Some School Years are Like That

By my count I am finishing twenty years of homeschooling. This gives me some sort of perspective point (though I am not sure how meaningful it is). 

At the beginning of the year I bought a pack of sticky stars to mark our schooldays on the calendar. Sticky stars have motivated me ever since I was in first grade so I thought how cheerful a calendar full of stars would look. 

This is how school looks at the beginning of the year, all shiny and perfect, with everything in a row.

And now last week I looked at the sheet of stars being used. It turned out the pack that was so shiny and perfect was NOT. The machine had only cut around 3 points of them and so points tear off when you try to get them off the sheet. I am too cheap to buy a new pack when I have several hundred still unused and too obsessive to put torn stars on my calendar, so using them proved to be something of challenge. Which is so often just how the whole of life goes.

This is how school looks at the end of a year. 

And after twenty years, what I know is, that's OK.

Whittington

I want to post book reviews of things as I finish reading them. This one is out of order but it is short and the book is at hand. I picked up a copy of Whittington by Alan Armstrong at one of those "fill a bag for a dollar" sales at our library. Big risk there, huh? It made it into the bag because the cover picture looked, um, interesting.

My copy doesn't have the Newbery seal on it and at first I wasn't sure if it was for adults or children.

It is interesting, though not as I expected. It is a heavy-handed didactic barnyard Charlotte's Web with 16th century lore woven through (the more interesting part to me) and a strong moral lesson on the value of hard work and Learning to Read. 

My favorite parts were a quote near the end which I read aloud at lunch to Devastatingly Handsome and Mr Music, where, IMNEHO, an editor might have been useful: "He went to the side of the ship and untied the blue silk he wore around his neck. He wiped his face and tossed it overboard as a token for the cat." (Mr Music guffawed.) You will be stunned to learn, only a few pages later, that apparently his face was still intact, as we read that the beautiful Mary "touched his face gently, tracing his scar."

The other thing I liked was the listing of sources cited in the endnotes. I appreciate the author's thoroughness in listing everything from 1605 plays (the perfect date to encounter here on November 5th :) ) to The Blue Fairy Book to Robinson Crusoe and Herodotus.

Today's Theory

{Insert sarcasm font/} 
After almost a decade of schooling Mr Music, I have finally figured it out. The only logical explanation is that he has some sort of force field which drastically increases the coefficient of friction between his pencil point and the paper, thus slowing down its progress across the page. Yeah, that must be it. 
{/sarcasm font off}