Living-Deliberately.com

This was the kind of week that reminds me why I homeschool. For whatever cosmic sychronicity of events has descended upon our modest and crooked little house in the middle of town, the children actually got along. They practiced cursive with cooperativeness, nay even delight. They spent hours playing in yard, almost drunk with sunshine and pseudo-spring air. We finished up old math work books with thier remnants of equations and word problems and spent hours cuddled on the couch listening to me read. Thier faces, yes, even the nine-year old’s typically dubious expression changed to wonder at the illustrations in the book I was reading. Has it really been years since I saw that light in his eye? I consider actually suceeding at sitting down and reading a fairy story to them one of the greatest highlights of my week. Because no matter what homeschoolers say, accomplishing a cozy read-aloud with many children and a busy lifestyle can be a rare and difficult occurance.

The books is E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It. I can’t beleive I wasn’t familiar with it before! It caught my eye at the library this week and I grabbed it in total haste. It’s an enchanting story and a good one for doing a variety of voices. It has a good mix of the kind of logic children use and the moral lessons they eventually have to learn, with a spoonful of sugar for the delivery. And, I’ve just discovered there are two movie versions out, one with Freddie Highmore, so can anyone say, “comparison and contrast” coming our way?

Also this week, on friday to be exact, we did the bravewriterlifestyle’s “friday freewrite”, which was to create your own animal and write about it. Here’s a smattering:

A: The Poison tale is a highly dangerous dragon. It is a meat eater and it walks on three legs. It has two sets of fore arms. It weakens it’s prey by bashing it’s tail of poisonous prongs on it’s prey.

The accompaning picture shows a red and brown striped dragon with a spiked tail and red antlers. Verbal description went on to describe it’s life in a dry, desert-type atmoshere.

C: A Herentia (her-en-tee-ah) is an animal that swims in swamps. It can only see in red and it eats snakes and crocadile’s teeth. It sleeps in summer and awakens in fall and stays that way until summer. It is red and green and blue. It doesn’t have teeth; it swallows.

The picture shows a porcupine looking bird with cat ears and a beak and rolling eyes.

In tea time we are reading through Shel Silverstien’s Where the Sidewalk Ends… poetry that makes them laugh and completely listen with rapt attention.

And, meet Shelley, or a picture as close to the real thing as I could obtain.

A. found him in the creek in the back yard. After taking a walk to me across the bed room carpet (eewwwwww) he was not so ceremoniously deposited outside, where A & W built him a habitat, tried to teach him not to climb out, got the Nature’s Book out and identified him, learning about what he eats and how he lives. Oh, and that after handling turtles one ALWAYS washes thier hands…..

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