The Raven

October seems like the perfect month for Poe's The Raven:

• Classic Poetry Aloud offers an elegant reading of this classic creepy poem.
• StoryNory offers a perkier version.
• and you can hear the Allen Parsons Project version as the soundtrack to this whimsical home-movie interpretation of the poem: 

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pics

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God’s World

God’s World 

O World,
I cannot hold thee close enough
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise.
Thy wood, this autumn day, that ache and sag.
And all but cry with colour!
That gaunt crag To crush!
To lift the lean of that black bluff.
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough.

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this:
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart –
Lord I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me – let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

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October

October

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost –
For the grape’s sake along the wall.

-- Robert Frost

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The Daily Listen

I've mentioned this before -- using iPod playlists for instruction -- in my post about Breakfast Devotions.  Since then I have expanded it to include:

Memorization Work:

• The BSF memory verse for the week set to music or merely read aloud, if we can find it in iTunes.
• The poems that we are memorizing from Andrew Pudewa's Linguistic Development Through Poetry. 
• Our vocabulary words for the week from Wordly Wise.
• The current unit's chapters of Prima Latina. 
• The books of the Bible.

Read-Alouds

• Any Old Testament chapters from The Message that are part of our study for Ancient History from the guide that Beautiful Feet puts out.
• The chapters from The Message that our BSF study is covering this week.

This plays during the time of the day that we are doing chores, moving about the house.  While we are doing schoolwork, we listen to an all Classical playlist.

Later this year we will study Classical Composers, so their works will be added one at a time to the list, so that we can start to distinguish them from one another. 

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Wordly Wise

We have just started with this Vocabulary Building curriculum and I rather like it.  I download the audio presentation from the Wordly Wise website and add it to our iTunes "Daily Listen" playlist, which I will tell you about in an other post.   After a couple of days of listening, we tackle the worksheets.  The children get most of the answers right and feel all clever and "Good at English".  The webiste also includes fun review games which are a nice carrot for children who complete their lessons promptly.

Besides, what's not to love about a curriculum that includes this sentence: "Only the Congress of the United States has the authority to declare war."

P.S. Just found the Wordly Wise Word Lists here, so if you wanted to you could just work with the word lists and the audio and the games. 

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Stuffed Pumpkin

Oh how we loved it.  It reminded us a bit of a good cheese fondue, but more healthful.   I based it on Dorie Greenspan's recipe.

Dice and cook:
3-4 strips of bacon

Cut the top off of, and hollow out:
1 large pumpkin, about 4-5 pounds

Combine, and then fill the pumpkin with it:
the bacon
1 loaf of white artisan bread cubed and dried out in the oven.
1/2 C pinenuts
6-8 cloves garlic,
minced 3/4 C cubed cheddar
3/4 C cubed Swiss
1/2 C homemade soft cheese that I had to make when the yogurt I was trying to make curdled
1/2 C cream cheese, diced
1 C half-and-half
1 T nutmeg salt and pepper

Bake on foil lined cookie pan for about 2 hours at 350. Serve with apple and tomato slices.

Dorie's instructions are much more detailed, so if you have questions, go see her post, linked above.

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