ananse and the greedy lion

In this story, King Lion forces Ananse and Rabbit to capture and prepare food for him, but refuses to share any of the food with them. So Ananse cooks up a plan to get back at King Lion while King Lion conspires with rabbit to eliminate Ananse (both parts depicted here in J's drawing.)


So Ananse poisons a deer and then calls out that he's got a meal fit for a King. (Zoo Boy's drawing of Ananse tempting King Lion to come.)










Of course, the greedy lion comes a'runnin' and gobbles down the poisoned meat, which kills him. (My drawing.)

spring in full bloom

Blooms are bursting out all over!

In the pasture:
In the garden:

In the yard:

In the woods:

Along the stream:

By the pond:

Ok, ok, so those aren't technically blooms. But fiddleheads are pretty and as much a harbinger of spring as flowers!

And, according to Kiri, extremely tasty:

journals

This week's journal entries:

Above is J's. He he he, is anyone else as amused by their kid as I am by mine??

Below is Zoo Boy's:


This is amazing for several reasons. First, and most obviously, this is the first time The Boy has entered something other than Pokemon in his journal! That in itself is pretty outstanding. But even more exciting is that he's so taken by our West African Trickster tales, he feels the need to draw and write about them even when it's not required! We went to the library this weekend, and he sought out and read some Anansi stories in picture-book format, and one was the story he wrote about here. Pretty cool!!!

ananse talks to his house

In our last story of the week, Leopard hides in Ananse the Spider's house, waiting to ambush and eat him. Ananse, being the clever spider that he is, knows that Leopard has it in for him, so calls to his house as tho he expects it to talk back to him. When the house doesn't talk back, Ananse claims that, if the house is going to be so rude, he'll go spend the night at Eland's house. In desperation, Leopard pretends she's the house and talks to Ananse, thus revealing herself. This first drawing is J's.


The story ends by Ananse dashing through the window and hiding up in a corner of the room out of Leopard's reach (and explains why his children and grandchildren, etc, now all hide in corners of ceilings in houses). Zoo Boy chose to draw this part of the story.




My drawing.

That's it for this week, but the kids are already chomping at the bit to get started with more Ananse stories next week! We may read one tomorrow to get a jump on it -- we're on "break" from Monday Homeschool classes, because it's school vacation week in this area and the museum we use for our classes will be open to the public instead. So we get a longer than normal "school week" this week, and will take full advantage of it to bring the kids more Ananse stories!

ananse saves mouse

In this story, our friend Ananse the Spider finds Mouse pinned down under a furry paw (as depicted here by Zoo Boy) and about to become King Lion's dinner. Ananse inquires how this happened, and Mouse tells him that King Lion was caught in a pit and promised not to eat her if she helped rescue him. So she tied a rope to a tree, tossed it into the pit, and of course King Lion grabbed her the minute he pulled himself out. (He is, after all, King Lion!)

Ananse asked King Lion to demonstrate, so he let go of Mouse and jumped back into the pit. (He might be King, but I'm tellin' ya, the dude is a little short on brains.) Of course, Mouse ran off. You can see her tail as she makes her escape off the page of J's drawing. (I love his overhead perspective!)


So Ananse wished King Lion luck at getting out of the pit on his own this time (my drawing, at left) and went on his way searching for dinner, having both played a trick and done a good deed all at once.

I'm with the kids on this -- these stories are FUN!

otters and ducks and mink, oh my!

We showed up at our usual parking place by the frog pond yesterday for our morning walk at the state forest and discovered a delightful surprise -- an otter was frolicking by the far shore. We quietly crept out of our car, leaving the puppy inside for a few minutes, to try to work our way closer to the otter. Whenever it went under water, we snuck a few steps nearer the pond, then held still, trying not to even breathe, when it surfaced. It was all a completely wasted effort -- by the time the kids got sick of playing the stealth game and we took Kiri out of the car to splash along the shoreline, the otter noticed the racket we were making and immediately swam in to have a closer look at what was going on. So much for the virtues of quiet observation!


Ok, so this picture is a little like a picture of the Loch Ness monster -- there's an otter there, honest!! (What can I say, my camera STINKS.) The smaller "lump" is it's head and the longer "lump" is it's rump and tail. You'll just have to take my word on it. But it was SOOOO cool, and as we made our way around the pond on our walk, it kept just ahead of us, checking in on what we were doing occasionally, fully aware that is was safe as safe can be in the water. It looked like it was having SUCH a great time -- I want to come back as an otter in my next life!

As we were "sneaking up on" our otter, we found a mass of frog eggs. (Yes, another lousy picture, sorry!) It's the fuzzy white clump amid the weeds towards the top of this photo. That, plus the otter, convinced us that the frog pond was the place to be yesterday morning, so we hit the trail that follows the perimeter of the pond, hoping for more wildlife spottings. We were not disappointed!

The kids and Kiri on the trail. One challenging aspect about this trail is that there are several inlets to the pond, and one quite swampy area, so lots of water to get across.

The boys show off their balancing skills by hopping their way from rock to rock across an inlet stream. We were immediately rewarded for our hard work, because as we approached the swampy area at the main inlet...

...we flushed a trio of Wood Ducks from this stand of dead pines. They flew right past our heads and we had a great look at them, listening to their whistling for quite some time after they flew off. Perhaps there are suitable nesting holes in those old snags?

We carefully picked our way through the swamp, looking for more evidence of the Wood Ducks, and again, we were not disappointed.

A wood duck print amongst the forest of skunk cabbage. Not only that, but a short distance away...

...we came across these mink tracks!

A closer look at another mink track. Don't let the scale deceive you, these tracks are really quite small, we would have missed them if we hadn't been specifically checking the mud for duck tracks.

There was no lack of beauty surrounding us on our walk. These little Wood Anemones were everywhere along the trail.

All in all, it was a great morning to be out and about enjoying the gifts of our planet.

Now, you see how easy it is to spend an entire morning on a walk that should have only taken half an hour?!

into Africa

I know I've been on a posting blitz today, and I apologize, I'll try to keep up a little better. I've got two more posts to go before I'm completely caught up, but probably won't get to those tonight. Please bear with me and keep on reading for several other posts I put up today.

This week we started our cultural block on West Africa, beginning with a couple of weeks of Trickster Tales, which in this case mostly revolve around Ananse the Spider, that clever little West African trickster! The boys just adore these stories, so we're having a super-fun week around here!

We started with "Ananse Turns Tiger Into a Horse." Zoo Boy's story drawing is above -- he chose to draw the scene where Snake and Ananse are arguing about who is braver, and Ananse brags that he's so brave, he rides Tiger like a horse.


Snake of course knows Ananse is lying, so he tells Tiger about it, and Tiger confronts Ananse, insisting that he go to King Lion with him and admit he was lying. J drew this scene. Ananse fakes illness and Tiger says that he will take him to see King Lion if he has to carry him there, which Ananse agrees to if Tiger could only find a saddle so his weak legs could hold on, and then if only Tiger could find a bridle so he could hold himself aboard the saddle, and then if only Tiger could find a whip so Ananse could keep the flies off of himself on the way.

Here's my drawing, of the final scene -- Ananse riding Tiger like a horse outside of King Lion's house, proving that he was telling the truth.