Adventures in Narnia

I would like to try and get through each of the remaining five books in a month, as near as possible! Given that it’s already nearly the middle of January, we’d better get a shift on!

So:
The Horse and His Boy by the time we go to Melrose (mid Feb)
Prince Caspian by the end of March
Voyage of the Dawn Treader by May
The Silver Chair by Joe’s birthday (mid June)
The Last Battle by the beginning of August.

My good friend Liz gave us a stunning Christmas present, knowing how hard I find it to read out loud - she read the Horse and His Boy, and recorded it onto CD for us. I’m really looking forward to listening to it! Planning to listen to the first chapter over lunch today.

My friend Maria came round last night and we tested a couple of turkish delight recipes, as she is going to make turkish delight with the kids’ club in a couple of weeks. Found a definite winner in terms of ease of making and best result - this recipe from the C S Lewis Website. We didn’t use the nuts though. It didn’t *quite* set hard enough to slice into cubes, but hard enough to, for example, roll into truffle sized balls and then powder with icing sugar. Might have gone harder in the fridge overnight, I suppose, I’ll have to test it again this morning. Also, I personally would use more rosewater than given in the recipe, double, perhaps.

The other thing we did today was look at this board game … not the most thrilling game in the world but easily accessible by all three children. We didn’t know who all the characters were as it is based on *all* the BBC adaptations, but it was still fun - I think we’ll shelve it for a while until we’ve read a few more of the books though.

All credit must go to my friend Liz, who found the cookbook at a reasonable price for me! I’m not worthy!!! And where was Google when I needed it, I searched for hours to find that and didn’t manage it!

Have ordered it, btw, so any future loans of the study guide can include it

Huh! A short lived victory, as my order has been cancelled today because they can’t get the book. Will go back to collecting my own recipes for things as and when we come across foods in the books.

It looks excellent There is a fair amount of Christian/Biblical content, but given that we are dealing with the Narnia books I think it’s fair enough - in fact, I’m pleased about the Biblical aspects, and will try to include some of them as we go along. It’s strong on language, literature, history and geography, a bit of science in there too. Plenty of choice of activities - I went through the first section on The Magician’s Nephew and picked out the ones I thought would be appropriate for our children, and there are a couple for each chapter, which I think will be about right for us.

I had thought that we’d read the whole book first then go back and ‘do’ the study guide, but having looked at it, I think it will be best to read/do them gradually together.

Today Anna and I sat down and talked through a few of the activities from the first five chapters of the book that we’ve read so far. I don’t want to go backwards so we’ll just pick up from where we are.

We’ve started a list of characters and their symbolic meanings. Anna was quite interested in that, she clearly hadn’t made the link for herself before now. We looked at some of the ‘vocabulary words’ suggested in the study guide, and talked through definitions, then used them in sentences. We talked about temptation, and compared the temptation in the book (of touching the rings, of seeing what was in other worlds, of ringing the bell with the hammer) to the temptation of Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden. Then got sidetracked wondering when the vacuum cleaner was invented, thankfully Josiah came to the rescue with a Ladybird Read-it-Yourself Inventors book!

Have been looking for recipes this evening, and found this cookbook - which looks fantastic, but can anyone tell me quite why it should be so expensive?!!

We’ve set up yet another blog We’re planning a more-structured-than-usual (for us, anyway) project as part of our family’s home education this academic year, or as long as it takes; we are going to study the Narnia Books by C S Lewis. As it’s going to be an ongoing project I thought it might be good to keep a separate blog.

Steve and I last read the books five years ago, so we’re planning to re-read them alongside the children. Anna already knows the stories of the first two books from audiobook adaptations she’s listened to, but she’s never read the books themselves. Abbie and Joe both know the story of ‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’ from the animated feature film (the old one, that I watched as a child!), but that’s about it.

Anna and I decided that we’d do a literature based project on the books when we first saw the trailer for the new film - somehow a project seems to have a nice ‘end’ with a film, but I’m hoping we’ll carry on past the first two books and look at all of them, even if we do it in dribs and drabs over the next few years.