It was a warm day today, and the sun is now up when we have supper, and therefore I'm straining towards spring and trying not to be disappointed that, in fact, it is still very much the middle of January.
Still, let's talk about gardens. Because it is warm.
For the past five years that we've been here I've planted a vegetable patch and every year I am pretty disappointed in it. I'm not much of a vegetable gardener; my talents (such as they are) lie in the realm of flowers. Last year I extended the linear bed in the back garden and started another bed around the rock wall and one in the front garden as well. I filled the front garden plot with a bright green vine called Creeping Jenny, and some big annuals and some smaller annuals and also a bunch of Lily of the Valley that I dug up from under the spruces. I think my goal is to focus on those beds and really try and fill them up with colour, and also to take out the 4x4 wooden raised beds and give them to my parents, who enjoy vegetable gardening. I will plant a bunch of scarlet runner beans, though, because they bring me bees and hummingbirds. And also I will keep my garlic in, if only because I must have 100 bulbs in the ground right now. The rest will go.
So what flowers to plant!? How exciting. I have very bad luck with bulbs, except for oxalis, which the chipmunk won't eat. So plenty of that around! But last year the dahlias did well, and the sedum went crazy to the point where I split one big clump into four plants. The ground sedum spread fantastically.
I think I'll branch out into hardy plants that will withstand our sporadic attendance on them. The issue is that we have so much travel to do in the summer, and our garden suffers. In the fall I transplanted a lot of daylilies, and that should withstand whatever I can throw at it, and of course the sedum and other drought-tolerant plants are fine, but generally speaking the garden sags a lot when we are gone. This might be part of the problem with me growing vegetables, but it isn't a problem I can fix.
It's hard to believe that in six months the sun will be nowhere near setting right now but will have hours left in the sky. The children will play outside after supper, and I will be watering the gardens in the evening with the cat beside me, watching to make certain I do a good job, and the chipmunk who is fast asleep at this moment, surrounded by his or her seeds, will be on the big flat rock, trying to eat my tulips.
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
Sunday, January 6, 2019
How To Read A Lot Of Books - One Technique. Also the books I have started.
Here's one way in which I read lots and lots of books every year - I scatter them. I strew them about. I tuck them everywhere in my life. There is a book beside me in the car. There is a book beside every chair. There are books in my kitchen and my bedroom and there are books stacked in the bathroom. There are books I would like to read in my children's rooms and there are books in closets. My entire life is filled, filled, with books. I mean filled. I read constantly.
Well, I suppose that isn't totally true. I read constantly in spurts and in between spurts I read lazily. I meander through books off and on, pausing to get deeply involved in a different project like learning how to make a certain food or finish a certain craft or hike somewhere or watch a documentary I've wanted to watch. And then something will pull at me and I will disappear into books without noticing time passing. I will forget to eat. Sometimes I will stay up very very late. Too late.
This isn't so much a technique for how to read more, so much as an explanation of how I personally read as much as I do. I keep books everywhere so I am almost never without a book, and when I feel like reading them I dive in and get lost in them and forget the passage of time. Not a helpful technique for many, perhaps.
I'd like to finish up some of the books scattered in my life right now, so I thought I'd wander around the house and see what I can find that is unfinished.
Let's start:
Beside my favourite reading chair we have a substantial pile.
There are also several books here that I have intended to read and haven't. I'm not going to start those right now, since I have so many books on the go at the moment. I will come back to them later.
In the bookshelf of doom, where books that are purchased sit and get forgotten, there are several titles that have been started...
Right. And of course beside the bed:
I'm going to gather up all of these books into one big pile and make a list on paper and start crossing off titles as they are finished. It will be nice to get a fresh start and then I can bring up all of the unread books and start those. Like spring cleaning the reading lists.
Well, I suppose that isn't totally true. I read constantly in spurts and in between spurts I read lazily. I meander through books off and on, pausing to get deeply involved in a different project like learning how to make a certain food or finish a certain craft or hike somewhere or watch a documentary I've wanted to watch. And then something will pull at me and I will disappear into books without noticing time passing. I will forget to eat. Sometimes I will stay up very very late. Too late.
This isn't so much a technique for how to read more, so much as an explanation of how I personally read as much as I do. I keep books everywhere so I am almost never without a book, and when I feel like reading them I dive in and get lost in them and forget the passage of time. Not a helpful technique for many, perhaps.
I'd like to finish up some of the books scattered in my life right now, so I thought I'd wander around the house and see what I can find that is unfinished.
Let's start:
Beside my favourite reading chair we have a substantial pile.
In the bookshelf of doom, where books that are purchased sit and get forgotten, there are several titles that have been started...
And also a LOT that have not been started. It's taking significant willpower not to start another book right now from that pile.
I'm going to gather up all of these books into one big pile and make a list on paper and start crossing off titles as they are finished. It will be nice to get a fresh start and then I can bring up all of the unread books and start those. Like spring cleaning the reading lists.
Tuesday, January 1, 2019
The 2018 Reading Wrap Up
This year I read 70 books, which is up from my total of 62 in 2017! I try to beat my own personal best of the year before, but of course the danger of doing especially well is that the following year you have to best it. 2019 will be the year of 71 books!
Here's the breakdown:
18 fiction
22 non fiction
1 play
1 book of poetry
28 children's books.
I count books I read aloud in the car to the family, books I read on my own, those I read aloud to the children at bedtime, and if I used Audible (I don't, but not for any particular reason) I would count those as well. If I start a book, and don't finish it, I don't count it. Even if there is only a page or two left. However, I can count those books on the next year's list. I use my own common sense with children's books - I will count The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, but I will not count Mr. Putter and Tabby Bake A Cake - even though 'technically' it has chapters. A book has to be somewhat substantial for its genre. To this end I do not count long essays in my yearly total - although I do write them down on my list for my own records.
Of the 28 children's books:
2 of them I read aloud in the car (I actually read three books in the car this year, but only two were recorded as 'children's' books):
More About Paddington
Abel's Island
18 of them I read aloud to the children:
The Family Under The Bridge
Ballet Shoes
When My Naughty Little Sister Was Good
The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
Poppy
Stories From Grandma's Attic
More Stories From Grandma's Attic
The Four-Story Mistake
Encyclopedia Brown Cracks the Case
Twenty and Ten
The Doll People
Catwings
Catwings Return
The Milly-Molly-Mandy Storybook
Pippi Longstocking
Book Scavenger
Mr. Popper's Penguins
8 of them are children's books that I read on my own:
Catherine, Called Birdy
Moominvalley In November
Island Of The Blue Dolphins
Every Living Thing
The Gift of the Pirate Queen
Shoeshine Girl
Everything on a Waffle
The Boggart
Here's the breakdown:
18 fiction
22 non fiction
1 play
1 book of poetry
28 children's books.
I count books I read aloud in the car to the family, books I read on my own, those I read aloud to the children at bedtime, and if I used Audible (I don't, but not for any particular reason) I would count those as well. If I start a book, and don't finish it, I don't count it. Even if there is only a page or two left. However, I can count those books on the next year's list. I use my own common sense with children's books - I will count The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, but I will not count Mr. Putter and Tabby Bake A Cake - even though 'technically' it has chapters. A book has to be somewhat substantial for its genre. To this end I do not count long essays in my yearly total - although I do write them down on my list for my own records.
Of the 28 children's books:
2 of them I read aloud in the car (I actually read three books in the car this year, but only two were recorded as 'children's' books):
More About Paddington
Abel's Island
18 of them I read aloud to the children:
The Family Under The Bridge
Ballet Shoes
When My Naughty Little Sister Was Good
The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
Poppy
Stories From Grandma's Attic
More Stories From Grandma's Attic
The Four-Story Mistake
Encyclopedia Brown Cracks the Case
Twenty and Ten
The Doll People
Catwings
Catwings Return
The Milly-Molly-Mandy Storybook
Pippi Longstocking
Book Scavenger
Mr. Popper's Penguins
8 of them are children's books that I read on my own:
Catherine, Called Birdy
Moominvalley In November
Island Of The Blue Dolphins
Every Living Thing
The Gift of the Pirate Queen
Shoeshine Girl
Everything on a Waffle
The Boggart
Monday, December 24, 2018
Grade three and grade one - 2018 - first semester
I'm taking this blog post to record what the two oldest children worked on since September *something* when I started our school year. A lot of this post will likely be of minimal interest to general homeschooling since it is very specific to our family needs and education plan, but I'm always nosy about other people's school stuff, so I'm sharing anyway.
The 8 Year Old
Math
The sole purpose of this year's math curriculum is to prepare the 8 year old to begin working with the Saxon 5/4 material next year. To that end, rather than focusing on any particular resource, I've sort of pieced together the odds and ends he needs to know in order to get to that level.
From September to October we covered multiplication - the distributive property, commutativity and associativity, single with single digit multiplication, single with multiple digit multiplication, and multi digit with multi digit multiplication. We worked through pages 53-64 of Dr. Wright's Kitchen Table Math volume 2 and pages 290, 291, 293 and 299 of the textbook Journeys In Math 3 (published in a similar style to Saxon). We practiced skills with the workbook Kumon's Multiplication - pages 10-11, 22-23, 26-27, 30-31, 36-37 and 40-41.
Next we used this kit for a week:
It gave us a little mental break before launching into our next session.
Session 2 (the second half of our first semester) was devoted to measurement. We focused on metric system measurements, not imperial, although at some point he will learn both, and conversion between the two. We learned about millimetres, centimetres, metres, kilometres, grams and kilograms. Our primary goal in this was reading scales and measuring devices, and converting measurements up or down - eg. how many millimetres in a centimetre, etc. For this work we used the Kumon workbook Geometry and Measurement.
Spelling
The 8yo is working on Spelling Workout B. This semester he finished lessons 19-30. His handwriting improved noticeably over the course of the lessons and mistakes with basic punctuation are non-existent at this point.
Literature
In the first half of the semester the 8yo read four books for his literature study, and one poem. He also listened to and discussed five stories read aloud to him. In the first session I included a list of topics relating to the books read aloud/listened to. In the second session I let that take its own form. The second half of the semester the 8yo read five books and one poem and listened to and discussed two poems, one book, and four articles.
We attempted, with little success, to keep track of additional books read as 'free reading'. I have seven titles listed that he read in that category but I know that number is very inaccurate.
Music and Physical Education
In the summer the 8yo graduated from the piano book his instructor is using with him and progressed to book two. I can't speak to what specific techniques he is using because I don't play the piano myself, but his playing does seem to be smoother this semester. This is the course he uses:
The 8yo was enrolled in twelve weeks of swimming lessons. He worked through the Swim Kids 1 level and has passed into Swim Kids 2, which will start in the new year. I've noticed smoother movements in his swimming and more confidence in using the flutter board.
History, etc.
I finished reading The Story Of The World Volume 1 aloud to the children and began A Child's History of the World.
The 6 Year Old
Math
For kindergarten and grade one I do as Memoria Press and use the Beginning Arithmetic program from Rod and Staff publishers. It covers all the basics and one workbook functions for each of those two years. The 6yo is working through the second workbook in Rod and Staff's level one curriculum. In the first semester she completed lessons 86-109. Topics covered were addition and subtraction review, reading a thermometer, reading an analog clock to the quarter hour, coin values, simple fractions, etc.
Spelling
The 6yo uses Spelling Workout A and this past semester she completed lessons 1-14. Her handwriting is readable but we are focusing on proper use of capital/lowercase letters. She still reverses some numerals.
Literature
This semester she read aloud three Frog and Toad chapter books to me. She listened in on many of the read aloud/discussion books used with the 8yo. I neglected to keep track of the books she read independently, but she spends much of her free time with her nose in a book so I assume several of those were finished over the months.
Physical Education
This semester the 6yo (and her 4yo sister) were both enrolled in an early swimmers program. I believe their level was Sea Otter at the onset. The 6yo finished two levels in the 12 weeks and is now a Starfish and gets to progress to the deeper lap pool in the new year.
The 8 Year Old
Math
The sole purpose of this year's math curriculum is to prepare the 8 year old to begin working with the Saxon 5/4 material next year. To that end, rather than focusing on any particular resource, I've sort of pieced together the odds and ends he needs to know in order to get to that level.
From September to October we covered multiplication - the distributive property, commutativity and associativity, single with single digit multiplication, single with multiple digit multiplication, and multi digit with multi digit multiplication. We worked through pages 53-64 of Dr. Wright's Kitchen Table Math volume 2 and pages 290, 291, 293 and 299 of the textbook Journeys In Math 3 (published in a similar style to Saxon). We practiced skills with the workbook Kumon's Multiplication - pages 10-11, 22-23, 26-27, 30-31, 36-37 and 40-41.
Next we used this kit for a week:
It gave us a little mental break before launching into our next session.
Session 2 (the second half of our first semester) was devoted to measurement. We focused on metric system measurements, not imperial, although at some point he will learn both, and conversion between the two. We learned about millimetres, centimetres, metres, kilometres, grams and kilograms. Our primary goal in this was reading scales and measuring devices, and converting measurements up or down - eg. how many millimetres in a centimetre, etc. For this work we used the Kumon workbook Geometry and Measurement.
Spelling
The 8yo is working on Spelling Workout B. This semester he finished lessons 19-30. His handwriting improved noticeably over the course of the lessons and mistakes with basic punctuation are non-existent at this point.
Literature
In the first half of the semester the 8yo read four books for his literature study, and one poem. He also listened to and discussed five stories read aloud to him. In the first session I included a list of topics relating to the books read aloud/listened to. In the second session I let that take its own form. The second half of the semester the 8yo read five books and one poem and listened to and discussed two poems, one book, and four articles.
We attempted, with little success, to keep track of additional books read as 'free reading'. I have seven titles listed that he read in that category but I know that number is very inaccurate.
Music and Physical Education
In the summer the 8yo graduated from the piano book his instructor is using with him and progressed to book two. I can't speak to what specific techniques he is using because I don't play the piano myself, but his playing does seem to be smoother this semester. This is the course he uses:
The 8yo was enrolled in twelve weeks of swimming lessons. He worked through the Swim Kids 1 level and has passed into Swim Kids 2, which will start in the new year. I've noticed smoother movements in his swimming and more confidence in using the flutter board.
History, etc.
I finished reading The Story Of The World Volume 1 aloud to the children and began A Child's History of the World.
The 6 Year Old
Math
For kindergarten and grade one I do as Memoria Press and use the Beginning Arithmetic program from Rod and Staff publishers. It covers all the basics and one workbook functions for each of those two years. The 6yo is working through the second workbook in Rod and Staff's level one curriculum. In the first semester she completed lessons 86-109. Topics covered were addition and subtraction review, reading a thermometer, reading an analog clock to the quarter hour, coin values, simple fractions, etc.
Spelling
The 6yo uses Spelling Workout A and this past semester she completed lessons 1-14. Her handwriting is readable but we are focusing on proper use of capital/lowercase letters. She still reverses some numerals.
Literature
This semester she read aloud three Frog and Toad chapter books to me. She listened in on many of the read aloud/discussion books used with the 8yo. I neglected to keep track of the books she read independently, but she spends much of her free time with her nose in a book so I assume several of those were finished over the months.
Physical Education
This semester the 6yo (and her 4yo sister) were both enrolled in an early swimmers program. I believe their level was Sea Otter at the onset. The 6yo finished two levels in the 12 weeks and is now a Starfish and gets to progress to the deeper lap pool in the new year.
Saturday, November 24, 2018
Reading Notes - November
What I've been reading recently...
Country Matters: The Pleasures and Tribulations of Moving From a Big City to an Old Country Farmhouse by Michael Korda
Korda was, at the time of the book, a senior editor (possible THE senior editor, I'm not certain) at Simon and Schuster, a major North American publisher. He also moved from downtown New York City to rural New York State to live in a farmhouse built before George Washington became president, which takes a certain amount of chutzpah. I picked up the book mostly because it reminded me of the similar narrative of Marsha Boulton, a Canadian high up someone who moved from urban Toronto to a country farm to raise sheep. And I really enjoyed Boulton's stories, which are also in the same popular one-story-per-chapter format as Korda's. Country Matters gave me something light and fluffy to read while on a three day work trip with my husband, and it was ideal for that purpose, but there were too many annoying little details for me to really enjoy it. I feel a little pedantic writing them down, but here they are:
Korda refers to the blacksmith coming to shoe the horses. Blacksmiths don't shoe horses. The proper name for someone who shoes horses is a farrier. This sort of detail bothers me and it should bother a professional senior editor as well.
There is a lot of pussyfooting around the subject of fox hunting. My opinion on the issue is irrelevant to my book review, but the author mentions having no particular opinions about it at one point, and then mentioning later that he didn't agree that the hunt was environmentally friendly and was very much a snobby and new gentry type thing to do. This kind of 'say one thing here then say another thing there' writing was all through the book. It made it very challenging to get absorbed into the story because I kept getting sidetracked. "wait, he just said all these things about this guy over here and now he's saying he likes him?"
I know this is trivial but honestly so much of the story is about the vast amounts of money Korda and his wife poured into the property. The bought more land that butted up against their own, they erected new buildings, they did masses of renovation work, they hired a very expensive decorator, they kept buying horses, they hired multiple staff members, even at one point buying and renovating a second house so the handyman and barn hand have somewhere to live...you get the idea. But instead of being able to focus on the story all this mention of money just kept making me wonder where it was coming from! Where? How much do a former model and horse event participant (his wife) and publishing house editor MAKE? Which I realize is not part of the story, but was such an ever-present question.
Anyway, all this is to say that there were little details that annoyed me enough that I didn't love it. It wasn't Marsha Boulton. But it was interesting.
Discipline: The Glad Surrender by Elizabeth Elliot
I only knew of Elizabeth Elliot through the movies about her first husband, Jim, and their work with indigenous people groups in South America. I knew she had written books, of course, but this was the first one I've read. I really enjoyed it! There were a few times I felt as if Elliot and I had differing views on a religious subject but compared to her I haven't lived, so who knows, maybe years from now I will re-read her and those more challenging views will suddenly be in perfect alignment. The vast majority of her writing was spot on, and I found it very interesting to see how faith based non-fiction has changed in the thirty or so years since Discipline was published.
The struggle I had with the book was in knowing how to suggest it to others. It's not a particularly deep exploration of the topic of Christian discipline, so I would tend to think it would be more helpful for those without a lot of experience with the topic or who need a peaceful refresher, but then the style is very old fashioned and that makes me hesitant to recommend it to a new Christian nowadays, because I'm not sure they would take the time to get past that to the meat inside.
It's...it's like Oswald Chambers! My Utmost For His Highest is, in my opinion, probably one of the best devotionals ever written, but the only Christians I know who read it are older, or appreciate the classics in that genre.
Traveling With Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Anne Kidd Taylor
I am puttering through this one slowly. Kidd and Taylor, a mother/daughter author team, take turns alternating viewpoints of the same time period when Taylor has been rejected from her first choice of graduate school and Kidd is progressing through menopause - two seasons of life that seem very different but are knitted together by the story of Demeter and Persephone. There was quite a bit of 'divine female' type delving into the topic of womanhood, which can be very heavy handed in some texts but I thought was handled well and sensitively by Kidd and Taylor.
I'm not done yet. But I will say it has inspired me to look into more Christian feminist writings and see what else people have to say about all that.
Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear
I've heard people say they just love the Maisie Dobbs series for a very long time, but I am a slow embracer of new mystery authors in a way that I am not, necessarily, with other genres. The last time I really, really enjoyed a new mystery author was when I read the first Flavia De Luce story, A Sweetness at The Bottom of The Pie, by Alan Bradley. Since I read that while in labour with my first child, who is now 8, I think I can safely say that new authors in this genre do not come to me easily. But I really enjoyed Winspear's rather endearing Maisie. There was tension, and also a very unexpected twist, and I was pretty captivated by the novel. I think I might just have found my once-per-decade addition to the mystery shelf.
What Is Stephen Harper Reading? by Yann Martel
Not only do I (obviously) love talking about the books I've been reading, but I equally love hearing about what everyone else has been reading, and I think that must have been my thought process behind picking up this book. Which in hindsight was perhaps a little narrow sighted of me because one very obvious reason why someone would decide to send a book every two weeks to the leader of one's country, along with a letter talking about the book...it's an attempt to 'educate'. And this seems to be Martel's plan - he apparently has judged Prime Minister Harper as uneducated in the literary arts and has taken it upon himself to show him the light. Frankly, with the condescending tone of many of the letters I am surprised that Prime Minister Harper's office bothered to respond even the two times they did.
That being said, and if you are able to ignore the heavy handed advice in the book suggestions, it's an odd list that Martel offers the politician.
And there you go. That's what I have been reading.
Country Matters: The Pleasures and Tribulations of Moving From a Big City to an Old Country Farmhouse by Michael Korda
Korda was, at the time of the book, a senior editor (possible THE senior editor, I'm not certain) at Simon and Schuster, a major North American publisher. He also moved from downtown New York City to rural New York State to live in a farmhouse built before George Washington became president, which takes a certain amount of chutzpah. I picked up the book mostly because it reminded me of the similar narrative of Marsha Boulton, a Canadian high up someone who moved from urban Toronto to a country farm to raise sheep. And I really enjoyed Boulton's stories, which are also in the same popular one-story-per-chapter format as Korda's. Country Matters gave me something light and fluffy to read while on a three day work trip with my husband, and it was ideal for that purpose, but there were too many annoying little details for me to really enjoy it. I feel a little pedantic writing them down, but here they are:
Korda refers to the blacksmith coming to shoe the horses. Blacksmiths don't shoe horses. The proper name for someone who shoes horses is a farrier. This sort of detail bothers me and it should bother a professional senior editor as well.
There is a lot of pussyfooting around the subject of fox hunting. My opinion on the issue is irrelevant to my book review, but the author mentions having no particular opinions about it at one point, and then mentioning later that he didn't agree that the hunt was environmentally friendly and was very much a snobby and new gentry type thing to do. This kind of 'say one thing here then say another thing there' writing was all through the book. It made it very challenging to get absorbed into the story because I kept getting sidetracked. "wait, he just said all these things about this guy over here and now he's saying he likes him?"
I know this is trivial but honestly so much of the story is about the vast amounts of money Korda and his wife poured into the property. The bought more land that butted up against their own, they erected new buildings, they did masses of renovation work, they hired a very expensive decorator, they kept buying horses, they hired multiple staff members, even at one point buying and renovating a second house so the handyman and barn hand have somewhere to live...you get the idea. But instead of being able to focus on the story all this mention of money just kept making me wonder where it was coming from! Where? How much do a former model and horse event participant (his wife) and publishing house editor MAKE? Which I realize is not part of the story, but was such an ever-present question.
Anyway, all this is to say that there were little details that annoyed me enough that I didn't love it. It wasn't Marsha Boulton. But it was interesting.
Discipline: The Glad Surrender by Elizabeth Elliot
I only knew of Elizabeth Elliot through the movies about her first husband, Jim, and their work with indigenous people groups in South America. I knew she had written books, of course, but this was the first one I've read. I really enjoyed it! There were a few times I felt as if Elliot and I had differing views on a religious subject but compared to her I haven't lived, so who knows, maybe years from now I will re-read her and those more challenging views will suddenly be in perfect alignment. The vast majority of her writing was spot on, and I found it very interesting to see how faith based non-fiction has changed in the thirty or so years since Discipline was published.
The struggle I had with the book was in knowing how to suggest it to others. It's not a particularly deep exploration of the topic of Christian discipline, so I would tend to think it would be more helpful for those without a lot of experience with the topic or who need a peaceful refresher, but then the style is very old fashioned and that makes me hesitant to recommend it to a new Christian nowadays, because I'm not sure they would take the time to get past that to the meat inside.
It's...it's like Oswald Chambers! My Utmost For His Highest is, in my opinion, probably one of the best devotionals ever written, but the only Christians I know who read it are older, or appreciate the classics in that genre.
Traveling With Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Anne Kidd Taylor
I am puttering through this one slowly. Kidd and Taylor, a mother/daughter author team, take turns alternating viewpoints of the same time period when Taylor has been rejected from her first choice of graduate school and Kidd is progressing through menopause - two seasons of life that seem very different but are knitted together by the story of Demeter and Persephone. There was quite a bit of 'divine female' type delving into the topic of womanhood, which can be very heavy handed in some texts but I thought was handled well and sensitively by Kidd and Taylor.
I'm not done yet. But I will say it has inspired me to look into more Christian feminist writings and see what else people have to say about all that.
Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear
I've heard people say they just love the Maisie Dobbs series for a very long time, but I am a slow embracer of new mystery authors in a way that I am not, necessarily, with other genres. The last time I really, really enjoyed a new mystery author was when I read the first Flavia De Luce story, A Sweetness at The Bottom of The Pie, by Alan Bradley. Since I read that while in labour with my first child, who is now 8, I think I can safely say that new authors in this genre do not come to me easily. But I really enjoyed Winspear's rather endearing Maisie. There was tension, and also a very unexpected twist, and I was pretty captivated by the novel. I think I might just have found my once-per-decade addition to the mystery shelf.
What Is Stephen Harper Reading? by Yann Martel
Not only do I (obviously) love talking about the books I've been reading, but I equally love hearing about what everyone else has been reading, and I think that must have been my thought process behind picking up this book. Which in hindsight was perhaps a little narrow sighted of me because one very obvious reason why someone would decide to send a book every two weeks to the leader of one's country, along with a letter talking about the book...it's an attempt to 'educate'. And this seems to be Martel's plan - he apparently has judged Prime Minister Harper as uneducated in the literary arts and has taken it upon himself to show him the light. Frankly, with the condescending tone of many of the letters I am surprised that Prime Minister Harper's office bothered to respond even the two times they did.
That being said, and if you are able to ignore the heavy handed advice in the book suggestions, it's an odd list that Martel offers the politician.
And there you go. That's what I have been reading.
Saturday, November 10, 2018
The literature we're using in this session
This year I have split up my lesson planning into sessions, or sections, each one lasting a few weeks and outlining what we will focus on weekly. At the end of the session I can re-evaluate if we need a break, if we need to focus on any particular areas, if we need to revisit any topics, etc. It's a bit easier for me than trying to lesson plan for an entire year, or even for a semester. So much can change from week to week or from month to month.
Here is the literature that the 8 year old and I are using for this session, which will last until early December. I chose reading that focused on nature for this session, not for any particular reason, just to help me pick readings because I have so many books. Poetry is in quotation marks. Sections from larger books are underlined.
One Day In the Woods - Jean Craighead George
Grass and Grasshoppers - Rose Wyler
How To Be A Nature Detective - Millicent Selsam
Can You Find The Animal? - Wilda Ross
Who Lives There? - John Hawkinson
Animals In Winter - Henrietta Bancroft
"The Lonely Land" - A.J.M. Smith
"Indian Summer" - Wilfred Campbell
"A Vagabond Song" - Bliss Carmen
Migration of Birds - The Handbook Of Nature Study
The Asters - The Handbook Of Nature Study
First Walk In November - Enid Blyton
The Chipmunk - The Handbook of Nature Study
Here is the literature that the 8 year old and I are using for this session, which will last until early December. I chose reading that focused on nature for this session, not for any particular reason, just to help me pick readings because I have so many books. Poetry is in quotation marks. Sections from larger books are underlined.
One Day In the Woods - Jean Craighead George
Grass and Grasshoppers - Rose Wyler
How To Be A Nature Detective - Millicent Selsam
Can You Find The Animal? - Wilda Ross
Who Lives There? - John Hawkinson
Animals In Winter - Henrietta Bancroft
"The Lonely Land" - A.J.M. Smith
"Indian Summer" - Wilfred Campbell
"A Vagabond Song" - Bliss Carmen
Migration of Birds - The Handbook Of Nature Study
The Asters - The Handbook Of Nature Study
First Walk In November - Enid Blyton
The Chipmunk - The Handbook of Nature Study
Thursday, November 1, 2018
November
Several years ago I became interested in the idea of starting to organize our family year in a more seasonal fashion, mostly using the liturgical year as a basis but incorporating a lot of the old seasonal rituals and folklore that used to be prevalent when we were all more closely in tune with the cycles of the year. I don't remember exactly what started me on this but I definitely remember the first book I read about it - Sarah Ban Breachnach's Mrs. Sharp's Traditions. I have to say, regardless of your faith or how much time you might have to engage in more optional pursuits, I can't recommend this book enough to start building your own family traditions.
I always turn to thinking about this topic in the fall. There is something about fall that makes me feel like doing things, some primitive urge to put away and tidy and prepare. In past years I've mostly satisfied that urge by making masses of preserves and cleaning the house out, but in more recent years I've had to change that up as schoolwork has become more intense and I just don't have the time to spend six hours bottling jam.
Today, being the day after Hallowe'en, and also All Saints' Day, is a good day to work outside. The pastor is visiting the bereaved (a good day for that, as well), and the children are very happily busy creating a fort out of a large box, and so I am putting away the summer toys and bicycles, sweeping the decks, tidying the last of the gardens, picking up the clothespins that have flown from the line these many months, and stacking wood.
The lead up to Remembrance Day on November 11th is always filled with a lot of little tasks as we get ready for a day of several cold, windy, bitter services back to back to back - a day of standing silently in churchyards and at cenotaphs in the surrounding valleys and villages. It does us good, like a fast before a feast, to start this season off remembering the saints, and stacking the wood.
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