Posted in Books, Books and More Books
I meant to post this closer to Christmas time, but never seemed to get around to it! But I wanted to blog about two stories that we read around Christmas time this year. In the past, we've done an advent wreath and read Jotham's Journey together as a family. But this year, that book is still packed...somewhere... and the advent wreath is buried in the storage space, so we didn't do that
But we Did read some new to us stories. The first is a short story from a compilation volume called Christmas in Prose and Verse that my friend Janice gave me when she moved back to CA. Included was the ever popular story by Henry Van Dyke called The Story of the Other Wise Man. I think I've never actually read the story before, although I was vaguely familiar with the story line, and the children had never heard it before.
This was an unabridged version, not one translated into kid friendly terms. So the first chapter rather dragged for them. I found myself "translating" for them, but they got the general idea that a 4th wise man was very excited about the new star and the prophecy given by Balaam about the birth of the Hebrew King. This 4th wise man invited all his closest friends to hear his good news and to have the chance to join him on his quest. All of his friends politely declined to engage upon such a wild goose chase, so Artaban set off on his own. That first night we talked about why his friends didn't want to go with him, and how that didn't deter Artaban from starting on his journey. He wasn't swayed by the arguments of the other "wise" men.
The second night we read the next chapter and they became more engaged in the story of Artaban's travels. There are 5 sections altogether, we actually finished after Christmas.
Artaban has several moral dilemmas where he had to choose whether he would stop and give of himself to help someone in need, or continue on his quest which was time sensitive. He begins with 3 gifts for the new king and along the way he parts with all of them. This was a struggle for him as he questioned whether it was "right" to use his gifts for the king to benefit strangers who seemingly had nothing to do with his quest.
Artaban's journey wound up taking much more time than he originally anticipated. More great opportunity to talk about persevereance, dedication and courage. The story ended with a great twist that made the first difficult chapter worth it!
Another thing I loved about the story was the beautiful descriptive language. ( Although the kids could have done without the flowery description of Artaban's home and the details of the conversation between him and his friends in the first chapter.) But occasionally I would stop reading and look at Lukas and say 'What a great sentence that was!" Since we're working on English composition this year, we're both more aware of things like "strong verbs" and "descriptive adjectives." Here is an example that I stopped to marvel aloud at:
"I saw him again at the foot of the pyramids which lifted their sharp points into the intense saffron glow of the sunset sky, changeless monuments of the perishable glory and the imperishable hope of man."
Wow! How's that for descriptive? Lukas agreed that there wasn't a banned adjective to be found and the 7 year old piped up "And it's good alliteration!" Ha! (for some reason, we love the concept of alliteration around here and tend to comment on it when we hear it).
So. If you've not read this story for yourself or out loud to your children, do it! ( It's also a good story to read at Easter time. )
This has gotten rather long, so next time I'll talk about the other story that we enjoyed!
This has gotten rather long, so next time I'll talk about the other story that we enjoyed!
Posted by Janice
