Macbeth- Homeschool Style

Saturday from 6:30-8:30 p.m. 24 homeschool high schoolers, under the imitable direction of Mrs. K gave a stellar performance of Macbeth. Using the Dover edition as their script the kids worked for 6 days straight, practicing for 6 hours a day. Costumes created by Ana & Jannell (click on their names to see even more fantastic pictures and a video!), make-up by another high schooler, dry ice, smoke bombs, sound and group t-shirts provided by Shelly and Nora. It was...AMAZING!

The weird sisters.

Miss. I (the black haired witch, above,  did the choreographer). Fantastic performances by all 4! Viking Man recited the "toil, toil" speech right along with the hags. 

Lord and Lady Macbeth. Stellar performances by Feeche and the beautiful and talented Miss. A.

Take note, boys. This is the kind of gal you don't want to catch!

Banquo gets knifed. He perished admirably. Really, a great on-stage death.

 Banquo returns to torment the evil-do-ers.

 Great costuming, great on-stage movement!

 Macduff confronts Macbeth.

The 2 Lords and Lady Macbeth. C. (on the left) played Macbeth for the first 2 acts and set the stage admirably. Feeche took over from there.

The gangs all here. I'm so proud of them I could burst

 and all I did (besides go over Feeche's lines with him several times) was to show up and applaud!

The beautiful and talented Directress, flanked by her girlie and the crazy lady.

The Best of...

...the week.

Best view of our yard.  Here's the garden looking towards the road. We are hard work blessed with 10 acres, which were sorely neglected and abused when we moved in. We have spent the past 8 years hauling and burning tons of trash, removing downed barbed wire and forgotten farm implements, clearing brush and weed piles, re-seeding, weeding and growing gardens. I'm only showing pictures of the good looking beds. If you want to come see the real thing (the weedy, overgrown ones crying for attention you have to come and visit me ; )

French intensive style. Maybe I over packed ? Cukes, cabbages, beets, bush beans, carrots, eggplant, potatoes.

Wildflowers  amidst tomatoes. Someone spilled a packet of tomato seeds- I've transplanted a couple dozen though I have no idea what variety they are.

Squash, tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, onions, and way down the row, parsley, basil, spinach and lettuce. Strawberry's on the left and our other over packed bed on the right.

Best Drink: Strawberry, lemon slushies with fresh parsley. The perfect retaliation for the 100 degree weather.

Best food: Fresh homemade pesto. There's none left to take a picture of. Make your own by processing 2/3 c. fresh basil, 1/3 c. fresh Parmesan, 1/3 c. olive oil, 2 Tbs pine or walnuts, 1/2 tsp. salt, 1/8 tsp. pepper, 1 clove of garlic. Perfect on pasta, crispy french bread, dressing for meat or salad, with carrots or celery, etc. etc. 

Best Deal:  I walked in to a store and found shoes with a good foot bed- a requirement for my ailing knee- and found, not 1, but 2 pairs of decent looking shoes in my size, long and not wide, 1/2 off. It's a minor miracle).

Best Pets: Our pile 'O Kittens. 6 cutie patooties. We have been having a blast watching them and playing with them.

Best defense against the long, cold, hard winters of the territories. Lots of stored summer goodness; above, dried parsley.

Best activity: Macbeth, performed tonight at a local park.

Little By Little

*1*

My quote for the summer is going to be, "little by little, one travels' far." (Tolkien). I am out of umph but seems like there is lots in our lives that is still requiring it. I'm a "get 'er done" kinda a person and I will be working to the bitter end if that's what it takes, dragging along whomever I can grab ahold of with me in order to.get.things.done.  I am just so beyond that in terms of energy this year (not to mention the fact that my natural walking pace of "fast" might be forever gone) and am contenting myself with much smaller bites. It irks me to walk away, however slowly,  from projects (like rooms or floors) and leave it till "later." And yet, that is exactly what I am doing, day after day. This week we finished the master bedroom closet and got 3 coats of paint on it (dryboard is thirsty stuff). I doing the woohoo dance, even though there are more closets, and more rooms and more drywalling and painting and sanding and staining and etc. left to do. It's good enough for right now.

*2*

Ana has more fun and fabulous pictures of Shakespeare Camp posted over at her blog. They look like they are having a blast. How could they not be? It is a combination of intellectual challenge, drama and fun with friends. Winning combo!

*3*

The notsolittles started on their nature journals this week, beginning by creating illustrations featuring beavers, one of our many critter neighbors. KB's dog has actually swam with the beavers that live in our river and we saw beaver kits this spring. It is so romantic and yet they have destroyed an entire stand of young trees, which is just down right irritating. I'm checking out books on North American Wildlife so that they can write a paragraph to go along with their drawings. We are using the Draw Write Now books as inspiration.

*4*

The only other schoolish thing we've done this week is to go over a brief synopsis of Macbeth so that the kids aren't totally lost during the performance tomorrow. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

*5*

I've read little but Science News and Ranger Rick articles lately. Did you know that scientists have already created and implanted computer chips in the brains of paralyzed patients? Or that ancient pre-hominid type females moved away from home as adults, whereas males did not? My theory is that the shopping was probably better somewhere else.

*6*

4th of July at our house is a holiday. Viking Man loves fireworks and his little tribe of 5 have caught the fever. Flower has been doing the "can't wait till June is over so we can spend big bucks on explosives" countdown for about 2 weeks now. Sunday we are going to blow things up. Monday we'll go to a community event and watch more things explode and in between we'll eat cole-slaw (KFC copycat recipe here!), water melon and shrimp ka-bobs. George Grant writes about An Experiment in Liberty. 

*7*

A beautiful blog post by my friend Lydia on gratitude. I've written enough this year about working on holding more than one thought at a time in my mind. Grief and loss along with thanksgiving. The realization that things are gone and gratitude for what it's been replaced with. Forgiveness and release along with recognition of what was or wasn't. It's been a difficult balancing act and I have failed more than not. My husband keeps telling me, preaching to me really, that we are not made for this world. That we are heavenly bent and so our hopes and dreams will always ring shallow and hollow here.

Little wins. Little by little, one travels far.

Blue Babies

Something the Lord Made is a fantastic flick about a white head of medical surgery and his black lab assistant who found the cure for "blue babies" among other things.Starring Alan Rickman, as Dr. Blalock, who we've loved since  Sense and Sensibility (which is oft quoted 'round here) and Mos  Def, who starred as Vivian Thomas, delivering an excellent performance as the brilliant right hand (literally) man to Blalock. The film is very well done and tackles prejudice in both the medical community (the heart is off limits) and in the wider cultural community (blacks are lesser citizens). The director captures the feel of being closed in by arbitrary ceilings depending on what color you are, the devastation of bank failure and watching someone else get kudos when you've done a huge chunk of the job. In other words, unfairness is a prevalent theme. The cool thing is that this story doesn't camp there. It's not about victimization, though it easily could have become so. It's about calling, pursuing your passion regardless of obstacles and being involved in something bigger than yourself. The super cool thing is that, in the end, justice is served up sweet, making this one of the best, true account stories I've seen.

This film would make an excellent addition to a study on race relations, the history of medicine and character.

Bardology

I don't consider myself a Bardologist by any means but I do think Shakespeare is an important thing to cram into one's curriculum, if only because stories and quotes from Shakespeare are part of the Great Conversation. To that end we've done a bit of study on the good Bard.

For starters we've read Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, which is an excellent introduction. The Lamb's distill the essence of each work, maintain important quotes and scenes and yet keep it simple. Perfect for very young children.

We've also used Usborne's Stories from Shakespeare. The illustrations are excellent.

Logos Press has a simple, yet thorough study guide; Tales from Shakespeare, by Matt Whitling. appropriate for elementary aged kids or older who haven't had a lot of exposure.

The Teaching Company has an interesting course: Shakespeare: The Word and the Action by Peter Saccio that Feeche and I are going through this summer. Saccio is a performer and he knows his Shakespearean stuff. We are learning a lot.

For the ultimate field trip, make it to the Globe Theater if you can, like our oldest dd did. If you can't cross the big pond, there are Shakespearean Festivals all over the world. Take a look here to find something near you.

There are a plethora of good movies that have brought the Bard's words to life. Kenneth Bannaugh is probably most famous for his many productions such as Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Henry V titles but we still love Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in The Taming of the Shrew, one of KB's all time favorite movies. And there are re-makes galore.

photo courtesy of my friend Ana. Read and see more here: http://anabragahenebrysjournal.blogspot.com/

And of course, to really, truly, get a hold of the depth and meaning of Shakespeare, there is nothing quite like performing in a Shakespearean play. Our brave troupe, under the excellent leadership of  Enak has taken the Dover classic, divided up the parts, sewed costumes (Ana rocks!) and will performing on Saturday. More pictures to come.

Even more resources on the Bard here.

My blogger buddy Moonbeam suggests Shakespeare without the Boring Bits by Humphrey Carpenter which prompted me to remember The Shakespeare Stealer et al by Blackwood.

Food Stuff

The theme for Lego League this year is "Food" so we are going on a food field trip to a Prairie Garden, a successful organic mini-farm which started as one of their kids' 4-H projects (I still haven't discovered the Magic Formula. You know, the one that turns time consuming and expensive projects into streams.of.viable.income). They sell tons of stuff at the Farmer's Market, jam at the local Breadsmith and CSA shares. I'm looking forward to gleaning as much garden knowledge as possible.  Here's some great blog links if you are looking for Local Harvest.

Don't our beets look great?

What My Hands Would Tell You

My hands can tell you why my blogging has been sporadic of late. You will find on them dirt, splinters, dry wall mud, paint and fruit stains I have washed them but I think it's going to take a loofah to get them truly clean.

I've been gardening.

Still trying to re-claim the garden beds from their sore neglect last year. The veggie patch is looking great. We are still eating and giving away tons of lettuce and spinach with parsley and basil making more frequent appearances. The bush beans and potato's and peppers are beginning to flower, the cabbages are starting to form heads and the beets are getting bigger underground.

I've been mudding.

One bedroom is ready for texturing and by the end of this week a couple more will be too. Feeche will be gone all week and I will miss his super speedy sanding.

I've been painting.

KB and painted the huge new closet in what will be Flower's bedroom. Then we moved the wood trim into it so that we can keep mudding in the southwest bedroom. KB also re-painted the buffet while I went over MacBeth with Feeche one last time. Drama Camp begins tomorrow. It's an hour away so he'll be staying with good friends of ours and he is looking forward to drama, good friends and a week away from Dr. Dave's Work Camp.

I've been feeding my family berries.

We are coming to the end of our strawberries and have enjoyed almost daily fruit smoothies, strawberry syrup with just enough left over to make strawberry/rhubarb jam. Today the kids hauled the ladder out to the mulberry trees and picked a pail full. They are a somewhat bland fruit but the kids love, love, love picking a handful of summer goodness as they play around the fields.

What would your hands say?

Work, Read, Weed

*1*
KB, Feeche and I got a fair bit of the mudding, corner rounding, sanding and finish mudding done in 3 bedrooms upstairs. Feeche and I are going to complete the huge new closet today (had to go back and actually mud in holes), paint and then use that as a storage areas for the piles and pounds of trim wood we stained last summer. The last bedroom, the one we've been using as an office instead of a "Lego," "Barbie" or "Christmas tree (think miscellaneous) room," needs a LOT of mudding and tapping. A whole new retaining wall, and a huge ceiling area where we took out  a closet (removing the large box closet turned the room from an awkward "L" shape to a much more useable rectangular shape). I'm sure no one cares but me, but it's rather cathartic to write it out and say, "We are getting it done!"

*2*
Watched Waiting for Superman; falling test scores, "failure factories," school reform, school reformers, lotteries and the evils (duh, they did their job, they are now the evil empire. Please, someone take out the Death Star!) of teacher's unions. There wasn't a whole lot new in here if you follow education news at all. My take away was that there are some super hero educational reformers out there, Teacher's Unions (democratic lackeys) are just as Machiavellian as ever and should be legally disbanded with the eye to making America's educational system work effectively.
In related new I cast my vote this week for my own property taxes to be raised in support of my local schools. This state has a rider that the schools can't just grab and take money they think they need. I applaud that. The reality is that good schools = good communities. I'm not opposed to paying for something I don't necessarily use overtly. I'm opposed to Unions and systems taxing without representation to promote an agenda that isn't voted on and strong arming teachers, the community and kids in to paying for their lack of accountability.



*3*
PSA: Are your hands dry from weeding, washing dishes and cars and cats (like mine are?). Get Bag Balm (you know, the stuff you put on sheep and cow udder's to keep them from cracking?) We got some for our Old Lady Pooch cause she has  sores on her front forelegs that won't heal (thanks to a thyroid condition). I've been using it for 2nd degree burns on my arms (true confessions: I know multi-tasking doesn't work. I know it. I've read it. I believe it. I don't live it. Suffice it to say, don't pull stuff out of the oven, while talking on your cell phone, while directing your 8 yo. The result is not pretty). It moisturizes and heals and works miracles, even for garden dried, housewife weary hands. (Someone should pay me for this).

*4*
Reading:  In the Land of the Believers: An Outsider's Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of Evangelicalism by Gina

Welch. It might be more aptly named, A Bird's Eye View at the Life of an Atheist." Not only does Welch make vast and sweeping generalizations that are poorly researched about the "evangelical community" (for starters she uses fundamentalism and evangelicalism synonymously), her writing style leaves a lot to be desired. I am so metaphored out in some paragraphs I have to go back and look for the subject of the sentence. What is with this style? It is not poetic. It is not illuminative. It is BAD writing. Seriously, editors, the.king.is.nekked!!  I have, oh, so much  more to say about this book, but will save it for another post. For anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the postmodern atheist, this is a must read.

*5*

The kids and I spent hours in the yard this week, moving plants, weeding, harvesting lettuce and spinach, parsley, some basil and chamomile. I'm working on coming up with something clever and inexpensive for the cukes to grow on and we finally landed on using the 2 remaining dog kennel sides to form a lean-to in the cucumber area. Our attempts at French intensive beds have gone a bit too far. Cub helped me with the beet seeds and the beets are now crowding the cabbage so much that some of the cabbage is angling.

*6*

School this week consisted of lots of reading (Lawhead is the author of choice this year), grammar, and Feche getting his lines for Shakespeare Camp down solid. He has MacBeth from Scene 3 on in the Dover edition; lots and lots of lines. This is my son who can't spell worth beans, can barely write in cursive but can explain complicated science concepts to me his siblings with patience, can talk about the Punic Wars for hours and can memorize like it's fun. My kids are idiot savants. I take full credit.

*7*

I am going to re-do the buffet.  The confederate grey never darkened and it now looks like a military somethingorother. I had high hopes of posting my b.a.utiful buffet in a blog "reveal" but it's on hold. I have to go buy more paint. I'm thinking orange for the laundry room. My analytical Doctor Scientist husband thinks off-white is living on the wild side of color but I'm hoping that it's in enough of a corner of the house he won't mind.

Is anyone else having problems with blogger? I can't post comments without a huge hassle, can only post pictures sometimes and spell check isn't working. What's up?

Plains Dragons

Mud Works & Crepe Filling

I am happy to share that, even though an entire 9 months have zipped past since my last mudding escapade, I have not lost the touch. Neither have KB and Feeche. As our Father's Day present to Rockin' Viking Man we made him unbelievably great crepes, topped with fresh organic strawberry syrup, a lunch that featured lettuce and cilantro from the garden and for dinner strawberry smoothies.

Along with feeding the man the kids and I re-started tapping and mudding the closets on the 2nd floor (we had a house fire a year ago last October- you can catch up all about it under the "Tear Down to Build Up" posts) (and yes, my bed is still in the living room in case you are wondering). We got a good groove going and kept at it today.We took out the totally useless partition in the new double closet in the master bedroom, adding an extra 4" of closet space and providing some new 2 x 4's for my evil Ana White site plans. Laugh all you want- in a house this old, every extra centimeter of closet space is coveted.


partition in, modeled by the lovely KB

Then we mudded, and mudded and mudded some more- 1 1/2 five gallon buckets worth of mud. We are filling in depressions left from when we added drywall to plaster areas for new plumbing and to add another gargantuan closet in one of the bedrooms and areas that were totally rebuilt due to fire damage. It's a great feeling to be working on building up again. 




partition out, modeled by the lovely Flower

 Viking Man is happy. Happy 'cause he's teaching an on-line intensive college course this month and his schedule is cooking his grits 'cause along with umpteen papers to grad each week as well as daily on-line interaction, he still has his day job. And while he's working, we're working. I think it's a German thang, which I can totally get behind. I am, after all, more German than him ; ). We did have to consult with the good Doctor several times cause the 2 x 4's were nailed in like they were there for the duration. We ended up sawing them out. Thank goodness my older kids lurve power tools and my notsolittles are happy to be on stand-by to run and fetch.
All of that to say- train your children to work hard when they're young. You'll have a work crew you can be proud of.  And if your man loves good food, make him this; he'll be a happy!

Unbelievably great crepe filling
1 8 oz. pkg creme cheese softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 c. sour cream

Mix first 4 ingredients and whisk well. Cook over double burner for 10 minutes, stirring well. When cooled slightly, whisk in sour cream. Fill pre-made crepes (we get our recipe from All recipes.com). Top with:

Crushed strawberries, heated and sweetened slightly with honey.

Serving Up the Harvest

Serving Up the Harvest  by Andrea Chesman has proved a welcome addition to my very small number of cook and gardening books; my larger collection having been lost in the fire. Like a lot of stuff we've gone slow in replacing them.  But this little gem was a must buy. It is much more than a recipe book, it's a gardening book as well!
The book is divided by harvest; Spring and Summer; Early to Mid-Summer; Mid to Late Summer; and Fall into Winter vegetables, along with a section on "The Well Stocked Pantry", Mastering the Basics (of recipes) and a helpful appendix.
What I love, love, love about this book is that each section is divided into chapters that feature a plant growing in your garden. There is a fact sheet about the vegetable that talks about sowing & reaping, how to convert harvest to recipe measurements, how to cook, and nutrition notes. And then the recipes begin. You'll find some tried and true old friends like broiled tomato's and pesto but there are plenty of other tantalizing new recipes that will tempt you to branch out. And the best thing is that  Chesman writes with an eye to health and economy. You won't have to go out and purchase beaucoup bucks of unheardof condiments to turn your humble veggies into a summer feast. She comments on the kid friendly-ness of the recipes as well. We could use that around here because I have a couple of kids that would just as soon starve than eat something bizarre, no matter how much weeding they did to get it to the table.

The reason I bought this book was because of the variety of recipes and information about beets and eggplant - 2 newbies to my garden. And I'm so glad that I did. There's plenty in here to learn for the beginner and more experienced gardener or cook.
A great addition to our small collection of recipe and gardening books. Check it out and let me know what you think! I'd love  to hear about your favorite gardening/recipe book!

Beds

 This is my newest flower bed. I had this quick and easy idea last year to move some daisies but Viking Man got involved and it ended up involving spades, tape measures, RR ties and more hours than I'd figured. As a result we have this lovely little side bed next to the driveway. Daisies were my Mom's favorite flower and we had them planted at every house we ever lived and it was the flower my Dad always gave her.  Did you know that the scientific moniker for the common daisy has 29 synonyms?

This is one of our long veggie beds. It is chock full of green. Cukes, green and purple cabbages, beets, beans, carrots, potatoes, and eggplant, which my friends Ana and Mary assure me we'll love and finally zucchini at the very end (so far at the end they are out of the bed!

Our 3 long veggie/berry beds along with our grapes (see the old clothes line posts? That's them- there's also more around the fence of the chicken shed). 

This long bed has spinach, lettuce mix, celery, then basil, parsley, cilantro, tomatoes, then a variety of peppers then Brussels sprouts and broccoli, then tomatoes and winter squash and then more tomatoes and wild flowers. Cub spilled a pack of tomatoes and we had about 30 volunteers spring up all interspersed with the beans and beets so we've been transplanting. The 3rd long bed has strawberries and then parsley and carrots.

I have pumpkin and Indian Corn (thanks, Grandpa!) in the shed that we burned down area, along with Canna's and then acorn squash, more toms and a "Hansel & Gretal" mini eggplants in the front flower beds.

Cabbage is beautiful. And did you know that it is a cancer killer? 

Today we harvested more strawberries, lettuce and spinach as well as chamomile, basil and parsley. I've been drying the chamomile  for tea, and tomorrow we'll have our first serving of fresh pesto. Yum!!

Lovin' Summer

*1*

In my life this week…

Cleared the brush pile in the south field and leveled the dirt left behind by the huge animal diggings.
Sanded, primed, painted, re sanded, painted the buffet. I chose Graphite by Benjamin Moore. It's a bit too grayishy/blue for what I was thinking. I'm not convinced I like it yet.
Weeded and planted in the garden, all of holes are filled ; )
Harvested pounds of organic, fresh strawberries, lettuce and spinach.
Wrote a couple of articles for Heart of the Matter on-line and The Homeschool Village.
Daily walks.Nightly Thunderstorms.

*2*

In our {summer} homeschool this week

Rod and Staff Grammar 3, 5 and 9. Feeche is finishing up Alg I and working on lines for MacBeth. We still haven't hit a good scheduling groove as far as adding in the TC DVD's but we'll get back to those next week.
The notsolittles are going through the Stargate Atlantis episodes with out Wraith and are full up of techno questions such as "What is a nanite?" Good thing we have plenty of Science News mags lying around.

*3*

My favorite thing this week was…

putzing around the yard. 6 flower beds and our large veggie/herb garden, plus the continued reclamation of our property gives us plenty to do. After our long winter, it is great to be outside doing it!

*4*

My burning question of the week....

When did thorough and fun become mutually exclusive? There's been several on-line discussions on homeschool forums about the dumbing down of homeschool curriculum, how to make homeschooling "fun" and "how thorough should one be?" Here's my humble opinion. Sometimes learning is.not.fun. In fact, often, learning is hard.work. Everything we learn ultimately is filtered through our understanding the grammar of the subject(grammar stage), really getting ahold of the complexities of it and putting it into our grid of understanding (dialectic stage) and then owning it and being able to share that knowledge with others (rhetoric stage). We might not choose to get to the rhetoric stage with everything, but if we do, it will usually entail hard work. The belief that learning should be fun is self defeating because that definition crowds out the reality that learning can be satisfying, challenging, exhilarating in ways that go beyond fun. It's like being wrung out from a hard physical work-out. No one who works out that hard really calls it "Fun" and yet they go back for more...for that adrenaline rush sense of accomplishment that goes deeper than fun. But speaking of which...

*5*

...Fun links....

Darlene at Time Warp Wife is hosting a "My husband rocks because..." contest. Check it out here.


Zero Tuition College is a new web-site that supports auto-didacts who are skipping college and Nike at Thrive has some fun ideas for th 4th Star-Spangled S’mores 4 ways. and ...

*6*

...Father's Day

First Thing has a list of Best Dad's in T.V. and Film. Fun list. Viking Man is getting a snow blower. It's actually already gotten and sitting in the garage goat shed (seriously, our property was advertised as having a "2 car garage" when we first looked at the house. 2 car  IF you are driving Model T's).
Speaking of celebrations, we've been married 26 years already. Time flies when you are birthing babies, gathering degrees, homeschooling, moving around the country,  working like crazy, having fun!

*7*

What's Working

I've been way more on top of menu planning. Last month's food/ household supplies/dog food cost $475, plus we ate more variety. My fav web-sites for good main dishes are $5 Dinners and Martha Stewart.

What's happening in your corner of the world this week?

Linking up Hop, Homeschool Mother's Journal, Conversion Diaries