Family Stories: The Ingalls Family

Little House in the Big Woods (by Laura Ingalls Wilder) was the first book I read aloud to my girls. Olivia was three and a half years old, Karina was two and Susanna was in utero. We had already read the My First Little House Books, which I had come across at our small local library, and Olivia kept wanting more stories about Laura. But there weren't any more of those books, so I decided to feed her desire by reading her the original book Little House in the Big Woods. It had the added advantage of being about a girl that was close to Olivia's age (Laura is four in that first book) and her family life in the big woods of Wisconsin.

I took it slow, reading only about half the chapter every day. I knew she had an excellent attention span and comprehension for someone her age (a result of being read aloud to almost from birth combined with no television viewing) but some of those chapters have long descriptive passages that were beyond her knowledge base and so could easily lose the attention of one so young. Olivia loved it. It delighted her to encounter the expanded episodes she was familiar with from the My First Little House Books. (I think the pace we took was perfect for her.)  To this day she remembers the story of Ma slapping the bear (thinking it was Sukey the cow), and cousin Charley's version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, where his trouble-making lands him in a yellowjackets' nest, and he has to wrapped in mud and linens to bring down the swelling.

Coincidentally (or maybe not) this is the first novel I remember being read aloud to me, and it made a big impression on my young mind, too.

For those of you unfamiliar with this book -is there anyone unfamiliar with this book?- it tells the story of a family living in the woods of Wisconsin in 1872. Pa is a tall hard-working brown-haired, brown-bearded man with twinkling blue eyes, adored by his little girls. Ma is quiet, gentle, and determined to teach her girls about manners, hard work, and self-sufficiency. Mary is the oldest daughter who, even at five years old, is always obedient and industrious. Laura is four years old, small in size but large in spirit, which frequently gets her into trouble in this and the subsequent books. Baby Carrie is the youngest. This is the story of their life in those big woods.

I remembered the books with such fond nostalgia from my childhood, but reading them as an adult gave me a whole new appreciation for them. What strikes me in reading these books is the background story that's taking place: the hardship the family experiences may be mainly from Laura's point of view, but the tension and thread under the surface is about these two adults who are trying to scrabble out a living while protecting their children as much as possible. Life was very hard for those pioneers and homesteaders. The mere act of living for pioneering people meant working from sunup to sundown just to make sure they had what they needed to see themselves through the cold winters. These are wonderful history books about the pioneering movement and spirit. The fact that Laura gives so many wonderful descriptions of what living that life entailed, means that we get a fascinating glimpse into the early settlement west. Despite what some critics of the books have said, Laura doesn't romanticize the life. She tells the good and the bad matter-of-factly. Some of the bad things that happen in this and the other books of the series have no easy, nicely-wrapped-up resolutions. She knows that life was hard, and yet they found comfort in the little things like Pa's fiddle music, an ongoing motif throughout the series. (See my post about Pas' Fiddle Project for a fun addition to your reading of this series.)

Our family has gone on to read more of the Ingalls family adventures in:

• Little House on the Prairie where the family leaves the Big Woods because they were getting too crowded to Pa and journeys to the Kansas Territory. It tells of life on the trail in the covered wagon, the family building their log cabin and the problems of life on a flat prairie in Indian Territory (wolves, a prairie fire, etc.) (Be aware that this book contains some of the prejudiced attitudes of white settlers at the time. But I thought the scenes where Laura and her Pa discuss those issues were very poignant, since Pa recognized the problem that people like him were creating by their westward expansion -i.e. the Native Americans being booted off their land- but didn't know what to do about it. Toward the end of the book, this forced migration is something Laura witnesses.) In the end, the Ingalls family is evicted from their land by the U.S government as well.
• Farmer Boy is about Almanzo Wilder (Laura's future husband) as a boy in on a large farm in New York state.
• On the Banks of Plum Creek has the family leaving the Kansas territory and settling in a dugout on Plum Creek in Minnesota, before Pa builds a house with machine sawed lumber. In this book Laura and Mary go to a real school and church for the first time, and meet obnoxious Nellie Oleson. The family also has to contend with a plague of locusts, which forces Pa to walk to find a job three hundred miles away in order to feed his family and be able to buy grain for the next planting season. Ma and the girls has to cope with everything in his absence.
• By the Shores of Silver Lake takes place five years after the family first came to Plum Creek and finds the family just recovering from a scarlet fever epidemic. Mary has been blinded by scarlet fever. and Grace has been added to the family. The family (Baby Grace has joined the family) moves to the Dakota territory, where Pa works as the pay clerk for the railroad company. And the family becomes one of the first to settle in DeSmet. (This one was our least favorite so far.)

That's as far as we've gotten in our reading aloud. We will probably revisit the series toward the end of this year, rereading Little House in the Big Woods for Susanna's benefit. She will be delighted to read about a girl who is her age. (She seems a little obsessed by that idea right now.) And my older girls appreciate it more at their "advanced" ages than they did at three and two.

 I would highly recommend the series for young boys. There are tons of exciting things that happen.

The books of the The Little House on the Prairie series:

• Little House in the Big Woods
• Little House on the Prairie
• Farmer Boy
• On the Banks of Plum Creek
• By the Shores of Silver Lake
• The Long Winter
• Little Town on the Prairie
• These Happy Golden Years
• The First Four Years

Family Stories: The Moffat Books by Eleanor Estes

We had a delightful time reading The Moffats aloud last year, and the girls are eager for more Moffat adventures. So I caved to their begging and pleading and am reading the second book in the Moffat series, The Middle Moffat.
If you are not familiar with The Moffats, the stories -written in the early 1940's- revolve around an American family living in Cranbury, Connecticut before and during the first World War, that includes Mama, Sylvie, Joey, Jane, and Rufus. Their father died before we meet them in the first book. Their mama supports the family with her sewing and tailoring, but it's not an easy living. There's a lot of scrimping and making do, and the children have a lot of freedom to come and go, in a manner unfamiliar to children in our day.

The first book's overarching theme is that Moffat family house, which all the young Moffats have grown up in, is only a rental, and the landlord has put a "For Sale" sign on the house. With this looming over their heads, the Moffats proceed with life.

In these somewhat autobiographical books, based on Eleanor Estes' childhood memories, each chapter of the books is a complete story about some episode in the children's lives. My girls' favorites from The Moffats were the Halloween chapter, where they make a ghost in their attic to try to scare the obnoxious neighbor boy, and the chapter about Jane losing their coal money.

The second book, The Middle Moffat (winner of the Newbery Honor), finds the family adjusting to life in a new house, neighborhood, new friends, and for Jane, a new school.

The appeal that Eleanor Estes' books have is that she is able to capture the mind set of young people, their impishness, their curiosity, how they see the world, etc., in a way that transcends the passage of time. And Louis Slobodkin's whimsical sketches helpfully highlight the story. (These books are also an interesting look at American children's lives during this time in history.)

We've enjoyed getting to know the Moffats and we're looking forward to more of their adventures.

Here are the books, in order:
The Moffats
The Middle Moffat
Rufus M.
The Moffat Museum

Book Review of Home Schooling: A Family's Journey by Martine and Gregory Millman

Homeschooling: A Family's Journey

Written by Gregory and Martine Millman

Autobiography/Memoir

Published in 2008 by Tarcher

This very well-written book chronicles the journey of one New Jersey family out of the public/private school system and into interest-led home schooling; a journey these highly educated parents didn't originally anticipate, but one which they found to be completely rewarding.
This book also touches on some important deficiencies in the public education arena, and gives a very interesting look at one family's personal solution to those deficiencies. If you are a home schooling family looking into interest-led home schooling, read this book. If you are a mainstreamed public or private school parent, this is a good book to read to understand why some parents choose the home schooling route for reasons other than religion.

"We want our children to become who they are--- and a developed person is, above all, free. But freedom as we define it doesn't mean doing what you want. Freedom means the ability to make choices that are good for you. It is the power to choose to become what you are capable of becoming, to develop your unique potential by making choices that turn possibility into reality. It is the ability to make choices that actualize you. As often as not, maybe more often than not, this kind of freedom means doing what you do not want, doing what is uncomfortable or tiring or boring or annoying." - Gregory Millman

Their approach to learning is characterized by a reliance on "real" books (as opposed to textbooks), real-world experiences, and travel, with very marked success. Gregory Millman says, " With exceptions so rare it is hard to remember one, textbooks are to books as powdered food supplements are to a good, balanced meal." Yes, yes and yes.

Here are some other quotes from the book on issues that resonated with me:

"Sometimes it [the government/society]* wanted children to solve the social problems, such as racial segregation, adults could not handle. Sometimes it tacitly supported some schools as warehouses, not instructional facilities. Sometimes it sought schooling to be the equalizer in a society in which the gap between the rich and the poor was growing... Now the drumbeat demands that all children achieve academically at a high level and the measure of that achievement is tests." - Patricia Albjerg Graham, former director of the National Institute of Education

In elaboration of the above statement, Millman writes, "The decision to send a child to school is a decision to send a child into an environment with an organization and culture shaped by such seldom articulated assumptions and compromises. It is a decision to entrust a child to an enterprise whose tacit mission and goals may be different from the ones written on the wall. These missions and goals are both political and economic."

Millman discusses the concept of "agency risk - the notion that people who manage an organization [in this case, schools] tend to manage it in their own interest, not in the interest of shareholders or other stake-holders [i.e. the children]."

Personally, I read this book with a silent cheer, because not only does it outline so well the issues and struggles my own family has faced in the public school system in our town, but the Millmans' philosophy toward education and learning is one that I passionately share.

(Let me also clearly state that I support every family's right to choose the educational option that works best for them, be it public school, private school, home school, or even no school. It is not my place to question another family's educational decisions.)

*The words within the brackets [ ] are mine, to make the quote clearer.

The Millman's blog at http://www.homeschoolingafamilysjourney.com/