Archives

A Kid’s Eye View

Aug25

Hi! This is the Optimistic Idealistic Drama Queen, aka Brown Bear Daughter (age 11). Since it’s Take Your Kids To Blog Day, I’m here! Okay, so I just finished a book called Open Your Eyes: Extraordinary Experiences in Faraway Places. This is my review for it.

First of all, I have to explain. This book is made up of stories by authors about themselves. Nonfiction. I am usually not too interested in nonfiction, but as this was a school book, I didn’t have much of a choice. I actually thought it would be interesting, however, when I first looked at the jacket blurb.
Anyways . . . the authors who wrote the book are M.T. Anderson, Piper Dellums, Jean Fritz, Kathleen Krull, Lois Lowry, Harry Mazer, Susie Morgenstern, Elizabeth Partridge, Katherine Paterson, and Graham Salisbury.
I don’t want to give too much away, but I have to say that my favorite story was the one written by Jean Fritz. It was about her, as a preteen, in China where she spent most of the first thirteen years of her life as a missionary kid. I was especially interested in it because she was almost my age throughout most of the story.
It had a bit of language in it, but I kind of had to ignore those parts. Part of why I really liked it was because it was a book with lots of different stories, and it was not just one book. It was impossible to get bored with it because everyday I would start a new story, and then, if I had been bored before, I would get interested again.
Actually, I had only heard of a couple of these people before I read the book. The only authors I recognized were Jean Fritz, and Katherine Paterson.
Okay, I have to go! You should take advantage of reading a kid’s point of view of a book. Bye.

More Maps, More Globes

Aug21

In our second week of school, we’ll be using the following resources:

Music:
Johann Sebastian Bach—Brandenburg Concertos

Mission Study:
1. Window on the World: Pygmies
2. WotW; Vagla
3. WotW: Wodaabe
4. WotW: Republlic of Guinea

Poems: Marvelous Math—Lee Bennett Hopkins

Science:
History of Mathematics

Nonfiction Read Aloud:
The Book of Where, or How to Be Naturally Geographic–Bell. The urchins are really enjoying the projects and information in this book, a part of the Brown Paper School series. I recommend the entire series, brown paper-covered books on a variety of subjects including music and sounds, backyard animals, and money-making ideas for kids, just to name a few.

Fiction Read Alouds:
Mr. Popper’s Penguins—Atwater. I’m reading this story to Betsy-Bee and Z-Baby. We think it might be a bad idea to keep a penguin in your icebox.
The Boy Who Sailed Around the World–Graham This book is an abridged “youth edition” of the original book by Robin Graham that tells about his solo sailing trip around the world. He began the trip from California at the age of sixteen and and finished five years and more than 30,000 miles later in the same place he started.

Elementary Readers:
Adrift—Baillie
Explorers: From Columbus to Armstrong—Everett
Explorers Who Got Lost—Dreher
They Put Out to Sea–Duvoisin

Other Books:
Sebastian Bach, the Boy from Thuringia–Wheeler This book is out of print, not available in the Houston Library system, and the used copies I’ve found on the internet are a bit pricey. So we may not get to read it this week, but I’d certainly like to own a copy of this biography and the others in the series by Opal Wheeler and Sybil Deucher.

Movies:
Shackleton This A & E program stars Kenneth Branagh as Ernest Shackleton, the famous Antarctic explorer.

Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon by Dhan Gopal Mukerji

Aug16

If you’re interested in carrier pigeons, or pet birds, or India, or birds used in war, this Newbery award book from 1928 might just fit the bill. Yes, it’s somewhat dated in style and content. Yes, the first half of the book is a nature story reminiscent of Jean Craighead George’s books such as The Other Side of the Mountain, and the second half changes focus and deals with themes of fear, war, and religion. Yes, the narration jumps back and forth from the boy who owns and trains the pigeon to Gay-Neck himself telling his own story by means of “the grammar of fancy and the dictionary of imagination.” Yes, its audience would probably be limited, but I think there are some children and adults, especially nature lovers and bird lovers, who would really like this book.

Dhan Gopal Mukerji was born near Calcutta in 1890 and came to the United States at the age of nineteen. So, I’m fairly sure he gets the atmosphere of life for a boy in early twentieth century India. Mukerji wrote other nature stories, including Kari the Elephant and Hari the Jungle Lad. In Gay-Neck, Mukerji gives a lot of information about pigeons and about training pigeons, and he imparts that information by means of a fascinating story of the adventures of one particular pigeon, Gay-Neck or Chitra-griva.

The descriptions of the pigeons’ defense against their enemies, eagles and hawks, and of their capacity to deliver messages even in the midst of battle are detailed enough to make the reader feel as if he could go out, purchase a pigeon, and begin training tomorrow. And it sounds like fun. As an adult and a non-animal lover, I’m sure it’s not that simple, but don’t be surprised if a child, after reading this book, wants his own bird to train and watch and admire.

Gay-neck is admirable. Even when he gives in to fear after a deadly encounter with a predatory hawk, and again after his war experiences, Gay-Neck is able to make a comeback. “Love for his mate and the change of place and climate healed him of fear, that most fell disease.”

The story does take place in India, and it’s filled with lamas and monks and Hindu or Buddhist prayer and meditation. If that’s going to bother you or confuse your child, but you still want a book about training pigeons or about India, try something else. However, if you can appreciate the story as a picture of another place and another time, a vivid portrait of a boy and his pet bird, and a good imaginary tale of India and its culture and a childhood in the Indian countryside, you should enjoy this book

Gay-Neck is a good homeschool book. It would make a fun read aloud for children who haven’t been spoiled by too much action in TV and movies. Gay-Neck has lots of action, war and predators and natural disasters, but the reader or listener must have an imagination to appreciate the story. Gay-Neck would be good to read during a science study of birds or ecosystems, or as we’re doing, during a study of India and its culture. The boy in the story spends most of his time with his pigeons, caring for them and training them, and he learns a great deal about birds and about communication and about fear and courage. I can see a homeschooled child making the raising of pigeons a cross-curricular project and learning more than just how to train birds, too.

Finally, I leave you with a sample of Mukerji’s observations on nature, especially animal life:

I thought, “The buffalo that in nature looks healthy and silken, in a zoo is a mangy creature with matted mane and dirty skin. Can those who see buffalo in captivity ever conceive how beautiful they can be? What a pity that most young people instead of seeing one animal in nature–which is worth a hundred in any zoo–must derive their knowledge of God’s creatures from their appearance in prisons! If we cannot perceive any right proportion of man’s moral nature by looking at prisoners in a jail, how do we manage to think that we know all about an animal by gazing at him penned in a cage?”

Maps and Globes, or On the Road Again

Aug13

We start school tomorrow morning. I’m ready. The urchins have been alternating all day long between asking if they could watch TV and asking for a snack. I’m ready for some structure and scheduling and plans and . . .

Let’s play school for a while. I’ll get tired of that eventually, too. But for now school days, merry old golden rule days, sound really appealing.



Around the World is the theme for Semicolon School this year, and our first week’s theme is Maps and Globes.

Here’s the basic plan for this week:

Music:
Antonio Vivaldi—Four Seasons
Mission Study:
1. Window on the World: Missionary Kids
2. WotW: Children of the Streets
3. WotW: Gypsies
4. WotW: Navahos
5. WotW: Refugees
Poems:
Spectacular Science—Lee Bennett Hopkins
Science Theme:
What Is Science?
Nonfiction Read Alouds:
The Book of Where, or How to Be Naturally Geographic–Bell
Fiction Read Alouds:
Mr. Popper’s Penguins—Atwater
The Boy Who Sailed Around the World Alone–Graham
Picture Books:
Mapping Penny’s World—Leedy
Somewhere in the World Right Now—Schult
How To Make an Apple Pie and See the World–Priceman
Elementary Readers: (We won’t read all these this week, but the sixth grader and the fourth grader get to chooose one each. Brown Bear Daughter chose Open Your Eyes, a collection of adventure stories, and Karate Kid chose Ghost in the Noonday Sun, a pirate story.)
Windcatcher—Avi
Ghost in the Noonday Sun—Fleischman
Open Your Eyes–Davis
Other Books:
Wild Places (Usborne)
Maps and Globes—Knowlton
Games of Many Nations–Harbin
Movies:
March of the Penguins
Eight Below Actually, we already watched this movie, and I thought it was a good family movie, It’s about dogs and Antarctica, even though I’m not an animal person (how many times have I written that?), I really enjoyed the movie.

In addition to this list of resources, we’ll be doing math (Miquon and Saxon) and grammar (Dailygrams and Easy Grammar) and handwriting (cheap practice books). And we have a family Bible reading and prayer time each morning. And soon they all start outside classes at co-op and dance and drama and piano and karate and Spanish and an English/history class for the tenth grader. If that sounds way too busy, it is, but we don’t ALL do all those things, and I do have eight children after all.

Oh, I almost forgot I have to send two of them to college next week. Yes, we really are on the school bus road again.

Mission to Cathay by Madeleine Polland

Aug6

Mission to Cathay tells the fictionalized story of Father Matteo Ricci, the first Western Christian missionary to enter mainland China. In 1583, Father Ricci gained permission to build a mission in Suiching in southern China near Canton. He stayed in Suiching until 1589 when he was expelled by a hostile government official. After that, he travelled to other cities in China and eventually had an audience withe Emperor in Peking. Father Ricci stayed in China until his death, and he was honored with a state funeral by order of the Emperor.

The book covers only the first few years of Father Ricci’s stay in Suiching from the point of view of a servant boy with a mysterious past. With only the name Boy and no family that he knows about, the servant becomes a part of the family of the Lord of Heaven, although his Chinese mind is far from understanding what it means to be in the family of God through Christ. Father Ricci tries to comunicate the gospel to the Chinese by becoming a part of their culture, but he fears losing himself in vast and ancient land. Anothe subplot involves Boy meeting a mysterious boy named Chang with a secret so perilous that it could endanger the entire Christian mission to China.

The ending to this book and the solution to all the mysterious occurences was too easily deciphered from all the clues that were rather obviously embedded in the story. However, it might not be as obvious to elementary age children. I did enjoy the pieces of Chinese history and culture that were a part of the story. This book would make a good read aloud for a unit study on China or Chinese or world history.

Behind the Burqa

Jan31

The full title is Behind the Burqa: Our Life in Afghanistan and How We Escaped to Freedom by “Sulima” and “Hala” as told to Batya Swift Yasgur. I’ll do a quick review in light of the fact that this book is propaganda, not in a bad sense, but propaganda nevertheless. The purpose of the book is to “anger you, frighten you, and ultimately, inspire you with the compelling and suspenseful stories of these women.” The author wants you and me to care about the plight of Afghan women and about the difficulties of illegal immigrants who are seeking asylum in this country, and she even includes an appendix at the end of the book on “how you can help” with ideas, addresses, and websites for those who want to do something in response to the stories in the book.

I already find that I care just as much or more about what is happening to the people, especially the women and children, of Afghanistan as I do about Iraq. I would say that reading The Kite Runner last year was responsible for bringing my interest in Afghanistan to the surface. So after seeing Behind the Burqa in the bookstore, I was interested in reading this account of two sisters’ lives in Soviet and Taliban ruled Afghanistan and of their escape to the United States. My evaluation: the book is good, well-written, and accomplishes the purpose the author set out to accomplish. I did come away from the book wanting to do something to help those who flee to the U.S. to escape persecution only to be trapped inside our immigration system. I’m not sure what that “something” will be yet, but the appendix again suggests several websites to go to for more information about helping both Afghanistan and asylum seekers in the U.S. I don’t know enough about them to recommend all these organizations, but if you are interested, I would suggest you check out the websites for yourself.

Women for Afghan Women
Equality NowEquality Now
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service
Lawyers Committee for Human Rights
Physicians for Human Rights
Hebrew Immigration and Aid Society

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born October 27th

Oct27

James Cook, b. 1728. Famous English sea captain and explorer, he discovered the Hawaiian Islands and was killed in Hawaii on February 14, 1779. He also was the first European to visit New Zealand while looking for a southern continent that was believed to exist in order to keep the earth in balance. This book sounds interesting: Explorations of Captain James Cook in the Pacific As Told by Selections of His Own Journals, 1768-1779 by James Cook and edited by A. Grenfell Price. Another one for The List.

Theodore Roosevelt, b. 1858. He was the 26th president of the United States and my favorite. He was the first president to ride in an automobile, the first to submerge in a submarine, and the first to fly in an airplane. TR quotes:

“For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.”
“There are two things that I want you to make up your minds to: first, that you are going to have a good time as long as you live – I have no use for the sour-faced man – and next, that you are going to do something worthwhile, that you are going to work hard and do the things you set out to do.”
“Don’t hit at all if you can help it; don’t hit a man if you can possibly avoid it; but if you do hit him, put him to sleep.”
“I don’t think any President ever enjoyed himself more than I did. Moreover, I don’t think any ex-President ever enjoyed himself more.”

I think Teddy Roosevelt is so much fun to read about because he did enjoy thoroughly whatever he did. It’s a trait I could afford to emulate more often.

Dylan Thomas, b. 1914. Poem in October was written in celebration of the poet’s own thirtieth birthday.
“It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore . . .”

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Jun28

The Kite Runner is set initially in Afghanistan, and it’s a tale of father and son and of betrayal and forgiveness. Amir, the protagonist and narrator, is the son of a wealthy Afghan businessman, while his best friend, Hassan, is a Hazara and a servant. I learned from reading the book that the Hazaras are an ethnic group within Afghanistan and that they are looked down upon because they are Shi’ite Muslims rather than Sunni and because of their ethnicity and poverty. Because Amir and his father do not understand one another and because family secrets poison the atmosphere in their home, Amir escapes into a world of books. He also spends a lot of time playing with his servant/friend Hassan, and it is Hassan who defends Amir when the two encounter bullies or other difficulties. Amir, writing this story from the vantage point of adulthood, is ashamed of the way he used and depended upon Hassan, and he is especially ashamed of one incident that happened when Amir was twelve years old and that, he says, changed his life forever.

“I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.” So Amir begins his story. The rest of the novel is a sort of quest for atonement and forgiveness. Even though others forgive Amir for his weakness and cowardice as a twelve year old boy, Amir canot forgive himself until he is called upon to do something dangerous to atone for his sin. Even when he gets himself almost killed in a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Amir cannot remove all the consequences of his misdeeds. He can only live with what he has done and try to see glimpses of hope.

This novel is Dr. Khaled Hosseini’s first, and it was number seven at Amazon when I checked tonight. Pretty good for a first time novelist. His description of growing up in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion and before the Taliban features boys running the streets freely, hurling pebbles at passing goats, and kite-fighting. Kite-fighting was a popular sport in prewar Afghanistan, and Amir and Hassan work together to become the best kite flyers in the city. Hassan has a further talent: he is the best kite runner, hence the title of the novel. A kite runner retrieves the fallen kite of an opponent, and his reward is to hang the kite, or perhaps many kites, on a wall as a trophy, a reminder of his triumph. Hassan runs the kites–and gives them to Amir, and then he is called upon to give much more than just kites. Later, Amir must repay Hassan’s courage and selflessness with matching courage.

Another significant role reversal takes place in the novel, too. In Afghanistan, Amir’s father, Baba, is a strong man, respected, even beloved. Amir feels he can never live up to his father’s reputation nor his expectations. When the two men immigrate to the United States, Amir slowly becomes the strong one. He says of his father that he liked the idea of living in America, but actually living there gave him an ulcer. Amir seems not to realize that his strong, self-sufficient father is now dependent on him. Such changes do happen so slowly that we are surprised by them. Hosseini does a good job of showing this transition from boy to man as it occurs—in fits and starts, almost imperceptibly.

Excellent novel, highly recommended. This one and Acts of Faith are both on my A list for this year. I’ve been blessed to read several good recently published fiction books lately. Are the selections from the publishers improving? This book would make a great movie, but it may be too politically incorrect for Hollywood. The Muslims in the book are a mixed lot, some good, some bad, and the Taliban-types are totally evil.

Acts of Faith, Part 2

Jun28

I wrote something about my initial impressions of this book a few days ago, and lo, and behold, the WORLD magazine that came in the mail today has an interview with Philip Caputo, the author. To continue my thoughts on the book, as I promised, here’s another quote:

The successful capitalist is successful because he has no love in his heart, Fitzhugh, thought, returning to his hut from a volleyball game. He has only the love of success. He devotes himself to work work work instead of to a woman loved with all his soul. He attempts to fill the hollow in his heart with the accumulation of wealth and what it buys, whether things or power or both; but wealth, things, and power fill it only for the moment, as water does the belly of a hungry man. The heart is empty once again, and its cravings drive him to acquire more; yet he is never gratified.

Sounds very Biblical, doesn’t it? Fitzhugh is the flawed hero of the book, and he does see the emptiness of unprincipled blind belief in a Cause and hypocrisy in the name of humanitarianism. However, his salvation is, of course, found in the love of a good woman and in the creation of a family. In the WORLD interview, Caputo says that “the theme in Acts of Faith is how faith, whether it is religious or a belief in some secular ideology or cause, can curdle into fanaticism.” This being the chosen theme, all the believers in the book do “curdle”, turn into the antithesis of believers in goodness and righteousness. And there but for the grace of God go I. What the book doesn’t show is any real hope for redemption and forgiveness.

But what we become, Fitzhugh thinks, is what we have been all along. To outward appearances, each of us is a half truth. The self we present to the world conceals a clandestine self that awaits its time to come out. Africa had not changed Quinette. It had merely provided the right circumstances and the right climate for her pretty chrysalis to pop open and reveal the creature within. To see the whole truth of oneself is also a redemption of sorts. . . . Again, he knew only what he wanted to believe, and he wanted to believe redemption was possible.

Acts of Faith reveals human sinfulness in a particularly intriguing and relevant story. However, seeing one’s own depravity is only the beginning of salvation, and by itself that kind of self-revelation can lead to despair instead of redemption.

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man’s all. For God will bring every work into judgement, including every secret thing, whether good or evil. Ecclesiastes 12:13-14

Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya

Feb28

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live. –Coleridge

I read this book last week and thought it gave a beautiful, but very sad, picture of life in India for many people. It’s the story of a poor family, a fourth daughter who, because she has no dowry, cannot marry well but must settle for marriage to a landless tenant farmer who brings her home to a mud hut he built himself. Fortunately for the girl, Rukmani, her husband Nathan is “poor in everything but in love and care for me, his wife, whom he took at the age of twelve.”
Rukmani narrates the story in first person, telling of the birth of her daughter, the long wait during which the couple think they will have no more children, and then the birth of her five sons. The village where the family lives is on the edge of poverty and starvation; a bad year with too much rain or too little rain will push Rukmani’s family over the edge. Change and new economic oportunities come to the village; however, these new ideas and possibilities are full of danger too, for peasants who have nothing in reserve and are unable or unwilling to move with the times.
I wrote about a month ago about some of my favorite fantasy worlds. These fantasy worlds were first encountered on the pages of books. Then, there are historical and sociological worlds that I visit mostly in books, too. Finally, there is the actual world. I’ve never been to India or China or South America, but I have a picture of what life in those lands is (or was) like–again, from books. I think that Nectar in a Sieve, first published in 1954, will become a large part of my picture of India, along with missionary stories, the young man I met a few years ago at Baptist World Alliance Youth Conference, and other sources, such as the women I see at the grocery store here in Clear Lake dressed in saris.
Warning: The book has a bittersweet ending, but it’s realistic without being hopeless and depressing. Excellent.
These are some of my favorite books that have given me a picture of the world. Most of them are fiction.
Around the world in books:
South Africa: Cry, the Beloved Country and Too Late the Phalarope both by Alan Paton
India: Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan
China: Imperial Woman by Pearl S.Buck, The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang
Antarctica: Troubling a Star by Madeleine L’Engle
The Netherlands: The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
England (Yorkshire): All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
Lebanon: Alice by ? Doerr
Russia: The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig (And, of course, Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, although they’re more historical)
Israel: Exodus by Leon Uris
Hawaii: Hawaii by James Michener

For some of these places, all my ideas about the culture come from the book I listed. For others, I am certainly indebted to the book for most of my information. Can you suggest any books that capture the culture and living conditions of a country in either fiction or biography? I do prefer and learn more from stories.