Two of my more experienced homeschooling friends were talking recently about taking a more relaxed approach to school during Advent, and I decided to do the same. Actually, I had already been doing the same; I just decided not to feel guilty about it. I tried to think of one thing I ever learned in school in the two weeks before Christmas break and came up empty. So, then: here we slump relaxedly.
Yesterday morning we got a late start. I aim to start at nine, and I also aim to get all the floors clean on Monday mornings before school, and only one of those things was going to happen yesterday. I chose clean floors and we started at ten.
We sat down together, with the Christmas card boxes and my address book and the US map puzzle on the table, and while I finished addressing envelopes the boys made an alphabetical list of the US states. We did a little imaginary road tripping when they needed a nudge -- where would you end up if you went west from Iowa and north from Kansas? After the list-making and envelope-addressing were complete, Marty went through the stack and announced where each one was going while Alex kept a hash-mark tally of states and countries.
Here you can plug in your own data to create a graph, and that's what we did next. They entered their results and had some fun with funky colors and fonts, and then they emailed the finished Christmas Card Destinations pie graph to Dad at work.
We are on track to finish the first half of The Story of the World (vol. 4) before we break for Christmas; yesterday's reading was about World War I. On impulse I googled the Christmas Truce (I wasn't sure if I had the right WW). In one version of the story, the German and British troops alternated Christmas carols until the Brits began singing "O Come, All Ye Faithful." The Germans joined in, singing "Adeste Fideles." Coincidentally, last week's Latin lesson was "Adeste Fideles," with its handy assortment of plural imperatives. Be there! Come! See! I didn't really expect it to stick, but my oldest left the table singing the Latin words yesterday.
Usually I try to get to the library in advance to get books to pad out the information in SOTW. I hadn't done that this week, but I remembered that Rilla of Ingleside is all about the impact of WWI on the Blythe family and their neighbors. I pulled it off the shelf for Alex, who said, "You want me to read this? Maybe real school wouldn't be that bad." It is #8 in the series, which offends his systematic soul, and it has a really girly cover. He objects vehemently to reading it. He would complain less if I assigned him some Hegel, I think. I've agreed that he can bail if he gives it a fair trial and hates it. One chapter in, he gave it a negative 10,000 on a 1-10 scale. Two chapters later, it earned a positive 3. We'll see.
After a little break we read the Tomie de Paola book on Our Lady of Guadalupe and prayed the beginning of the rosary together. The boys sat down afterward to draw the Virgin of Guadalupe and got in a fight about art supplies. "No!" said the oldest. "You can't use my oil pastels. You'll blunt them!" I tried to mediate calmly, quelling the urge to turn away and beat my head against something hard. Slowly and painfully it emerged that the 6yo only wanted to draw a border with the oil pastels. Of his own volition, the 8yo said, "I'm sorry, Marty, I was kind of a jerk about that. Do you need any others besides purple and red?" I scooped up my jaw, which was somewhat the worse for its sudden smack against the floor, and we moved on.
We are finishing out the year with Revelation, a choice that worried me because there are many chunks of it that make me say, "Huh. I don't know what that means. Let's ask the Holy Spirit to help us with that one." I had hopes of finishing David Currie's book on eschatology before we started but it is sitting under the end table, helpless against marauding dust bunnies. In spite of my incomplete exegesis, the boys are eating it up. More! they say when I finish a chapter. Can't we read one more?
(You're not getting the wrong idea, are you? You're not envisioning them sitting reverently and hanging on my every word, are you? You have to imagine them squirming and poking each other and asking deliberately goofy questions -- and then asking for another chapter. They love the war stuff, and the improbable beasts.)
We folded laundry all together while we listened to this CD, the first seasonal music I've played. (Christmas is weeks away, see -- at least six weeks from now. I wouldn't want to get tired of the CDs we have.) I wanted to hear this hymn but I had forgotten how much I enjoy the whole disc. We decided to play outside instead of going to the Y, and I started a pot roast for dinner. While I was searing the meat and preheating the oven the smoke alarm went off (forgot to wrap the Springform pan in foil when I made the cake for Elwood's birthday).
How does that thing work? my oldest son wanted to know. I sent him here, and while he was on the computer I pulled Clown of God off the shelf to read to the middle boys. I love that book -- love the idea that any gift can be given gladly to God. Yesterday I even got through it without crying. Alex came to ask if he could read further on that same site, to find out about how laptops work.
Then there was cabbage-slicing and potato-mashing, and table-setting for the boys. After dinner there was dishwashing, and the big boys sat down to confer on their assignment: how was the Narnia movie different from the book? I was busy elsewhere and discovered later that they had only come up with one thing, **SPOILER ALERT** which was that the movie White Witch wore Aslan's mane in battle. (In the moment I thought this was a cool touch. Now it bugs me. I can't remember -- where does Lewis write about the scent of Aslan's mane? (Reminds me of the "aroma of Christ" passage from 2Cor.) Wouldn't that drive the WW crazy? Or maybe it was like the apple in the sixth book, which she ate even though she knew she'd pay for it forever. One thing I know: anyone who can change overnight from crazy cool dreadlocks to perfectly sleek has magical powers for sure. I loved her hair.)
Hm. I was going to write about today as well, because today was even more fun. But this is long and possibly boring, and my kitchen is still trashed from our project this morning and there are many many library books arranged artfully on the living room floor. And Pete fell asleep and would probably prefer horizontal in bed to slumped in the sling with his head leaning on my left wrist. Maybe tomorrow I'll write about today. LMK if you have strong opinions about boring vs. not-boring. G'night.
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