One Thousand Gifts

Today, a whole list of gifts which I've neglected to post for the past two months. Make yourself a cup of tea if you intend to read the whole list!

302. Affirmation.

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303. Godly friends for My Girl.

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304. A life of miracles, for whom we ask for continued miracles.

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305. Challenges to do hard things.

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306. Healing power of prayer.

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307. Corporate prayer's beauty.

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308. Friends.

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309. Eye contact.

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310. E.

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311. L.

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312. S.

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313. N.

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314. J.

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315. D.

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316. S.

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317. E.

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318. L and A.

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319. C.

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320. R.

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321. You love me.

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322. Working through difficulties.

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323. Questions that will be answered.

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324. Washing machine.

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325. Weight lifting from my heart.

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326. Blue Jay up close.

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327. Prayer to the God Who Hears.

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328. Wisdom in community.

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329. Painful moments that produce growth.

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330. Eyes to see the Gifts.

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331. Your patience with me.

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332. Challenges that make me face my sin.

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333. Fears overcome.

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334. Sioux Lookout: challenging me to do things that I'd normally shy away from.

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335. Two weeks of no meal preparation.

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336. Loving care for my children each day.

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337. Impressive excavation.

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338. Nearby playground.

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339. People who want me, us, to succeed.

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340. Old friends.

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341. New friends and acquaintances.

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342. Worldwide ministries.

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343. Beautiful weather today.

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344. Al fresco meals.

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345. Affirmation of a call to obedience.

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346. Moments of isolation.

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347. Questions.

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348. Body of believers.

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349. Big needs that push us into Your arms.

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350. Assurance that You are the Great Physician.

To see my complete list of One Thousand Gifts, click here.

A New Link

Sadly, it looks like LindaFay is no longer going to be blogging at Higher Up and Further In. (I'm not sure if this is a temporary stop or a forever one; you'll have to ask her that.)

She has, however, set up a website to help those getting started with a CM education. She calls it Charlotte Mason Help. You might like to check it out. It has links to articles she's written for Higher Up and Further In that relate to Charlotte Mason, as well as a history schedule for 12 years, yearly booklists, and weekly schedules for each year. She also has a link on her website to Leslie Noelani Laurio's modern English version of Charlotte Mason's volumes.

Art and Music Appreciation - Free plans available

Are you looking for a simple, prepared composer and artist study to use with your children? Barb at Harmony Art Mom has several such resources, and she has made one of them available free this summer! Here's what she says about it:

How would you like to have some relaxed plans for art and music appreciation this summer? I have pulled together six weeks' worth of ideas for you to use with your family. I have chosen an artist and a composer for you and put down some specific plans for listening, viewing, and follow-up for each.

I have packaged them all up into a neat little PDF for you to download for free.

The plans introduce the music of Felix Mendelssohn and the paintings of Claude Monet in this mini-unit. The plans also include every print I suggest and you can view them in the PDF, online, or you can print them out if you wish. I have created simple artist biography and composer biography notebook pages for you to print out as well.

To access the pdf, go to her blog post about the resource, and you'll find the link to click on. That will bring you to a Lulu page of ebooks, etc., that Barb has available, and the free summer art and music appreciation one is at the top of the list. (At least it was when I checked a minute ago!) From there you can download the ebook pdf onto your computer.

Spring Garden

Last fall The Ones I Love and I made our first venture into planting bulbs. My Girl and I spent a lengthy time at the local garden centre selecting a mix of tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths of various heights, colours, and blooming times. Then we went to work in the garden. We dug. We added new soil. And we buried those bulb in four different areas around our home: The little circular garden around our young maple in the front, the bed directly in front of the house, a small patch beside the front walk that has always looked scruffy, and in My Girl's garden in the back yard.

Within minutes of covering over those bulbs, the squirrels were out, doing their own digging! So we found some chicken wire and laid it over the bulb beds, pinning it in place with whatever we could find: sticks, tent pegs, etc. But by then we weren't sure how many bulbs were even left, as there was a big hole in My Girl's garden and several smaller ones in the front.

This spring we waited for the snow to melt, for the ground to soften, and for the first green tips to poke out of the ground. When we saw what was coming up, we were overjoyed! There were many little plants growing, and we were able to begin identifying them right away by the leaf shapes and sizes.

Given a bit of time, this is what our gardens held at one point of their production:

The bottom photo, at the tree base, is one of the many faces the little garden showed this spring. It went through a white and yellow phase, then this one with orangey-red added in, then the white and yellow were gone and replaced by purples other colours. I loved the changing colours of this particular bed, and, while the growth was a little spotty (thanks to the squirrels), I am pleased with the results of all our efforts in the fall.

Here is this year's boulevard garden, complete with several varieties of tomatoes, peppers, beans and peas:

We expanded it to double the size of last year's plot, so it's almost 4' long. Can't wait to see what it produces!

And in one of My Girl's emails to me while I was in North Carolina for the ChildLight USA Charlotte Mason conference earlier this month, she told me that the clematis had a blossom. Here's the photo she took of it that day:

I'm learning to enjoy gardening, but it's still a stretch because of my small knowledge base. I'm sticking with the basics and going from there.

Art With the Ancients

Have I mentioned before that we have The Best Art Teacher In The World? Not only is she an accomplished artist, but she is a creative teacher and homeschooling mom who follows a Charlotte Mason education with her own children. AND she is using a CM approach to teaching history and art in the art class my children attend with two other families once a month. AND she loves our children! AND she's willing to teach the children 'messy art techniques' that I take great pains to avoid at home!

Sandra was using Art Through Story, which combines world history and art instruction, and A Child's History of Art (Hillyer).

The year began with reading a story about the discovery of cave paintings in Lascaux, France, the children narrating the story onto pages with a print of a cave painting from Lascaux, and then producing their own cave art: the children crumpled large sheets of Kraft paper, spread them out, and then used pastels to depict animals that would have been seen in cave paintings.

That would have been thrilling enough for my children, but, being The Best Art Teacher In The World, Sandra kept the completed works at her home, backed them with cardboard, and stuffed them with newsprint to give them cave-wall like shape. When we came for class the next month, Sandra sent the children in pairs to her basement, complete with head mounted flashlight, to explore a nook which she had lined with the cave art of all 9 children! Did I mention that all the students LOVE Sandra? Who wouldn't?

Here are the cave paintings done by Little Man and My Girl, back in October:

Lion by Little Man

Beasts by My Girl

We then moved into Ancient Egypt, which we were also studying as a family in history. The Ones I Love were so pleased to have the things we were doing in school relate to art class, and having Sandra teaching them about the art of the Ancient Egyptians gave them another angle from which to view the culture.

Several classes were spent on Ancient Egypt. First they learned some of the style of the Egyptian art: bodies positioned in paintings to emphasize their role, use of colour and size and position to show perspective, etc.

The children learned about working with clay: low relief, high relief, techniques for working with clay, etc. And, of course, they got to create. Two examples of their high relief work are shown below.

Pyramid by My Girl

Sun by Little Man

Two classes of Ancient Egypt were spent working on the next project: masks. First the children shaped clay faces, getting more instruction in working with clay, shaping facial features (making nostrils was a favourite!) and so on. Then a frame of cardboard was made to depict the crown of Tutankhamen or Nefertiti. All those pieces were left with Sandra, who used papier mache to create the working masks*. In our second session the children painted the masks, following the design of Ancient Egyptian masks found in tombs and in art work from that era. Here are the finished products:

Pharaoh Tutankhamen by Little Man

Queen Nefertiti by My Girl

We are already making plans for next year's class, when we will dive into Ancient Greece and move on from there.

I am so thankful for the people God has placed in my life who can offer my children things I couldn't give them myself. Just over a year ago I barely knew Sandra, and in this short time she (and her family) has become a treasure in our lives! And did I mention that she's The Best Art Teacher In The World?

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*I do have to let you know here that Sandra's intention was to have the children do the papier mache themselves, but in February Sandra and her husband Tim had their 4th child, whose life was - and still is - quite fragile. Art class took a hiatus for a few months, and to enable this project to reach completion, Sandra papier mached all 9 masks herself!

Transformation

While I was in North Carolina, my backyard went from this:

to this:

Isn't that beautiful? (See me, in your mind's eye, smiling broadly?)

Dear Man and the rest of The Ones I Love worked hard to roto-til the backyard just before I left home, and then, while I was away they laid sod, put in pea gravel under the spider web, layered stone dust over the field stones that had been placed before I left, re-sanded the sand box, AND poured a new concrete floor in the garage. The concrete now extends several feet forward onto the driveway, the rest of which is gravel, so the children have a fantastic surface for ball bouncing, skipping, chalk, and more!

Here are a couple of the photos My Girl took of the process:

And one parting shot of the yard, just to leave you with a glowing impression of how wonderful my family is:

The Habit of Attention

I'm back from spending one entire week away from The Ones I Love to explore, with 150 other educators (school and homeschool), the educational philosophy and methodology of Charlotte Mason. It was, for the third year in a row, a highlight of my year!

While there were many things that I learned from being there and many things that were reaffirmed for me, there was one thing that really stood out for me as a weakness in myself: attending - the habit of attention, the discipline of self control.

In North Carolina I witnessed people who were busy with a hundred tasks, all important to the smooth running of the conference, completely stop what they were doing and give full attention to others who approached them with questions, needs, concerns. The individual person was more important to these over-tasked conference planners than any measurable occupations. Time and again, personal deadlines and quantifiable activities took a backseat to people. Those tasks got done, to be sure, but they were done around the needs of the people, rather than the people's needs being worked around the tasks.

I was humbled. I was ashamed.

I thought about The Ones I Love and the way I so often ask them to wait while I do my things, only give half an ear to the stories they want to share, put them off in a dozen different ways.

Here I am, wanting to develop in the little ones the habit of attention, and not only have I not been modelling it, I haven't even noticed that it wasn't there!

I had a long drive home from the conference, which I shared with two special friends, and in that drive I verbalized some things that I hope to be held accountable for.

The first (and maybe the easiest) is this:

I need to curb my time at the computer. It is one of the main distractions I have from The Ones I Love and from spending time with my Lord. I'm going to set a specific time for dealing with emails (and no checking outside of that time, no matter what exciting things I might be waiting for: if someone needs me urgently, they'll phone); I'm going to have a specific time for computer-based scheduling and record-keeping; and I'm going to completely eliminate games on the computer. In fact, just moments ago Dear Man 'hid' the games on my laptop, at my request, and removed all signs of them from the startup menu.

The rest of my reflections will have to wait until another, pre-scheduled computer time! For now, the children are tucked in bed and I have two appointments: one with my Dear Man, the other one with Jesus.