Wednesday 24 February 2021
The Castle on the Hill by Elizabeth Goudge (1941)
Friday 12 February 2021
Charlotte Mason Simple Spanish - a Curriculum for Young children
The author recommends the lessons be woven into your days, e.g. the poetry informal lesson
could be done during tea time, the challenge (replacing an English sentence with Spanish) when they wake up and so on.
For the early years, two lessons of five minutes a week where the child learns a very short song for a month through play and exploration is suggested.
For the formal lessons for Year 1, two lessons of ten minutes each week are recommended and one ten minute lesson a week for the poetry recital. In addition, a lesson of fifteen minutes a week for song study is suggested.
Audio links to Spanish music, stories, songs, and pronunciation are given via QR codes which are very easy to link to with a mobile phone. Nature walks, poetry and Bible verses are included in each unit.
As you can see, this is a very immersive and gentle method of learning a foreign language which is very consistent with a Charlotte Mason approach.
The home page of the Charlotte Mason Simple Spanish website has a link, Expectations by Age, which has ideas on how to use the curriculum with different ages.
Charlotte Mason Simple Spanish is an economical and attractive curriculum. There are some free resources to download and if you subscribe to the website you get 15% off your order.
Wednesday 10 February 2021
Non Fiction: A Woman in Berlin (1954)
Tuesday 2 February 2021
2021 European Reading Challenge (Belgium): William - An Englishman by Cicely Hamilton (1919)
This
book is a gem!
Cicely
Hamilton worked in administration in France during World War I and served at
the Front as the Germans were advancing and the area was being bombed.
Incredibly, she wrote this novel during that time, probably in a tent, and in
between evacuations and mopping up efforts. The book was first published in
1919 and reprinted by Persephone Books in 1999.
I
don’t want to give too much detail about the storyline except to say that its
ending is very different from its beginning.
William- An Englishman tells the story of William Tully, a very nondescript young man
of twenty-three living under the strict rule of his mother. According to his
office colleagues William was ‘a negligible quantity’ and he remained so until
a crisis occurred in his life and changed the direction of his life.
William’s
crisis led him to unburden himself to one of his work associates, a young man
by the name of Faraday, who tended to keep to himself. Unbeknown to William,
Faraday was a passionate Socialist and before long William, hitherto clueless about social issues, wholeheartedly embraced the same
cause and devoted himself to it. Within a year he was in demand as a speaker
and campaigner. He also became involved in the suffragette movement and it was
in one of their meetings that he found his perfect match in Griselda. Like
William, Griselda ‘had found peace of mind and perennial interest in the hearty denunciation of those who did not agree with her.’
William
and Griselda held to identical idealistic creeds. They were Pacifists when it
suited them but knew next to nothing of history, science, literature or art.
They believed in, ‘a large, vague and beautifully undefined identity, called by William the People, and by Griselda, Woman; who in the time to come was to accomplish much beautiful and undefined Good; and in whose service they were prepared meanwhile to suffer any amount of obloquy and talk any amount of nonsense.’
William and Griselda believed their own intentions were pure and therefore the intentions of those who did not agree with them must be evil and impure. No dissent was permitted. The author played on this belief and the pernicious idea of isolating ourselves from those who hold opposing views. (There is nothing new under the sun, it seems.)
‘They were, in short, very honest and devout sectarians - cocksure, contemptuous, intolerant, self-sacrificing after the manner of their kind.’
William and Griselda were married and travelled to the Belgian Ardennes for their honeymoon where a fellow revolutionary had made her cottage in the forest available to them. There, in a foreign country, where neither of them knew the language and had no knowledge of or interest in world affairs, their narrow and idealistic thinking was shattered. For, the day before they had planned to return home to England, World War I was declared and the young couple were oblivious that the world had changed overnight.
Cicely
Hamilton wrote with a brilliant combination of irony, sarcasm and humour about
those on the sidelines of the war effort. William, Griselda and their
associates were combatants in their own War; waging battle in scuffles at
Cabinet meetings, suffragette protests, stirring up revolt and distributing
pamphlets. Caught up in their own view of international affairs, armchair
critics of everything military, they were completely unprepared for what
awaited them.
I mentioned earlier that the book’s ending is very different from its beginning. As the story progresses there is a gathering intensity. The author keeps the sardonic tone but as their slightly ridiculous behaviour becomes pathetic rather than laughable, I felt a growing sympathy for the two of them.
‘So they trotted down the valley, humiliated, dishevelled, indignant, but still incredulous - while their world crumbled about them and Europe thundered and bled.’
‘...it is one thing to brave ridicule with an approving audience in the background, another to face it unapplauded, uncrowned with the halo of the martyr...’
I’ll
leave my thoughts at that. I think William - An Englishman is a neglected
classic that deserves to be noticed. I’ll be adding it to my daughter’s free
reading for this year’s study of the 20th Century as I appreciate the way the
author looked at the folly of dogmatically cutting oneself off from the views
of others. The book is unusual in that it views World War I through the eyes of
noncombatants. Another book I enjoyed in this vein was ‘Pied Piper’ by Nevil Shute, set in World War II.
Linking
to Reading Europe 2021 Challenge at Rose City Reader: Belgium