“Little Mrs. Peter Rabbit, who used to be Little Miss Fuzzytail, sat at the edge of the dear Old Briar-patch, anxiously looking over toward the Green Forest.  She was worried.”

“There was no doubt about it.  Little Mrs. Peter was very much worried.  Why didn’t Peter come home?  She did wish that he would be content to stay close by the dear old Briar-patch.  For her part, she couldn’t see why under the sun he wanted to go way over to the Green Forest.  He was always having dreadful adventures and narrow escapes over there, and yet, in spite of all she could say, he would persist in going there.”

From The Adventures of Prickly Porky by Thornton W. Burgess.

Thus we traveled last night on another new bedtime reading adventure.  We opted for something light.  Something fun.  Something about animals. 

And while we are talking about animals, please excuse the disheveled look of old Bunny in the picture above.  He has been loved by four near-grown children and has had many bold adventures himself.

If you just cannot get enough of animals with big personalities, who talk and interact with each other in their forest and prairie homes, you’ll probably enjoy this sweet little book.

There’s even a Thornton W. Burgess Society, I was pleased to discover.   You will find some very pretty coloring pages at their website, information about the society, and more.

Unit-study-wise, we are following after, in a most relaxed fashion, the sword and the snowflake.  What is that? you might ask.

Well, Joseph and I are beginning a study of Shakespeare and Hamlet.  Though it’s been in my mind for forever, it seems, we still have not read anything by Shakespeare.  It’s time.  The child graduates in 2009.

Princess of the Universe and I are currently rowing Snowflake Bentley (Caldecott Medal Book), using Five in a Row for lesson plans, of course. 

I am just anxious to see how the two intersect, because I know they will.  

Last of all, you might want to visit the HomeMade DollHouse to see what the dolls are up to.  Picture a little general store in Vermont where the snow is piled up underneath the windows and they sell candy canes and sleds.  (I love how the doll house gets tied into school.)

Wishing you a wonderful day!

Lynn

This is Unit Study at its finest.  If you are homeschooling, interested in unit study and Charlotte Mason and you don’t follow this blog: Smile, Wink, Nod, then you are missing a great resource. 

Michele has posted a week review of their fabulous unit study of the Fire of London, the Great Plague and more.  Very cool stuff.  And as I told my friend Michele, I am inspired to copy.

Lynn

This is a project that my public school son did.  I really enjoyed seeing this come together.  He had to make a book for children about the French and Indian War.

He and I sat down to talk about what kind of paper he wanted to use.  He did all the decision-making, but I had a ton of paper and craft supplies that I thought he might want to look through.

He chose a very heavy stock for his pages – 2 sheets.  First we folded on a horizontal line and cut the sheets in half.  Then we stacked the sheets evenly and folded on a vertical line to make a little book.   This produced a book with 8 actual pages, 16 if you count front and back.

The search then began for images to go along with the text he had written and printed out.  This was fun and informative.

Once everything was formatted, glued in and perfectly in order, I laid the pages open and flat, to the center of our little book, and sewed with large stitches on the old Singer, right down the middle.  (I was glad he chose heavy stock for his book.)  This made for an old-looking binding, and part of the challenge was to make the book look old.

I couldn’t help but think how awesome an idea this is when you are combining older and younger students for a study.  Having the older students write and design their own book for younger children is a way in which simple ideas can be brought out and retained by all.

Fun!

Yesterday we finished up Very Last First Time.  It has been a really good study for us using Five In A Row for our lesson plans and then tying in items of interest that popped up along the way.   In my post a couple of days ago, My Symphony, there’s that line I love, “…await occasions, hurry never.”  I have been amazed again this week at how many appropriate occasions offer themselves to us when we are “rowing” a book. 

I was very pleased to see that Monday’s Reading Rainbow would be Dive to the Coral Reefs.  This rich 30-minute episode prompted us to compare what lives in warm tropical waters as compared to the icy waters around Ungava Bay.

Princess of the Universe painted a picture that includes coral reef, a dragonfish, a squid and a blue parrotfish.   She wrote in her nature journal about the parrotfish nibbling on coral and then excreting a trail of sand onto the ocean floor.  Is that what we end up building sand castles with?  Pretty cool. 

You know a FIAR book would not be complete to me unless we had a little reminder in the way of a doll house accessory!  I used a little matchbox to recreate Eva’s box that she pulls across the ice.  I looked through some of the little boxes on my sewing/craft desk and found a couple of little card charms that resemble picks or shovels.  A bottle cap makes a great mussel pan. 

I was so thrilled when Princess of the Universe wanted to make her own little sled-box out of paper and tape.  Her box is deeper, which I commented is more like what Eva had.  And Michaela even tore up little pieces of black paper to make mussels for her pan. 

Do you know it just made my heart sing when she said, “Mommy, I love my doll house.” 

As occasion would have it, our little girl doll looks like she could pass for Eva. 

We have enjoyed this book immensely!

Lynn

One of the things I love about homeschooling is the freedom to study what one is passionate about.  Do you know how attractive it is on a transcript for a student to have really excelled at one thing?  It’s attractive.  

Konnichiwa is hello in Japanese, by the way.  I’ll be hearing it more and more around here, I’m sure.  I think I told you that Rosetta Stone Japanese is on the way.  Well, we are bringing home more and more items to help us in our study of Japan.  We were going to start it for 12th grade (next year), but I’d say the fun has already begun.  And why not?  Why not get in enough work to possibly have two years’ worth of credits under out belts?  We have all of the summer ahead of us.

I went to Barnes and Noble this morning and found a stunning book on Japan, full of beautiful pictures, for only 6 dollars.  I also got a map of Japan to go on the wall.  I picked up a kit to learn Japanese ink painting.  B&N also had some of their journals on sale, so I picked up two very Japanese-looking journals, one for me and one for Joseph.  I will use mine like I always do.  Joseph will fill his with clippings of Japanese news, any Haiku he writes, any ink painting he does and copies of the papers he will be writing.

After leaving Barnes and Noble, I ran by Whole Foods (I miss you guys!) and then I ran into the near-by thrift store.  I lucked out!  What was on the shelf but a small conversation pocket guide for learning Japanese and some magazines and children’s books, totally in Japanese!  Also, I found this beautiful jar with an old sticker underneath that says “Japan.”  I think it’s been a good day for Joseph.  This, of course, is the beginning of Joseph’s collection of books on Japan that he’ll take with him when he leaves home.

Now, after leafing through all these books and drooling over the very serene Japanese gardens, I want one.  I have an area that I might turn into one. 

If you want to see pictures of a great Japanese garden in the US, it’s in Portland and they have a website.

Sayonara!

is what we are rowing this week.

The Wild Horses of Sweetbriar

We will be doing some fun activities this week.  (You can get complete lesson plans by using Five In A Row.  Of course we will be using our new acrylic paint set to try our hand at painting horses.  We may have to cruise through some thrift stores and look for a horse barn and some horses to add to our doll house.

We started with special activities today by playing a go-along card game I purchased to help my daughter learn the various breeds of horses.  It sure was fun!

Happy Rowing,
Lynn

I bought something that I am so excited about.  Well, you’ve already read the title of my post, so you know what it is.  ~:-D  I was very happy to see that the complete Christy TV series is now on DVD.  It’s a GREAT price.  If you have not seen Christy before, it’s a very clean series of shows that aired on TV in the 1990s.  The location is beautiful.  Of course, being the Appalachian mountains, how could it not be?  Kellie Martin is great as Christy Huddleston, and I really like Tyne Daly in her role as Miss Alice.  And who can resist the constant wondering whether Christy loves David or Dr. McNeill? 

I love the clothing that Miss Christy Huddleston wears.  It’s so old-fashioned and beautiful.  I love the long hair styles, too.

Anyway, if you are studying the Appalachian mountains, as we did with The Rag Coat;  Down, Down The Mountain; and, When I Was Young in the Mountains, you might want to look into getting the Christy TV series on DVD.

Christy – The Complete Series

Miss Priss and I just watched the pilot episode.

Lynn

In our homeschool, we always have a themed learning center somewhere in the house.  In my living room, we have set up a coffee table display of Thanksgiving-related books.

Of course, President Lincoln is the president who made Thanksgiving a national holiday, so we have many books out about him.  I have pulled out some of our fall craft books to give my daughter and me some things to work on together.  Some Fall magazines add color to the table and give me ideas for decorations I will have done when family comes in on Thursday.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Lynn

PS – If you want to see a couple of other learning centers we have had set up, you can check out our Owl Study page and our Paul Revere page.

life is so much easier. 

I think the key for my own homeschooling success is consistency but not intensity.  When I consistently spend time one-on-one with my student each day, we happen upon topic after topic after topic that we can learn from.  I suppose that that is the essence of unit study, which we have always done most of all here in our homeschool. 

Even though I am aiming for a somewhat ”classical” finish with Joseph by moving through history one more time in a sequential fashion and doing much more writing and literature, I still LOVE how one thing leads to another and we learn something new every time we sit down together. 

This morning we were watching Story of a Patriot, the Colonial Williamsburg tape I found at the thrift store yesterday.  One of the characters in the story was William Byrd III.  I knew my son had probably never heard of the original William Byrd.  I told him about a college honors class I had taken called Early American Writers.  We studied William Byrd in that class.  Before the story commenced, we stopped the tape and I pulled The Norton Anthology of American Literature from one of our bookshelves.  We looked up William Byrd and read a bit. 

No, my son is not now an expert on William Byrd, but he understands a bit more about the kind of writing that we studied in that class.  He has a sense that many of these early American writers were Englishmen, well educated, who kept journals and diaries that show us how liberty and land affected them once in the New World.

Another laid-back educational thing we do is take a brisk 15-minute walk each day.  It’s dreary and wet here today, but we walked anyway.  Our walks are very Charlotte Mason-ish.  ~:-D

Our talk today centered around all the trees that we could name.  We saw a squirrel climbing frantically away from us, up and up a tree, to a nest that we wondered about.  Was it a squirrel’s nest or a bird’s nest we were looking at.  Judging by the size, we figured it was a squirrel’s nest.

Note to educators:  Whenever I see a Norton Anthology of any kind that I don’t already have, in the thrift store, I buy it!  They are wonderful resources to pull from as you work your way through a timeline.

Lynn

Here’s an idea for a get-together that is both fun and educational.  It’s Book Character Day.  My daughter is taking part in one today.  Each child dresses up like their favorite book character.  With book in hand, each child comes dressed up and ready to view and review an assortment of books and costumes!

Games and snacks could be included to make it extra special.

My daughter is the little fox from Little Fox Goes to the End of the World.

Little Fox Goes to the End of the World is actually a great book choice for a unit study for the elementary grades. Many paths could be taken in the direction of winds, sea, sailing, and animals!

Enjoy!