Learning By The Way

Margary, happy on the streets of Philadelphia

Five Lansberrys in a telephone booth in Chinatown, Philadelphia

Since Raquel is sitting in with us on the writing lessons (writing is her specialty), I needed to find something to occupy the two littles while we were working on it. (Thankfully, Margary was taking a nice long morning nap). The frequency of Elsie and Peter’s need for mama always seems to rise the greater the inconvenience of the interruption. Since I wanted everyone in at the first writing class to be able to concentrate fully, I looked for a nice educational website that would keep their attention. I got exactly that when I stumbled upon Storyline, a program of the Screen Actors Guild Foundation. Want to see Sean Astin read A Bad Case of Stripes“? This is the place to go!

We started our new writing curriculum today. I am very excited about it. It is called Write Your Roots. Upon completion of the full year of curriculum, we will have a book filled with stories recording our family history.

In addition to questions to help us discover our writing styles, we had a writing assignment. Write a vignette (basically a piece of historical fiction) describing someone you know. Here is Samuel’s vignette about his baby sister.

Margary
by Samuel
Margary sees Einstein at the top of the steps. She gets excited and starts slapping the ground. Then she starts crawling up the steps, jabbering to herself in baby language. “Aba, ba, ba.” She keeps stopping to look up at Einstein. When she gets to the top, she keeps hitting him and pulling his hair, imitating the big children when they pet Einstein and scratch behind his ears.