Read Hettie’s Christmas Gift (doesn’t seem to be available through Amazon—I guess, because it’s Australian.)
We did this. This is another book to which I really enjoy returning. I love the fact that it provides a link between the northern hemisphere traditions that we read about, and our southern hemisphere reality.
Read Is That You, Father Christmas?
Read Wombat Divine
This is a family favourite:-) We read it a couple of times today, and I am sure we will read it many more times until it is put away:-)
Read Is It Christmas?
This is a book we got from the library last year, and it was so sweet that it was a family Christmas present on Christmas Day:-)
This year Puggle is still enjoying it, and Bilby is starting to point out features of it… she’s especially keen on the baby bear hanging from the Christmas tree:-)
Today we read Room for a Little One
Puggle and Bilby also made the rest of the gingerbread up… I’ve really enjoyed Bilby requesting that we ‘woll, woll!’
Today the task was to read The Secret of Saint Nicholas
This gave us a chance to catch up on our cooking:-) So while I put Bilby down for her nap, the boys baked:-)
We’ve just been reading The Magic Faraway Tree
When I chose Julie Vivas as our Picturebook Artist for this year, I requested a number of her books (that we didn’t have) from the library. Cuddle Time
I have to say, I’m delighted by it (enough that I’m thinking about getting it for one of the kids for Christmas!) Very simply, it’s the story of two children getting up in the morning. It makes use of a little repetition, and some gentle rhymes (in fact, gentle is probably a good description of it as a whole). The greatest joy for me thoguh, is that Julie Vivas’ beautiful illustrations show the two children as being very similar in size to my big kids:-) So it depicts waking up as being very like our house (on a good morning:-) )
This post is one that I thought would appeal to a number of my friends-list:-)
Puggle just came in to tell me that he’s water witching:-)
We’ve read Water Witcher
So he’s found an appropriate stick and has spent some (a small amount!) of time water witching—but now he’s put his special stick aside so he can ask Grandpa next time he sees him:-)
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I have read most of the first, and I will get through the rest one day!)
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (Loved this:-) The whole series:-) )
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (Enjoyed this far more than The Mayor of Casterbridge—but that wouldn’t be at all hard!)
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read an awful lot of them, but I know there are more I need to get to. Some I love, others I like, and others didn’t really appeal to me.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (I chose it for bookclub, and I still haven’t finished it yet:-( )
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot (I was given this for Christmas years ago, and I haven’t gotten to it yet.)
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (I can’t actually remember any details, but I do know I read it.)
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (I keep coming across references to this, so it’s getting to the time I’ll get around to it.)
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (Bookclub)
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Bookclub)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (I’m a big Anne fan:-) )
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (I had already read it, and then we read it for Bookclub.)
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (Read it in about year 10 and hated it with a passion.)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (We got it for Christmas a couple of years ago, but we’ve lent it to my father-in-law.)
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (Bookclub. I hated it. The following year I taught a year 11 english class, and someone else had already set the booklist so I had to teach it. By the time I finished doing so, I was far more appreciative!)
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (Hmm… I’m pretty sure I have, although, once again, I can’t recall any details.)
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Really enjoyed most of them.)
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (Haven’t read them in years, but I do have very fond memories.)
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (In French and English.)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Last year, a couple of weeks before his birthday, Puggle chose his cake. At the same time, he chose his cake for this year! And he has continued to be consistant in his choice (he’d flick through the cake book, and identify the Tipper Truck as “the cake I’m going to have for my fourth birthday”).
So he did:-)
The instructions were from the Children’s Birthday Cake Book
Break Week, Block 2, Boronia Term
We did do a lot of singing, and some cooking, but not a lot else:-( Have kind of kept going with all the music though, which has been good. Puggle’s started getting really regular in his enthusiasm for Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories
I’ve been following Sarah’s artistic journey at Handmade Homeschool (well, I was following it when she was Poppins… but she’s at HH now), so when I was at the library, I thought I’d look around the art/photography section for some ‘inspiring’ books (or at least attempt to browse… a Puggle is still only partially conducive to that!)
Puggle was reasonably obliging—and joined me in browsing:-) He had to bring home this book so he could learn to draw:-) This morning, he decided he was going to begin. He got out pencils and paper, opened the book to the first page—some information about drawing eyes. The first demonstration was a circle for a face with two dots for eyes, and a mouth. So that’s what he drew!
This is his first ever attempt at a person:-) (There are eyes, but they’re dots, and in light green so they’re a little hard to see.) Pretty good I thought:-) He was quite keen to post it to someone, but instead, turned over and drew more people:-)
Week 2, Block 1, Boronia Term
Language
Introduce phonograms ‘d’, ‘f’ (sandpaper letters and sand tray)
o mea Maria (Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary)
Amabo te (Please)
Frère Jacques
Viens! (Come)
English Studies
‘A Lost Paradise‘ from The Lilac Fairy Book Andrew Lang
‘Great Claus and Little Claus’ from The Complete Illustrated Stories Hans Christian Anderson
Narration: ‘The Frogs and the Ox‘, ‘The Dog, the Cock and the Fox‘, ‘Belling the Cat‘ from The Aesop for Children Ill. Milo Winter (He’s really a bit too young for Narration, so I’m mostly going to be keeping an ear out for re-tellings, or incorporation in play)
Recitation: Buckingham Palace A. A. Milne from When We Were Very Young
Art and Music
Folksong: The Drinking Gourd
Composer: Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Work: Scheherazade
Artist: Leonardo da Vinci
Work: Ginevra de’ Benci
Music: Loud/Soft (The Kodály Method 1 Lois Choksy) Hop Old Squirrel
Art: Watercolour
Painting a Wash (Art Ideas Fiona Watts)
by A. A. Milne
by Andrew Lang
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