Adventures in Narnia

Read the last chapter today while the children were eating tea. Nice to have it knocked on the head. Joe and Abbie loved the part about the apple tree being made into the wardrobe, and the happy ending with Digory’s mother being healed by the magic apple.

There is a crossword in the study guide which uses all the vocabulary words with clues, by way of review, so we might give that a try … or we might just do one of the quizzes from the link in the top right hand corner of the blog - the crossword looks hard even to me!

No vocab words in our unit study today, so we read two chapters of our book instead. And we weren’t really inspired by any of the assignments so we didn’t bother today - well, Abigail made a crown, which was one of the suggestions. Sometimes it feels as though plodding on with an ‘activity’ after the chapter detracts from the enjoyment of the story, so I don’t mind not doing them sometimes! We’re planning to read the last chapter of the book later on today, whether we get round to it remains to be seen.

Word of the day: fledge. An easier one to understand, thankfully! The children enjoyed this chapter, where Strawberry is given wings, renamed Fledge, and then Polly and Digory fly with him to find the garden. Even Josiah was better today. If only someone would bring out a version of the book with a picture on every page, we’d be fine.

Anyway. There is a line in the chapter that Strawberry says about Aslan: ‘I’m sure he knew you needed that but I have a feeling he likes to be asked’. The Bible activity from the study guide picked up on this, relating it back to how the Bible teaches us to pray, and whether God knows what we need, etc. Anna read a couple of the verses, Josiah read one, and we discussed it briefly together.

Read chapter 11 today. Vocabulary word was ’sagacious’, which I’d never heard of, so I’m learning as well.

After the reading we briefly talked about the Cabby’s reaction to having been asked to be King of Narnia, and compared it to reactions of Bible characters when appointed to do things - for example Moses (who tried giving a number of reasons why he couldn’t lead the Israelites out of Egypt), and Saul (who hid behind a load of bags when Samuel anointed him King of Israel).

The children then did the art assignment, which was just to draw a picture of Uncle Andrew being planted by the animals, and to include all the animals mentioned. This provoked huge moaning from Anna who decided she couldn’t fit all the animals into one picture, and she couldn’t draw dogs, or moles, or elephants. Hmmm. She then managed to produce a lovely picture, albeit with Uncle Andrew in the style of Elvis, as she was being stroppy, but it was quite amusing. Abbie worked hard on hers, and so did Josiah, he drew a fantastic elephant!

Read chapter ten today The girls are definitely getting more out of the reading than Joe, although he is enjoying the story as well, his concentration span just isn’t quite there. Anyway. Vocabulary words today were ‘faun’, ’satyr’, and ‘naiad’, all useful words to know I suppose

After the reading we looked at one of the Bible activities together - the study guide was making the comparison between Uncle Andrew’s reaction (of convincing himself that lions can’t sing & animals can’t talk) to Aslan/the founding of Narnia, and the Pharisees in the gospels who refused to hear Jesus’ message. An interesting parallel, not sure I would have got there myself, but there we go.

Trying to get TMN finished before next Friday because a club that the girls go to is starting to ‘do’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe there as well, so it would be good to try and align/tie in with that. I think we’re just about on track

We read chapter nine this morning. Kids were more fidgety than usual - I really don’t know how people manage to read more than one chapter of a book out loud in one sitting - either my lot just aren’t used to it, or they all have ADHD or something! One chapter is about our limit.

Anyway, it’s one of my favourite parts of the book, I love the idea of the animals coming up from the earth, and the birds flying out from the trees as Aslan sings.

Words for today were ‘lilting’ and ‘ostentatious’. After reading the chapter, between us we’ve done all the assignments from the study guide today.

One was a Bible one, just looking at verses describing Jesus’ place at Creation, so we did that together. On reading ‘He is the image of the invisible God’ Josiah rolled his eyes, looked at me, and said ‘I *know* they’re both invisible’

The second one was to make a plant notebook either by looking at real plants or encyclopedia pictures, so Anna’s been doing that. She’s actually just done a miniature book, but she’s working really hard on it, and it looks beautiful so far.

The third activity was to draw a big tree, cut out birds from magazines and make a collage, but we didn’t really have any suitable magazines so Abbie decided to do a drawing instead, which she’s worked equally hard on.

Forgot to mention the ‘homework’ I gave the children. After we’d read the chapter today I challenged them to try and use the keyboard to compose a piece of music to represent the Voice(s) singing. They were quite interested by the idea but haven’t done anything about it yet. I said there was no time limit, it’s just something they can work on if they want to.

Hopefully getting back up to speed on Narnia stuff this week. Today our vocabulary word was ‘impertinent’, which Anna could almost describe the meaning of.

We read chapter 8 together, while Josiah hama-ed, and the girls drew pictures in their project books.

After reading, we discussed the first couple of assignments, about the reactions of each character to the Voice. There were a few Bible verses to look up, about Satan being in the presence of God, which are interesting if you are looking at the parallels of Jadis - Satan/Aslan - God.

We also answered the critical thinking questions about the characters of Uncle Andrew and the Cabby. Anna was quite good at this, although I know if I’d asked her to write anything down it would have been hard work to get it in writing. Something to work on, I guess.

Steve read chapter seven of the book to the children, while they fidgeted. Hmm.

Read chapter six this morning It almost happened spontaneously, I hadn’t really planned to ‘do’ Narnia today, so it was really nice when the kids asked for it - they had hama beads out at the same time - them having something to do while I read really helps, as it means they don’t fiddle and fidget around!

Anyway, we ran through the vocabulary words from the study guide before we read the chapter - I quite like this exercise, it makes the kids listen harder during the chapter as well, as they’re listening out for the words in use. Today’s words included sham, treachery, dabble, pax, um, and I can’t remember all the others. Anna particularly liked the word sham and has included it in a couple of sentences this afternoon!

We skimmed over the Bible activity as well - but it was about the evils of magic, today, and very much coming from the fundamental ‘all magic is bad’ stance (you know, those people who would preach about the evils of Harry Potter), so I didn’t want to focus on it too much. Personally, I would agree with the fundamental viewpoint, but not the way in which it is communicated/expressed. Anyway, didn’t want to confuse Josiah any more, he already thinks God is Magic, and does things by Magic An understandable conclusion, I suppose!

We did the ‘critical thinking’ questions too, which were about (a) putting yourself in Digory & Polly’s shoes - how would you have reacted to the Witch when she went all weak at the Wood between the Worlds, and (b) what the ‘Mark’ of a magician might have been.