Glass making, a pictorial how-to

Last week, when we were exploring castles and cathedrals on our trip through the middle ages, using the book Built To Last, by David MacAuley, we ended up taking a side trip through this video (and its second part) to find out how the glass for those glorious windows was made. Although I'm sure there are betters ones out there, we had a lot of fun with those videos. This week, as Calvin was gathering all the drawings, writings, and other paraphernalia of our medieval meanderings, he was slightly aghast at finding nothing about this glass blowing side trip and decided to write up a sheet of instructions for future memory jogging. There are many different ways to chronicle, and I love that he is exploring all of them, from journaling to sketching, and now a colorful combination.

The Tin Woodman of Oz, by L. Frank Baum (our reviews)

There are only two more books, after this one, left in the Oz series as written by Baum, and I am sad to see the end so obviously in sight. While there are yet another 26 books in what is considred the Oz canon, I am a sentimentalist, and it will be hard, and a little nerve wracking, to break into the Oz world as imagined by other authors. I am hoping that, if so many other Ozites consider these other books to be canon, we will be just as happy with them as we have been with Baum's vision, and certainly there are far more than 26 other Oz books out there, so selectivity did come into play. My fingers are crossed and my breath held as we near the end of Baum's road, though.

The Tin Woodman of Oz, though, was also a slight variation from Baum's usual, and I've heard that this, and the last two books in the series, are dark by comparison to his previous books of wonder. In the Tin Woodman, in fact, the reader is reminded of the Tin Woodman's somewhat gruesome past, and also meets his severed head, on the tinsmith's shelf, and many of his former body parts, now glued back together to create a different being. And, if these anomolies are not enough, there is definitely a thinly veiled question here about makeup of a soul, and the value of a body. Which, after all, is the real Tin Woodman, Nick Chopper? Is it the head, with the brain, the body, with the heart, or the new tin creation, with the memories, the creature we have all become accustomed to? There is really a lot of symbolism and imagery in all of Baum's work, much of it being politically motivated by the situations of the early 20th century, but this is perhaps the most striking, and the most demanding, of them all.

For all of that, however, much of this is naturally over a four-year-old's head, and since I did not see fit to draw attention to these complex themes, although I'm sure we could have discussed them, Calvin enjoyed this book as he has all the others: deeply and with great excitement.

Journal entry—waterfowl hike

After their waterfowl hike yesterday, Calvin came home and wrote about the experience in his journal. I still think we maybe need to make him a nature journal, but for now it's all in one.

This one, obviously, is completely unedited. When we first started the journal last fall I helped him sound out all words and get them spelled correctly. Over time he gained confidence and proficiency, and a desire to shrug off all outside interference, and a couple of months ago he started writing the entries on his own. When he finishes I usually read them out loud to him, in part to enjoy them together, now that I'm not part of the process anymore, and also to help him catch any glaring phonetic errors. My goal is not for him to spell everything correctly, but for him to have a good grasp, over time, on the general rules. This one I didn't read until today, and it is clear to me that he has made a lot of wonderful progress all on his own. It's hard to say which came first and encouraged the other, the reading or the writing, more they were simultaneous and co-dependent, but I am so happy about both his progress, and how it has happened—not with lessons, or practice sheets or even with many easy readers, but mostly just with practice and use. As my dad always says, nobody told him he couldn't read, and nobody implied that it was a difficult process that required systematic help, either, and so he just did it.

The Lost Princess of Oz, by L. Frank Baum (our reviews)

This rates at the top of the Oz list for me. I enjoyed all the books, but as with any series some will inevitablly be better than others. The Lost Princess of Oz is the tenth book in the series and it brought back every single one of our favorite characters. Calvin loved it. The first few chapters were almost like a roll call and every time another of our best loved friends arrived for the story Calvin would giggle with joy. And we met some delightful new ones, too.

Rinkitink in Oz, by L. Frank Baum (a review by Calvin)

Fun, imaginitive, a bit of good vs. evil with good winning the fight, Rinkitink in Oz is a standard Baum fairy story, but the only reason it's an Oz book is that Dorothy and the Wizard make a cameo appearance in the last chapter or so, and the new Nome King, too. I think Calvin missed our old friends, but he's so captivated by these books in general that I'm not sure he remembered he missed them until they showed up at the end. Another Baum that gets an A+ from us.