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Category Archives: Schoolhouse on the Ranch
saintly stories
I have received some of the season's first gifts already from my sweet friend Dessi. Dessi and I have rather mirror-image experiences. She moved from a village in Europe (Bulgaria) to homestead and homeschool in the States. I moved from a stateside homestead to a European village. We share a love for all things old school and old world. When she shared with me she had been writing stories of lesser known saints I was so very excited. When I held the most recent story in my hands I was even more excited to see another familiar name on the cover, Kimberlee's daughter Lydia Grace.
These picture books are such a lovely way for us to begin a quiet season, reading and learning together. They are genuine, written by a mother's hand. Dessi's voice rings out through the pages and I imagine her by her own hearth with her children gathered around listening to her stories.
And Lydia Grace? This is a brilliant pairing. Could there be a more creative family than this? Such pure, sweet talent. I have enjoyed seeing Kimberlee's family create peace and beauty over the years. I expect we will see great things from this little girl.
I hope you are busy reading and crafting wherever you are. May I suggest:
on reading and weeping
The theme of the week for a little photo challenge was 'book' which reminded me to write about one the most moving read aloud's we have shared together. The Christmas before last Asher sent us an edition of Little Women, carefully reworked by U-Star Novels. This company inserts personal names in place of your choice of characters from classic literature, leaving the rest of the text untouched. (no compensation happening here fwiw! will add the disclaimer that some of their titles are racy) Being a bookish boy, he leapt on this idea, and chose Little Women for his four little sisters and mother. Hence the March sisters became Alannah, Moira, Therese and Abbie and their personalities and stories intertwined with our own throughout the long leisurely months we have lived with them.
Originally we had not intended to read so slowly. However, another international move came up. Then Alannah went to work fulltime and couldn't bear for us to read without her. As our evenings and weekends filled up with new activities there was less time with all seven at home at once and able to read together. So we began to sneak in a chapter on our own while she was gone. Then another. Then we couldn't stop. ; )
Now we are coming to the end of this story but these stories are part of us forever. My quote book is full of thoughts we have mulled over. Virtue versus vice, status versus family, industry versus idleness. How to be a real man as well as a noble woman. How best to find peace, both in oneself and in marriage and family. It turns out that it was a blessing the reading spread out as long as it did. It became a curriculum of sorts, a life manual for us all.
There has been a downside. We saw it coming early on when one older child said WAIT! Doesn't someone die?? And Asher, a bit regretfully, remembered yes. We braced ourselves for that part, but as a mama reading the words aloud I still completely fell apart when the fateful chapter finally arrived. It took two separate tissue breaks to get through it, devoted as we had become to the sisters and impossible as it was, by that time, to really completely separate our angel from theirs. (fortunately our angel was a bit oblivious to 'her' demise ; ))
It may not work that way for everyone but, in our case, Louisa's views match my own so well that I could not have imparted these lessons better than Marmee did. It's been years since I have read or seen anything Louisa May Alcott and I am not eager to view a film version any time soon. I just want to hang onto my own images and think longer on what we have read and talked about. The the bittersweet aspect of 'living books' is the hangover of sorts left after the closing chapter, where you cannot conceive of cheating on the characters by loving another book. Ever. But of course there will be more. They too will move us. There are others vying for our hearts even as I type…
For this, I am so very grateful.
living and learning lately
So this was September in a nutshell:
doing geo-puzzles EVERY school day
then coloring coordinating maps
measuring the distance between countries in South America (B's idea when he figured out how the map key works)
making tortillas – because we were hungry, but they tied in nicely with above
pattern block cards – oh magnetic pattern blocks, where have you been all my life?
picking apples – making applesauce
math games - they've become wild for anything involving dice
playing British football. Five days a week. Think: little league in the States. High school football in Texas. Somethin' like that. Jury is still out….
discovering the source of the unholy smell in the closet wall (hint – disproportionate size to smell ratio)
geometry. Just geometry. It gets its own line. This helps.
caves of Lascaux impromptu project – there was an article years ago called How a Textbook Mom Does Unit Studies. I would be like the inverse of that. I am a unit study mom doing textbooks. I try to pull out easy projects to go along. This went with the prehistory chapter. We lined a closet in brown paper.
and… planning all the trips in October.
yes days
I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.
~e.e. cummings
flutter by
The verdict is Tortoiseshell, one of the English butterflies are not in our American books. We have found several in the house since the weather turned colder.
stop, drop, and roll
We are so busy. Like, so busy that I am sitting here at midnight blogging because I don't want to forget these days. But I'm telling you they are cram packed right now. School is in full swing and there is a lotta math happening. I am willing to bet I am muttering mathematical jibberish in my sleep. We are giving British football a whirl (more to follow) and we are seeing as much as we can on days off. Which brings me to these pictures, totally out of order with other recent trips, but since these are fresh and I am still smiling I am starting here.
It's my blog. I can wreck it up however I want right?
There were about a million and one things we should have been doing this weekend. Laundry figured prominently among them. Instead, we decided to take the children to a function at the flight line. They toured the fire trucks and got to spray the hoses.
At the end of the presentations they got to get up close and personal with this beauty. She helps drive other birds off the runway to keep them from getting caught up in the airplane engines.
Funny note of the day – the littles were really nervous about climbing up into the fire truck. But then they ran to the front of the line to pet the giant bird with the wicked talons who spreads her wings over your head on command. No explaining some things <g> Guess we're outdoorsy.
I hope your year is off to fabulous start as well. I have not worked this hard in a lot of years but it feels really good. Everyone is super enthusiastic and while some of these upper level classes are stretching our brains a bit it is a blessing to walking this road together.
Summer reading – family style
"…she
discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss
Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my
reading.
“Ma’am?”
“Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.”
I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the
long hours of church—was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to
read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just
came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or
achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus’s moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the
evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws,
the diaries of Lorenzo Dow—anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled
into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not
love breathing."
Summer reading for the older (teen +) crowd courtesy of Asher who has organized those who have not yet read To Kill a Mockingbird to do so. He has Farenheit 451 scheduled after. We sent him the first of Michael O'Brien's Children of the Last Days novels. The younger set has now seen Odysseus safely home and we are choosing our next lunch time read aloud.
I have never really had the time nor energy to join a book club. That's ok though. One sprang up right under my nose. Just as naturally as breathing. : ) It's been a blessing of later motherhood. There were many earlier years when I was too tired from daily work to dig into classic novels. So, just letting you know, if you find yourself there, that fog does clear. I am taking time daily to turn off screens and vacuums both and continue my own classical education.
There is always another great book to read. Now, there are whole bunch of people handy to discuss them.
summer learning – it’s elemental
Although there was absolutely no forethought given to it, I realized this afternoon that we have fallen into some very hands-on learning about the four elements this summer. It made me think of a song on an old cassette from my crunchier days about the earth, the air, the fire, and so on. (I was pretty darned crunchy before crunchy was cool let's just say ; )) It was a tenet of wholistic education that learning be as multisensory as possible as well as incorporating lots of natural elements. I can't say that I worked very intentionally on that beyond what our faith already wove into our lives – candles, incense, baptismal water, Easter fire etc.
Somehow without trying (in the sense of not have a 'program') I realized that all those earthy things are filling our days. There are fires for roasting around, tidepools to wade in, gardens for digging, sand to dig toes into, wind to whip your hair every which way. We are gone alot finding wild places. When we are back home we have had many discussions like why did the forest fire burn faster and longer than the prairie fires did? What does drowning look like? Which way should you stand so the bubbles blow away instead of popping in your hair? Why does the dirt blow in great clouds over the fields when the rains stops falling? What is inside a shell? What is growing on the rocks? Why do we need more water in the summer? Why does the sunscreen work?
So many questions. So many talks. So many afternoons out under the sky.
This whole outdoor thing pushes a mom out of her comfort zone. The elements can be dirty and dangerous, but also lifegiving and sustaining. They are to be used and channeled not avoided in a healthy life. This is the messy world we were born into. It's wild and wonderful. We are happier out in it. We sleep better. We all smile more.
Ok, we wash more clothes and shoes too. But it's worth it.
I should add the disclaimer that there have been other summers with new babies or illness that confined us to more backyard adventures. The four elements are found there too. Sand and water tables, sparklers, pinwheels, windowboxes. Even on a smaller scale they have made for happy kids.
there were books
I sat on these pics thinking I was going to pull together all they represented, all that I felt looking at them. I realized however, that this story is probably just too big to be contained within the pages of this blog. This epic journey doesn't sum up neatly in 4 or 5 paragraphs. I can give you the highlights at least and they begin with this picture.
Once upon a time there was a boy, a beautiful boy. And he needed to stretch and move and reach and learn and push past the limitations imposed by his condition. (Spina Bifida) So his mom and dad set him on this blanket every day and enticed him with words and pictures. He grew stronger and more determined to get to those stories himself. Before long he was rocking, then crawling, then sitting and holding books by himself. So our story began…
By four, he knew all his letters and had been a regular at library story hour for years. We had only this grand plan: check out a few books from each section of the children's library every week. So there were animal books and poetry books, fairy tales and cookbooks. The Caldecott list was in the diaper bag. Books by educational pioneers and reformers like Marva Collin's inspired and challenged the cartoon-y twaddle the local preschool offered. Alternative medical books made their way into the book bag as well. Those educated us and helped us to help him. We read and read and read.
By five, he was reading independently, thanks to copy of Alphaphonics another library mom shared. Following that success there was a big box of first grade materials from Calvert School with his name on it. He devoured that too and became an official homeschool student. This proved to be a critically important choice because this busy, happy boy found himself in the hospital part of nearly every year. His mom would find herself housebound periodically with pregnancy complications. There would be a few of those too. ; ) And there were the relocations due to military life, 13 of them during his childhood.
Despite all those odds seemingly stacked against success, school went on very consistently if non-traiditonally. It was soon clear there was no reason why math had to be completed at 9 am. Or at the table. So books were read in lobbies, on hospital beds, at hotels, in the car, and on the way to sports practices. When pain prohibited reading otherwise, they were read aloud. We adapted, adjusted. We read.
Words and images filled his heart and his mind and carried him far beyond his physical confines. In one medically challenging high school year he devoured 32 books – Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, Up from Slavery, 1984. Every week another novel, another continent, another era, another world.
College came. There were more challenges. There was still that dogged determination. All those magical words which culminated in a cum laude English degree, with much loved courses in poetry and short story composition.
This is where we found ourselves on a warm Saturday morning in Denver. I squeezed in close to catch him passing by in procession and my eyes welled. All around me were people fanning themselves and idly texting, waiting for the endless line of graduates to snake their way through the grounds. I could no longer see anything more than blue satin swirls. In my mind there was only this picture of a beautiful baby boy on his blanket with his books. There was hope and fear and worry and needles and anesthesia. There were the two of us, reading Pearl Buck in a hospital room in VA one year, me fighting early pregnancy nausea and him recovering from surgery, coming in and out as I read. There was a boy and his Dad maneuvering a chair through off road paths in Rocky Mountain National Park. There was the crashing of wheelchairs against one another during basketball games. I was deluged with memories and the sudden realization that he did it, we made it. Against crazy odds.
I can't possibly explain to you what that meant to me. To him. To all of us.
"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers."
– Charles William Eliot
Starry Sky Journal 