Homeschool Friday

 

 

 We’re reading a book called The Year of Miss Agnes. It’s about a one room school house in Alaska, and all of the schoolchildren are Native American.  They go through a run of teachers who can’t stand the life in Alaska, nor the constant smell of fish that is packed in the children’s lunch bags.  Then there’s Miss Agnes, who is tough enough to handle the rural life, and has a sinus issue preventing the fish smell from detouring her.

There’s so many options to go off of with learning in this book!  It’s just fascinating!  The little girl in the book lives with her mother and grandparents who make things from caribou legs, and moose sinews.  Things like boots and snowshoes.

The first assignment that the Miss Agnes gives is to make a painting.  She gave each of the children a piece of paper and said they must not let once space of it go without color.  It must have color on every inch.  So after we read that, I suggested that we bring out the paints, and Silje should do that assignment too.  Silje nearly fainted from surprise.  Mommy?  Offering to bring out the paints without me begging asking?  So of course she took me up on it, and made a picture of a rainbow…and a snowman.

With such a great success there, I was pushed on to continue looking for extra fun things to do.  I wanted some great memory making activities.  So as I was brainstorming, I saw pieces of our fireplace all over the living room floor, and thought to myself that the stone is currently not on the hearth, and there will be empty spaces underneath it.  Why don’t we do a time capsule, and keep it underneath the hearth, never again to be seen by our eyes?

So at supper that night, I brought up the idea of the kids building a time capsule.  Knut loved the idea, and Silje was curious as to what it was.  I said we could put things in it that we feel represent our life.  We could put in a family picture, a newspaper, maybe a note or drawing, maybe a toy we don’t use anymore. Silje started to brainstorm which toy she could put in.  As some of her favorite toys came up to question, I reminded her we weren’t going to have access to the time capsule.  It was going to be sealed below the fireplace hearth, never to be seen again by us.  It was going to be for someone in the future.

I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.  Silje started to cry.  Tears were burning in her eyes and she was wondering why she had to bury one of her toys so that she could die and another girl could come and live in our house and find them.  She didn’t want to give up her favorite toys.  She looked at me with tears in her eyes and asked “Why are you making me do this?”

With a mixture of laughter and frustration, Knut and I blundered through trying to correct the idea that we had mistakenly given her as to the point of the time capsule.  She could put in there whatever she wanted.  We wanted her to think of something that would help people in the future understand how we live.  Still, the idea that someday we would all be dead, or that the house would fall apart and someone would someday find it horrified her.

Well, I guess you win some, and lose some.  As a family, we put in the time capsule a newspaper, our family Christmas picture, a note from Silje telling who all lives in our house and two drawings. 

As for a poetry update, we’ve moved into acting out her poem with stuffed kittens and real mittens and little tin plates for pie.  It’s amazing how much easier it is for her to wrap her mind around the words when she sees the sequence of the 4 stanzas of the poem in action.  The confusion has gone way down.  So work has begun on voices and tone for the different characters in the poem.

The comments I’ve heard from Silje this week is “just one more chapter!” or “just 5 more minutes” when she has her journal time.  (I set the timer and she has to write for 10 minutes.)  That makes this all worth it.