Seven Quick Takes on Creature Collections, Email Switches, Read Alouds, and MORE!

:: 1 ::

Daughter A’s creature collection has been in flux. Her rabbit, Emerald, escaped her cage while we were at the AO Conference and, unfortunately, had an encounter with the dog. We tried valiantly to save her, but she passed away overnight on Wednesday. So Daughter A is down one creature.

But she’s also up. Perhaps the most notable is that she is raising a baby bird that fell from the nest at Auntie R’s house. She named it Twitter, and it perches on her shoulder while she goes about her day {well, when it’s not sleeping, which seems to be its main hobby outside of eating}. It wakes her loudly every morning and is generally pretty cute.

In addition to Twitter, she also has a fresh water snail collection. No kidding. Early in the spring, I took the children to the park so that they could collect tadpoles to raise. They had varying levels of success in catching them, but they did manage to raise many of them to the frog stage. Anyhow, A-Age-Eleven also managed to capture a snail at the same time — she didn’t even notice it until we got home. Said snail laid a bunch of gelatinous eggs. The eggs hatched. The baby snails grew up. Now we are on the next set of eggs already! Exciting times.

It doesn’t make up for the loss of Emerald, but at least it keeps her mind occupied.

 

:: 2 ::

I have been switching email providers this past week. So many of you have had problems with email delivery and remaining subscribed to what you want to be subscribed to that I decided to move. The hassle and extra expense suddenly became totally worth it! A-Age-Eleven is just happy that she was able to earn a few dollars deleting people out of the old system!

You might have noticed the difference in how this week’s emails looked. I’m still adjusting things and there might be bumps along the way. I’m thanking you in advance for being patient. 🙂

Also: please note that if you unsubscribe, you unsubscribe from everything. This is true for most emails you receive from bloggers, by the way. So adjusting preferences is best unless that is what you truly want to do.

For now, if you’re not getting the Weekly Digest, and want to, just use the form below to sign up:

 

:: 3 ::

This week’s links collection:

• Want to write better? Read better writing. from The Boston Globe
  • Pretty good explanation of why we don’t want lots of twaddle going in — since this can even influence the writing of the adult brain, just imagine the influence on the growing brain!
• How The “Tricky People” Concept Saved My Boys from timewellspent
  • LOVE the parenting advice in this one.
• Preserve Faith-Based Higher Education from Biola University
  • My alma mater, Biola is. And they are worried about our state’s attacks on religious freedom. Of course, our state is attacking many kinds of freedom, so religion isn’t really singled out. But still: it’s a travesty. They are going to have to stop allowing their students to be funded by government loans if they want to survive as a religious institution. Unfortunately, that will make them unaffordable for almost everyone.

 

:: 4 ::

This month in 2015:

 

In case you were wondering. 🙂

:: 5 ::

We’re back in our read aloud groove and I’m loving it! Like anything in life, the time available for such things ebbs and flows. During tennis season, there seemed to be a lot less time to go around. Now that our oldest is down one activity, our time for reading aloud as a family seems to have multiplied. And as we’re wrapping up the school year, we’ve found time in other pockets as well.

Here’s what we’ve been reading, or recently finished:

Pinnocchio is one we finished up this week. This is the fourth time I’ve read this one aloud. I do it for first grade — it’s just so perfect for the age, and the other children have never seemed to tire of it. It was another success, for sure. It’s sort of sad to think that was probably the last time I’ll read it aloud. We read this one mostly as a lunchtime selection.

Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates is a whole-family {even Dad} read aloud we recently finished. I had never read it before, and it was oh so great. One child made a comment about this book tricking them into learning about Dutch history. Is that a bad thing? I think not. It was also a great tale of enduring heavy trials with dignity and determination.

The Ordinary Princess is our new lunchtime read aloud. It was a special request from Q-Age-Nine, and I can honestly say we’re all enjoying it. It’s been fun so far to connect the allusions to fairy tales we’ve read in the past.

The Wonderful O is our new whole-family read aloud and has been such a delight so far! I’ve never read any Thurber before, and the whole thing is very reminiscent of Ella Minnow Pea — which is a favorite little novel of mine, but not very good for reading aloud because you really have to see the words to see the humor. I was a little worried that The Wonderful O would be similar, since it is also about forbidden letters, but I have been pleasantly surprised. There is music in this one, folks. It is such a joy to read aloud — the rhyming and sing song coming out all over the place. I couldn’t help falling in love.

 

:: 6 ::

This summer, I need to do a lot of reading. I mean a lot of reading. I’m choosing books that I find pleasurable to read, but the truth is that I really need to read these. Some of them are books for The Low-Energy Mom’s Guide to Homeschooling series that I’m working on. Others are possibilities for school next year. Still others are for one of the talks I’m giving at GTB. {A plenary session usually takes me about 80 hours of writing and research time!} So this summer, I think the blog is going to become a bit of a reading journal.

I’m sort of excited about that.

 

:: 7 ::

Yes, I’m still using a bullet journal. I guess you all are in planning mode already? People! This is the last day of school for me! Why are so many of you asking this question?? 😉

But yes. I’m still using it. It’s mainly for business purposes. I needed one central location to put ideas for the blogs, podcast topics, outlines and quotes for talks, and more. I regularly use it for doing Brain Dumps so that I can figure out what my priorities need to be.

I don’t use it as a calendar. I simply do not have the patience for drawing a calendar when I can buy a nice big pretty one with thick pages that I love. {Mine is by Blue Sky and a lot like this one except that it’s a calendar year rather than academic year.}

So why does a bullet journal work so well for me? Well, the truth is that I used to write all these same things down, but on scraps of paper. Which I promptly misplaced, of course. So the combination of disciplining myself to write all the stuff in one central location, coupled with keeping a Table of Contents so that I know what is there, has been very powerful for me. I know a lot of people keep to-do lists in their bullet journals, but I actually don’t. The bullet journal is for my ideas and Brain Dump lists. From there, I move all of the to dos — the ways of implementing my ideas — to my calendar.

It’s still working really well for me.