Christmas Shopping?

But Christmas is, like, 14 months away, isn’t it?!

That’s what I told a friend of mine who wondered if I had my Christmas shopping list posted yet. She used a few of my ideas from my confessions-of-a-terrible-Christmas-shopper post last year (which you will notice was posted on December 13th—oh, how I love Amazon Prime), and she was hoping to snitch a few this year.

It got me thinking—handy for daily-task-avoidance. Why, certainly, Christmas gifts are an important thing to plan, right? That’s why there is no dinner on the table this evening. Ha!

But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m not a “master Christmas shopper, make all my kids’ dreams come true” kind of mom. I’m a “your room is trashed, you don’t play with toys, why should I buy something that will be broken and discarded in two minutes just because it’s a holiday” kind of mom. True story.

Seriously, the boys don’t play with stuff. They use sticks. And duct tape. And Costco-size boxes of tin foil. And copier paper and markers.

I asked Levi for his wish list. He wants hang-out time with a friend and Dr. Who Monopoly (we already have two versions).

I asked Luke for his wish list. He wants Electronic Monopoly.

I asked Leif for his wish list. He said, “I know I added something to my list. I’m thinking………………………… Come back to me later.”

I do like the idea of getting big ticket items or activities. The older boys may be getting bows for archery 4-H, but they’ll need them before Christmas. In December, the boys and I (and close friends) are attending a fun over-nighter at our phenomenal local-ish aviation and space museum, complete with an IMAX movie and a day at the water park.

The rest of our gifts will be small. And bookish. That’s just the way it is around here.

Here are my general ideas for the ages on my Christmas list.

(Most of the following links are Amazon affiliate links. I receive a small commission on anything you purchase after arriving at Amazon through one of my links, even diapers or tires or flour. You have no idea how much I’ve appreciated the purchases y’all have made over the past year to support Mt. Hope Chronicles!!)

Ages 0-2 (Rilla Grey)

The Cosy Classics board books are so lovely! The felt images are simply gorgeous. I can’t wait to snatch up Jane Eyre as soon as it is available.  Oliver Twist would be a fun baby gift to pair with Focus on the Family’s phenomenal radio theatre production of Oliver Twist for older children (our own family Christmas gift last year).

The Giraffe That Walked to Paris looks darling. I’m thinking a Vulli Sophie the Giraffe Teether, Giraffe Blankie, or a Schleich giraffe figure would be a fun addition.

Or, a Beatrix Potter Dish Set and The Beatrix Potter DVD Collection or Tales of Beatrix Potter Ballet (DVD) (two of Lola’s favorite DVDs) (both Rilla and Lola already have the complete book sets).

 

Boys 2-4 (Little Ben)

My family has adopted a friend and her darling two-year-old boy, so I’m back to buying little boy gifts this Christmas! Curious George Goes Camping or Fred and Ted Go Camping will go well with Fisher-Price Kid Tough Explorers Binoculars and/or Pacific Play Tents Super Duper 4 Kids Tent.

Girls 3-6 (Lola Colette)

(The Matryoshkas and book I got her last year have been a huge hit!)

Minette's Feast: The Delicious Story of Julia Child and Her Cat is, well, a feast. The illustrations and prose are beautiful and charming; I adore it! I can’t wait to give this one to Lola. With a stuffed kitty (named Minette, of course). And maybe a basket of pastries, wooden fruits or veggies, and darling red wooden pots and pans. Or an apron? Or splurge and go for a play kitchen? We shall see.  (P.S. I’ve been to Les Deux Magots restaurant in Paris shown in the illustration above! How fun is that?!)

 

Different Like Coco would go well with the sweet little black dress I purchased for Lola at Old Navy. I think she needs a string of pearls, don’t you? {grin} Which segues perfectly into…

Just Being Audrey—another book with darling illustrations—paired with Audrey Hepburn's Enchanted Tales (Audio CD) or an opportunity to sponsor a child. Wrapped up with a red and white striped scarf? Yes, please!

Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian is a beautiful picture book full of rich colors for the nature-lover. A Butterfly Garden, Fanciful Butterflies Stained Glass Coloring Book, Butterfly Cookie Cutter, or Melissa & Doug Butterfly Friends Bead Set round out the theme.

(As you can see, I’m on a biography picture book kick…)

Ages 6-12 (Leif, Ivy, Luke, and Levi)

Have you ever tried Perplexus Twist? The boys had a different Perplexus model a while back, and it saw more action than just about any other toy they’ve received. And I loved it because there were no parts and pieces to be scattered, and it can be played independently! I think they are going to love the Perplexus Twist.

I’m big on DVDs as gifts, second only to books. My boys have (and love) all the Buck Denver Asks: What's in the Bible? DVD series (entertaining, but packed with a high level of information!) as well as the What's In The Bible? Buck Denver Asks...Why Do We Call it Christmas? DVD, so I’m getting them Buck Denver & Friends present Clive & Ian's Wonderblimp of Knowledge: 6 Big Questions About God and Clive & Ian's Wonderblimp of Knowledge 2: 7 Big Questions About God. They’ll be perfect for stockings.

My niece will be getting Liberty's Kids - The Complete Series ($5.99 for all 40 episodes—are you kidding me?!!!), and Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? - The Complete Series (again, all 40 episodes for $5.99!!) will find its way to boy stocking #3.

I recently purchased the first six books of the The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica series, and Levi is raving. So I’m adding the seventh book, The First Dragon, to his list. Luckily it will be released in November. He has also been begging for Ralph Masiello's Dragon Drawing Book, which a friend of his told him about, and I’ll add Watercolor Pencils and a Watercolor Postcards Pad.

Luke, my mischievous son, will be getting a couple more Nicholas books, but I’m really running out of ideas for him and Leif. Any suggestions?

Levi’s birthday is just a week after Christmas. Luckily he is a Dr. Who addict. Doctor Who: Who-ology + The Eleventh Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver + Dr Who Tardis Union Jack T-shirt = one happy boy.

 

Stocking Stuffers

D-Ring Carabiners

Mini Flashlights

 

Finger Flashlights (my boys LOVE these)

Travel games or playing cards
Spin Toothbrush
Character Bandaids
Tape (duct, scotch, masking, painters… it doesn’t really matter for the tape-addicted kid)

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Alrighty, that’s the list so far. Don’t ask me what I’m getting the adults, because I have no. idea.

Have you started your Christmas lists or shopping yet? I’m certain I have super-on-top-of-it-all readers who already have their shopping finished. Could you rub some of that off on me?

(I’ll have some new favorite Thanksgiving and Christmas book lists up soon, but if you’re interested in getting a head start I shared some last year here, here, and here.)

Fahrenheit 451

Written over 60 years ago. Blows. My. Mind.

(It seems most sacrilegious to share piecemeal quotes of Bradbury’s book. As he says, “In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings, or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.” Nonetheless, here are a few of my favorites.)

p. 29

“I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this…Or talking about how strange the world it. Being with people is nice. But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film teacher. That’s not social to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not.”

p. 31

“Sometimes I sneak around and listen in subways. Or I listen at soda fountains, and do you know what?…People don’t talk about anything…They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.”

p. 55

"School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the joy counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?”

p. 57

“More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don't have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere..."

p. 58

"With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be... We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone *made* equal...So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man?"

p. 60

“Heredity and environment are funny things. You can’t rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That’s why we’ve lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we’re almost snatching them from the cradle.”

p. 61

“If the government is inefficient, topheavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that the people worry over it.

“Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs…Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy…Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians…”

p. 75

“I don’t talk things, sir,” said Faber. “I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I’m alive.”

p. 96

“I plunk the children in school nine days out of ten. I put up with them when they come home three days a month; it’s not bad at all. You heave them into the ‘parlor’ and turn the switch. It’s like washing clothes: stuff laundry in and slam the lid.”

p. 98

“Did you hear them, did you hear these monsters talking about monsters? Oh God, the way they jabber about people and their own children and themselves and the way they talk about their husbands and the way they talk about war, dammit, I stand here and I can’t believe it!”

p. 153

“Do you really think they’ll listen then?”

“If not, we’ll just have to wait. We’ll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can’t make people listen. They have to come ‘round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can’t last.”

“But that’s the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing.”

p. 155

“When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for all the things he did…He was an individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world, The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”

Coda p. 178

“If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.”

Interview p. 184

“We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.”

Book Detectives ~ Mirette on the High Wire

For this month's (parent-child literary analysis) book club selection, we read Mirette on the High Wire, a Caldecott Medal book written by Emily Arnold McCully.

Rather than discussing characters, setting, plot, conflict, and theme, however, we tried something new. We used part of the "invention" process from The Lost Tools of Writing. Invention is the first of Aristotle’s five canons of rhetoric. (The other four are arrangement, elocution, memory, and delivery.) (We didn't delve yet into the five topics of invention, but you can read about them here if you are interested.)

We started by saying, "What questions can we ask about this story?" Once the kids got used to the idea that they got to ask the questions and we weren't answering them (we just wrote them on the white board), they really embraced the spirit of the discussion and participated enthusiastically.

Our questions were:

Should Mirette have been eavesdropping?
What did Mirette's mom think?
Should Bellini have trained Mirette?
Why was Bellini scared?
Why did the author name her Mirette?
Did Mirette fall at the end?
Is the story true?
Why did Mirette want to learn how to walk the high wire?
Where did they travel with their show?
Should Mirette have gone up to join Bellini on the wire at the end of the story?
Why were Mirette's feet unhappy on the ground?

Then we asked if we could change any more of the questions to "Should __(character)__ have__(action)__?"

We changed a few:

Should Bellini have been scared?
Should Mirette have wanted to learn how to walk the high wire?
Should Mirette's feet have been unhappy in the ground?

Then we voted on which "should" question we wanted to talk about. And we turned it into an "issue" to discuss.

"Whether Bellini should have trained Mirette" was the issue we settled on.

We set up our "ANI" (annie) chart with three columns on the white board:

A for Affirmative. N for Negative. I for Interesting.

We listed all reasons he should have trained her under "A." All reasons he shouldn't have trained her were listed under "N." Any miscellaneous comments or questions were acknowledged and written under "I."

I had no way of predicting the outcome of the discussion ahead of time (especially since it was my first time ever leading by this process). It was a smashing success. Everyone participated, and somehow we ended up with a perfectly even 13 reasons in each column.

A:

She could follow her dreams
He could pass on his skills
She could be happy
She could inspire him
He could train her correctly and safely (since she was trying it on her own in the beginning anyway)
It's fun
She showed responsibility with her other duties
She had passion and perseverance
Friendship/partnership
Learning to overcome difficulties
Teaching children benefits adults
She got a career/travel/adventure
She healed his fear

N:

She wasn't ready to learn
She might fall
Her feet would never be happy again on the ground
Not fun
Dangerous
He lacked confidence
He needed to hide his fear
He wanted to hide his identity
Chance of fear or failure
He didn't have permission to train her
He was a stranger
He didn't want to waste his time teaching a kid

I:

(We ended up with a few more questions rather than comments.)
Why didn't she ask someone for help at the end?
Was she lonely?
Did she have a dad?
Why did she want to walk on the high wire?
Did her mom travel with her?
How old was she?

And that was it for this book club meeting. I'm looking forward to digging deeper into invention each month!

Mt. Hope Academy @ The Live & Learn Studio ~ September 2013

Lola: preschool, Leif: 2nd grade, Luke: 4th grade, Levi: 6th grade (oh, my!!)

Food for Thought

:: George Orwell’s Despair by Russell Kirk @ The Imaginative Conservative (A very interesting explanation of why I disliked 1984. While I have appreciated many other dystopian books (The Giver, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World), I found 1984 to be devoid of hope.)

Orwell saw the Church in disrepute and disorder, intellectually and morally impoverished; and he had no faith. He could not say how the total corruption of man and society would be produced; he could not even refer to the intrusion of the diabolical; but he could describe a coming reign of misrule wonderfully like the visions of St. John the Divine. He saw beyond ideology to the approaching inversion of humanitarian dogmas. All the norms for mankind would be defied and defiled. Yet because he could not bring himself to believe in enduring principles of order, or in an Authority transcending private rationality, he was left desperate at the end. A desperado, literally, is a man who has despaired of grace.

::  From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

“It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books…Three things are missing.

“Number one: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion…Well, there we have the first thing I said we need. Quality, texture of information.”

“And the second?”

“Leisure.”

“Oh, but we’ve plenty of off-hours.”

“Off hours, yes. But time to think?…The televisor is ‘real.’ It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!’”

“Where do we go from here? Would books help us?”

“Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said: quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.”

Quality, texture of information. Leisure to digest it. And freedom to act on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.

Sounds like an Andrew Kern lecture to me… Or a Stratford Caldecott book:

Fahrenheit 451 p. 164

“And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering.”

::  You Can’t Do Simple Maths Under Pressure (a fun online game—see if you can beat it!)

::  The map that shows where America came from: Fascinating illustration shows the ancestry of EVERY county in the US @ Daily Mail

::  No Happy Harmony: Career and motherhood will always tragically conflict by Elizabeth Corey @ First Things

"We are limited, embodied creatures. These limits mean that we cannot do everything to its fullest extent at once, and certain things we may not be able to do at all."

::  When your children’s dreams are different than your own @ Simple Homeschool

“No matter how happy our childhood, we always want our children to have it better than we did. We want more. More choices, education, opportunity to explore interests, freedom for them to soar and realize their full potential.  I don’t know what grand scheme I had in mind for my eldest, but I wanted him to soar!”

::  I’m an introvert and I don’t need to come out of my shell @ The Matt Walsh Blog

"Maybe it’s a stretch to try and connect techno and roast beef with our society’s obsession with being extroverted, but I think it all grows from the same root: We’ve decided that small talk is better than real talk, noise is better than silence, and we’d all rather be — or we’d rather our kids be- Tony Robbins than, say, Leonardo Da Vinci (a notable introvert)."

::  The awesome books my literature students read @ Write at Home (because you know I love a book list)

::  Stories Are Makeshift Things @ CiRCE

"John Gardner wrote that 'The great artist . . . is the [writer] who sees more connections between things than [ordinary people] can see.' I finally think our need for stories is our need to find those connections, and to have confirmed for us the theology we hold secret in our heart, that even the least of us are necessary to the great universal plot in ways we hadn't imagined."

::  School Is No Place for a Reader @ Canadian Notes and Queries

During library period in grade 4 the librarian teaches the children computer skills: making their names appear in various colours and fonts on the screen and designing brochures. At the end of the period there are a few minutes to check out two books. Most children decline the offer. The child sees a book she wants high on the top shelf and asks the librarian to reach it for her. “No. You can’t have anything with a yellow sticker. They are too hard for you. You might be able to read it, but you wouldn’t understand it. Pick one of the books with green stickers.” Green stickers mark the spines of The Magic School Bus, The Babysitters’ Club and The Pokemon Guidebook. The book the child has just finished reading, Oliver Twist, is not in the library at all.

Which leads us to…

::  Shakespeare’s Language and the Evolution of Human Intelligence @ CiRCE

The reason we can’t understand Shakespeare or read the King James Version of the Bible or grapple with Milton or almost any poetry is because we systematically school children in our culture to become increasingly stupid. Charlotte Mason uses the term “stultify” to describe what we do.

::  Some Thoughts on Jaden Smith’s Tweets on Education @ Write at Home

If Jaden meant that education in this country is a mess that needs to be revamped, I’m with him. If he meant that knowledge-hungry teens seeking to satisfy their cravings through independent study at home is better than the insipid fare offered in too many of our nation’s schools, I’ve got his back.

::  Oregon test scores nose-dive, 40 percent of high school juniors failed writing @ Oregon Live

Reading performance dropped in every grade from third through eighth. Passing rates in math fell in five of seven grades tested, including 3 points in third grade and 2 points in seventh grade.

:: Math and the Nature of Reality @ Classical Conversations

“So think about this: do poems follow rigid logical forms? How about allegories? What about irony? These are all forms of thought which contain truth, but do not lend themselves to the analyses of formal logic and mathematics. Nonetheless, logical positivism became one of the most powerful driving forces in modern philosophy. And with it, came the death of many of the deeper forms of human thought in academics and, to a lesser extent, society as a whole.”

::  The complementarity (not incompatibility) of reason and rhyme @ Quantum Frontiers (physics + poetry = lovely)

::  Students Who Get Moving Boost Memory, Study Finds @ Education Week

::  Six Words You Should Say Today @ Huffington Post (fantastic parenting advice!)

::  Let’s be gentle with each other. Let’s read each other’s signs. @ Mamamia (Yes, let’s.)

::  Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy @ Wait But Why

Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor and GYPSY expert, has researched this, finding that Gen Y has "unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback," and "an inflated view of oneself."  He says that "a great source of frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often feel entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren’t in line with their actual ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the level of respect and rewards they are expecting."

 

Lists and Lessons

 

Classical Conversations (Cycle 2) Weeks 1-4 Foundations classes (includes public speaking). Essentials: (Levi and Luke)

Faith:
Telling God's Story, Year Two: The Kingdom of Heaven
Buck Denver Asks: What's in the Bible?
Independent Bible Reading

Math:
Teaching Textbooks (Levi—level 6, Luke—level 5, Leif—level 4)
Life of Fred (Kidneys, Liver, Mineshaft, Fractions, Decimals and Percents, Elementary Physics, Pre-Algebra with Biology)

Logic:  

Science:
The Oregon Garden field trip
CC memory work (biomes, consumers, food chain, natural cycles)
The Magic School Bus: The Food Chain (DVD)
Food Chain Frenzy (The Magic School Bus Chapter Book, No. 17)
Desert (Eyewitness Videos) (+Arctic & Antarctic, Seashore, Pond & River, Ocean, Jungle)



P.E.:
Swim team practice
(hiking and swimming) 
 
Fine Arts:
CC Drawing
Joyful Noise Choir (weekly rehearsals + music theory homework)

Language Arts:
CC memory work (parts of speech, pronouns)
Essentials (Levi and Luke) grammar
IEW Medieval history-themed writing 
All About Spelling (Levi and Luke: level 4, -step 13; Leif: level 2, -step 7) 

Latin:
CC memory work (conjugations)
Song School Latin DVD (Leif)
First Form Latin DVD lessons (Luke and Levi (Levi completing workbook lessons), lessons 1-3) 

Spanish:

Geography:
CC memory work (Europe)

History/Literature:
Renaissance Faire
CC memory work (timeline and history sentences)
The Story of the World Volume 2: The Middle Ages (Ch 14-15) 
Man Who Loved Books by Jean Fritz, illustrated by Trina Hyman (Saint Columba)
The Story of Rolf and the Viking Bow (historical fiction, chapter book)
Myths Of The Norsemen by Roger Lancelyn Green (literature)
Nordic Gods and Heroes by Padraic Colum (literature)
Favorite Norse Myths by Mary Pope Osborne (literature)
Odin's Family: Myths of the Vikings (literature) (library)
Leif Eriksson
Eric the Red and Leif the Lucky
Leif's Saga: A Viking Tale
Leif the Lucky by D'Aulaire
Viking Times (If You Were There)
History News: The Viking News
Viking Adventure
Who in the World Was The Unready King?: The Story of Ethelred
The Edge On The Sword (historical fiction, chapter book, Levi IR)
The King's Shadow (historical fiction, Battle of Hastings, chapter book, Levi IR)
William the Conqueror
Hastings (Great Battle and Sieges)
Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction by Macaulay
Cathedral (DVD)
Cathedrals: Stone upon Stone
Don't Know Much About the Kings and Queens of England (William the Conqueror)
Famous Men of the Middle Ages (selections)
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (literature)
The Kitchen Knight: A Tale of King Arthur (literature)
Merlin and the Making of the King (literature)
Knight prisoner: The Tale of Sir Thomas Malory and His King Arthur (literature)
King Arthur (Eyewitness Classics) (literature)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (historical time-travel fiction, *literature, Levi-IR, 540 pages)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Tolkien (*literature, read selections aloud)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Selina Hastings (literature)
Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady by Selina Hastings (literature)
(And other King Arthur books…)
The Princess Bride (DVD, just for fun)

Literature Studies:

Miscellaneous Picture Books:
Non-fiction:
Fiction:

(I didn’t keep a close track of independent reading this month!)

Levi’s Free Reading
Chasing the Prophecy (Beyonders) by Brandon Mull (library)
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry
Messenger by Lois Lowry
The Prince And The Pauper by Mark Twain

Luke’s Free Reading

Leif’s Free Reading

Miscellaneous:
McDowell Creek Falls (hiking and swimming)
OAKS Amusement Park
House Rock (hiking and swimming)
Birthday parties
The Oregon Garden
Football
Renaissance Faire (and outdoor movie night with friends) 
Bowling with charter school friends

Inadequate

I’m feeling….woefully inadequate. Inadequate for the present task. Inadequate for the future. What can I say other than that?

But for the grace of God.

I’m taking an internet break for a little while—a week? (though I’ll be checking my email).

I’ll leave you with this link to read while I’m away:

Hard Times, Pretty Pictures @ Small Things

Sentence Diagramming Challenge ~ Answers

Did you try your hand at diagramming any of the sentences in my challenge? Did you get stuck, or feel comfortable with the diagrams? I’ll admit, I had to guess in a couple places!!

Kellie @ Blue House Academy joined me, so I’ll share her diagrams as well. (They’re fantastic! Thanks for participating, Kellie!)

Here are our sentences:

Level #1

Oh, I will miss the world!

It was a general disaster.

Is that what you got?

The first one is a straightforward subject (I), verb phrase (will miss), and direct object (world). “Oh” is an interjection, which is diagrammed on a floating line above the subject, and “the” modifies “world.” Yes?

The second sentence has a subject (It), a linking verb (was), and a predicate nominative (disaster) that renames the subject. “A” and “general” modify “disaster.”

Any questions?

Here are Kellie’s diagrams (which give us a head start on level 2):

Level #2

The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine.

Your mother wanted to name the cat Feuerbach, but you insisted on Soapy.

(ETA: Okay, that second one is a little more tricky that it seems at first glance… Let’s add one more.)

This habit of writing is so deep in me.

Let’s talk about the tricky one first.

Two things.

1. I was thinking that, in the infinitive phrase “to name the cat Feuerbach” (which is being used as a direct object), “cat” is a direct object and “Feuerbach” is an object complement noun.

2. I also decided that “insisted on” could be a phrasal verb with “Soapy” as a direct object, so that’s how I diagrammed it.

But I totally could be wrong about both. Like I said, kinda tricky.

 

The sprinkler sentence was a little more straightforward. An independent clause and a dependent clause are joined by the subordinating conjunction “because.” The first clause has a linking verb with a predicate nominative that renames the subject. The second clause has verb that transfers the action to a direct object. “To sunshine” is an adverbial (modifies the verb) prepositional phrase.

I diagrammed “writing” as a gerund (a present participle verb form used as a noun). Either way, it is the object of the preposition “of.”

Which propels us straight into the final sentences.

Level #3

His mother would take tiny bites of her food and swallow as if she were swallowing live coals, stoking the fires of her dyspepsia.

In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.

My grandfather seemed to me stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn’t actually sleeping.

 

I am missing my conjunction “as if” on the dotted line above. I knew I’d forget something. I decided to treat “stoking the fires of her dyspepsia” as a participial phrase, but it could have joined “swallowing” to make a compound predicate without the conjunction “and.” Kellie chose to diagram it as a participial phrase modifying “coals.” That could be right. Anyone want to share an opinion?

This next quote is from one of my favorite paragraphs in the book.

Kellie diagrammed it a bit differently. Hers could be correct.

And, last but not least…

I don’t know what to say about that, except I tried. Tell me where I went wrong.

Kellie’s looks great:

Some of our differences are simply stylistic differences. There is some accepted variety within diagrams, such as diagramming conjunctions and indirect objects.

And, whew, that took me forever.

Any questions?

Three

One. (I love these pictures!)

Two. (A collage of her year as a one-year-old.)

Three.

And a celebration of Lola’s past year: