Our Week in Review

We started the week by going to see Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

It was delightful. At first I was expecting to be disappointed when I read the blurb just before the play started, but I needn't have worried. It was a great deal of fun and Shakespeare's theme was kept intact:

Please put aside your 'preconceptions' of what A Midsummer Night's Dream is all about. Join me as we travel to 'Athens Beach,' NSW, Australia in the mid 1960's. It is summer and wealthy celebrity Theseus, aka 'The Duke,' is about to wed his love Hippolyta... 
Debbie Smith, Director

This was our first week of Term 2 of both Ambleside Online Years 4 & 8 so time for a new artist. We are looking at the work of John William Waterhouse and 'Thisbe' who stars in both A Midsummer Night's Dream and also Bulfinches' Age of Fable, is the first of his paintings we'll be studying.

Thisbe by John William Waterhouse, 1909

Moozle continues to read through Fabre's Story Book of Science and I've been adding videos and other resources on Pinterest. We've done up to Chapter XXXI at the time of writing.

Some of Fabre's ideas are outdated and that's where other resources are very useful. The same goes for Madame How & Lady Why by Charles Kingsley (which I read to her) but I really like that both books are written in literary language. I've also posted some things we have used on Pinterest for that book. 

We included some history with our earth science studies this week:

I've been aware of a number of connections this week. I love it when this type of learning happens and one thing relates to another without me trying to make it all happen.

When Moozle finished reading Fabre's chapters on venom, vipers & scorpions, I started to explain that we don't treat snake bite now in the way he described. Then she started telling me Fabre said that 'no animals can shoot venom and harm us from a distance but in Hal and Roger (characters in the Willard Price adventure novels) there was a spitting cobra!'
Then she proceeded to tell me all about the African Mamba.

All my kids loved reading these books around the age of 8 to 10 years & they're great books to get boys reading.


 

They also love the Biggles books by W.E. Johns. I'm saying this because both series get mentioned regularly. Moozle hasn't read any of the Willard Price books for a while but she still remembers so much about the animals and natural phenomena described in the books. Biggles even came up after we'd read a chapter of Madame How & Lady Why - apparently Biggles had a mission which necessitated flying over an English moor or something to that effect...

Free Reading - Moozle's reading of choice has been Anne of the Island and Anne of Avonlea by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Bengy finished a biography of Billy Graham which he enjoyed and is now reading Jesus Among Other Gods by Ravi Zacharias, which he said is very good but requires a good deal of concentration. He picked up some lighter reading today when we paid an impromptu visit to a second hand book shop - The Saltzburg Connection by Helen MacInnes and a book in the Oregon Files series by Clive Cussler. He's read one book in this series & it was ok but I'd be cautious about some of the author's other books.

Read Aloud - I Can Jump Puddles by Alan Marshall. An Australian classic written in 1955 about the life of a young boy who contracts polio (Infantile Paralysis) in the early 1900's.

 Some cloud observations at sunset earlier in the week...

Nature Study - Insects with diversions into wedge-tailed eagles and emus, animals we have seen on our trips interstate

Reading The Story of Karrawingi the Emu by Leslie Rees to Moozle - excellent. Karrawingi had run ins with wedge-tailed eagles, black-breasted buzzards and a dingo.

An experiment on velocity...

My reading - just finished The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens; started Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and continuing with Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason.

 And 'furnishing my mind' with some poetry...

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

By William Butler Yeats ( 1865–1939)