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The Red Bird – Astrid Lindgren
I stumbled upon this book at our library, and with no more than a glance at it noticed the authors name and brought it home. We loved Pippi Longstocking, so I wanted to read this one too.
What a different book this turned out to be. It’s a short story about two poor children, Matthew and Anna who after the death of their mother end up working for a harsh farmer. They are cold and hungry and ‘cried a great deal when no one was watching’. Describing their days ‘as gray as the mice in the barn’, they will themselves to survive until the winter when they will be able to go to school every day for a few weeks.
When winter finally comes they do attend school, but are disappointed by the cruelty of the other children and nearly freeze on their long hungry walks through the snow. One day however a beautiful red bird appears who leads them to a mysterious place inside a wall where it is spring time.
Anna stretched out her hands towards the bird and wept.
“He’s red,” she said, “oh, he is red!”
Matthew cried too and said,
He does not even know that there are gray mice in the world.”
Called Sunnymead, it is filled with ‘the loveliness of spring’. Matthew and Anna play with other children and are given plenty of good food to eat.
“Then Matthew and Anna followed the other children across the meadow to a little cottage, and there was Mother. You could see that it was Mother, she had a mother’s eyes and a mother’s hands, and her eyes and hands were enough for all the children who crowded around her. She had cooked pancakes for them and she had baked bread”…
Each day after school the red bird leads them there however they always leave in time to get home to milk the cows before they are in trouble with the farmer.
Finally it is the last day of school and the children contemplate their lives without the daily joy of Sunnymead to comfort them and make a decision which will change everything. (Not telling the ending!)
This beautiful story is sad and tender and beautiful. It reminded me of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl. I wasn’t sure at first about reading it to E5 given that it touches some tough subjects, but in the wonderful way of the child she enjoyed the magic of the story and it’s redemptive ending.
It is illustrated by Marit Tornqvist. The pictures evoke the emotions along with the text at each part of the story, particularly with the use of colour….gray’s and browns for their ‘mouse-life’, stark white for the icy winter where the contrast of the red bird is so beautiful and brilliant springy greens for their happy moments in Sunnymead.
I loved this book. I’m not sure it will be my childrens’ favourite, but it has become one of mine.
These school holidays just gone, the kids and I participated in a school holiday program run by our church. (I posted about it over here.)
They had heaps of fun and finished with a bang on the last day with face painting. Aren’t they beautiful?
The other day D stuck a few large pieces of paper on the wall, grabbed some markers and started to draw. Of course the kids joined in, (including R1, which resulted in more pen marks on the walls that on the paper) and this is E5’s work. She worked away at it quietly.
She has paid attention to detail…I have curly long hair, Dad is tall with short hair, B3 has spiky hair, R1 is in my arms with no hair at all, and she has drawn herself with long hair. I love our tummies! And that we are all holding hands.
Here’s another free printable worksheet we used when E5 was learning to count to 100. (She’s still mastering it!) It can be found here.
You can’t tell in the picture, but she had to trace the words and numerals in the bottom line.
To help E5 learn how to write her letters, we have used these free worksheets.You can make your own worksheets and there are a couple of fonts to choose from. We used the D’Nealian font because it has joining tails, which I want E5 to use so that it’s easier to transition to cursive. Each page has capital and lower case and starts with dotted lines for the child to trace. Because you can determine the text on the page, it’s also easy to teach them to write their name too.
This is E5’s work from March.
One of E5’s friends broke his leg eariler in the year. She made him this card which is so sweet. You can see in her picture the cast on his leg (complete with graffiti) and her arms around him. This is from April.
We are reading The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, (a lovely edition illustrated by Inga Moore) We are about half way through and the book’s main character Mary Lennox has just found her way into the secret garden. Her discovery there awakens in her a passion for making things grow and she begins to tend the plants and dig in the soil. She asks for garden tools and seeds and is excited about planting them.
Halfway through a passage in which Mary and her friend Dickon are discussing seeds, E5 interrupts me and begins to tell me that she wants tools…
“…….and B3 too, and R1 when he’s big enough to use them. I want a garden all of my own. I want to have a gate so that I can lock myself in and be happy about being locked in. It has to go around my swing set and have a path for people to walk one behind the other one, and for my bike, and flowers all around it.”
She is quite excited about all this and then shouted: “It’s THIS BOOK that gave me the idea!”
I remember reading in Susan Schaeffer Macauley’s book For the Children’s Sake about learning being about making connections between ideas. Here are a couple of quotes from Charlotte Mason’s work (taken from here):
Now that life, which we call education, receives only one kind of sustenance; it grows upon ideas. You may go through years of so-called ‘education’ without getting a single vital idea; and that is why many a well-fed body carries about a feeble, starved intelligence; and no society for the prevention of cruelty to children cries shame on the parents.
And this one:
The whole subject is profound, but as practical as it is profound. We must disabuse our minds of the theory that the functions of education are, in the main, gymnastic. In the early years of the child’s life it makes, perhaps, little apparent difference whether his parents start with the notion that to educate is to fill a receptacle, inscribe a tablet, mould plastic matter, or nourish a life; but in the end we shall find that only those ideas which have fed his life are taken into the being of the child; all the rest is thrown away, or worse, is like sawdust in the system, an impediment and an injury to the vital processes.
I am so excited because I am starting to believe that this relaxed home schooling thing might actually work. Ha ha. I’ll keep you posted on the garden.
