• About Farm School




    "There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live."
    James T. Adams

    Family, books, food, organic farming, classical home education, books, gardening, journeys, music, books, thoughts, movies, and books.

    Davy is in third grade, Daniel in fourth grade, and Laura in sixth grade

    Email: farmschool at hmsinet dot com
  • Old Farm School

  • Notable Quotables

    "The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall, nations perish, civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead."
    Clarence Day

    "Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing."
    Cicero

    "Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend."
    Sir Francis Bacon, "Essays"

    "The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning."
    Gilbert Highet, "The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning"

    "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."
    Walter Wriston

    "I'd like to give you a piece of my mind."
    "Oh, I couldn't take the last piece."
    Ginger Rogers to Frances Mercer in "Vivacious Lady" (1938)

    "No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem."
    Booker T. Washington

    "Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."
    Attributed to Groucho Marx in "The Groucho Letters" by Arthur Sheekman

    "If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me."
    Alice Roosevelt Longworth

    "If we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives, we feel all our hard work ain't been in vain for nothin'."
    Jean Hagen as "Lina Lamont" in "Singin' in the Rain" (1952)
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Poetry Friday: A post for my father, who thinks I fell off the blogging earth

Written in Marchby William Wordsworth
(from our copy of Favorite Poems Old and New, selected by Helen Ferris and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard)
The cock is crowing,The stream is flowing,The small birds twitter,The lake doth glitter,The green field sleeps in the sun;The oldest and youngestAre at work with the strongest:The cattle are grazing,Their heads never raising;There are [...]

Festival report

We spent most of yesterday at the first day of the town’s arts festival. The boys each recited a poem in the morning for Speech Arts, and in the evening Laura performed her musical theater number, “I Have Confidence” from The Sound of Music.
For the past few years, the kids have entered just the Speech [...]

March issue of The Edge of the Forest

has been out now for a bit. Hurray, and thanks to Kelly Herrold and all the contributors. Features that have caught my eye so far, since I just started reading through it:
Liz’s interview with Kirby Larson, author of Hattie Big Sky (historical fiction set in 1918 Montana, and a 2007 Newbery Honor book)
Nonfiction reviews of [...]

Hot to trot tots and their pole-dancing mamas

A couple of months ago, after seeing the Macleans magazine cover story about “dressing our daughters like skanks”, I wrote,
What continues to surprise me is how many mothers around here, and remember, I’m far away from liberal east coast urban types, so your experience may be wide of my mark, are the ones who choose [...]

St. Patrick’s Day: One thing leads to another, and the mist that do be on the bog

Last year’s more conventional entry
This year’s less conventional one, from ‘Tis by Frank McCourt, which I’m rereading while awaiting the arrival via ILL of his Teacher Man:
I walk through Woodside to the library to borrow a book I looked at the last time I was there, Sean O’Casey’s I Knock at the Door. It’s a [...]

Project Beagle (and Science in School)

I’ve added a new button to the right for Project Beagle, which I discovered at the Beagle blog. You can read more there and at the Project Beagle website; the actual ship plans are here. As the website notes,
we aim to provide the most compelling event of Charles Darwin’s 2009 bicentenary by [...]

Poetry Friday II: A new(ish) resource for literature

With many thanks to the person on one of my Sonlight groups for posting the link to the American literature page at AOL@School (with some interesting looking literature guides), which led me to these Emily Dickinson links (here, here, and here). Though I wonder what Ms. Dickinson would think about her modern transformation.
And AOL’s [...]

Poetry Friday: A unicorn for spring

Laura, the one child who isn’t reciting anything in the speech arts part of the arts festival next week (because she’s up to her eyeballs in 4H public speaking), selected this because “it makes me think of Spring”:
Unicornby Anne Corkett
Unicorn, Unicorn,where have you gone?I’ve brought you some silver dewout of the dawn.I’ve put it [...]

New from the Edmonton Public Library system

I heard on the radio this morning that the Edmonton Public Library system has started offering OverDrive, so that patrons can download hundreds (I think 700 or so) of audiobooks and music CDs from home: “Browse and search hundreds of great titles from OverDrive and download them to your computer, transfer them to a portable [...]

What not to wear

to court for Lord Black of Crossharbour’s trial, starting Wednesday. (Though perfectly lovely for taking the March air.)

Poetry Friday: The Friday whirl

The kids and I dashed off to the Goodwill shop yesterday after lunch to find a few things to add to the kids’ “Fiddler on the Roof” wardrobes. In addition to two vests for the boys, and a polyester lace tablecloth from which I plan to cut a shawl for Laura, I found a small [...]

A child’s introduction to classic art and classical music

New to me, from the March 2007 issue of Canadian Family magazine, found yesterday at the library:
Can You Hear It?, book and accompanying audio cd, by William Lach of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (published by Abrams); suggested for ages four to ten. From the Met Store website:
A bustling cityscape full of cars and people; [...]

A Landmark decision

While starting to put together a list of children’s books set in and around Boston (what I really want is what doesn’t exist, the Boston version of Leonard Marcus’s Storied City), I came across some good news (requires free registration) in last week’s Boston Globe, “An adventure in finding books for boys” (emphases mine, as [...]

Rendered edible?

As disturbing as the news that 8,000 cattle and farmed deer in Saskatchewan are under quarantine after receiving tainted feed containing now-banned* ruminant meat meal and bone meal is the fact that what they were supposed to receive was “feather meal”**. The newspaper article in the previous link describes feather meal as “a protein source [...]

Children’s entertainment that isn’t prechewed

One of the joys of traipsing in and out of Toronto’s Pearson Airport over a weekend is being able to stock up on the Saturday editions of The Globe & Mail and National Post, and the Sunday edition of The New York Times. In the G&M book review, I found a brief mention of the [...]

Trip snaps

Palm tree (friend’s garden)
[...]

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007)

From his obituary in yesterday’s New York Times:
Young Arthur first attended public schools in Cambridge, but his parents lost faith in public education in his sophomore year after a civics teacher informed Arthur’s class that inhabitants of Albania were called Albinos and had white hair and pink eyes. He was shipped to the Phillips Exeter [...]