Do you ever get discouraged and wonder if your homeschooling is working?

Katie of CM, Children and Lots of Grace wrote this beautiful post.

Dinner: Prebirth

(what you get when you combine an egg dinner for five with three flashlights and a photographer. The setup:)

The Lunch Game

I think this game posted at the Beehive may be the funniest thing I've ever seen - you simply must play!

Peculiar Aristocratic Title

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Most Noble and Honourable Tim the Rustic of Fritterton on the Marshes Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

(from The Common Room)

What I'm thinking about today

"In great states, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents wanting to make men and women of them. In vile states, the children are always wanting to be men and women, and the parents to keep them children."

- John Ruskin, Mornings in Florence

What Non-Homeschoolers May Not Know About Homeschoolers

This post from another blog was posted to one of the Ambleside Online email lists. It's nice to remember these things when I feel bad about not meeting all my own expectations about doing it all.

Oh dear...

While reading Amusing Ourselves to Death (Neil Postman) today I came across this quote that I liked, so I paused to put it in my quote book.

"To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community."

Returning to the book, I read this in the very next paragraph:

"...A good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph."



[Edit - Moody Broadcasting is doing an online Book Club feature of this book, the link is here.]

Miss M

This morning she came rushing out of the bedroom, excitedly yelling, "Swan Lake! Mommy, it's Swan Lake!" I went back to the bedroom, and, sure enough, Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake was playing on the radio. I'm amazed - she's seen the Nutcracker live a couple of times, seen the ballet on TV a lot and heard the CD all Christmas, so it doesn't nsurprise me when she recognizes it (lately she can correctly pick out Snow, Hot Chocolate and the Arabian dance), and we did a whole term of Mozart so I'm not surprised when she recognizes him, but she hasn't heard Swan Lake more than a few times.

Oh, and this morning she proudly showed me how she figured out how to work the child-proof cabinet latches. It may be time to install double latches on a few of the cabinets. I'm not ready for her to be able to get into any of the cabinets she feels like playing in.

test

Stacks Book Challenge Completed!

I almost forgot - I finished The Iliad for Boys and Girls a week ago. It took a bit longer because I read it aloud to my 10-year-old son. I enjoyed it. I was never able to make it through the whole Iliad, not even in audiobook form. I could never keep all the people straight. This was much easier to follow, and now I feel more prepared to tackle the original.

I posted about Linnets and Valerians here.
Roller Skates
All-of-a-Kind Family and Just David
The Mouse and His Child
and my original post where I listed the books I'd read here.

Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer
Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge
The Iliad for Boys and Girls by Alfred Church
All of a Kind Family by Sydney Taylor (and I read two sequels)
Just David by Eleanor Porter
The Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban

Article on Liberal Education

The Common Room posted an article about standards in liberal education. The author laments the lack of any common core of knowledge to teach in colleges. Instead, students can take a couple of courses of their choice in science, math, humanities, and get a degree - but two students with identical degrees from the same college might not have ever read the same book! (Tim says this won't be a problem for long, once the UN's world curriculum is adopted by more schools . . .)

Charlotte Mason had a lot to say about what should be learned in schools, and she was very much against vocational education that's narrowly focused on training students in job skills in lieu of a standard liberal education that passed on a body of knowledge and developed character. A quote two-thirds down in the article did a great job explaining that concept very concisely. Peter Berkowitz commenting on John Stuart Mills:

"Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians." In other words, the cultivation that they bring to professional schools from their liberal education goes a long way to determining whether professionals practice their trade sensibly and decently.

Listen to Poetry

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/

I found this other site http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/poets/toc.html which includes a reading of Wordsworth's Intimation of Immortality, but the reader doesn't have a British accent.

What European City Do You Belong In?

You Belong in Dublin

Friendly and down to earth, you want to enjoy Europe without snobbery or pretensions. You're the perfect person to go wild on a pub crawl... or enjoy a quiet bike ride through the old part of town.

What European City Do You Belong In?

What's Your Personality Type?

We've been having fun with this online personality test. I scored INTJ, Mr. B scored ISTJ, and Tim scored INTP (gee, we're all a bunch of introverts here!) J just took it and scored ESFJ, but I think it's still too early to tell - so much of what he does is by default because of his family. I'd love for some of my friends to take it - Miss Roxie, Ginger, Sis and her mom, my Bioluminescent Twin, my AO friends.

One thing I found about the test - if you truly don't understand a question or strongly feel like you could go either way (they ask "yes" or "no" and don't give an "I could go either way" option), you can leave it blank so than an erroneous answer doesn't throw off your results.

This is my first time posting to our updated blog.

Edit: Here's a second variation of the test - you can take both to see if your results jive.

Calligraphy in the Sky

(the above is dramatized; below is closer to how it actually looked)

(taken November of last year)

But a week since...

500!

That last was our 500th post. This makes 501 and still counting!

(here let there be imagined sundry exclamations of exceeding pleasure)

I Might as Well Have Let Her Carry Them

I brought some things upstairs this afternoon - a bag of apples, a head of lettuce, a bag of mixed greens. And I was carrying Miss M at the same time. She said, "Mommy, I can carry the apples!" I said, "No, because if you drop the bag, they'll fall on the cement floor and be bruised. I'll carry them." So we started up the steps. I fumbled to open the door at the top of the steps - and the bag of apples went bump-bump-bumping down every single step until it bounced off the last step, rolled onto the cement floor and hit the cement block wall.

Miss M was shrieking with laughter. I don't think I've laughed that hard in a long time. I can't wait to see the condition of those apples when I cut them up for breakfast in the morning.

Hula on youtube.com

Here's a kahiko (ancient-style) hula on Youtube. The ladies are wearing long red skirts and black sleeveless tops, and they're from pretty far away.

and a modern hula to the song Ke Aluala. I love this song! Knee-length white dresses, long sleeves. Too bad the sound acts weird.

God is Like . . .

Miss M wanted me to read her a book. She picked it (the Little Golden Book of Prayers) and sat down and said, "No, I'll read it. First you read it." So I did, and then it was her turn. She opened the book and began:

"This girl is praying, and there's a very dangerous . . ." (I could see her grasping for the most dangerous thing she could come up with) "a TABLE!" I guess it's early, the cobwebs still aren't all out yet. Next page. "God is like . . . a butterfly."

This reminds me of people who won't believe in the God of the Bible because "a loving God wouldn't . . ." or "I just don't think God could . . ." or "I just don't see how a merciful God would . . ." So instead, they make up their concept of God. I googled the phrase "I think God is like" and here are some I found:

I think God is like abstract art.
I think god is like Yoda.
I think God is like the fiery yellow-orange-red power that comes out of the big explosion they call the Big Bang.
I think God is like a little kid, fascinated by this new toy he has: a little doll house with little dolls that he can play with. No real implications, no consequences for what he does with these dolls, whether that be playing dress-ups or throwing them in the bin when they get ragged and worn out.
I think God is like my kitten. I love my kitten, but she isn’t real anymore.
And then Miss M's "I think God is like a butterfly."

And then I found this, which is the truth:
"It doesn't really matter what I think God is like. What matters is what is He really like."

Hula

Miss M's current obsession is hula - I have some kahiko (ancient chant style) big time competitions that I ordered online and she's been asking to watch those. Her newest thing is that, as she dances (with a few ballet moves mixed in), she chants, like the dancers she sees on the DVD. She stops mid-dance, holds her arms out, and yells out gibberish. In the real dances, they introduce and end dances with a Hawaiian phrase - I know they end with a line that starts, "He inoa . . ." and it says the name of the dance they just did (but that's all I know!) And now she wants me to be the kumu hula, the hula teacher who sits on the stage and beats the ipu. I have nothing gourd-shaped, so we're using a flashlight.




Can you see the resemblance? No? Well, I guess you have to really stretch the imagination . . .

Sleeping

It's Been a Hectic Week . . .

We started school back up on Jan 1 after two weeks off. I know, I know, the holiday and all, but our AO schedule is Mon-Fri, and if we take one day off, we usually end up taking the whole week off - and, last year, that left us with a two-week summer vacation.

We took it slow and easy on Monday, no math or copywork, just the books on the schedule. And we've taken all week to ease ourselves back into it. But it's really hard to get back to routine after two weeks, and I'm back on the raw diet without cheating and off the caffeine, and that's taken its toll on me - I've had a hard time dragging myself out of bed and I've been sleeping in until 11! Just keeping up with meals, school schedule, Series paraphrase, Cloud of Witness daily entries, has been all I could manage (plus chasing the toddler!)

So, I haven't had much to say, or time to say it.

I'm reading the last of my Stacks Books Challenge book (The Iliad for Boys and Girls) aloud, so it's taking longer - I was able to get the others read in bed within a few days.

Tomorrow we take the Christmas decorations down. The pies are gone, cookies are gone, See's chocolates are gone, gifts are put away, Nutcracker is over, holiday schedule has been replaced with school schedule, Christmas songs replaced with hymns - it really feels like Christmas is over.

The next thing to look forward to is the CM conference in North Carolina in June.

Christmas is Over

I'm going to miss Miss M's rendition of Jingle Bells:

"Jingle bells, jingle bells, all the way to London, oh what fun it is to ride . . ."

I think she confused it with the Mother Goose rhyme "See saw Sacaradown which is the way to London town."