Cottonwood Fuzz and Other Buzz

It's a Cottonwood fuzz kind of day.  I see the cotton drifting past the house, carried on invisible, silent air currents.  Bees forage in the honeysuckle by day and sphinx (hummingbird) moths dip and sip gracefully at dusk.  The air feels heavy and humid, and the sun retreats and presents itself  by turns.  The soil is still moist from our recent rains, and the temperatures are mild and the wind is light.

I love knowing that the grain is getting plump in the wheat heads in this ideal growing weather.  In the garden, the lettuce heads enlarge and stay sweet and crisp.  Somewhere in the world, weather like this is probably so typical as to become monotonous.  Not here.  Here it's a gift to be treasured on the sixth day after its arrival.

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Life and death dramas play out around us constantly.

Tomorrow evening a celebration is planned after church to honor Amos and Anne N.'s 90th birthdays.

John S. Nisly (sewing machine repairman) died today, after having been diagnosed with cancer only last week.  He was married to Sylvia, and was 81 years old.

Lydia Yoder, who is in her upper nineties, recently became ineligible for hospice care, since her condition has been stable for the past six months.  Stable is not to be confused with improving.  She suffers from dementia, has no mobility and requires total care.  Her daughter Rosa is her primary caregiver.

Marian, who died last October, was Lydia's youngest daughter.  On Sunday, Betty Y.  told us in church of the little momento Rosa's granddaughter Jessamy created in honor of Marian.  It was a clay sculpture of a woman kneeling, and serves as a reminder of how Marian's prayers continue to bless all of us who were part of her family, her circle of friends, and her church.

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The Marvin Mast family is planning to travel in southern Europe, the Middle East, and in Asia for about a month this summer.  If a certain special grandbaby of ours arrives a few days before the expected time, they might get to see her months or years before we do.

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The language arts curriculum review is still underway at the grade school.  Tomorrow the review committee and the grade school staff are meeting to discuss the project.  As part of the committee, I've been immersing myself in perusing information from a variety of sources.  One big surprise is that I found a lot of common ground in "Common Core" standards (the government program of the hour) and in Charlotte Mason's writing from the late 1800s and early 1900s in England.  One notable difference, however, is that Mason has a strong Christian foundation for her educational approach.  People often have a decidedly negative view of Common Core.  Maybe I didn't see enough of it to analyze it accurately, but what I saw of it didn't look horrible to me.  The common ground I found was the idea that the study of language arts ought to be firmly embedded in the study and presentation of material from many disciplines--not heavily or solely dependent on grammar and usage rules in isolation from dealing with meaningful material from other fields.

I'd love to hear from any readers of this blog who have thoughts on ideal language arts curricula, opinions to pass on, or specific curriculum recommendations to make.  In a stroke of genius, Arlyn suggested that we solicit input from local homeschoolers.  Those responses are beginning to come in, and, as I have known for many years, these parents are bound to have more experience than most classroom teachers have in selecting curriuculm, weeding out what doesn't work, and hanging on for dear life to what does work.

I may attend the homeschooling conference this weekend in Wichita.  It's been a long time since I've gone.

Another matter I'd love to hear input on is how Christian schools elsewhere view their relationship to state standards.  Do you try to follow them?  Do you try to exceed them?  Are you familiar with them?