Anne with an "e"
Part of our education day involves reading good books, not twaddle as Charlotte Mason would call it. By the way, had I ever heard of Charlotte Mason when we launched into homeschooling 16 months ago? Nope.
I'd barely heard of LM Montgomery, the wonderful author who created Anne of Green Gables. How embarrassing to confess that? Oh well. We started reading it mostly for Giles because his spring home school play is Anne of Green Gables. And I wanted him to be familiar with the book before delving into a shortened script version.
I feared he wouldn't enjoy the book. Being about a girl and all. He loves it just as much as the rest of us.
Often we have to pause and comment that Anne (aka Cordelia) Shirley is much like our Lydia. Imaginative. Precocious. Romantic.(Quick to temper occasionally). And extraordinarily wonderful.
This book has been so good for broadening our (my) vocabularly. We have to have a pen and paper and dictionary nearby to write down our unfamiliar words and then look them up.
Here are a few of the words we've learned:
vim, gimlet, heathen (I knew that one, of course, but the kids did not), wincey, grippe, fortnight.
After we read, Giles and I pick out a passage that I dictate to him and he copies. Helps his spelling, grammar and punctuation.
Here is today's assignment. Take a deep breath, it's a long one.
The orchard, with its great sweeping boughs that bent to the ground with fruit, proved so delightful that the little girls spent most of the afternoon in it, sitting in a grassy corner where the frost had spared the green and the mellow autumn sunshine lingered warmly, eating apples and talking as hard as they could.
Fifty-six words. (I made Giles count them). Wew. I could never write a sentence that long or that poetic.
I hope my kids will be able to.
But my secret wish is that I could play Anne in the play.
Posted in: on Tuesday, February 13, 2007 at at 1:43 AM
