The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs by William Joyce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This story had some dark moments for my taste in picture books, but the illustrations were fantastic, my kids loved the plot line, and it came full-circle beautifully. Three cheers for Louisiana authors!
Miss Nelson Is Missing! by Harry Allard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
My girls thought this was fantastic. They loved the lightbulb-turning-on feeling when they got the twist in the story.
Lucy and her friend were practicing multiplication tables this morning (not my idea – I love having extra kids around sometimes!) and they decided it would be fun to make it into a Go Fish! game. So they did. And spent half an hour or so playing 6 Times Table Go Fish.
Just caught Clare explaining to another friend about how difficult it was for Michelangelo to carve David (“and if he made a tiny mistake, just this big, the whole thing would be ruined!”) and retelling the story of The Library Mouse. Narration? Done.
And as I type, Isaac is trying to put an apple slice in my pocket. Earlier he was working on building train tracks.
In other news, I should be putting my first children’s book manuscript in the mail in the next couple of days. Pray hard! Asking St. Therese of Lisieux for special help, since it is about her, after all. (And if you want a preview, let me know and I’ll send the text along.)
🙂 You should read The Courage of Sarah Noble. You should read it because it is about a little girl named Sarah Noble and she goes into the woods with her father to build a house near Indians. She had to leave the rest of her family behind because there wasn’t enough room to bring everybody. The Indians turned out to be nice. So when her father left to bring the rest of their family home, Sarah stayed with the Indians. Their closest friend was Tall John so she stayed at Tall John’s house. The Indians of the North were the other Indians’ enemies. The most interesting part was that the Indians at the North passed by the Indians at night and did not disturb the Indians. Sarah Noble taught the Indian children many things, and they taught her new Indian games.
the end
Love,
Lucy
PS
this is one of the best books ever! 🙂
This book is about three little children. There names were Amanda, Jemmy, and Meg. They sailed on a ship to go to America and to find their father in Jamestown. Their father had a door knocker that people thought was made of gold. Dr. Crider is a doctor that helped them get to the boats and he fell overboard on the ship. Their ship got shipwrecked at an island and they built a tiny village. They built two ships and sailed to Jamestown. They found their father at Jamestown. My favorite part was them getting to find their father.
Love, Lucy.
P.S.
This book was the best book in my life!
I liked
Trumpet of the Swan. You should read it. It is about a swan who doesn’t have a voice, but gets a trumpet and learns how to play it.
The swan’s name is Louis.
Louis’ dad robbed a music store to get a trumpet.
It is also about a little boy named Sam. Sam saves Louis’ mother from a fox by hitting him on the nose with a stick. Louis works so he can pay back the trumpet that his father stole. It was very exciting. My most favorite part was when Louis got a trumpet, because he did not have a voice. The book has pictures in black and white.
I just have to say, I am so glad we are homeschooling. Lucy informed me last week that the picture books I had been getting from the library were “getting boring”, so I thought, “fair enough- we’ll move up to the 3rd-5th grade reading list. I started her with Charlotte’s Web. She is reading it herself (and she doesn’t know every word, but has no trouble at all discussing the story with me) so I am reading it myself, too. And I had forgotten, if I ever really appreciated, what a wonderful book it is. Which I most likely would have missed out on if she were in school, and it wasn’t my job to pay attention to what she was reading and what she is getting out of it.
In other news, Lucy is about to loose her third tooth in less than a month, and all three girls are loving their ballet classes. Lucy is very excited about her first communion this spring, and has taken possession of my old Precious Moments Bible (from my first communion) earlier than I had planned, because she wants to read it, too.
And tonight we make pumpkin pie. It’s a good life.
So it took us a full week to get the last week’s post functional. But there it is. (And then it took almost a full week to get this one functional…we’re actually almost done with C now…but more on that later.) So these are would have been kind of back-to-back, but hopefully the kinks are worked out and things will be smoother from now on.
This week we focused on the letter B, with Saints Bernadette and Bernard, and the bugle flower fairy, and lots of bees and birds, and a few bears and blueberries.
We made letter B’s out of modeling wax, which Lucy promptly turned into a butterfly, a la Fancy Nancy.
Lucy’s Amazing Butterfly
(Sadly, butterflies did not get the attention they deserved this week – keeping them in mind for the next trip down the path.) Lucy has mastered half-whole relations (1st grade math GLE-6 for those of you following along). We also went through the bird guide to discuss how different birds have differently adapted bodies, and how they use them. Not full-on natural selection so much as the beauty of variety and the complexity of creation. More important than natural selection, in my opinion, now that I think about it.
Fr. Thomas reading to the girls (in a british accent)
Fr. Thomas Schafgin joined us for tea and dinner on Friday. Well, dinner, then tea, since we forgot to warn him about the New Orleans-to-Baton Rouge Friday traffic. We had blueberry tea and blueberry scones with a lemon glaze for tea time/dessert. Lucy is really learning her way around the kitchen. Mixing the dough was followed by all three girls getting a turn to experiment with the measuring cups and a bowl of water. Those were happy children. They were also happy being read to by Fr. Thomas…
Lucy & Clare with Butterfiies
Clare’s Clay
Here are this week’s books, in no particular order:
Comet’s Nine Lives
The Mitten
The Umbrella
Honey, Honey, Lion!
Town Mouse, Country Mouse
By Jan Brett
Jan Brett’s art is gorgeous. The girls like the stories, too.
Wild Birds by Joanne Ryder
I like it. Beautiful pictures of all kinds of (mostly) song birds. I think my mom would like this one. 🙂
Saint Francis Preaches to the Birds by Peter Schumann
Simple story with simple, striking illustrations. Not convinced St. Francis drank coffee, though. Haven’t investigated that yet.
Brigid’s Cloak by Bryce Milligan
I didn’t know this story before. Really, really beautiful.
The Bird House by Cynthia Rylant
A sweet story about an orphan girl finding a home. And, of course, birds.
Owl Moon by Jane Yolen
Classic. Beautiful. I like it because it points out how even a child can put aside discomfort, when necessary, for something important.
Owl Babies by Martin Waddell
Cute baby-mommy story.
Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey
One of Clare’s favorites. She asks me to tell her this one after the lights are out at bed time. And I do, because it’s well-written, and a really fun story.
The Life of the Honeybee by Heiderose and Andreas Fischer-Nagel
Informative bee book.
Busy Buzzy Bee by Karen Wallace
Easy-reader about bees.
So. And today (Saturday, 8/17, when I started this post!), Lucy went to a tennis open house at city park, which she wants to do every week from now on. And she and Craig took apart the broken CD player to see how it works. And she made the meatballs for the spaghetti, which is on the stove right now. So…art lessons resume next week. And I did a basket switch, because the basket for the “school” books was only about half big enough. The library ladies are going to be tired of me soon. 🙂
“The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint–virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if the wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. ‘Blah blah blah,‘ hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by whole sale desires.”
-Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Thanks for the book, Fr. R.B.!
I think she has a point, don’t you? What do we wait for anymore? Not information, there’s the internet. Not food, there are microwaves. Not TV shows, even: we have DVR. Not letters, a phone call is quicker. Not babies, their ‘delivery’ is scheduled for our convenience or our doctor’s. There does seem to be a pattern.
“My great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother are all alive for me because they are part of my story. My children and grandchildren and I tell stories about Hugh, my husband. We laugh and we remember–re-member. I tell stories about my friend, the theologian Canon Tallis, who was far more than my spiritual director, with whom I had one of those wonders, a spiritual friendship. I do not believe that these stories are their immortality–that is something quite different. But remembering their stories is the best way I know to have them remain part of my mortal life. And I need them to be part of me, while at the same time I am quite willing for them all to be doing whatever it is that God has in mind for them to do. Can those who are part of that great cloud of witnesses which has gone before us be in two places at once? I believe that they can, just as Jesus could, after the Resurrection.”
-Madeleine L’Engle, Glimpses of Grace
Happy birthday, Dad. We planted some blackberry bushes in the backyard for you today. We miss you and we love you. Pray for us!