These are the titles which I think she has enjoyed most since birth. They are not in any order!

Little Nut Brown Hair
Jungle Book
Secret Garden
Peepo
Winnie The Pooh
The Borrowers
Mighty Tug Boats
Miffy
Meg and Mog lift the flap book
ABC – Sarah Pinto
Hiawatha
Little Women
Little Bee Cloth book.
Angelina Ballerina
Shirley Hughes Collection
Kipper Collection
Flower Fairies Collection
Usborne Farmyard Tales.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
A squash and a Squeeze has been a favourite at times..

When she was very small she enjoyed the original Noddy books, from the 70;s and Peter Rabbit.. though i am not sure this didnt give her bad dreams!

She also enjoyed the ladybird book. ….. and in fact still does!

She has a collection of the Medici Childrens Books. She loves them all. Especially King Cups cottage

She enjoys the Secret Garden, and The little Princess, both by Frances Hodges Burnett.
She is also currently enjoying Little Women .. Louise Alcott.

This is partly because of the christmas spirit, and partly because Asha has had a snuffly cold for a while, so were still not onto “written work”

However she now has full command of the following three works of literature :

Little Women – Louise Alcott.. to the extent that yesterday, when I asked her which was her favourite book, she informed me that ” little women is, because Joe is like you and me mummy” Slightly abashed I asked her what she meant by this” she has a tempor which rises up and we both try and control it.. but fail misserably” Well there you go…

She also asked why daddies cant always be around, and what the war was in the story. She seems to empathise a lot with the girls when they are sad..

The secret Garden – Frances Hodges Burnett. She has loved this title for some time now, and I am seriously starting to tire of it. But her games have gone from Colin;s nautyness to being an Animal Charmer.. She is no longer wanting to be like Mary Lennox, recognising that Mary has a terrible temper, which Asha says isnt like a princess… It has also encouraged a great amount of interest in india, and if anyone has any recommendations for indian literature suitable for a 5 year old i would like to hear them!!

The Little Princess, also Frances Hodges Burnett.
This is interesting as it is encouraging her good behaviour and her love of literature and her sympathetic nature. Its also bought up questions about mineing, death, quarrying.. and slavery / maids… Wonderful stuff!

She also has some command of the following works.

The Hobbit. – daddy is currently re-reading it to her.
Winnie the poo.
Hiawatha.. All these have developed a lot since November and I am pleased with these outcomes.

In December we went to a violin concert in liverpool held by the Liverpool Suzuki group, it was wonderful. Asha had a lovely evening, though she was fidgetty, after a long day in birkenhead and liverpool, visiting such wonderful places as Woodside, Birkehead, etc..

Her violin practice has been slow this month, but hopefully we will get back on track once her snuffle has gone.

Currently Asha is not interested in reading or writing. Were encouraging these skills by ensuring she always has access to pens, paper and reading fodder… I am not worried about these skills, as last time I worked on them with her, she was well within her age group needs… and well.. there is more to education!

Her fascination with local birds is continuing.. we feed them every day, and she watches them every day.. often for hours at a time.. I plan on doing more work with bird life, once I have found some more resources on it.. We certainly seem to enjoy talking about there shapes, feet, wings etc….

Crafts, before Christmas we made loads of decorations.. snowmen, candles for on the wall, birds to hang up.. all sorts, since christmas we have done some painting, some drawing and talked about the chemical reaction needed to make a crystal snow tree.

Asha has contined to spend much time doing skateboarding, walking and enjoying time outside. We have also enjoyed a trip to portmerion…

I am generally more than happy with Asha’s level of education. She is a sociable, happy child.. what else can I want?

Lights were shining from every window, and there was a savoury smell of roast goose, for it was New-year’s eve—yes, she remembered that. In a corner, between two houses, one of which projected beyond the other, she sank down and huddled herself together. She had drawn her little feet under her, but she could not keep off the cold; and she dared not go home, for she had sold no matches, and could not take home even a penny of money. Her father would certainly beat her; besides, it was almost as cold at home as here, for they had only the roof to cover them, through which the wind howled, although the largest holes had been stopped up with straw and rags. Her little hands were almost frozen with the cold. Ah! perhaps a burning match might be some good, if she could draw it from the bundle and strike it against the wall, just to warm her fingers. She drew one out—“scratch!” how it sputtered as it burnt! It gave a warm, bright light, like a little candle, as she held her hand over it. It was really a wonderful light. It seemed to the little girl that she was sitting by a large iron stove, with polished brass feet and a brass ornament. How the fire burned! and seemed so beautifully warm that the child stretched out her feet as if to warm them, when, lo! the flame of the match went out, the stove vanished, and she had only the remains of the half-burnt match in her hand.

She rubbed another match on the wall. It burst into a flame, and where its light fell upon the wall it became as transparent as a veil, and she could see into the room. The table was covered with a snowy white table-cloth, on which stood a splendid dinner service, and a steaming roast goose, stuffed with apples and dried plums. And what was still more wonderful, the goose jumped down from the dish and waddled across the floor, with a knife and fork in its breast, to the little girl. Then the match went out, and there remained nothing but the thick, damp, cold wall before her.

She lighted another match, and then she found herself sitting under a beautiful Christmas-tree. It was larger and more beautifully decorated than the one which she had seen through the glass door at the rich merchant’s. Thousands of tapers were burning upon the green branches, and coloured pictures, like those she had seen in the show-windows, looked down upon it all. The little one stretched out her hand towards them,
and the match went out.

The Christmas lights rose higher and higher, till they looked to her like the stars in the sky. Then she saw a star fall, leaving behind it a bright streak of fire. “Someone is dying,” thought the little girl, for her old grandmother, the only one who had ever loved her, and who was now dead, had told her that when a star falls,
a soul was going up to God.

She again rubbed a match on the wall, and the light shone round her; in the brightness stood her old grandmother, clear and shining, yet mild and loving in her appearance. “Grandmother,” cried the little one, “O take me with you; I know you will go away when the match burns out; you will vanish like the warm stove, the roast goose, and the large, glorious Christmas-tree.” And she made haste to light the whole bundle of matches, for she wished to keep her grandmother there. And the matches glowed with a light that was brighter than the noon-day, and her grandmother had never appeared so large or so beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms, and they both flew upwards in brightness and joy far above the earth, where there was neither cold nor hunger nor pain, for they were with God.

In the dawn of morning there lay the poor little one, with pale cheeks and smiling mouth, leaning against the wall; she had been frozen to death on the last evening of the year; and the New-year’s sun rose and shone upon a little corpse! The child still sat, in the stiffness of death, holding the matches in her hand, one bundle of which was burnt. “She tried to warm herself,” said some. No one imagined what beautiful things she had seen, nor into what glory she had entered with her grandmother, on New-year’s day.

The Little Match Seller a Christmas Story by Hans Christian Anderson

I am currently re-reading one of my favourite books from my teens.. Yes I did read it well before I became a parent!

The first 30 pages of it have some wonderful paragraphs, which i feel are very instumental on explaining some of the ignorance and ways of individuals…I have decided to add them here, as i love all of them!

p14.

..

.and this is rather different from the challenge and protest type of thinking. Indeed some governments see the teaching of constructive thinking as the best protection against blanket protest thinking which is all that is usually availiable to mentally energetic young people who have not been taught thinking…

In the positive challenge we acknowledge the value of existing idea then we create a new idea and lay it alongside the old idea. We then seek to show that the new idea has merits and benefits

p15

Our egos become very much tied up with being right. In western cultures that is the basis of argument and the adversarial system. We are reluctant to admit defeat because of this ego problem. The result is that our thinking is both aggressive and defensive but rarely constructive.

p16

The second reason we have neglected creative thinking is very interesting indeed. Every valuable creative idea must always seem logical in hindsight after someone has had the idea, If the new idea were not logical in hindsight we would never be able to respond to it as valuable So we are only able to respond to those ideas which are indeed logical in hindsight. The rest remain as crazy ideas.

Its a Longman new reader book, “when nibbles gets lost in Ms Millers classroom, will anyone be able to find the hamster”

In the book you can discuss disability – Julie has some physical disabilitie. Different lifestyles – Letang nan used to own goats. Bullying, and name calling. emotions, and all the animals which we call pets.. and how different people have different pets. Julies nan used to keep cows, so Julie had a pet calf when she was younger..

Anyway, following on from our story, Asha started playing pet games… again, and my bed is now covered in soft toys, but i managed to catch her at it… just a pity she noticed, and started “acting” for the laptop.

MOV000010.avi

I will embed this later, when i can remeber how to do it again… :d

Today was Alice in Wonderland at Penrhyn Castle. Along with Chris, from the Harlequin Puppet Theater The oldest purpose built puppet theater in britain , at Ros on Sea – Well worth a visit!!

Asha loves the national trust fun days, as she gets time to do some crafty project – todays was decorating a fairy cake,

and making a plate rabbit. Also today she planted some seeds, in little pots. As well as this there was the colouring in competition, and the trail – with a prize for everyone who did it..

she also enjoyed having a go at lawn crochet, and hoop playing..

Added onto this, about three hours of Bimbamboozle,and time to play in the large grounds, fun play area and if you want visit the castle, or stable areas where there are displays such as the steam trains, old dolls etc etc..

Anyway, today we had agreed to meet some friends there, who did the fancy dress parade, as well. We didnt do it this week, but are going to endevour too for next week.

Having fun doing all mad stuff at the moment but I fall asleep as soon as I get home at night, exhausted!!

(Photograph of Chris, and Asha, kindly provided for by Debbie Pritchards Proffesional Child Minding Service )

This morning we enjoyed,  Midsummers Nights Dream and Romeo And Juliet in bed, and This evening we read, Twelfth Night.

Asha absolutely loved them.. They are illustrated enough for her to enjoy looking at the line drawings, and ask questions whilst listening to the stories…

Fantastic.. And because they arent tooo long, I can read her a whole book in less than an hour.

Now which Key Stage do they cover Shakespere in

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
x (some of them) 4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
x 5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible -
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
running total: 8

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
x 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
running total: 16

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
x 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
x 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
running total: 22

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
running total: 31

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
x 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
x 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
x 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
x 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
running total: 37

x 51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
x 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
running total: 45

x 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
x 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
x (half way thru) 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
x 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
running total: 50

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
x 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
x 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
running total:55

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
running total: 60

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

68 Oh well, at least there are still some titles to tackle for me

From – “A City of Bells” by Elizabeth Goudge – the hero is opening a book shop the next morning, and his grandfather,a lovable elderly Anglican priest, stops shelving books to deliver a homily on the profession of a bookseller:
“A bookseller is the link between mind and mind, the feeder of the hungry, very often the binder up of wounds. There he sits, your bookseller, surrounded by a thousand minds all done up neatly in cardboard cases; beautiful minds, courageous minds, strong minds, wise minds, all sorts and conditions. And there come into him other minds, hungry for beauty, for knowledge, for truth, for love, and to the best of his ability he satisfies them all…Yes…It’s a great vocation.”

“Greater than a writer’s?” … “Immeasurably,” said Grandfather. “A writer has to spin his work out of himself and the effect upon the character is often disastrous. It inflates the ego. Now your bookseller sinks his own ego in the thousand different egos that he introduces one to the other…He deals in the stuff of eternity and there’s no death in a bookseller’s shop. Plato and Jane Austen and Keats sit side by side behind his back, Shakespeare on his right hand and Shelley on his left…Yes, writers, from what I’ve seen of them, are a very queer lot, but booksellers are the salt of the earth.”

One of my all time favourite quotes