Poetry kids love: T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

I was looking for some fun poems to enjoy with the girls when I was suddenly thrown back to my childhood and the memory of my time in the car, with my mum, singing songs from “Cats: The Musical”  by Andrew Lloyd Webber. We had watched the musical together in the West End on a trip to London and we both loved the music. I learnt all the lyrics to the songs and was surprised to  find out later that the lyrics were actually adapted from poems by T.S. Eliot. These poems had been written to amuse his grandchildren and they certainly entertained. I remember devouring the poems as a child and I suspected my girls would get the same amount of enjoyment from them too. The poems are hard to resist and they beg to be read out loud and acted out and that is exactly what happened as the girls read them.

We started off by reading a selection of poems like Macavity: The Mystery Cat and The Naming Of the Cats, which I had printed off the internet and then, just for fun, I showed them clips from musical. It whetted their appetite and they were eager to read the other poems as well as watch more clips from the musical. Before long, I caught them practising their own rendition of The Old Gumbie Cat - not only had they had memorised it but they had also choreographed a whole song and dance routine and were practising it with such glee. :)

Needless to say - it was great fun and I always love it when they get this enthusiastic about something they are learning!

I purchased a lovely audio version of the poems beautifully read by Sir John Gielgud and Irene Worth.

These are some of the videos we watched from Cats: The musical. It definitely served a purpose in increasing their interest in the poems.

My daughter was so into it, she even made a glog about it. Making the glog really appealed to her artistic sensibilities and it was also a valuable exercise in learning to research and distil the information needed to fit the limited format. She really enjoyed the process and did a great job. 

Losing one's way: the road to perspective

 "Mummy, try not to be too stressed." 
My elder daughter looks at me with a worried frown on her face. 

Am I stressed? Have I been yelling again? Have I misplaced the joy of being here - present - alive? 

I have to take deep breath.

"I'm sorry." This is all I know to say when I realise that I've lost my way - again. When was the last time I laughed with my kids?

I need perspective, I need to step back. 

I need to remember why I'm doing this: homeschooling, juggling family and work. It seems to always be about trying to prioritise the right thing -  time with God, my husband, my kids; or trying to catch up on things - reading, administration, sleep, life...

Sometimes we all need to look up from our ceaseless tasks and perceive the landscape of our lives and make sure we haven't taken a wrong turn and ended up entangled and so far removed from our original path that we don't even know how we got there.

I'm a do-er, a planner and a tick-off-my-list kinda girl - so it is really easy for me to get caught up in the day to day busy-ness of homeschooling and lists of to-do's. I focus on the tasks and not on the present. I miss out on little smiles, tender hugs, whispered secrets, silly jokes. I lose my grace and end up frazzled, grumpy, stressed out and just no-fun at all. My brokenness emerges and I am undone by my lack.

So when my daughter looks at me with her big eyes and rubs my back in concern - I know I need to stop:  to take refuge and check in with God, to allow him to draw me back and restore my soul. 


Our recent family devotions have been spent doing a study about becoming a woman of excellence and through our discussions one thing stood out clearly to me. In order to pursue excellence - we need to know what it is we are striving for. We need goals and a vision. I realised I needed a new vision for our family - no, wait - we needed a shared vision for our family.


At the beginning of the year, the girls and I made a list of goals - it included things like learning how to sew, how to ride a wave board, how to play the guitar, being on time for family devotions, sleeping earlier and exercising more. As we talked about how we did on these goals - we were pleased to see that we'd accomplished many of these goals. We also realised that if we hadn't articulated these goals, we would never have taken the necessary steps to achieve them. For example: because the girls expressed their desire to learn how to sew - and being deficient in that skill myself - I sought out a sewing teacher and opportunities for them to learn how to sew. The result was some beautiful bags and two glorious medieval costumes for our end of term medieval feast celebration. 

So with the Christmas season fast bearing down upon us, I thought the year's end would be the ideal time to take stock and talk about our hopes, desires and goals. It is a great way to check in with each other and ourselves, to make sure we are going in the direction we want to. So over these next few weeks, we will be working on a Family Mission Statement as well as our goals for us as a family and for ourselves individually. 


We spent the last week or so talking about the things that we want for our family. We began with a time of prayer and worship and invited Christ into our discussions and everyone had a chance to talk about things we'd loved to be doing as a family - practical things like getting back to regular games nights and about parents not using the phones during what is supposed to be family time (oops!). We got to heart issues as well - like the way we talk to each other and how that makes us feel, the need for more patience and consideration to one another. We reflected on how we could ensure that Christ was at the heart of our family and how we could impact the lives of people around us with grace and blessing.


After all the talking, we got to work on creating a Family Mission Statement - something that would reflect who we are and who we want to be as a family.  We got the whiteboard out and started a mindmap of ideas.

Out of this, we saw where we wanted to be in relation to God, to one another and to the world outside our family.

It is a wonderful thing to have at the forefront of my mind as I go through each day - it reminds me of my purpose as I mother and school my children.  I love that Christ infuses our hopes and dreams for our family. It feels like a marker for our journey - something that will keep us grounded and on course. So when the day spins out of control and all my best laid plans crumble under the weight of real life, when I am tempted to lash out, lose it, lay down in defeat and cry, I look to His grace and return to our vision and remember... 

Our Family Mission Statement

We choose to keep Christ first and foremost in our hearts and our home. We echo Joshua’s words “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

We choose to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness in order to create time and space to be in God’s beautiful presence, to receive daily strength from the Holy Spirit and to bear his fruit through grace-filled lives.

We want our family to be unified in love and appreciation, in understanding and care for each other.

We desire our home to be a refuge and a safe place where we are loved unconditionally for who we are, where our failures and mistakes are forgiven and our dreams and aspirations find their wings.  No one will be left behind or ignored and our purpose is to build each other up, not to tear down.

We desire that our home will be a welcoming place for all – that all who enter our home will breathe in an atmosphere of holy laughter, joyful peace and loving acceptance.

We choose not to ignore the needs of others, to give of ourselves generously and sacrificially, to strive always to see others with the eyes of Jesus.

We want to learn to be available to God and to respond to his prompting so that we may be vessels of blessing.

We do all this so that we may live lives worthy of the calling we have received, that we may be completely humble and gentle, always patient in bearing with one another in love. We choose to make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter. ~e.e. cummings

A Study On Clouds

I love nature and I'd like to get out more, but as I explained in my last post, we just don't. Clouds (and stars actually) have long held a fascination for me. So I guess it was only a matter of time that I would find a way to incorporate it into our nature studies. 

Most recently, I started having the girls observe the clouds on a fairly regularly basis, making sketches and noting the weather. To help them, I printed out a cloud guide from here to help them identify the clouds. 

While doing this, the girls complained that it was hard to draw clouds properly and this seemed like a great opportunity to link in an art lesson or two on "How to paint the sky". And then, I thought why not turn it into a fun unit study? So I declared an "All About Clouds" day and quickly put together a unit study on clouds which would allow us to delve more deeply into all areas of the subject. 

After the usual morning's task of cloud sketching and identification was completed, we started our day reading the following books:

  

  

John Day's Book of Clouds is a beautiful photographic portfolio of clouds which is organised and explained very clearly. We "ooh-ed and ahh-ed" over many of his photos and absorbed a great deal of new information . The Man Who Named The Clouds is a lovely simple picture book which packs a lot of learning into a easy read.  It combined biography, history and weather science.

In my opinion, a study on clouds lends itself perfectly to poetry and art appreciation. I picked out a few simple little poems to read and focused particularly on the idea of Imagery.

Clouds
By Christina Rossetti

White sheep, white sheep,
On a blue hill,
When the wind stops,
You all stand still.
When the wind blows,
You walk away slow.
White sheep, white sheep,
Where do you go?

 

Rain Rain

by Jame Horner

Rain rain
falls on the street,
mud in puddles
cleaning my feet.

Thunder thunder
rumble and roar,
close the windows
and lock the door.

Clouds clouds
black and gray,
heavy with water
to drop all day.

Sun sun
is breaking through,
clouds are moving,
the rain stops too.

Rainbow rainbow
across the sky,
see-through colours
to tickle my eyes.

And then we tackled Percy Shelley's longer, more complex poem, aptly named The Cloud. We took it verse by verse and discussed the language, imagery, alliteration, assonance and personification. It is a long poem and we only looked at the first three verses. You can read the whole poem here.

The Cloud

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,
Lightning, my pilot, sits;
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits;

Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,
Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,
Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The Spirit he loves remains;
And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

After reading all that poetry, we had to try our hand at writing some of our own. So I instructed the girls that they were going to write a poem in free verse. We started off with a five minute freewrite where they could get all their thoughts down about on paper without worrying about spelling or grammar. Then they took a short break and came back to their work. They highlighted phrases and ideas that they liked and then off they went, using those phrases and ideas as a jumping off point for writing their own 

In the afternoon, we moved onto learning how to paint clouds. I think this was the highlight for us and we had a lovely time experimenting different techniques and ideas.We used these Youtube videos to start us off and then after that we looked at photos from The Book Of Clouds and tried to paint our favourite pictures. 

I belatedly found this lovely Cloud Art slideshow at Hearts and Trees, which I will definitely use for more art appreciation on how different artists paint clouds.

We finished up by reading a general book on weather and exploring some weather terms but not in any great detail. We also used some very helpful worksheets from here to complete our studies. We'll probably have to come back to do a more comprehensive study at some point but all in all, it was an enjoyable day of learning.