More on Books

A few days ago we visited a small local bookstore to find a First Communion gift for a friend of ours. I found a beautiful picture book on Mother Teresa written by Demi. We've enjoyed many of Demi's books of Chinese folktales, but I had never seen this book before. Then I told Arielle and Liana that they could each choose one book.

I rarely buy books except used ones from book fairs. There is no need--we have a great little library only a mile or so from our house, and what we can't find there we can order through the inter-county loan system. At home we have a collection of very special books. I always love when the girls receive books as gifts, especially if the gift-giver has written something in the front cover to one of the girls. But mostly, all the books the girls read are from the library.

My family never had much money when I was growing up but books were very important to my mother. In the small desert town where I lived as a child, there were no libraries or bookmobiles. That came later when we moved to Missouri. But we did have the Arrow Book Club at school. My mother allowed me to get as many as I wanted with the condition that I read every single one of them. I always had the largest stack on my desk when the orders were delivered to the classroom. I'm amazed by that now because I don't know how my mother paid for them all. I still remember some of the titles: The Shy Stegasaurus of Cricket Creek, Emily San (about Japan), and Elizabeth Blackwell, Woman Doctor. I still remember that new book smell and the pleasure of holding a crisp new paperback in my hands.

The girls were excited to actually buy a book and what fun they had choosing. They skipped over most of the modern series and then paused for some time over the non-fiction, picking up books on presidents and ancient Egypt. They examined the American Girl mysteries. Then Arielle discovered the shelves with the Newberry Medal winners. She found several she wanted, reading the back cover and exclaiming, "This looks good!" I reminded her only one book. We wrote down some titles that she could request from the library.

At home Liana had just finished her first chapter book, read silently rather than aloud to me. I encouraged her to choose another. She found Treasure Island, a Stepping Stones adapted classic and immediately decided that was the one. Arielle settled on Johnny Tremain, a book on the Revolutionary War. My girls love adventure!

Creative Writing

Liana's teaching time is long. Not because she is slow to learn; she is not. She has a very quick mind. But the style of learning that she enjoys and that is most effective for her is time-consuming. She loves the artsy-crafty things. She loves me to read her stories. She loves making up stories.

Yesterday her assignment for language arts was to write a paragraph on this topic: what would you do if you woke up and found out you were two inches tall. Liana sat down to write a rough draft, asking me how long it had to be and did she have to write in cursive because she HATES handwriting. She finished quickly, a sloppy job, with half the words misspelled. I encouraged her with a few questions to continue her story. This time she dictated to me while I wrote her words down. She went on and on since I was the one doing the writing. Then she looked at the paper and said, "Oh no, I'm going to have to copy all that!" So she didn't want to say anymore. I suggested she continue with her story while I typed it. She was excited about that. We went upstairs and she dictated a long, long story, full of detail and imagination.

Now I know she needs to learn to write neatly by hand. (Although that is a debatable idea among educators since computers now dominate our lives. On the other hand many homeschoolers believe daily copywork and penmanship are important.) But should I squelch her creativity by torturing her to handwrite her ideas on paper? I don't think so.

The answer is obvious to me as I write this. I need to teach her to type. Then her fingers can fly at the same speed as her lively brain.

Van Gogh Lapbook

We have been working on three lapbooks this year. Liana is working on one of birds and one of the orchestra. I will post pictures when they are complete. It's hard to describe a lapbook if you've never seen one. I'd call it an informational artistic display of learned material, small enough to hold on your lap. We use file folders and cardstock to create the "book." We glue in pictures copied from books or downloaded from the internet, and we cut out pictures from a great resource we have--a very old set of World Book Encyclopedias. I got these books free at a homeschool conference, and I specifically planned to use them for this purpose.

Liana immediately took to the idea of making a lapbook. She created the one on birds as a review of all the topics we covered this year and then the orchestra book was just her own idea because musical instruments greatly interest her. Arielle was more reluctant to make one. I gave her a choice from different subjects she's studied and she finally settled on Vincent Van Gogh. It's finally complete! Here is how she did it:

On the cover is a picture of one of Van Gogh's sunflower paintings. When the lapbook is opened, she has displayed several of his self-portraits and an accordian-fold time line of his life. On the flaps on either side are questions and answers. Inside the first page is a gallery of paintings. Then the next section is a written report about Van Gogh. I had given Arielle the option of making a lapbook OR writing a report in the conventional way of reviewing a subject. Still, she chose to write a mini-report anyway and then put it in her book. That's her style of learning.

Arielle also has a pocket with index cards with "fun facts about Vincent Van Gogh." We had some trouble finding maps of the different countries where Van Gogh lived because the individual maps are not to scale with each other. But she does have small maps of England, the Netherlands, and France marked with the important cities and corresponding events of his life.

Lapbooks are not Arielle's preferred way of learning, but I think she enjoyed making her book and it stretched her in a different direction and that was good for her.

Please share your ideas on lapbooks!

Poem about India

I promised Liana I would post the poem she wrote about India. She wrote it last fall when she was eight:

A Great Place

India is so very hot,
I have a sari that I bought.

We saw elephants in the street,
I thought it was very neat.

Gita was a girl I met,
She had an elephant for a pet.

The Taj Mahal is very nice,
After that we ate some rice.

The sitar is lovely to hear,
We wanted to get very near.

We saw girls dancing along,
I thought it was a pretty song.

Now it is time we must go home,
Gita my friend gave me a comb.

So I will remember her yet,
The nicest girl I ever met.

Arielle's Passions

Arielle's passion is people. From the time she was a baby, people fascinated her. In restaurants she would twist around in her high chair to study them. She was never fussy or bored in public places.

Arielle enjoys people. She has never been shy to join a group of children and has never been inhibited around strangers. She is quiet, but not timid. She watches and learns. When friends come to play, she has never been very interested in getting out toys, rather she wants to talk. She loves to hang out on the outskirts of the room when women are talking, seemingly fascinated by our conversation. Arielle is a communicator, verbal from a very early age. She likes to talk! She now has her own e-mail, carefully monitored by me. This has opened her world so she can connect with family members and friends across the country.

One summer the girls and I helped out at a day-care center for a week. Arielle discovered her very favorite of people--babies. She truly shone that week as she helped care for 1-year-olds. They delighted her and each day she came home with stories of the cute things they did.

Her love of children is evident when the grandkids are over. She is attentive and nurturing with the little ones. She will gladly give up a whole day to care for baby Laci. She is gentle and kind with 4-year-old Mattie and 5-year-old Lana. She is never impatient and never grows tired of them. And what a help she is to me!

Of course, her gift with children will carry her far in life. But how does being a people-person translate into our school day? Arielle is a very orderly person. She is methodical and conscientious. School work that doesn't really interest her is done quickly and accurately just to get it out of the way. But she thoroughly enjoys reading stories of her favorite topic--people! She is not a read-for-information kind of girl. She loves stories. Arielle is a child who would enjoy a homeschool co-op. Right now she doesn't have that, but I think it would be worth pursuing.

Last night we had a homeschooler's book fair at our church. Arielle was in her element--books and people! She and her friend wandered around talking with others they knew. I gave Arielle $5 to spend and she took such pleasure in choosing her books. She proudly told me she bought a total of 15 books with her money! Maybe she also has a talent for finding bargains.

Liana's Passions

Since Liana was very young she has a tendency to fixate on something that interests her--much more so than what most children do. At three, she amused herself by cutting confetti with a small pair of scissors while I taught Arielle's lessons. She literally cut for hours. This prepared her for her flannel board era. When she was four, Fred covered a wooden board with a scrap of pink fabric and Liana drew tiny figures of people, cut them out, carefully glued a strip of sandpaper to the back of each, and then created her imaginary world on the wood. At one time I counted her "people" and there were 67!

Liana became interested in musical instruments a couple of years ago. She spent all her Christmas and birthday money on acquiring different intruments. She bought an authentic snake-charmer's flute from a rare instrument store in Colorado and a Chinese bamboo flute from an importer in San Francisco. She has a miniature violin, hand-crafted by a man in Hong Kong. After a concert she attended, she became fascinated with the Irish whistle. This is a child who will sit quietly and listen to classical music. She will tell you her favorite composer is Vivaldi, but she recently heard Pachebel's Canon in D and frequently accesses it from our favorites in the computer.

Before she had written language skills, she "wrote" books. Oh, how many papers she stapled together to form pages for her stories. There were no written words but detailed illustrations, and she could tell you the elaborate tales as if she were actually reading words. Her interest in ancient cultures would be a springboard for her imaginary journeys. She passed through the Egyptians to the Native Americans to the Chinese and now she has settled on India. Since she has learned to sew, she spent her last dollar on silky embroidered fabric to make herself a sari and wears it most every day.

This is a child who has trouble sitting still for a spelling lesson or instruction in long division. She has sleep difficulties because she can't shut down her brain. But since I have made some adjustments in school, she truly is a homeschool mom's dream. She delights in learning (most things) and she is never bored. Television doesn't hold a candle to the much more fascinating stories happening right in her mind. As her mom and teacher I must give her the skills she needs to explore the world. Then she will soar!

Library Day

Once a week or more we go to the library. It's one of Arielle's favorite places. Mine too when I was a child. We didn't always have an accessible library in the towns I lived, so that made the trip even more special when one was available. I still remember the smell of books back then and the excitement of choosing one from the shelves. It would have been a book without a colorful cover or beautiful illustrations like children's books have now. But a good story to take me on a journey into another world was enough for me.

Arielle makes the rounds to her favorite shelves that hold fairy tales and folk stories from other lands, the Nancy Drew mysteries, magazines for young girls, or her favorite--historical fiction. Liana looks for books about musical instruments, art, or ancient civilizations. And of course ducks. The girls never want to leave, yet the longer we stay the stack of books to check out gets taller and taller. I go through the readers to find books to interest Liana. She is a very discriminate reader. Forget talking animal books, ones with TV characters, or even books about kids her age. No, she wants action, history, and foreign places. Once I thought I'd found the perfect book and even ordered it on-line from our inter-county loan service. It was called A Doll Named Dora Anne about a girl who's given a doll handed down from her grandmother. (I would have liked it when I was Liana's age.) Liana read it but it wasn't nearly as interesting to her as Escape North about Harriet Tubman or Ben Franklin's Big Shock.

I remember long ago coming home from the bookmobile on a hot, summer day. My mom and I would get a cold drink (no A/C back then) and curl up with a great story and read away the afternoon. Well, my mother probably had to stop reading way before she wanted to in order to cook dinner or care for the younger kids, but she would read as often and as much as she could and still does. She left a legacy and my children are following in her footsteps.

We're home from the library and the girls' chosen books are scattered on the carpet around them. The house is quiet as they read, lost in other worlds.