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Swearing In, Bunbun, and Books (Weeks 12, 13)

Dec 5th, 2015
by Annie Kate.
4 comments
Woodwork in the library of the Canadian Parliament

Woodwork in the library of the Canadian Parliament

We had the amazing privilege of attending the swearing-in ceremony of a new Member of Parliament.  Although it was a unique homeschooling moment, it was so much more than that and I don’t think we will ever forget it.   Neither will the staff, I think, for our group sang ‘O Canada’ with a gusto they were not expecting.  What’s more, we knew the final stanza which they had never heard of.  And Miss 13 claims she saw the bullet holes of last year’s shooting….

For the first time ever we took an extra reading week.  It was good; the girls read a lot and I was able to get a few other things done:  I froze some kale, started making some curtains, and read way too many books.

And, yes, we did do ordinary schoolwork of all sorts, too.  The girls took some tests in various subjects and they went well.  That is always so encouraging for everyone!  We also did an extraordinary amount of reading aloud.  Stories are, after all, the best way of developing a relationship with a topic, and sharing a story is one of the joys of life.

Although my older three children were able to work somewhat independently and preferred it that way, my younger two need me to work alongside them.  It is a completely different way of homeschooling, very satisfying but also enough to make my head feel like a tornado, awhirl with all the topics they are learning.   I’ve been learning a bit from Teach Like a Champion Field Guide.

Reading week has taught me the importance of leaving good books lying around.  Otherwise, despite the fact that we own thousands of books, ‘there is nothing good to read’.  Since the books that capture Miss 15’s attention are adult level nonfiction, I’m kept very busy finding appropriate titles that might interest her, and checking them.  And then, occasionally, they are so good I need to read them myself.

Life:

Bunbun has developed a distinct personality.  She lives in our verandah but often comes inside to play in the basement.  When someone walks downstairs she hops up eagerly, waiting for her forehead to be stroked.  When Miss 13 stretched out on the floor to rest one afternoon, ignoring Bunbun, our gentle rabbit lost her temper and started thumping her hind leg.  My husband has started calling her Atilla the Bunbun.

This week the dogs treed a mink in the top of a lilac bush, or maybe it was a young fisher.  Scary!  Miss 13 raced outside to help the dogs catch it, and when I warned her that they could be dangerous, she pointed out she was putting on a tough denim jacket and Daddy’s thick leather gloves.  Fortunately for everyone involved, the mink/fisher streaked away in a brown blur; we all enjoyed the excitement but no one got hurt.

For the first time this year, we have had events cancelled because of freezing rain.  Winter is approaching, very slowly, but I still do not feel ready.  We try to spend some time outside each day, enjoying the unseasonably warm weather.

The ground is not yet frozen, and we still have kale growing in the garden.  I’ve been freezing it, slowly since I am not strong enough to do a lot of that at a time.  Yet organic kale is so worth it.  We eat it regularly mashed with potatoes and onions, with sausages added, and there are so many other yummy ways to enjoy it.

Miss 13 has started making a quilt out of old jeans after finishing her braided rug, which will probably become a pillow top.

Miss 15 has been working in the retail Christmas rush, selling all sorts of ethnic treats and practicing her Dutch.  A part time job can be a beautiful thing.

Books:

I’ve finished Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther and am beginning Job.  This time I’m planning to read Mason’s The Gospel According to Job as I go through the Bible book.  I’ve also finished The Dorito Effect, McCaughrean’s Canterbury Tales, and Money Making Mom, and am currently reading too many other books:  Do You Call This a Life?; Sometimes You Win, Sometimes you Learn; Total Recovery; and Stepping Up. For homeschool I’m reading these books one chapter or story at a time: The Hittite Warrior, Trial and Triumph, King Alfred’s English, Pilot Literature 3, Story of the World 4. Currently on hold:  How to Really Love Your Child, Joy at the End of the Tether, The Traveler’s Gift.

The girls have been reading Louis L’Amour, Enid Blyton, Total Recovery, Sometimes You Win Sometimes You Learn for Teens, the Hardy Boys, McCaughrean’s Canterbury Tales, and Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow.

Reading aloud:

Pegeen and the Pilgrim, The Mouse on Wall Street, Isaiah, and Romans.   My husband also treated us to his favorite poet, Kipling.  There’s nothing quite like sitting in front of the fire listening to Kipling being read aloud.

Watching: 

  • The Stratford Adventure, about the beginning of the Stratford festival, to tie in with Pegeen and the Pilgrim.
  • The Nile: Lifeblood of Egypt, a documentary that treats Bible stories matter-of-factly and assumes they are true.
  • Planet Earth: Grasslands, another one of the BBC’s outstanding nature documentaries.
  • Miss 15 has been watching Top Gear.

Recommended Links:

As winter approaches, we can learn a lot from the Norwegians who stay cheerful during their long, dark months.

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This post is linked to Kris’s Weekly Wrap Up and Finishing Strong.

Posted in: Weekly Wrap Up.

Review: The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor

Dec 3rd, 2015
by Annie Kate.
4 comments

the first fossil hunters

Every once in a while I encounter a book that opens up a whole new world.  The First Fossil Hunters:  Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times by Adrienne Mayor is one of these.  As someone interested in the history of science, I know that ancient Greek philosphers had noticed fossilized seashells on the mountains and concluded that the are must have been under water before.

I was completely unaware, however, that the area around the Mediterranean and into Asia is replete with beds of the most enormous mammalian fossils. Did you know that the ancients not only knew about fossils, but also collected them, studied them, wrote about them, put them in their artwork, made myths about them, and devoted them to their gods?  Did you know that there was an ancient ivory trade (perhaps such as Solomon engaged in) based on the tusks from fossil beds?   Would you have imagined that the dark Egyptian god Set had two temples full of small black fossils?

Why are these things not common knowledge?  Perhaps because the philosophers of classical times, the ones people study, preferred to focus on classifying what was normal and normative.  Perhaps it is because those who are interested in the more obscure documents of those days are not usually interested in or knowledgeable about paleontology.  Certainly it is partly because of the modern illusion that we are more intelligent than the ancients and that true scholarship began with us.  Whatever the cause is, Adrienne Mayor has presented and interpreted a wealth of data that will enlighten our view of ancient paleontology.

The First Fossil Hunters begins with a discussion of griffins, mythical creatures that guard gold.  Mayor shows how similar they are to protoceratops which lived in the area of gold-mines and whose fossilized bones are everywhere in that desolate area.  Now, it turns out that traders travelled to this area in the era when griffins became popular in Greece.  Thus the author suggests that the concept of griffins was based on ancient bones.  Without Mayor’s precondition that such animals were extinct long before humans existed, and based on how realistically griffins were portrayed in Greek art and writing as well as in other Asian archeological finds, one might even speculate that some of the stories were based on eye-witness accounts of these fearsome creatures.

The rest of the book discusses finds of enormous fossils, like the 10 foot coffin and skeleton that a smith, digging a well, discovered and quickly reburied and that was eventually stolen and taken to Troy as Orestes’ skeleton.  There are mammoths with 15 foot tusks.  There were femurs and scapulae (leg bones and shoulder blades) that were interpreted by the ancients as remains of human giants but that Mayor suggests were parts of mammoth or whale skeletons because humans just don’t get that large, and because people of the past might easily have confused them.  However, about the 15 foot human skeletons, the ancients said that of course people used to be that large.  How else could they have built the giant stone fortifications evident in various places?

These fossil finds were revered in ancient times.  The ones interpreted as giants and other creatures from mythology were sometimes kept in temples or were among the prize possessions of emperors and other wealthy ancients.  Smaller fossils were jewellery and curios and offerings.  They were buried with their owners, and most archeologists, not realizing their significance and completely unaware that these people could have owned fossils, may have ignored them as uninteresting extra bones.  In those days, fossils recently exposed by earthquakes, landslides, or erosion quickly became tourist destinations.  In fact, the monster’s face on the vase on the cover of the book, at the right—that monster looks like the realistic portrayal of a fossil according to paleontologists.

Mayor not only presents a detailed and utterly fascinating history of classical paleontology, but she also discusses the relationship of fossils to myth.  In fact, mythological locations of great battles between gods and giants coincide remarkably with fossil fields.  She also catalogues references to fossils in ancient literature, lists current paleontological finds for locales where the ancients observed giant remains, and explores possible reasons for the great philosophers’ silence about fossils.  She also discusses paleontological hoaxes and fraud, both intentional and due to ignorance, from the Roman era to the present and is convinced that many of the human giants are misinterpreted mammoths or were mammoths reburied with ancient weapons after having been disinterred earlier.

In this breakthrough book Mayor discusses so much, but always from the viewpoint that she is studying the reactions of humans thousands of years ago to creatures that had died millions of years ago.  I wonder how someone who is not constrained by those time scales would interpret her data.  To me, that question is endlessly fascinating.

This would be a great book for high school students interested in paleontology, mythical creatures, classical literature, or classical history, and could be combined with materials from creationist researchers (available at AIG and CMI) to open up a whole new world for your teens.

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This is the kind of book I would recommend for your teen’s science and math reading. 

This is yet another book in the in the 2015 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge and is also linked to Saturday Reviews, Booknificent Thursdays, Literacy Musings Monday, The Book Nook, Finishing Strong , Trivium Tuesdays.  

Disclosure: I borrowed this book from our library and am not compensated for this review.

Posted in: 52 Books in 52 Weeks, Reviews, Reviews: Nonfiction.
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Sharing a Weekly Blessing: Sermon Links

Dec 1st, 2015
by Annie Kate.
6 comments

It took me just a few clicks of the mouse on my elderly friend’s computer and then he discovered the treasure he had been longing for.  He sat back with his gentle smile spread full across his face and said to his wife in a voice of deep satisfaction, “The Lord will provide.  In his own good time.”

What was it that gave this dear couple so much joy?

Sermon links.  Just simple audio sermon links.

When one is old and travel is difficult one misses so much that the rest of us take for granted, and attending their own church is what this couple missed.

So when he heard the beginning of a sermon, my friend was overjoyed.  “The Lord will provide.  In his own good time.”

For me it was an awe-inspiring moment, witnessing what was so obviously an answer to prayer and great longing.

Later it occurred to me that some of you, my dear readers, may also share this longing.  In that spirit I share the same sermon links with you.  Just to clarify, there are usually two sermons a week, one based on a Bible passage and the other based on the 450-year old Heidelberg Catechism. The latter are lessons on different aspects of the gospel. They follow the catechism’s theme that our only comfort in life and death is that we belong to Jesus, and that we can understand what that means by exploring how great our sins actually are, how we were saved from them, and how to be thankful for that salvation.

Of course, if you have a Bible-believing church you ought to be there on Sundays if at all possible, but if you have no access to godly preaching, I pray that these sermons will bless you.

And please, please always remember:  You can and should read the Bible on your own regularly, too, whether or not you have a church home where God is honored and his Word is preached.  If this is a struggle for you, here are some tips to make Bible reading easier.

May God bless us all and keep us close to him.  May God bless all his faithful pastors throughout the world, and may he encourage those who feed their congregations spiritual junk food to do better.  Especially, may he provide real spiritual food for those whose pastors are not feeding them at all.

Posted in: Devotional, Reviews: Reformed, Sunday Thoughts.
Tagged: · · ·

Review: Writers to Read by Douglas Wilson

Nov 28th, 2015
by Annie Kate.
No comments yet

writers to read

Do you want to know what to read or what to encourage your teens to read?  Why not ask Douglas Wilson, reviewer of over 1600 books since 2008 according to GoodReads?  He generally has his head on straight and he loves to comment on what he puts into it.

In Writers to Read:  9 Names that Belong on Your Bookshelf, Wilson recommends eight modern authors who have made him what he is, as well as one whom he has formed.  Some of these are to be expected:  Chesterton, Lewis, Tolkien, Eliot, and, for a very different reason, his son Nate.  Other good choices are Robinson and, apparently, Wodehouse.  I was introduced to Mencken, who sounds interesting, and reminded of Capon, whom I cannot stomach.

Wilson discusses the writers’ lives and work but more than that, he outlines their main thoughts, brings in quotations from other thinkers, and compares all that with biblical truth. Some of these comments are worth gold.  Furthermore, I was introduced to a wide array of Wilson’s ideas about all sorts of things and those are always thought-provoking.

As Wilson himself admits, he is so influenced by the Inklings that he cannot even see how great the influence is.  I would say that these giants have formed him and led to his appreciation of fantasy, his worship of myth, and his summary of the Bible’s story as “Slay the dragon, get the girl.”   Since our North American world, both secular and Christian, is so dependent on the ideas of Tolkien, Lewis, and others, it was good to read about their lives, writings, and faith from a disciple’s point of view.

For some reason, this part of the book raised strong emotions in me.  Having grown up completely outside the Inkling tradition, I am irritated by their myths and fantasies.  Life itself is interesting enough to write about without using myth and fantasy; neither of these is necessary for either faith or literary excellence.  Wilson would counter that they make both so much richer.  I would suggest that is an illusion, one he cannot escape because of his background, because systems of myth and fantasy distract from the mundane solidity of real life which is, in its own way, infinitely richer, more joyous, more heart-rending, and closer to truth.

On the other hand, Wilson’s insights into many things, from cabbages to kings, were fascinating and left me with much to chew on.

One thought that was especially a propos was this one:  Modern man has an insatiable lust to interfere with ordinary things.  Although Wilson meant it entirely differently, that simple sentence sums up my problems with the fantasy writing he so admires.

On an entirely different level, Wilson does appreciate real life in all its daily realness, especially the words God has so graciously given us, and food.  Of words, he says, “If words are our weapons, then we need to train ourselves in the use of them.”  Of food, well, there is a long section about the spiritual foolishness of food fussers and the joy of adding butter.

And here are some more thoughts:

Pessimism is not due to the hard things, but to a lack of joy in the good things.  (Perhaps that is why Ann Voskamp’s search for gratitude lifted her above tragedy.)

A sense of poetry is at the bottom of all sound prose. (This is undeniably true, and it is also at the bottom of all good science.)

Journalism used to be about afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, taking over the role of an ineffective pulpit.  (I really want to research that concept a bit more.)

Defeat is no refutation.  All the good guys go down, but that does not mean they were wrong.  (This, in opposition to the deadly silliness of the prosperity gospel.)

He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom. (This is the reason why I, a scientist, refuse to do even flower dissections in our homeschool, but encourage observing living plants and animals. The greatest miracle is not in how something is formed, although that is amazing, but in how it lives.)

The central point of food is not what you are eating but whom you are eating with…and that influences the thought you put into cooking. (This is obvious to me, but not at all to my family.)

We never recognize hubris in ourselves.  (Not even Wilson.  Not even me.  Nor you.  And that is one of the reasons why we live in community, why we read, talk, review books, and turn to the Bible over and over with the prayer that God will open our eyes.)

Do I recommend this book?  If you love the authors mentioned, absolutely.  You will see them with fresh eyes.  If you want to understand the North American evangelical fantasy scene or the classical education literary scene, yes.  This book is a good starting point.  If you want to learn more about some worthwhile authors, or if you enjoy Wilson’s writing and respect his opinions, absolutely.  You will not be disappointed.

Does Writers to Read have any place in your homeschool?  Because of its insights into literature, writing, and our place in this culture, teens who love reading, writing, or thinking would benefit from it.  Furthermore, if your teens are considering studying English at university, this book and the one mentioned below are essential.  For practical and immediate use in the average homeschool, however, Wilson’s wife Nancy’s short guide to American literature, Reading with Purpose, (link to my review) would be more helpful as a curriculum guide.

Note:  After reading his father’s recommendation, I tried Nathan Wilson’s books again.  Leepike Ridge was good.  I intensely disliked 100 Cupboards, but if your children read fantasy this series is probably better than most.  And his books for adults, well, they could use a bit more living.  Do watch for this writer a few decades down the road, though.

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This is yet another book in the in the 2015 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge and is also linked to Saturday Reviews, Booknificent Thursdays, Literacy Musings Monday, The Book Nook, Finishing Strong , Trivium Tuesdays.  

Disclosure: A review ebook was provided by Crossway and Beyond the Page.

Posted in: 52 Books in 52 Weeks, Reviews, Reviews: Nonfiction, Reviews: Reformed.
Tagged: · · · · · · ·

Now Thank We All Our God

Nov 26th, 2015
by Annie Kate.
1 comment

In the middle of the night this song entered my heart:

Now thank we all our God,
with heart and hands and voices,
who wondrous things has done,
in whom this world rejoices;
who from our mothers’ arms
has blessed us on our way
with countless gifts of love,
and still is ours today.

Since so many of you are celebrating Thanksgiving today, I wanted to share it with you.  Happy Thanksgiving Day!

The rest of the lyrics, the music, and a piano score are available online.

Posted in: Devotional, Quotations.

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