We’re off camping for a week.
Getting ahead on blog posts did not happen.
I’ll be back……
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
~ Henry David Thoreau ~
This post was supposed to be dedicated to our real-life-learning about tadpoles.
Instead it will be dedicated to the memory of our tadpoles. All four of them. None of whom made it to frog-dom.
Any comments about how to keep tadpoles alive would be welcome.
How can one get all the way through school and never have to read any Charles Dickens? Thankfully education does not finish with school and I have had the pleasure of making my acquaintance with Charles in recent years. We have read aloud The Adventures of Oliver Twist (and seen a theatrical presentation of the same), The life and Adventures of Nicolas Nickleby and A Christmas Carol. I have read to myself over these past few days Great Expectations.
What struck me particularly about this book was Pip’s conscience. Most of the more modern books I have read recently have not included characters with such an explicit awareness of their inner motivations. Not a bad thing to consider, really.
While we are certainly in holiday mode, we are definitely not in no-reading mode. In fact, summer is a great time to get a head start on our reading lists. Each of the children has a pile of “summer books”, the older ones have set out a proposed work plan for the entire year and I have an ambitious (for me) plan too. At the end of my year of grabbing moments to read I was surprised at how much I had managed to churn through. So with the determination to devote an hour to my own education every day this year, I anticipate I will be able to read the following by October (leaving a couple of months for books that get passed my way that I really want to dip into – it always happens! Plus I know I want to get through more of the Russian lit than just Anna Karenina):
Devotional books:
- Stepping Heavenward
- Radical
- The Practice of the Presence of God
- Ninety Days with the Classics
“Monday reading” (on Mondays I plan to take a chapter or two from books that I want to mull over and not read straight through from cover to cover)
- Johnson’s Scotland
- Families Where Grace is in Place
- Fallacy Detective
- Peacemaking For Families
- Beyond Stateliset Marble
- The Rights of Man
- Essays
“Tuesday – Sunday Literature”
- Great Expectations
- Anna Karenina
- Cry, the Beloved Country
- Les Miserables
- The Old Curiosty Shop
- Jane Eyre
- To Kill A Mockingbird
- The Three Musketeers
- Madam How and Lady Why
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
- Smoky
- Rasselas
- A Basket of Flowers
- Robinson Crusoe
- Understood Betsy
- Treasure Island
- The Princess and the Goblin
- Huckleberry Finn
- Frankenstein
- Silas Marner
- Jack and Jill
- That Hideous Strength
- Age of Fable
- The Ark
- Wee Sir Gibbie of the Highlands
- The Holy War
- Westward Ho!
- David Copperfield
- Penrod
- Rob Roy
- The Scarlet Pimpernel
- The Second Mrs Giaconda
- The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze
- Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- A Tale of Two Cities
- Anna and the King
- The Crucible
- Where the Red Fern Grows
- Lord of the Flies
- Number the Stars
- Ulysses
- The Hobbit
I’ll be taking a blog-break for a week or so….wishing you joy and peace, hope and love….
In the past we have had lots of littlies who could not read….and so at Christmastime we would choose just a handful of carols to learn and sing together each day. Music helped stick the words in their hearts and minds, and even the youngest quoted lines as they played and worked.
This year, for the very first time ever, we have only one non-reader, and so we are soaking up the richness of many many carols, lingering over the words printed out and filed in a new album.
But the words are not just read once, and then forgotten.
Strains of joy to the world erupt from upstairs.
Glorias and hallelujahs echo around the house.
And even in conversation over the lego I hear lines being quoted.
Not to mention a discussion between the six and eight year olds about how old God really is.
It’s good to have lines stored up inside you to spill out, to answer the questions that surface, to give praise.
On the first Friday in December for over a decade we have gone to the Auckland Symphony Orchestra’s Christmas Carol concert at the Town Hall.
It was the event the children really missed last year in Romania, although they ended up with something that matched it, and they had really missed it the year before in Laos, where there was not a hint of Christmas apart from our daily family devotions.
So we went again this year. Along with most of our friends.
And afterwards we drove up Franklin Road, one of the few streets in our not-totally-Americanised country with Christmas lights, and headed to the end of the tradition: McDonalds for ice creams despite the late hour.
Was it just because we have not been for two years, or was the music absolutely amazing? Pastor Ron’s booming Polynesian voice released ”O Holy Night” like every other year, the congregation joined the mass choir in other traditional carols, and listened in awe at the most GLORIOUS singing EVER of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
My mind wandered back to Laos.
No carols, just pop songs.
No Christ, just monks.
No Christmas.
