This Rabbit Trail is Sprinkled with Fairy Dust!

A funny thing happened during the first week back to a school year rhythm. In the absence of firm plans and without the books we thought were coming, a bigtime rabbit trail was born. Mary Beth's plans from Oak Meadow were delayed, so she set about to find some copywork in A Journey Through Time. She was happy to find some delightful flower fairy poems from Cicely Mary Barker. She read the poems and chose one to copy and then drew a picture to accompany it.She decided she was going to work her way through all the fairy poems in the book. It just so happened that I was hanging out at amazon.com at the time and I just so happened to one-click this book.

Later that day, I read Christopher's Harvest Time aloud to a whole gang of my children. And I totally fell in love. This is right there near the top of my "favorite books of all time" list. The pictures are clear and lovely and the characters delightful. Every single child was taken with this book. Katie just loved that the boy fairy was named "September" because when you are about to turn five and  your birthday is in September, any fairy named September is a friend of yours. Stephen and Nicholas followed Christopher's adventures utterly enraptured and were sorry to see them end. And Mary Beth was very happy to find still more botanical fairies rendered in a different artist's pictures.  More botanical fairies...hmmm...

I tried to nudge Nicholas towards the drawings I'd done to go with the alphabet quest story from Christopherus' First Grade Syllabus. He wanted nothing to do with them--or the story. He'd heard me tell Katie and Gracie that it was "B" week and he'd heard a "B" themed fairy tale to go with their picture. Mr. Order dug in his heels and insisted that "B" was fine for him, too, since he could not possibly start with K, P, Q, and W (the letters I'd chosen to present). Oh, and by the way, he said, he already knows his letters and how to read and he found a coloring a book leftover from last year's fairy study and the "B"  page just so happened to be yet uncolored. He spent the rest of the day copying that "B" fairy and recreating scenes from Christopher's story in his main lesson book.

The hours I'd spent at Google Calendar trying to get too many good ideas to form a coherent plan were rising to haunt me now. Why do I do this every year? Why do I think and think and think (though this year I didn't write intricate plans, I definitely thought them) and then dissolve into something altogether different than I'd thought it would be?

Because I listen to my children. And this year, they were hearing fairies.

They took up the beeswax and created Children of the Forest. They built more fairy houses in the backyard.They began to fashion felt folk who looked a lot like Woody, Hazel and Little Pip.
Soon, we decided to begin our days with "September" from Around the Year and recite it often enough to memorize it. They gathered acorns at  Patrick's soccer game, all the while talking about the  Acorn Fairy as if she were a familiar friend.

By now, enthusiasm was bubbling up and spilling over. Mary Beth was sharing her fairy-fondness with her friends  and I was telling their mom all about my plans gone awry. Katherine had a little fairy dust in her pocket too and suddenly we were obsessed.

I found myself ordering botany nomenclature cards to go with my botanical fairies. I ordered a refill for my Klutz fairy-making book. We dusted off Fairy Houses and watched the video version as well. (Incidentally, the video was shot in New Zealand and we all know there are definitely fairies in New Zealand;-) I found fairies to teach us how to knit. My friend Rebecca assured me they would probably prefer knitting needles like these.

Did you know that Frederick Warne published Cicely Mary Barker's books, too? And she has a website as lovely as Beatrix Potter's.  When you are there, you can learn the fairy code and write letters to friends in Texas. And those of us who love Beatrix Potter's Journal are equally delighted with Fairyopolis (same sized book, same idea--they're brilliant, those Warne boys;-) Those botany cards will work perfectly with the fairy finder. Type in your favorite fairy and learn its song, some folklore, and some botanical facts and some planting indications--that's if you can tear your eyes away from the whimsical pictures.  Shhh...don't tell the children, but there's an awful lot to learn here.

(Oh, and what about the Christopherus syllabi and those from Oak Meadow? It's all good. I've learned so much and we will use it all in one form or fashion.The greatest lesson I learned is that big families can't do "Waldorf at Home" the same way smaller families can, nor can they replicate "Waldorf at school." And I'm not a Waldorf purist anyway, just like I'm not a Charlotte Mason purist.  But that's the stuff of future posts. Right now, I have a fairy house to tend)

While I appreciate the beauty, the materials and some of the methods of Waldorf education, I am not a follower of Rudolf Steiner, his educational philosophy, or his religion. I am a practicing Catholic who is very clear in teaching the faith to her children. Please see this post for any further explanation of incorporating methods or materials that might also appear in Waldorf schools into your home. Take inspiration from what is good and what in in harmony with the true faith and leave the rest. If you can't discern, then leave it all alone.

Are You Ready for Some Geography?...

Tonight begins Monday Night Football, noted on my calendar for the entire season as "MNF."  Why does a middle-aged mama note Monday Night Football on her calendar? I like to keep track of my husband. He won't be on the couch with a beer and a bowl of chips. He'll be at every Monday Night Football site all season long (with the exception of San Francisco tonight--he can't bi-locate so when MNF is at two locations, he's only at one of them;-). As much as we love sports around here and as grateful as we are for this job, this is a very long haul through the fall.

Last year, as my younger children began to figure out the rhythm to Mike's travels, we started moving a Post-it note arrow around on a big wall map so that they could see where he was. But a flat map on the wall doesn't really do much for a child's imagination. They couldn't really picture him where he was working.  Kim introduced me to the idea of geography textboxes these wonderful picture books, and an idea was born.

Every week, on Monday, we spend the afternoon reading and writing about the state where Monday Night Football is being played. The books are packed with information and illustrations and pictures. There is a short rhyming verse on each page, perfect for the little ones. The older children spend more time with the book, reading the more involved columns on the page for detail.

Last year, the baby arrived four weeks into football season. I relied heavily on the idea in these free unit studies which are keyed to the books. This year, I think we are going to focus only on the information in the book during our study time. Each child is creating his or her own book. The books vary according to age and interest and I'm giving the children free reign to pull out of the alphabet books what matters most to them and then to express that in their notebooks.

On Monday evenings, we watch ESPN beginning well before the game. In all honesty, this has nothing to do with geography and everything to do with our Daddy's shows. But, the bonus to our devotion is that we see great scenic shots of the places we've just read in the books. All the way up through the pre-game show and the introduction, there are sights and sounds of the state we've studied.

Finally, as he dashes through the airport on his way home, Mike collects a few postcards from each state to add to the book. All the books we will use for Monday Night Football geography are linked on the sidebar. Maybe you'd like to travel with us this fall!

Sunflower House

In these waning days of summer, our sunflower house is looking "well-loved." We set about last spring to create a sunflower house inspired by Sharon Lovejoy's book, Sunflower Houses and the darling picture book, Sunflower House by Eve Bunting. We planted two varieties of sunflowers (each a different height) and planted sweet corn with it. Inside, we planted a groundcover of clover (it got a little out of control, frankly). My plan was to harvest the corn last Monday and make cornhusk dolls in time for Alice's The Beauty of Toymaking Fair, but the drought has really affected the corn and it's all much too small for harvest. So, we're just hanging out beneath the drooping sunnies, loving the last lingering days of summer sunshine. Shhh...don't tell anyone but I think the flower fairies and their friends are planning party to celebrate summer's end.

The Effect of L. M. Montgomery on a Twelve-Year-Old Boy

After about nineteen hours in the car, and all of Anne of Green Gables and much of Anne of Avonlea, we stopped somewhere in North Carolina for the last night of our trip. We were all pretty tired of each other  traveling. The stories had been our saving grace, those and the Tic-Tacs we kept feeding Katie to keep her quiet settle her stomach.

After the lights were out in the hotel room, Nicholas asked no one in particular, "How does heaven make snow?"

Mary Beth answered, "It starts to rain, but it's really cold so the rain turns to snow. Now, go to sleep."

Patrick leaped to answer more poetically, "God cries and his tears fall as rain. But the angels give Him Tic-Tacs. They make His breath icy cold and He blows on the raindrops. They turn to snow  and twinkle at Him as they fall to earth."

I smiled into my pillow. Lucy Maud Montgomery would be pleased.

Pictures tomorrow. I promise.

An Utterly Lovely Rabbit Trail

On the second night in Denver, after the busyness of a full day of the conference, my sweet husband and I snuggled up in bed with his laptop. He had stashed a movie with which to surprise me. It was a movie he'd seen on an airplane a few months ago. I remember him coming home and declaring that he'd just seen the most perfect movie for me. My children all found this quite amusing since I don't like movies. It is unimportant why I don't like movies--and I'm not quite sure I've figured it out--but my definite bias against movies made his claim to have found the "perfect" movie all the more preposterous.

But this was the man--the traveling man--who had just taken time off from work to get back on an airplane and travel across the country with a baby so that he could stand in a vendor hall and hold the baby while he watched me talk to one woman after another. The least I could do was act like I wanted to watch a movie. And so I did. I sat right next to him while he fired up that computer and I acted like I loved that movie. For the first three seconds. Then I was mesmerized. Hooked. Drawn into the story. And smiling. I smiled through the whole movie until we got to the sad part. Then I cried. And then I found myself smiling again when the protagonist did. Oh, what a perfectly lovely movie! Oh, how I wish I could roam the Lake District and come home to a farmhouse and paint darling pictures to which I could put timeless prose....

Oh, how I adore Miss Potter!

I loved Beatrix Potter before the movie. I loved her art, her delightful turn of phrase, her obvious respect for children. I'd read biographies and played with websites and even done an extensive unit study that was written with Melissa Wiley. But this movie inspired something different altogether. The movie inspired me.  I wanted to develop an adult relationship with Miss Potter. I went to sleep that night and dreamed in watercolor.

(Note: I wanted to give you an  link to the complete set of the little books, the way that Miss Potter insisted they be published, but they are unavailable at amazon.com or at Barnes and Noble. Here is a complete set in a single volume, but that seems a bit heretical.)

When I returned home, I was eager to share the movie with my children. The bigger boys snickered a bit as I settle to watch it with the littles, but I noticed that none of them left the room. Perhaps they were just so surprised to see me sit for an entire movie...

And as soon as it was over, Nicholas headed up the back stairs.

"Where are you going, Nickle-pie?"

"I have to write a story about animals and I have to paint pictures to go with it and I have to have it made into real books. And I have to start now!"

That's my boy!

The conversation had begun. One by one, children asked at different times for more of the story of Miss Potter. How much land did she end up buying? Did she have children? How many books has she sold? Who makes decisions about her books now?

We were delighted to extend our movie experience with a gem of a journal. Beatrix Potter: A Journal is a heavy, substantial book with period writing taken from Beatrix Potter's own diaries and journals. There are photographs and sketches and watercolors and scrapbook memorabilia all beautifully bound into a lovely hard book. It's perfect for perusing, setting aside, and coming back to again and again. My children have spent hours with this book. It's the ideal book for strewing casually on the living room table right after the movie has been watched.

Since this is my rabbit trail and I have this intense need to know, I'm deep into Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature and I'm already sure that Miss Potter will have a profound impact on my approach to education once again. The book captures Beatrix Potter the author and illustrator and the naturalist and conservationist. She had a passion for a place and she was a close observer and a gifted recorder. That is what I want for my children: passion, attention, and the careful stewardship of their gifts. Why, Beatrix Potter is a curriculum;-)!

My friend Leah, who is an extraordinary librarian (I highly recommend that everyone should have a dear friend who happens to be a librarian), recommended to me the The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter by Susan Wittig Albert . The Cottage Tales are a series of mystery stories in which Beatrix Potter is the protagonist. Susan Wittig Albert has done extensive research and befriended Miss Potter in order to write as faithfully as possible. The stories are easy, delightful read alouds that capture the attention of both boys and girls, particularly those who finish watching the movie and just want to know more--even if that more is fiction steeped in fact. These are available at audible.com--can you guess what we will be listening to on our next road trip?

And what is a Beatrix Potter rabbit trail without a  tea party? Mrs. Albert plans one for us and lay it out in lovely detail, complete with decoration suggestions and recipes at the Cottage Tales website. Dear friend, you might want to brew yourself a cup of tea before you begin to click around here.

Oh, and before we leave Mrs. Albert, here's the ultimate librarian tip: she and her husband also wrote the China Bayles mystery series. And at that website, we discover the "herbal" mysteries, that is mysteries solved by China Bayles, lawyer-turned-herbalist, who is quite the sleuth. Each mystery features an herb and lots of herbal lore and information is woven into the story. And, with all good herb stories, there, are of course, more recipes.(scroll down to the recipe index) and another sweet tea page (click on Tea Parties for a whole year's worth of themed tea parties). Note: I recognize that I have now left Beatrix Potter entirely but that's the stuff of great rabbit trails!.

Sigh. So there you go: a warm, wonderful movie that makes one want to wrap her shawl around her (if one had a shawl) and go for a walk around a lake--and then to come home again and paint beautiful pictures for and with children!