St. Constantine learns to spell

We've been studying St. Constantine lately in history, along with his vision and the legalization of Christianity in the Roman Empire.

Today while drawing a picture of an icon of St. Constantine, 7yo commented,

"There are three N's in 'Constantine.' I bet Constantine learned to write his N's really well."

Some recent fun

Some recent school fun at our house. Science: learning about friction and gravity with a parachute experiment using quarters and homemade plastic parachutes. Which size parachute will make the quarter fall the slowest? Small, medium or large? Our hypothesis ended up being correct!

History: Vesuvius erupting over Pompeii (well, a small Lego version of Pompeii). After this day, 7yo said, "Thanks mom, that was such a good idea for an activity!" Score one for me.

For moments like this . . .

On the hardest, most exhausting homeschooling days, I try to remember moments like this. I'm glad my sons are slowly learning to be best friends. Of course, most days they fight over the swing. But one day last week, for 10 minutes they worked it out. And it was magical.

Booklist - A fun "test" for homeschoooling parents (and anyone else)

One of my favorite things about homeschooling is the chance to add to my own knowledge and education everyday as I learn alongside my kids. (Of course, adding to my education is also my outside-the-home job at the university, but that still seems different from what we get to do at home.) Anyway, I got this list from Anne Marie's blog and thought it was fun. Plus it's a great way to note some gaps in my own education and reading background to work on filling in the coming years. Feel free to repost on your blog (or just comment) if you'd like. This is a sort of "coming clean" for me about what I haven't read! On the other hand, if they would include a little more world literature (especially Russia, Croatian and Serbian) my list would look more impressive!

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

The Rules:
1) Look at the list and put one * by those you have read.
2) Put a % by those you intend to read.
3) Put two ** by the books you LOVE.
4) Put # by the books you HATE.
5) Post.

#1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
*2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
**3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
*4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling (haven't made time to read them in English, but I'm working on reading one of them in Russian, Croatian and Polish for my dissertation, not sure that counts)
**5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
**6 The Bible
#7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
*8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
**10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Ms. Havisham remains my favorite literary character of all time)
**11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
*12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
*13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
*14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (lots, but not all)
**15 Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
*16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
*18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
*21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
*22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
**24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I both love it and hate it, but mostly love)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh -
*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- C.S. Lewis (more than once)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (Austen and I are not friends - Pride and Prejudice was enough Austen for a lifetime for me)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
**36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (many times)
%37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (started it this summer, but got distracted)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Bernières
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
**40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne (Quoted regularly at our dinner table)
**41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
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 - L.M. Montgomery (loved this years ago - I wonder if I still would?)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
**49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (have to confess I like it, despite the disturbing content)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
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
*62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (not cover-to-cover, but I've read sections)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
%65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
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 (yeah, I slipped through and managed never to conquer this one)
*71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
**73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (still one of my favorites, since I was about 9)
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 - Émile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A.S. 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 - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
**89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
*91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
**92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (Love, love, love it! Watch for a blog about it soon.)
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 (this is making me realize, why have I not read any Dumas? Big gap.)
*98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
*99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
%100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I'd like to get to this someday . . . )

OK, so I beat the 6 by a long shot, but I've found some significant gaps I'd like to fill.


Here are my favorites that are not on the list:

Novels:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Live and Remember - Valentin Rasputin
Bridge on the Drina - Ivo Andrić
A Hero of our Time - Mikhail Lermontov
Sofia Petrovna - Lydia Chukovskaya
Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin
The Chosen - Chaim Potok
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane

Short stories:
"The Death of Ivan Ilych" - Leo Tolstoy
"Matryona's House" - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Megalos Mastoras and His Work" - Borislav Pekić
"The Gift of the Magi" - O. Henry
Scenes from the Bathhouse - Mikhail Zoshchenko
"To Build a Fire" - Jack London

Plays:
Antigone - Sophocles
Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare
Macbeth - Williams Shakespeare
Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare
Boris Godunov - Alexander Pushkin
The Cherry Orchard - Anton Chekhov
Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams

Poetry collections by:
Anna Akhmatova
Aleksandr Blok
Emily Dickinson
Christina Rosetti
Carl Sandburg
Robert Louis Stevenson
Daniil Kharms

Other:
A Grief Observed - C.S. Lewis
The Prologue - Nikolai Velimirović
The Ascetic of Love - Mother Gavrilia
D'aulaire's Book of Greek Myths
D'aulaire's Book of Norse Myths
The Mountain of Silence - Kyriacos Markides
Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia - Lubov Millar
The Great Collection of Lives of the Saints - Dimitri of Rostov
Father Arseny: A Cloud of Witnesses - Vera Bouteneff
My Life with Father Alexander - Julianna Schmemann
The Journals of Fr. Alexander Schmemann
The Spiritual Meadow - John Moschos

Profound . . . or not?

This morning during breakfast the boys and I were doing our regular readings from the Prologue and the Children's Bible Reader. After 7yo finished reading, 3yo turned to both of us and said very decisively,

"Jesus is in my tummy."

7yo and I both looked at each other and giggled.

Then 7yo said, "You mean He's in your heart."

3yo thought for a minute and said,

"Oh, OK."

But in moments like this I can't help but stop and think about the theological context and also why my child would have said such a thing. I suppose he most likely confused his tummy with his heart. Maybe. Or was he thinking about taking Communion on Tuesday night? We certainly talk about how Communion is Jesus' body and blood. And we certainly talk about how God is everywhere. So I thought for a minute or so about where to take the conversation. Should I attempt to conquer that subject? I opted for no, and left it there, with a kind explanation for the 3-year-old from his older brother. That will probably suffice (along with some smirks between me and the older brother). But all day I've been thinking about Jesus being in our tummies. Perhaps He is.

First Child vs. Second Child

My boys spent the greater part of the late afternoon today gathering cicada shells off the trees in the yard. We have four big silver maple trees and they have been just covered in those skins for the past few weeks. In fact, we went and got a book from the library last week to read so we could learn about why cicadas shed their skins. (Actually, it's quite interesting. If you see them, you should ask the boys about it sometime.)

Anyway, this afternoon was really fun, both in terms of appreciating nature and appreciating how God makes children different. Wish I had caught it on video. My always cautious 7yo first child spent the whole time carefully plucking the little shells off the trees and tenderly filling his bug habitat with them. My always adventurous almost-3yo, on the other hand, spent the first half of the time knocking them off the trees with a big stick, and then crushing ("crunching" as he said) them hard with his foot. The second half of the time, he had figured out how to carefully pluck them off the trees . . . and then crush them!

That's my two boys in a nutshell (or cicada shell)!

Planning for the future

As many people know, my boys have great shiny red capes. They are superhero capes given to them by Grandmomma. 2yo wears it a lot. OK, let me be honest. He wears it everyday. We have to put it on each morning after getting dressed. He even wore it to Mother's Day Out this week. I don't mind. I love that he loves dress-up. But we have one rule. No capes in church. When it's time to go to church, he has to take it off. One exception: Pascha Sunday. On Pascha Day, for the Agape Vespers service he can wear the cape. Yes, our rules are that specific because they have to be. We discuss the use of the cape before almost every church service. Now, the course of the conversation, we've had occasion to mention that little boys don't wear capes in church. But, we've told him bishops, monks and priests do get to wear capes. I've reminded him that bishops actually have long red capes just like his. And his older brother keeps telling him, "If you become a monk, you can wear a long black cape, just like Batman."

Well, this evening before going to the church for Akathist, I reminded him that he'd need to remove his cape when we got to church. He looked at me very sincerely and asked, "Mommy, when I get big and I be a monk, can I wear my cape to church then?" "Of course!" I replied.

Preparing for the Dormition Fast

The Dormition Fast starts tomorrow for those of us on the new calendar. Here we go! My friend Jeanette sent me an awesome idea for helping kids participate in the Dormition Fast. I think it's such a great idea that I am both posting it here for all to see and making the exact same thing for my kids.


It's like a build-as-you-go icon puzzle. She made black and white prints of the Dormition icon. Then she also made color prints. She cut the color print into 15 pieces. Each day of the Dormition Fast the children will glue one piece onto the black and white icon, so that by the feast they will have a complete icon. Cool, huh? She took this picture before she took them to the store to be laminated so they can be used again and again.


So I headed out the copy store at 9:15 PM tonight to get big color copies and laminating done. We're going to do the same thing. I think maybe I'll have my kids attach the pieces with velcro which is stuck to the laminated surface and pieces. Then we can use it year after year. I know they are going to love this.

Thanks again Jeanette! I love it when friends share their great ideas! (Hint, hint to all you readers.)

Good Fast to all!!

Christmas in July!

It's really been Christmas at our house this week. Why? Well, all of our curriculum and extra books arrived. We've spent a few days unpacking things, getting them situated on our school shelves, hanging maps, packing up last year's work and just plain getting excited. It's so fun to open boxes of new books, fresh clean workbooks, art prints, science supplies, maps, CDs. Just yummy! We're so excited that we're just going to go ahead and start. So, school starts this coming Monday, August 4th for us. I had planned to wait until after the Dormition Fast, but my oldest really wants to get started. How can I tell him no? He's working a deal that if he starts now, he can get three or four weeks off at Christmas. Fine with me, since I need the time off then more than now.

The down side? I still wanted to blog about lots of the fun things we did last year. It will still probably happen, but it will need to trickle in as we get started on this year. So, here we go!

Discipline

Quote of the morning:

"Mommy, everytime my airplane breaks. But, I tell it, 'Airplane, you gonna get in time-out if you do that again!'" - my 2yo, while playing with the "airplanes" he made out of Lego Duplos

Gotta love it when they start applying discipline techniques to their toys. There is more truth in this than we even realize. He knows that's what you do to get someone/something to do something you want it to do . . .

Idioms

2yo: [trying to get out of his booster seat after dinner] "Can somebody buckle me up?"
7yo: [looking over to help out] "You're already buckled up!"
2yo: "Well, then can somebody buckle me DOWN?"

I just love the confusing nuances of language! My university students do similar funny things with Russian.

As we come to the end of Paschaltide . . .

Here are a few last minute Paschal wishes to you all for this year. 2yo is in LOVE with the Paschal greeting this year, and often spontaneously walks up to me and yells "Christ is Risen!" He also insists that HE has to be the one to start the tropar before every meal. You can see below that he is partial to the Greek, but gives Arabic a valiant try.

And here's the duet version. For kids whose mother is getting a PhD in Slavic Linguistics, these boys sure do avoid the Church Slavonic. They are like the cobbler's kids who have no shoes.

Oh, and for those who ask how I manage to homeschool and be a grad student, the disastrous mess in the background is the answer to your question. See the laundry, toys and books everywhere? That's just regular old life around here.

Birth, Pregnancy and the Incarnation

This is a repost from another blog from September 2007.

Here is my 6yo's explanation of the above topics to his 2yo brother over lunch today. His dad and I were listening in and trying not to interject too much.

6yo: Now listen. Only girls can have babies in their tummies. If you want to have a baby, you have to be a girl, and you have to be married. Well, except . . . [here my heart sank, wondering what was coming next and what he knew that I didn't know he knew] . . . except if you're Mary.

[I smiled in relief and agreement.]

[He stopped to think for a minute.]

6yo: But, actually she was married, too.

Me: Who was she married to?

[6yo takes his finger and just points upward.]

[Now I've got all of these theological themes running through my head as I try to figure out if I should just agree with his comment, or make any correction. I'm thinking, Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but never married, Christ is the Bridegroom and the Church is the Bride, Holy Virgins are married to Christ . . . My mind continues to race, and just as I decide just to let this one be and be impressed with his assessment, he pipes up again, talking to his little brother.]

6yo: But, the same one she was married to, she also gave birth to!!!

I think he's getting the paradoxes of our faith. He saw the look of happy surprise in my eyes and said, "Mom, I know all about this stuff!"

Summer Math Practice

My 7yo son loves video games. He really is a child of the 21st century with excellent computer skills. Oh well. Somehow, someway these things might serve him well. The thing is, we don't have any kind of video game equipment at all. No Gameboy. No X-Box. No Wii. No nothing. I have no plans to change that situation any time in the near future. We do have two laptops - one for mom and dad, one for homeschool (which we actually all use). So he likes to play various online games on lego.com , pbskids.org and playmobil.com. I usually allow him a little time to play some online games each day, after school and chores are done for the day. So, here's the deal we've made for the summer months. If he wants computer time, he has to start it with math practice. We're using Arcademic Skill Builders this summer. It is marked as a favorite on his school laptop. When he wants computer time, he starts by going to this site. I set the oven timer and he has to play math games on this site for 15 minutes. He really likes the games on this site and it gives him some good arithmetic practice. He seems to grasp abstract math concepts really well, but still needs a lot of work on the pure memorization of facts. This is really giving him the daily practice he needs and he never argues about it. He actually begs to play. After he has his 15 minutes of math, he gets 20 minutes to play something else. It's working so far, and I'm hoping to see lots of good improvement in his arithmetic skills by August!

Learning to love opera, one step at a time, through the ears of a child

I'll confess that I've never really been a lover of opera. And I'll confess also that no one ever took the time to teach me to love it. I remember really loving the occasional "operas" on Mister Rogers Neighborhood when I was a child. But my love ended there. When I was 13, I performed three major performances with a large opera company. But I was a dancer, not a singer. I danced as an angel in Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel. Though I was in awe of the elaborate costumes and sets, the music did nothing for me. It wasn't an art form I was going to understand or enjoy.

As a dancer I was in love with the ballet, and enjoyed soaking in the choreography of Petipa, Balanchine, Fokine, Njinsky and others. And I learned to love the music of many wonderful composers through my love of the ballet. So I learned to appreciate and know many works of Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Bach, Mozart and many other composers. But still, opera had no appeal. During high school, my best friend's father loved opera. Whenever we rode in the car with him, he would be listening to opera. I wondered how it could possibly hold his attention. Really, I wondered how he could even endure it.

As a young student living in St. Petersburg, Russia in the 1990's, I determined to make opera my own. I could go to the Marinsky Theatre almost any day, pay about $5, and see world-class opera and ballet. What better way to spend an evening after classes were over? Even if I went alone, it was magnificent. Of course, I took the time to see many of my favorite ballets - Giselle, The Firebird, Swan Lake and others. But I really determined to try opera on for size. Maybe if I saw it in such a magnificent theatre with meticulously trained voices, I would love it. Maybe. I saw a few while I was there. Madame Butterfly. The Magic Flute. I honestly can't remember what else. German operas mainly. It didn't stick. I wasn't sold. And I concluded that maybe I'm just not the opera type. I had truly given it the old college try. Even a couple years later, when I married a man who adores the music of Pavarotti, I was not won over. He could blast those arias in our living room all he wanted, I wasn't going to enjoy it.

Then, this past fall, I watched on DVD a truly magnificent 1990 production of Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov conducted by the very talented Valery Gergiev with Robert Lloyd as Godunov. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I was in love. I couldn't get enough. I brought home a copy and made my husband watch it. Granted, the subject matter is one that I'm very comfortable with, frankly, one I love. Granted, I was watching it while assistant teaching a class in Russian Culture and thinking carefully about how to teach college students to love this opera. So I was soaking in the music, the themes, the unbelievable acting, the unusual sets, the layers of folk music with church hymnography with traditional arias, and the breath-taking ability of Robert Lloyd. And I was thinking about how to explain these themes to students who didn't know as much about Russian Culture as I do. But I had so much fun with it. I decided that week that maybe I could love opera. Just maybe.

So, I was delighted when the end of our K12 music curriculum this year was a five-lesson study of Mozart's The Magic Flute. I couldn't wait to see what K12 did with it and what I could begin to learn about Mozart's opera. If I had learned to love Russian opera, maybe it was worth revisiting German opera. We had so much fun with this study!



The K12 material was simple, but just right to pull my 7yo in to the music and story. The lessons divided the narrative of the opera into 5 sections. At the beginning of each lesson we read a chapter in the narrative. My 7yo loved hearing the tale of Tamino, Pamina, Papageno, Sarastro and the Queen of the Night. The story has so many unexpected twists and turns, so each chapter left him wanting to hear the next. At the end of each chapter, we would listen to one or two short pieces from the opera. Included in our materials was a great CD of highlights from The Magic Flute. During the five lessons, we focused on 5 pieces from this collection. As always with K12's music, the listening was focused to help him pull something relevant from his listening. My son really enjoyed listening for the kind voice of Sarastro in "O Isis and Osiris" and for the anger in the voice of the Queen of the Night in "Der Hoelle Rache kocht in meinen Herzen." (He also enjoyed trying to sing along with the VERY high soprano sections of this piece.) But I knew he was hooked when we got to the last lesson. That's when we read the last chapter when Pagageno is united with Papagena and Tamino with Pamina. The chapter did a great job describing how Papageno cannot even find words to sing when he tries to speak to Papagena. 7yo laughed and laughed that all Papageno could sing was "pa-pa-pa-pa." When the time came for the listening section, we had a few pieces to use. But he begged to hear the duet between Papageno and Papagena. So, he happily laughed aloud as he heard the two sing "Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Papageno." I never even bothered him that everything was in German. And before I knew it, he was asking to hear some other pieces from the CD. And then, when we were finished, I found him staying at the stereo, to start at the beginning and hear more of the selections! He really enjoyed it. When his dad got home for lunch, 7yo insisted on playing a few of his favorite arias for his dad. And in the midst of it, I found myself also wanting to hear more from the opera. (And wondering how I missed so much of the beauty when I saw this opera in a beautiful theatre years ago.)

I think maybe it's time to find a good video of a performance of The Magic Flute. And I'll look forward to exploring some more opera with my kids next year. Thanks to K12 for helping us learn to love it!