adventures in home-making

Travels with Tintin.

Do I have a special place in my heart for the French Tintin because his first literary adventure took place in the land of Soviet Russia? Mais, bien sur! Billions of blustering blue barnacles, c'est vrai.

In 1929, Tintin In the Land of the Soviets appeared in a children's supplement to a Belgian daily newspaper, Le Vingtième Siècle. Hergé's satire on the Soviet state preceded the grand anti-communist crusades of the 1940's and 1950's . Soviet propaganda to persuade the world outside Russia that the economy was booming was a particular target for Hergé, as were the activities of the secret police, the OGPU.   

According to Benoît Peeters, the only source Hergé used when making this album was a book entitled, "Moscou sans voiles" from 1928 by Joseph Douillet. Douillet was the Belgian Consul in Rostov. Some of the scenes from the the album was taken directly from Douillet's book including the voting scene. Herge was just twenty-three when he wrote this first Tintin story. Yuri Kim has more on Tintin's  travels in the USSR.

More Tintinisms: Listen to the Tintin TV series tune here. Enjoy the Greek-ish music associated with Tintin's travels and the Golden Fleece. Download an entire Tintin adventure in English; The Red Sea Sharks makes for great car tripping. And this French episode, truer to form, makes for great trips of all kinds.  It never hurts to have a few Tintin coloring pages printed out for grumpy old folks.

Preparing for tornadoes...

I've learned that a having a very active 5-year-old requires a bit of pre-planning these days, so I thought I'd go ahead and make a link list of activities for us tomorrow, given the bad weather forecast. Consider this a few projects for rainy days....

• Create an "Architecture around the world" project using posterboard, markers, facade print-outs and a few other jazzy things.
• Take extremely detailed and technique-laden watercolor lessons. It's free (except for the paints and brushes).
• Start an Author Study of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Read, sing, discuss, and ponder what the Wilders or other pioneers might have done in a tornado. If you want more on this topic, the Hoover Presidential Library has a teaching unit on Wilder as well.
  
• Enjoy the games, activities, unit studies, audios, print-outs, renderings, and much-such from this fairy tales website. Truly a rainbow with a treasure at the end...
• Savor a few of these old-timey "pre-readers" with their sweet etchings and whim-licious illustrations.
• Raid your closets for junky old shoes and start spicing them up with some shoe art.
• Try this Unit Study on Weather from Easy Fun School. (P.S. I love Easy Fun School-- it really is easy and fun!)
  

Family fun.

One of my favorite old-timey treaures is the Family Fun book published by The Parents' Institute in 1931. Found it at a garage sale a long time ago, it's packed with games and ideas for, yes, family fun.

There are a few lines in the introduction which I find to be bittersweet, reflecting what people believed about the future of industrial society in 1931:

"Homemakers should gain more and more time to play. And, as production in industry is speeded, the working day must grow shorter. In not so many years we should have fathers coming home from work, not to an armchair and dozing over the newspaper, but early in the afternoon for outdoor play with their families and friends."

Now that we know the future never happened, on to the games...

FAIRIES AND INDIANS

This game is best for kids between the ages of 5 and 7. You can use props like home-made fairy wands (a twig with glitter glued to it) and feather hats (a rag tied around the head with a feather attached). The girls are fairies; the boys are Indians. The fairies are in the woods. They run about and at last fall alseep in the woods-- all but one fairy, who keeps watch while the others sleep. The Indians, who have been hiding behind the trees, come out from their hiding places cautiously. As they approach the sleeping fairies, the fairy on guard calls "Indians!" At the call, the fairies rush out to catch the Indians before they get back to their wigwams. Every Indian caught becomes a fairy.

GOSSIP

I love this game because it teaches kids how gossip takes a tidbit of truth and turns it into something yucky and unrecognizable. The players are seated in a circle. The leader whispers a sentence quickly to the one seated next to him. The second player whispers it in turn to the next player and so on around the circle. No one may whisper the sentence twice and each player repeats it as he hears it. It is interesting to see how the results compare to the original.

Setting out on a map quest.

Max and I have been using our family strolls this week to create a map of the neighborhood. On the first day, we drew the streets, and then we walked around, notebooks in hand, adding each house, noting numbers and neat mailboxes and big magnolia trees and speed limit signs and windy driveways and big, red front doors, and so on... We dubbed the steep hill that leads down to the old lake "Steeple Hill" and put it on the map.

We also added secret trails through the woods that lead to other neighborhoods. I think the secret trails still need names, so we'll use our wordsmith Max to this effect on the next stroll. I'm loving our map project and hope we can replicate it on a giant piece of paper and then watercolor the various details before mounting it on the wall.