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books are our friends

link | posted by Monika at 9:39 PM
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I've officially begun home educating my newly 6-year-old boy, Peter. I think it's Week Two. When you're home all the time, the days get a bit blurred together.

It's going well. He's a curious kid - he always wants to know the why and the how - great for a homeschool mom. But he still has a tendancy to get into tricks, if you know what I mean. He recently climbed up to the ceiling in the hallway. Feet on one wall, arms and back pressed tightly against the other. It was all fun until he realized how high he was, then it was, "Mom!! I can't hold on much longer!" It would have made a clever Christmas card picture.

So, we have the three main subjects: reading, handwriting and math. He's keen on math as long as it's not too difficult to write the number. Same with handwriting. Susan loved handwriting at this age and was already onto simple words; it can be tough not to compare them. He's a boy. He's much too busy literaly climbing the walls than to be bothered with writing his name.

I'll comment more about Peter's adventures into the world of education later. I also want to mention some of his favorite things do and his favorite books. Is it school? Is it play? You decide. When you home educate, it can be both.

link | posted by Monika at 4:29 PM
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You scored as Journalism. You are an aspiring journalist, and you should major in journalism! Like me, you are passionate about writing and expressing yourself, and you want the world to understand your beliefs through writing. Journalism 100% English 92% Theater 83% Linguistics 67% Mathematics 50% Philosophy 42% Sociology

link | posted by Monika at 11:30 AM
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A young lady very dear to me is pregnant. I'm feeling so many emotions. My heart is breaking for her. Part of me is shocked; never in a million years would I have imagined this would happen to this particular girl. She comes from a strong Christian home and is active in church. And, yes, I'm angry. This is not the first teen in our fellowship to be pregnant. What is going on?!

It's the Hollywood mentality run amock in our youth. Katie Holmes. Michelle Williams. Can't think of the others, but I know there are more. Before I was married, the fear of getting pregnant kept me from going too far. It wasn't that long ago when society frowned on the unwed teen. Nowadays it's not a big deal. A little shame never hurt anybody.

It seems to me we've done a great job at convicing these young ladies that abortion is not the answer, but the message to wait for marriage to be intimate is not getting through. Or it's not as strong as the temptations they are facing.

And you know what? I'm about ready to start handing out c*ndoms after church service. Young lady (and young man), if you're going to engage in adult activities, act like a responsible adult. Sixteen is too young to start on a lifetime of motherhood.

link | posted by Monika at 8:00 AM
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Our break from homeschooling has morphed into a computer/blogging break as well, so things may be a little quiet around here for the rest of the week. We finished up last week on a good note and I have a list of things I want to get done, so... enjoy those precious homeschooling moments with your little ones and we'll catch up next week.

link | posted by Monika at 8:40 PM
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Once again I turn to Anna Quindlen for a list regarding books. From her book How Reading Changed My Life.

The Ten Books I Would Save in a Fire (If I Could Save Only 10)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
The Collected Plays of William Shakespeare
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Books from years past. See why Time magazine had to use the cut off date?

Technorati tag: book list

link | posted by Monika at 8:20 PM
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Let's talk books again, shall we? According to Time magazine , these are the best English novels (from 1923 to the present). The ones in bold type are the ones I've read. Thanks to Brandwine Books and The Thinklings,

The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow

All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren

American Pastorial
Philip Roth

An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm
George Orwell

Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume

The Assistant
Bernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O’Brien

Atonement
Ian McEwan

Beloved
Toni Morrison

The Berlin Stories
Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood

Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder

Call It Sleep
Henry Roth

Catch-22
Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger

A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess

The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron

The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon

A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell

The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather

A Death in the Family
James Agee

The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen

Deliverance
James Dickey

Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone

Falconer
John Cheever

The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles

The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing

Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers

The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene

Herzog
Saul Bellow

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson

A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul

I, Claudius
Robert Graves

Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison

Light in August
William Faulkner

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies
William Golding

The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien

Loving
Henry Green

Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis

The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead

Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie

Money
Martin Amis

The Moviegoer
Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch
William Burroughs

Native Son
Richard Wright

Neuromancer
William Gibson

Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro

1984
George Orwell

On the Road
Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey

The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India
E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion

Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth

Possession
A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run
John Updike

Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow

The Recognitions
William Gaddis

Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles

Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth

The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner

The Sportswriter
Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
John le Carre

The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf

Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller

Ubik
Philip K. Dick

Under the Net
Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry

Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

White Noise
Don DeLillo

White Teeth
Zadie Smith

Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys

That's eight out of 100. Methinks I should hang my head in shame, but some of these books I've never heard of before and I consider myself a well-read person. And I beg to differ with some of the selections. The Blume book was good, but not worthy of this list, in my opinion. And where is a book by one of the Bronte sisters?? Or a work by Austen? Oh, wait, I think I just answered my own question... these are books since 1923. Humph. I wonder why Time selected 1923 as the cut-off date?

Another observation: of the ones I've read, I read it before having children. Actually, most I read in high school or during my college days. Maybe now that I've stopped reading nothing but homeschooling and parenting books, I'll read some of the books on this list.

link | posted by Monika at 5:05 PM
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