Learning By The Way

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.

After lunch, we went to the St. Louis Art Museum. It was grand. Now, I have to tell you, when we were planning where to go on this trip, Moriah wanted to go to Chicago to see Degas’ Little Dancer. After researching though, we discovered that the Little Dancer was in the Louvre. I told her that wasn’t an option! So we settled on St. Louis. Well, unbeknownst to us, the Art Museum there has a cast of the Little Dancer taken from Degas’ original work in 1920. Moriah was ecstatic. We saw Monets, Van Goghs, and made lots of new discoveries. The ancient Egypt section with its mummys and really, truly canopic jars was a special hit with Moriah as we had just been studying that.

After the art museum, we walked down to the zoo for our last stop in St. Louis. While early in the day it had been beautiful and sunny, the skies turned grey, and a stiff breeze started to blow. Sure enough, partway through the zoo, it started to pour down rain. We took refuge in the monkey building. When the sky cleared, we took a jaunt through the African animal display, and then headed home. We had a glorious time, and were thankful for the safe trip and the time we could spend together.

The 4 older children adore their fencing class. Here are some photos of the class 2 weeks ago. The top one is Peter waiting for the class to be over, and doing research for his upcoming book “101 Interesting Uses for a Purple Bouncy Ball” (he also put it under his tummy rolled on it by walking with his hands, and used it for a chair) Below is Moriah on the left (I think- they all look alike in their fencing masks!) fencing with her friend Gwen. Last is Mr. Emara trying to instruct them in what fencing is actually supposed to be like.