More similes for Dollygirl

"The short-clipped manes spring back like roosters' combs"  ~~ "Winged Team," by Jessie Haas, in Hoofprints: Horse Poems

"Chain mail polished like woven silver" ~~ "Treasure," by Jessie Haas

"Horses are swimming in the sea.
Their long manes slide like foam
down the green, glassy wave-troughs."  ~~ "The Spanish Armada Retreats," by Jessie Haas

"Like a prairie fire, the horseback idea
spread across the grasslands."  ~~ "Flare-up," by Jessie Haas

"He first saw one with the corner of his left eye, a wisp of pale sheen that faded away; but others appeared soon after: some like dimly shining smoke, some like misty flames flickering slowly above unseen candles; here and there they twisted like ghostly sheets unfurled by hidden hands."  ~~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

"While the grey light lasted, they cowered under a black stone like worms, shrinking, lest the winged terror should pass and spy them with its cruel eyes."  ~~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

Just for Crayons: Mama Squirrel's favourite horse story

Someone else has been thinking about the hard-to-find Pamela and the Blue Mare.

What to do at a horse party

There are some pretty terrific online lists of horsey party activities. We checked out Pony Party Ideas, the "Horse Power Party Planning Guide," and Birthday Parties for Kids. Mama Squirrel could have put an entire list together of really fun things to do outside--relay races, tag games and those sorts of things. If Crayons had been a little bit younger, she probably would have done exactly that.

However, this year we simplified the list. Counting on a sunny day, we planned for a sack race and horseshoes in the back yard, and a Bingo game afterwards.

And yes, it was sunny and quite hot for May.

The sack race was kind of lukewarm--some of the girls were still feeling shy and didn't feel too excited about into putting their feet into garbage bags. The horseshoes game was a bit more successful--Mr. Fixit showed the girls how to play and a few of them even made "ringers."

However, the next time Mama Squirrel looked out the back window, the game was over, and there were girls all over the swing set, girls hula-hooping, girls playing with the toy lawn mower, and one girl playing badminton with Mr. Fixit. You take one warm day in Ontario, one big back yard, and a couple of swings, and kids will more or less make their own party.

We finally got everybody back inside for Bingo. Mama Squirrel had taken our old Bingo cards--they're really old, worthy of the DHM's Rattery stash--and covered the BINGO part with paper loops (stapled together, slid over the cards) that said HORSE instead. So--under the H, 1; under the O, 16. Everybody got a chance to make a HORSE--after you won once, you had to stop playing. Each winner got to pick a little plastic horse.

And they opened presents, and ate, and then--everybody wanted to go back outside! Some of them stayed outside for the rest of the party, and the rest came back in to play with the gifts--Anna Sophia's new clothes were very much appreciated, thank you (you know who you are).

So while Mama Squirrel would have loved to try a few more of the organized ideas, and might have if the girls had seemed to be running out of things to do--she admits that sometimes it's better to let your guests just have fun than make them play Musical Saddles.

Horse parties--enough of this galloping around

"I want a horse party"--sounds simple, right?

A lot of the horse-and-pony-party websites assume that you must have unlimited funds and/or local stores brimming with cowboy toys. Some peoples' descriptions of their children's parties sound more like the Calgary Stampede. We wanted to have fun, but maybe not on that scale. Still, how hard could it be to come up with a few horse-themed decorations or toys?

Mama Squirrel can now understand why people end up buying the whole thing online.

We went to a party-ware store that had one mylar horse balloon--and that was it, the rest of the store seemed to be all 40th-birthday parties and adult Halloween costumes.

We went to the bulk store and couldn't find anything neat or original (which turned out to be a good thing since one of the guests has peanut allergies and can't have anything from the bulk store). Jellybeans and pretzels would have been fine, but we were hoping for something sort of cool, like gummy horseshoes.

We went to the "bargain store"--like the dollar store but they charge more. They had no party stuff at all. And very few horses.

We went to the Big Z department store, looked in the toy aisle and found nothing except big toy sets. We did pick up some striped paper plates and napkins, and two packages of dried-fruit snacks.

We went to the Craft Store. All the horse stickers were in the scrapbooking section and priced accordingly. We settled for plastic harmonicas, two packs of balloons, and a Toob of tiny horses (which ended up as game prizes). Mama Squirrel also bought a big ball of brown yarn--which became horses. (Note on the harmonicas: we would probably have been better off with the kazoos they sold, since those are supposed to sound kind of bad anyway.)

(We already had stuffing and scraps of other yarn for manes and saddles. Mama Squirrel would point out that the pattern, while quite good, has a couple of quirks. There's no mention of tails, and there's also no mention of stuffing the legs--but since we didn't want collapsed horses, we thought it must have been just an omission. Also, if you'll notice, all those seven horses were made by the same person using the same pattern--and some of them are quite different, depending on how firm they are stuffed and on the angle that the head is sewn on. No right or wrong, just pointing out how much Results Can Vary.)

We thought we had some clear gift bags, but remembered that we used them up at Christmas. Tin pails would have been fun, but not at Craft Store prices. So Crayons potato-printed paper lunch bags (we made a horseshoe and a star print), and we filled them with the fruit snacks, harmonicas, and crocheted horses. It might have been nice to have a few other candies or smaller things, but as Mama Squirrel has already pointed out, such things were not exactly plentiful (and we didn't think we could handle any more stores).

For decorations, we blew up the balloons, put out as many horse toys and books as we could find, and sidewalk-painted horseshoes coming up to the front door. (Ponytails added a welcome message with chalk.)

And Crayons took charge of the front-door table.

Wild, wild horses (The Silver Brumby)

One of The Apprentice's friends loaned her Elyne Mitchell's The Silver Brumby, and then Mama Squirrel read it to Crayons. This series of Australian wild-horse stories is way above the current run of Horse-Club type chapter books; and, unfortunately, seems to be almost unheard of in Canada. There was a 1993 film version with Russell Crowe, but I don't remember it; there was also an animated series (can be seen on You-tube). I checked abebooks.com for copies of the books and found very few in Canada at a decent price; the U.S. was not much better, but there were lots of copies in Australia and the U.K. Collins Modern Classics did a reprint in 1999 but it looks like it's also out of print. There are no copies of any of the books in our library system.

The book--the first one anyway--was published in 1958. It's kind of a cross between Bambi (the book, not the Disney movie) and Misty of Chincoteague. Thowra, a cream-coloured wild horse (brumby), is born during a stormy night; his intelligent and intuitive mother knows there are great things in store for him, but that he will always be in danger both from man and other horses (because of his unusual colour). She teaches him everything she knows about running, hiding, leaping over things, and general survival; and, though most mares forget their foals eventually, she never seems to be far away and reappears several times as Thowra grows up. (He also has a lifelong friendship with Storm, another stallion who was born at the same time.) By the end of the book, Thowra has defeated the other leaders of the brumbies (the fights are described fairly graphically), has his own herd (and foals), and has just escaped--in a final harrowing chase scene--from the stockmen (cowboys) who badly want to capture him.

The descriptive passages and the language--both the Australian geographical terms and the general writing level--may give problems to younger North American readers; maybe not your average homeschooler, but those who expect something on the level of the Horse Club books. The first book does have a short glossary in the back (candlebarks, flying phallanger, kurrawong, snowgrass, etc.). Here's a sample:

"Thowra and Storm moved back on to the Main Range as soon as autumn began changing towards winter. For a while they stayed in the timbered country below the Ramshead, and often spent the lovely bright days galloping on the snowgrass between the granite tors. Sometimes there were other young horses near--and once Thowra was given quite a beating by a three-year-old stallion who came along with two or three young mares and seemed to want to fight him just because he looked different--but mostly they were on their own, and day after day was filled with a sort of wild joy....The snow was late that year, and in the clear autumn light the rocks looked purple, and the snowgums blended every red and orange and green with their ghostly silver grey. Thowra became lighter in colour as he got his winter coat, and, even more than in other winters, he looked silver rather than cream."--Elyne Mitchell, The Silver Brumby

Luckily, The Apprentice's friend owns all four books in the series and Crayons is writing her a letter (and drawing her a picture) to say thank you and ask if we can borrow the next book.

Notes from a Book Talk

(Adapted from a talk I wrote for a support group meeting. Are you sitting comfortably?)

Books Fall Open

by David McCord

Books fall open, you fall in
Delighted where you’ve never been
Hear voices not once heard before
Reach world on world through door on door
Find unexpected keys to things
Locked up beyond imaginings
What might you be, perhaps become
Because one book is somewhere?
Some wise delver into wisdom, wit and wherewithal has written it
True books will venture, dare you out
Whisper secrets, maybe shout
Across the gloom to you in need
Who hanker for a book to read.


When Mr. Fixit and I were at the beginning of our journey together, one of us once gave the other one a gift bag with a Winnie-the-Pooh illustration on it and the words, "As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was going to happen." That's almost identical to a chapter title in Gladys Hunt's Honey for a Child’s Heart (at least the 1978 edition, which is what I have): "The Pleasure of a Shared Adventure."

Reading is an adventure, and even better, it can be a shared adventure.

What do you need for an adventure? You need some place to go—often some place unknown. Adventures require at least a bit of the unexpected, the unknown, a bit of uncertainty; “things locked up beyond imaginings.” Most adventures don’t happen right in your own backyard. To have a real adventure you need to step outside, push beyond your comfort zone.

Real adventures can include buried treasure, answering riddles, fighting dragons, outwitting giants. They include big problems and big decisions.

Adventures go better with food. Apples, popcorn, hot chocolate…

Here’s a quote, see if you know what book it’s from. "Her own small bedroom now became her reading-room and there she would sit and read most afternoons, often with a mug of hot chocolate beside her….It was pleasant to take a hot drink up to her room and have it beside her as she sat in her silent room reading in the empty house in the afternoons. The books transported her into new world and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She traveled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village."

And it’s nice to have a place to come home to afterwards. Our adventures are enjoyed more when they’re framed in the familiarity and security of home.

What should you expect from an adventure?

Expect it to take time. You can’t have a real adventure in five minutes, and some of the best book adventures are very long. We are often too impatient and we settle for abridged versions or just skip things altogether because they’re so long. But if you take, say, the long unabridged version of David Copperfield, there’s just a huge amount of wonderful stuff in there that hasn’t made it into shortened versions or movie versions. In other words, you don’t really know David Copperfield until you’ve explored the whole thing, and when you’re done you’re tired but you know it was worthwhile.

Expect some degree of danger, risk, opposition and difficulty. Being a reader these days can be a subversive activity, both inside and outside of the Christian community; it can make people angry; it can make a lot more people yawn with boredom. It’s not the books that get banned by school libraries that you will have to struggle to read or even to find; it’s the books that nobody’s actually supposed to be able or be interested in reading any more; that includes some of the treasures of our Christian literary heritage. How many people do you know--Christians or not-- who have actually read and enjoyed Paradise Lost or Pilgrim’s Progress, just for a start? How many homeschoolers will include those books in their children’s education? For some people, concentrating our children’s reading on the dead white guys (particularly dead Christian white guys) is seen as some kind of an act against contemporary culture. And those who don't get outright angry may try to discourage you in other ways. Just like in Pilgrim’s Progress, you are going to meet people with names like That’s-So-Dull and Much-Abridged who are going to try to get you to turn back; but press on, the rewards are there in the end.

And expect to be rewarded when you climb to the top. Who goes on a quest without hoping to bring back treasure? Without even specially looking for them, we can expect to make discoveries that lead to wisdom, teach discernment and critical thinking, inspire us with courage, and build character; what Terry Glaspey calls the Moral Imagination. Charlotte Mason said that “stories make the child’s life intelligible to himself; Gladys Hunt wrote in Honey for a Child’s Heart that “books help children know what to look for in life.” It helps to know what you’re looking for when you’re hunting for treasure. And besides that there are a lot of little side benefits of reading, like improved vocabulary and listening skills, creativity, and having bits of useful information stored up in the mind.

Again from "that book": “All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen. If only they would read a little Dickens or Kipling they would soon discover there was more to life than cheating people and watching television.”

Northrop Frye said that literature is true, more true in some ways than our everyday existence; because when our everyday life is disappointing and superficial or truly horrible, it is in literature that we find examples of true love, true honour, true courage. Reading is more than just escapism. It’s not escapism to find strength by remembering Christian’s defeat of Giant Despair; by thinking of wise words that Corrie Ten Boom’s father and sister told her; by making yourself smile at a lovely line of poetry or laugh at the Pooh stories.

But reading is an escape as well, in a good sense. We rebel against ignorance and smallness and look for something more; we try to remember what we are or should be as human beings. We can escape from the pride of thinking we know it all, and from limitations like not really being able to sail or fly or ride horses, or find a secret garden or a buried treasure. We may not have people in our everyday lives who are as loyal as Charlotte, as resourceful as Laura’s Ma, as wise as Clara’s grandmother in Heidi, as encouraging as Ratty, or as valiant as Reepicheep; but in books, we can do all these things and know all these people.

Expect to have fun. The roads through books aren’t all serious; there is a great deal of humor, delight and pleasure, even nonsense. About a hundred years ago, a parent in England wrote this:
“I cannot count the times I have read aloud the stories in the "Just So" book. During a dreary month of grey skies and perpetual snow, spent in the hotel of a grim Yorkshire village, those stories were our daily bread, especially those that took us to the sunshine of South Africa. And the greatest favourite of all was The Beginning of the Armadilloes. Only Rudyard Kipling or Lewis Carroll would dare to write anything so absurd. Day after day, for thirty days or thereabouts, those two rascals, Stickly-Prickly, and Slow-and-Solid, played their pranks, and day after day we laughed at the same places, and when Slow-and-Solid said to the Painted Jaguar--"Because if she said what you said she said, it's just the same as if I said what she said she said"--day after day we bounded out of our chairs with joy….Let us arm our children for the slings and arrows of later life by cultivating the spirit of innocent laughter.”

Terry Glaspey says that “being in the presence of greatness cannot but change us.” So expect to be changed, strengthened, stretched, widened, given a different perspective as you go on a particular adventure. As characters in books grow throughout a story, we share their experiences and also find ourselves growing and changing. One of my favourite short books is Rumer Godden’s The Mousewife, about a rather unhappy mother mouse who develops a friendship with a dove living in a cage. The dove tells her stories about the world outside and gives her a lot of new ideas about things she has never seen. Eventually the mousewife finds a way to help the dove escape, but suddenly realizes that she no longer has her friend there to talk to her and teach her things. Then she looks out the window. “She looked out again and saw the stars….When she saw them shining she thought at first they must be new brass buttons. Then she saw that they were very far off, farther than the garden or the wood, beyond the farthest trees….’I have seen them for myself,’ said the mousewife, ‘without the dove. I can see for myself,’ said the mousewife, and slowly, proudly, she walked back to bed.”

How can we get to be more adventurous, and get more out of our reading adventures?

Use the services of an experienced guide—in this case, booklists and books about books, including homeschool book catalogues and online reviews—but use them cautiously. In your book adventures, as in real life, some guides are more to be trusted than others; and some may simply suit your purposes or personality more than others do. What one hiking guide calls a nice little stroll may leave you exhausted; and what one booklist calls suitable for a ten-year-old may be your idea of something better saved for high school, or the other way around.

To have the greatest adventures, seek out the greatest treasures. Our culture tends to cheapen and trivialize reading (formula series, TV-tie-ins, other kinds of books that barely qualify as books); the media tells us we should read mostly because it’s fun. But even fun gets boring after awhile.

To have the greatest adventures, don’t stick only to the roads marked “fiction.” Read some of the history of medicine, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy. Find out what was beautiful, revolutionary and even dangerous about scientific discoveries. Read history, and go beyond “how the peasants lived.” Read biographies, poetry, nature descriptions. Read the Bible together.

There is also the idea these days that there are no specific important books—wrong. Some book adventures are just more rewarding than others, especially the places you know you’ll want to go back to again and take your friends along to enjoy. There are certain real-life places that everyone should try to see once; and there are book adventures that are too good to miss. You may not be ready for them all at the beginning, but you can work up to the challenge.

Which is another good point: to have the greatest adventures, take along some good companions; make it a shared adventure, and everyone who goes along will be in on the shared vocabulary, experiences and “book friends” that you meet along the way. How do you work around different ages? Not everyone who comes along will get the most from a particular book journey, but sometimes what they do bring back will surprise you. There are times in life when you just can’t read with everyone, but even if it’s just you and one other person, you’re sharing that adventure together, and maybe somebody else will decide to come along if the two of you look like you’re having fun.

How do you deal with general reluctance, the attitude that books are hard or boring? I once went to a health-food demonstration where the presenter was asked, "How can I encourage my children to eat some of these foods instead of hot dogs?" She answered, very unhelpfully, that really they should have just been better trained from the start. In the same way, it would be easy for me to say that if your kids are brought up reading with you from babyhood, you probably won’t have a problem with this, and that if you do you should just force it down them; but that sort of answer just makes you want to give up, doesn't it? So a better suggestion might be that you’re going to have to woo them—maybe with the hot chocolate and popcorn, maybe with a particularly wonderful or funny book that you know gets right into the story very quickly. These suggestions might also apply if you really want to involve a spouse or another adult family member; nobody wants to be made to read, especially if they think they’re going to be bored by kids books; so make sure that it’s something that everybody’s going to enjoy. One recommendation is Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It’s nothing at all like the movie and it’s a lot of fun and has lots of things blowing up in it.

How do you cope with busy schedules, and the competing attractions of other media? You can use audio books, maybe during mealtimes or travel; you can use more homeschool time just to read; you can leave books lying around; you can give books as gifts. Even the cost of new books shouldn’t be a deterrent to reading, not with libraries and used books and online books readily available; Emily Dickinson was right when she said that reading is a pretty frugal chariot compared with a lot of the other ways we can find to spend money.

HE ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book.
What liberty
A loosened spirit brings! --Emily Dickinson

To have the greatest adventures, let the adventures find you. "Books fall open, you fall in." We can’t always regulate reading by squeezing it into a READING period; by labeling books according to grade or age; or excluding every word or idea that we don’t think our kids will understand. Again, you have to risk a little. Lines like “bequest of wings,” “loosened spirit” and “take us worlds away” speak to us of flight and freedom; the idea of moving outside our own place and time, being able to see beyond our own lives; that’s what the word education means, a drawing out. As our “spirits grow robust,” we are able not only to handle more difficult book adventures but to use our experiences in the everyday world as well, to survive the “dingy days” and also to change them into something better. “Robust spirits” implies strength and health; this kind of reading is not a weak, wussy thing or just an escape from reality. In Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Cousin Eustace was the cowardly, mean character; C.S. Lewis says it was because he hadn’t read the right books.

What are the right books to adventure with? A great storyteller named Ruth Sawyer gave this list (quoted in Honey for a Child's Heart): “Stories that make for wonder. Stories that make for laughter. Stories that stir one within with an understanding of the true nature of courage, of love, of beauty. Stories that make one tingle with high adventure, with daring, with grim determination, with the capacity of seeing danger through to the end. Stories that bring our minds to kneel in reverence. Stories that show the tenderness of true mercy, the strength of loyalty, the unmawkish respect for what is good.”

THERE is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul! --Emily Dickinson

Let’s have the courage to adventure with books…and…Let’s go there together.

Some things you just can't do at school

Crayons and I sat down this morning to do "Grade One." That's what we call the half hour or so where I read her some of whatever's up in this week's Ambleside Online Year One. (The subjects we do with fifth-grader Ponytails don't count, in her mind, as Grade One.) One day it's Paddle-to-the-Sea, another day it's a fairy tale or Just-So Stories. Usually we read something from A Child's Garden of Verses and either a fable or one of the Fifty Famous Stories Retold as well, since they're pretty short.

Today we read the poem "The Land of Counterpane" and then we were about to start "Alexander and Bucephalus" from Fifty Famous Stories. But first I asked her to go over to the bookcase and pick out a book: Start in the middle. Now higher! To the right! Count five books over! What's the name of the book?

Stories of Alexander the Great, by Pierre Grimal. I love this book; the Apprentice and I read most of it the summer Crayons was born. "That's who this story is about," I said. "Alexander the Great."

"Okay, let's read the story out of this book," Crayons said.

"Well...okay." So I read it in Grimal's version (it's translated from French).

"So, my son, you think that you know more about horses than your father! Do you really think that you could break this one in?" he asked.

"This one, yes, of course," replied Alexander. "I am quite sure that I can deal with him far better than your squires."

"Well," replied Philip. "Why don't you try? If you do not succeed, what penalty do you deserve to pay for your presumption?"

"I will pay the price of the horse," replied Alexander.

And we read the ending:

"My son, it is time for you to find a kingdom worthy of your talents. I am afraid that Macedonia is too small for you."

Crayons started narrating it all back to me:

"Once upon a time...there was a king who was going to buy a horse for a famous price. [She meant fabulous.] Famous price now means that it's really cheap, but a famous price then meant it was really expensive."

Ponytails had wandered in after finishing her own assignment, and she kept saying, "I remember this story. This is a good story." (Pick up jaw from the floor.)

Crayons by this time had really gotten into her narration.

"Alexander said, 'I can ride this horse.' His father the king made a deal with him. If he couldn't ride the horse, he would have to pay the whole price of the horse himself."

"Do you want a horse?" Ponytails offered. "I'll be the horse."

Crayons considered the offer and then took Ponytails by the "bridle" and continued.

"He took the horse and turned him so he couldn't see his shadow. Then he got on and rode the horse. Then he galloped the horse."

(Ponytails: "Ooh! ow!" But she was a good sport.)

Crayons finished her narration, Ponytails got up from her knees, and we decided that one story was about enough for Grade One today.

Only in homeschool.

CM and Us and The Great Outdoors

The Muddy Puddle
by Dennis Lee

I am sitting in the middle
Of a rather Muddy Puddle,
With my bottom full of bubbles
And my rubbers full of mud,

While my jacket and my sweater
Go on slowly getting wetter
As I very slowly settle
To the Bottom of the Mud.

And I find that what a person
With a puddle round his middle
Thinks of mostly in the muddle
Is the Muddiness of Mud.

Unlike some of our nearest dearest CM friends' offspring, our Squirrelings have grown up with some mud and dirt restrictions. Call it overcaution. Call it urban life. Call it the parental ick factor. Whatever. We just don't do a lot of mudpies and backyard earthworks. Certain large squirrels in our treehouse grew up surrounded by nasty stories about what cats do in sandboxes and what toxins might be in this stuff we call soil, and the effects of that early training have not been diminished by the years. The Squirrelings' experiences with muddy puddles, wading in creeks, camping out, dogs, horses, and farm animals have been at somewhat of a distance. (Have you heard what kinds of things are passed around in petting zoos?...ugh, just another thing to cross off the list.)

However, when I start thinking about it, I realize that we have done our share of getting dirty, wet, snowy and/or buggy over the years; and a lot of it has been right in our yard. The Squirrelings can recognize most of our backyard birds: robins, crows, finches, mourning doves, robins, cardinals, and occasionally a hummingbird, a flicker, or a grackle. They love taking care of the occasional caterpillars that crawl across the patio (even one that we found on a cob of corn), and examining even the icky bugs under a magnifying glass. They know our maple trees very well, and the neighbourhood evergreens. They've played games with horse chestnuts, watched ants, and watched the variety of small mammals that show up in our yard: squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, and occasionally the nocturnal visitors like raccoons. (We have a big window just above ground level that lets squirrels and birds get right up close without realizing they're onstage.) They've been bothered by bees and bitten by mosquitoes. They've picked tomatoes, transplanted geraniums, and raked leaves. They saw a big tree come down and two more planted in its place.

Occasionally we do get further afield (I think of nature walks around the block as just an extension of our yard). They have had opportunities to get to know the beach, the sand, the pebbles, the water, the sky over Lake Huron. They've been to the woods--not as often as we'd like, but enough to get an idea of the quietness and the bigness of a hundreds-years-old kind of place. They've been outside at night to look for Orion's Belt, and we're hoping to get the younger ones to a local observatory a couple of times this year as part of their astronomy study.

And we go on all kinds of trips through our books. We've been in the blazing sun, poking at a badger and chasing prairie dogs with Laura. We've been in a beaver pond with Paddle. We've even been in the Secret Garden.

So, while I truly envy the abandon of those who don't mind their bottoms full of bubbles, maybe we're not so badly off either.

I Never Saw A Moor
by Emily Dickinson.

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

Language arts and a thrift-shop curriculum

(Slightly edited in 2018)

How did I come up with a year's curriculum, anyway? What does it look like? Would anybody use it? The last question is the easiest: nobody could, unless you had every book on the list, and that's not the point. The process here is much more important than the product.

What I came up with isn't necessarily a Charlotte Mason curriculum; that needs to be clear. I wasn't writing it for someone who's well versed in CM or who's ready to explore some of the online e-texts that can also make up a great almost-free curriculum. (It would have been too easy just to say that you should go look at AmblesideOnline.) I think it's more like an amalgam of Sonlight Curriculum and Ruth Beechick. It's supposed to be something that could keep you going, even if you were homeschooling for the first time. I try to point out in the workshop that with a few more books around (hopefully a library) or a bit more time, you could easily enrich what I have here; in fact, I did make one more thrift shop trip and I'm going to talk about that at the end.

This is how I put it together:

The first thrifting trip was made mostly for fun and with our own needs in mind; by the time I went to the rummage sale, I was looking more for the workshop. I didn't bother picking up the easiest of easy-reader books, but I did notice that there were several short chapter books, especially among the Scholastic titles: The Secret Hideout, Enemies of the Secret Hideout, The Three Dollar Mule, Casey the Utterly Impossible Horse, The Sword in the Tree, and Johnny Appleseed. There were also a few picture books, some of which might still be of interest to the third grader I was starting to envision. Some of these books I chose as "readers," and some I just kept for free reading or bedtime stories.

There were only a few books I felt really measured up to the best standard for school read-alouds, and on a couple of those I bent a little in favour of interest (I remember how much our fourth-grade class loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). I zeroed in on Charlie, The Old Nurse's Stocking Basket, The Peterkin Papers, The Dancing Palm Tree and Child of China, but there was still something missing. So I fudged on one literature book and added The Secret Garden, and also a book of poems; poems are usually easy to find, but these trips didn't yield any.

And at this point we have to talk about language arts and also the two teaching resources I'm drawing from--since the language arts work is drawn from them. I'm not assuming that my hypothetical homeschooling parent (even if it's me ;-)) can figure out everything that needs to be taught off the top of her head. Having at least one scope-and-sequence around is helpful when you're setting goals for the year, and books with activities to meet those goals are also helpful. I chose Ruth Beechick's set of three "3 R's" booklets: one each for Language, Reading and Math, and Diane Lopez's book Teaching Children. [Note: Mott Media re-released the three booklets as one, called The Three R's.] I did not choose Teaching Children because I thought it was the best Charlotte Mason book ever written; it's very classroomish in some ways, and it's not at all helpful as far as recommending easily-accessible resources (other than classic literature). However, Teaching Children does have a good Social Studies section, which might make it worthwhile as a resource for this particular year (more on that later); and if you got it for that reason, you could use it for its math and English breakdowns as well as for some hints on nature walks and other subject areas.

Ruth Beechick's booklets (and her book You CAN Teach Your Child Successfully for older children) have always been one of the best bargains out there; and this isn't meant to be a commercial! There are a few how-to-homeschool books that I've hung onto all these years and never regret buying; those are among them. In a few pages, you can get a pretty good picture of what a third grader might be doing in math; and in a few pages more, you get sample language lessons (the kind you can make up yourself, drawing from any suitable books), Bible copywork, spelling suggestions, and more. If you buy the package of booklets new,  I think you still get a poster-sized hundred chart with them. But the other reason I chose the Beechick and Lopez resources is that you can very easily get them used, usually from other homeschoolers, if cost is an issue. New, I think they'd total about $30. (If you had to pay full pop on those, consider that it's still less than the cost of a homeschool conference where you'd get to hear both of these ladies plus Susan Schaeffer Macaulay, the other contributor to Teaching Children.)

OK--so our bargain-hunting homeschooler has gotten hold of these books and wants to apply them to her stash of reading books. It's easier to show than explain, so here are three sample language lessons based on Ruth Beechick's A Strong Start in Language, Clyde Robert Bulla's The Three Dollar Mule, and (just for fun) the how-to-draw-animals books from the rummage sale. Each of these lessons is meant to be done over at least three days.

Sample Lessons

Week 1 (Read chapters 1 & 2)

From page 12: "Ben Gold was eating grass near the pasture gate. He was a slim horse, with long, slim legs. His color was bay--a light brown that looked gold in the sun."

Copy out these sentences in your best writing. Why is "Ben Gold" capitalized? Why isn't "horse" capitalized? What are some synonyms for "slim?" Why do you think Clyde Robert Bulla chose "slim" and not one of the other words? Try out Ed Emberley's horse lesson and the horse in the How to Draw Animals book. Compare these with Carol Wilde's illustrations of Ben Gold. Which one do you like best? --Write the whole passage from dictation.

Week 2 (Read chapters 3 & 4)

From page 29: "'We've always been proud of the animals on our ranch,' said Father. 'All the cattle come from the best stock. Even our chickens and ducks and geese are from the best stock we can buy. Do you think our ranch is any place for a three-dollar mule?'"

What is the plural of goose? Find three other animal plurals in the passage. (What is the difference between "cows" and "cattle?") Make a list of some other animal plurals and mark the ones that don't end with "s." Copy this passage and/or write it from dictation.

Why did Father say this to Don? What would you say if you were Don?

Bonus: Now that you can draw a horse, can you draw a mule too? (Look at the illustrations in the book.)

Week 3 (Read chapters 5 & 6)

From page 39: "'Mules do sometimes,' said Don. 'It's like a rooster crowing in the morning.' 'I don't mind a rooster, but that mule is something else,' said Father, 'and you'd better do something about him!'"

Copy this passage. (Watch out for the quotation marks!)

Find the two words that start with "some." Make a list of more words that start the same way. Study them for spelling and then ask someone to test you on them.

Why is Father capitalized? Is the word "father" always capitalized? What are some other words that work the same way?

Bonus question: why do roosters crow in the morning?

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Along with the third-grade goals and activities described in Teaching Children and A Strong Start in Language, our homeschooler could make use of Bible passages, the rummage-sale dictionary (looking up words that start with certain combinations of letters (like "some" in the lesson above), and practicing alphabetizing skills); the word-search puzzle books (they can also be used for spelling lists); and everyday "paper" like newspapers and phone books. This may seem odd to people who consider grammar and creative writing texts to be standard even in primary grades; but consider the value of copywork, personalized spelling, narration (having the child tell episodes back orally, in writing, or using creative alternatives), and reading/writing across the curriculum. The goal of "language arts" is to increase the child's facility in language, and that can be broken down into areas such as reading, writing, oral and listening skills. All these areas can be well covered by Ruth Beechick's "powerful natural method" of increasing language awareness, and CM-style narration.

So here's a hundred dollar (or maybe a three-dollar) question, and I'm asking it seriously: is this much harder than pulling language lessons from a pre-fab language textbook, even for a fairly new homeschooler? Is this very different from buying a booklet of comprehension questions to go with a novel? Besides the cost advantage, making up your own work is very flexible; if your child already knows all about plurals, you can choose another passage and work on something else. You can stress comprehension where I've focused more on mechanics here; you can draw in Bible passages too, if that's your style. Again I need to stress that you'll need to invest in some teacher tools if you want to teach this way; but once you've learned how to handle your tools, you can use them to build anything you want.

(Part 2, Part 3)

John Ruskin on books

"What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses? If a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad--a biblio-maniac. But you never call any one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear of people ruining themselves by their books. Or, to go lower still, how much do you think the contents of the book-shelves of the United Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, as compared with the contents of its wine-cellars?....how long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it!" "Bread of flour is good, but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book; and the family must be poor indeed which, once in their lives, cannot for such multipliable barley-loaves, pay their baker's bill." --John Ruskin, "Of Kings' Treasuries," in Sesame and Lilies

Ponytails' Narration of Five Children and It

Hi, this is Ponytails. Have you ever read E. Nesbit before? The Five Children and It one. It's about this Sand Fairy who grants these four children wishes. The first wish was to be as beautiful as the day; but then their housemaid Martha didn't recognize them, so she kicked them out of the house. Then they wished that Martha and all the maids wouldn't notice anything that they did that would get them in trouble. And then they wished for a lot of money, but all the shopkeepers didn't know what the money was. The money was actually spade guineas. And the shopkeepers didn't know the coins. So there was this one man who gave pony rides to people, and they asked him to drop them off at the brook, and he did that. He knew what the money was.

So Cyril, in another store, he bought some ginger beer. He had to use his own allowance, though. And the other kids, because it was so hot, they stuck out their tongues, and everybody said, "why are you doing that?" They tried to buy horses, but the horse guy didn't know if it was real money or not, or he thought probably that they stole the money. Something really gross...the shopkeepers tasted the money to see if it was chocolate! You'd probably get sick from tasting all those things. The horse man called the police, and they were taking them to the police station. And they ran into Martha and the baby (that was the fifth child), but Martha couldn't see the money that they were pulling out of their pockets, because of the wish that they did. She said, "you're on drugs." At dusk all their wishes would disappear, and now it was dusk. So when they got to the police station, the policeman said, "are you on drugs? There is no money on these kids."

The End, bye for now!

In the Eyes of Crayons

Do you know what a caparison is? It's one of those coverings that looks like a tablecloth, that knights used to put over their horses. The thing that covers up a lot of the horse.

Anyway, Crayons was looking at a picture of a knight on a caparisoned horse. Her comment: "What's that robot doing, riding on the horse dressed up like a pony?"