—interest in gnawing the pages, that is. So Beanie picked it up this week and finished it herself, and of course she adored it. Three children are sent to postwar London to live with the actress grandmother they never knew, the matriarch of a widespread clan of Theater Persons. There’s a movie-star uncle, a rhyming-slang-using Cockney housemaid, and other delights. Also quite a nice Shakespeare connection—one of the girls lands a part in The Tempest, which happens to be the Shakespeare play the girls and I are reading at the moment.
* Whinny of the Wild Horses — another much-loved horse book in these parts. I’m sure this has appeared on a Rose list in more than one previous post.
* Calvin and Hobbes
* Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices (we spent a pleasant half hour on the sofa with this one yesterday; such fun to read aloud together)
* several Cam Jansen books
* Tatterhood, a fairy tale collection
* Puck of Pook’s Hill (Kipling — tried it, hasn’t been hooked yet)
Meow
September 3, 2009 @ 5:47 pm | Filed under: Books
In case you missed this at the bottom of a long post earlier this week: A hilarious performance of Rossini’s Cat Duet by sopranos Felicity Lott and Ann Murray. This is the same duet that Betsy and Tacy performed in the school concert every year to the delight of their friends. Easy to see why!