I may be more excited than either of the kids...but that's generally the case. Scott did mention last night that he "was kind of glad to be going back to school". Maya has been so happy to sleep in the past two weeks that her eight o'clock wake up call seemed incredibly early. They had brownies for breakfast...I can only feel so guilty.
We cleaned the school room up yesterday. We got all of the stuff from last year organized and stored, got some new shelves, mopped the floor and got all ready to start a new year. Here's what it looked like when we were done.
Now that we're all ready, I'd like to share with you just a couple of things from this past year. I have so many little gems tucked away, but these are a couple of my favorites.
Scott really mastered cursive in his fourth grade year. When he wrote this paper, he still hadn't completely figured out the capital letters. Here is a book report he wrote on a Percy Jackson book.
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I think his handwriting is quite spectacular. Maya does, too, and has taken it upon herself to improve her own handwriting. I bought her a book for this year to help her neaten things up.
Speaking of Maya...Anyone who has spent time with this child knows that she has a very quick wit. She's hilarious, intelligent and a huge smart aleck. Those are just some of the things that we love about her. The last quarter of her seventh grade year, she studied works by Edgar Allen Poe. She's a huge reader and because of some of the darker things he writes about, (Maya enjoys the scarier literature) I thought she might enjoy Poe. She did. After she read Ligeia, I asked her to write a summary paper about the story. I wanted it in her voice, to see how she really felt about the work. It started off as I assumed it might, but got less snarky as the paper went on.
So, he falls in love with this chick, Ligeia, and apparently his memory is screwed, (although he spends a great deal of time describing this chick.) He apparently loves her but she gets sick from a disease of some sort, so she asks him to recite what looks like the Devil's poetry and then dies after he's done.
He buys himself an abbey, which the description for nearly drove me crazy. Then he gets himself married to a woman he calls "the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanian of Tremaine". Whatever that means.
The marriage doesn't go so hot. His wife "dreaded the fierce moodiness of my temper", and he "soothed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man". Kind of a downside, don't you think?
After what he says is the second month of the marriage, "Lady Rowena" is "attacked with sudden illness". She recovered, but was ill often on and off. Her illnesses were of "alarming character". She was talking about unusual sounds and movements she thought she heard and saw around the room, but he apparently couldn't hear or see any of these things until one day he sees a shadow. "The shadow of a shade" he says. While he was getting the Lady Rowena, (who wasn't doing so well at his point because she was sick and fainting,) a glass of wine, he hears a footfall on the carpet by the couch. While the Lady Rowena is about to sip the wine, he sees a curious fluid or "three or four drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid" appear from nowhere. Rowena doesn't see this and swallows her wine and he decides it was just his imagination.
Lady Rowena's health then takes a turn for the worse. On the third night after swallowing her wine, they "prepared her for the tomb". Lady Rowena had died. Late that night, he hears a low sob coming from the body and notices a slight flush of color on her face. He thinks she is still alive and that something needs to be done but he lives apart from the servants and has no way to get them without leaving Lady Rowena. The moment passes and the Lady resembles a corpse once again.
An hour later he hears another sound from the corpse. A sigh. He sees a movement in the lips, then they relax. He sees a warmth in her frame, a pulse of her heart and knows that the Lady lives. He tries to stabilize her, to wake her up, but it doesn't work. The color leaves her skin, the heart stops. She is dead.
He sinks into a vision of his beloved Ligeia, but again he hears a sob from the bed. Again and again he tries to revive Lady Rowena, but it never works and again and again she dies, only to sob or to sigh once more.
Then, she who had been dead stirred vigorously and the colors of life flushed her face. Her limbs relaxed and her body rose from the bed, taking feeble steps with her eyes still closed. There was a bandage around her mouth and head and when she stood...had she grown taller?
Off came the bandages and her hair, no longer fair, was black as night, and when she slowly opened her eyes, they were black and gleaming. It was the Lady Ligeia.
So, if you've never read Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe, there you have it.
Both of our kids really like poetry. Scotty studied poetry a bit more at the end of this past year and he wrote this haiku about snow.
So, as we begin Maya's 8th grade year and Scotty's 5th, what do we have planned?
A whole heck of a lot, actually.
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| first day of school July 1, 2012 |
We will continue with German using our Rosetta Stone Homeschooling program, plus I've gotten a few more books to help us a bit with some more conversational stuff. Both kids are delving into World History and a pretty heavy literature unit that includes things like the Iliad and the Odyssey for Maya, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and A Christmas Carol for Scott. We have our old favorites, as well, such as math, language arts and science, plus a study about Germany's geography, history and culture. It will be a full year hopefully peppered with a lot of travel. I'm looking forward to it!
The kids are, too. Can't you tell?
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