Oooh! Cool, Tenny! 😀

Today I visited an alpaca farm and they have 50+ alpacas, 1 llama, two fluffy dogs, and 1 incredibly fluffy adorable angora rabbit. I really, really want one now. IT WAS SOOOOOOO FLUFFY!!! 😀 😀 😀

This evening my 4-H club gathered at my house for a party to kick off our new year. We had a campfire and ate food from dutch ovens and played some fun games. It was great fun! 🙂

Tenethia, all those pursuits sound wonderful! I hope you'll tell us more about them as you go along. I love sewing and wish I knew more, and weaving has always looked so tempting.

An alpaca farm, NG? How cool. All that soft, fluffy alpaca coating in one place, plus a rabbit. Delightful to imagine. The party sounds like a great way to start the year. What projects do you all have planned?

So....Silver Chair is happening.

To be honest I really don't know what to think about that. I'm not really /happy/ about the prospect of it as a movie.

However if it means we get more newbies, well, that wouldn't be too bad.

Okay, seriously, I am on cloud nine today. First The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug trailer 2 releases and then the news of The Silver Chair!!! If my cat wasn't convinced that I was a crazy fangirl before, he does now. 😛

But kind of like Tooky said, it's been so long since there was any real news about the next Narnia movie, that I'm having a hard time believing that it's true! I'm crazy happy, and yet, not happy. It's a weird place to be in.

Silver Chair! *Squees* I sure hope it's true!
Also today is my cat's 6th birthday. 😀

"Today is a VERY big day!"- Flynn Rider

Haha! 😆
Happy birthday to Ela's kitty! 😀
*is such a happy unicavvey* *can't wait for Silver Chair*

Yay are kitty turned 6!!!

Now about Silver Chair, I'm not happy at all about it. I believe Gresham should have chosen a Christian to make these films period. I just don't feel that all of the Christian elements in these books will be brought to the screen, in Prince Caspian and VDT the storylines were messed up and I feel Silver Chair may go down the same route. Tryng to make it a cinematic blockbuster! Adding in lots more violence then needed!!! All that is going to drown out the true spirit of Lewis's writing. Also all the old cast is going to be replaced, to me that is plenty awkward, the actors are going to be much too old to play characters only 6 months after VDT. I'm really not trying to be the pessimist but I'm just afraid all the Christian elements are going to be stripped to a bare minimum and it doesn't please me at all.

I hadn't thought of that. Good point. 😀 But I still want to watch it. Maybe it won't be that bad. 😀

@Eria: by "other movies" are you referring to PC and VDT as opposed to LWW? Because if you are, you have to realize that LWW and PC were directed by the same guy who's definitely not a Christian. And as much as we'd like to, we can't always blame stuff on the director because not everything is the director's fault. (We can blame PJ for LotR and TH stuff more than the average director because PJ puts his fingers into many, many pies.)
I'm sure we have a good number of concerns with this announcement, especially if SC were to turn out like PC or VDT in their varying ways. But until we get any info on this, we can only hope for something that would surpass them. I know VDT was a hard blow to many fans for several reasons, but perhaps if Gresham gets more say this time around (he had rather little say for VDT, but I would sooner take the deviations from the book than lose the "another name" line, so he will always have my respect for the way he fought for that line), SC can bring us up from the underland of Hollywoodization.

It's an imperfect world, alas, and for some reason, the people making Narnia movies seem not to have as strong a sense of the books as Jackson does for the Tolkien works. It's not just that they leave out a lot of the spiritual implications and elements. They often don't even tell a good story! The characters just get lost in the chaos of endless action scenes.

By contrast, The Princess Diaries changed some stuff around from the Meg Cabot book to the film—for example, making the royal grandmother much nicer—but you got a strong sense of who all the main characters were, what they wanted, and how they changed throughout the story. Whereas Lewis was one of the world's most inventive and compelling storytellers, and the filmmakers managed to leave out most of the characterization and a good deal of the story besides. I understand they felt they had to add action in PC and to integrate the separate island visits with a central plot thread in VDT. But they did so in such a boneheaded way. The evil green miasma that made people misbehave against their will? What kind of idiot character motivation is that? No wonder they couldn't let Edmund, Lucy, or Caspian talk too much in VDT. If filmgoers had gotten to know these characters in depth, their meaninglessly contradictory behavior in the green slime scenes would have been so much more glaringly obvious. Grrr.

But with all that, I still have hope that this film will be better. I guess I'm so eager for a film about Narnia that I'll give it a chance. I truly thought that we'd never see another one, so this is like a reprieve. We can but hope.

Amen on the storytelling and characterization fronts!

Okay, friends, I have another school philosophy question for you. I know that a lot of you are homeschooled (and one or two of you are homeschooling parents!). I recently learned that many states no longer require schools to teach cursive writing. In fact, kids aren't even required to learn how to read documents in cursive! (Like the Declaration of Independence?) I understand that there's not enough time in the day for teachers to fit everything in, and that now kids are required to learn how to type in elementary school so they can take tests on the computer. But I am distressed that this useful motor skill (which trains connections in brain neurons that help with other motor skills as well) is being phased out in many places. Presumably kids will still be taught to print, and they can just learn to print very fast and somehow join the letters together if they need to take notes while someone is talking. Or they can just live on a keyboard for every task they ever have to do.

Which got me to wondering: how many of you learned cursive? Did you have penmanship as a separate subject? I'll tell you that I certainly did, but I grew up quite a long time ago. In fact, when I took a spelling test every week, I got two grades: one was for the words I spelled correctly, and one was for handwriting. I'd be curious to know whether you all have studied cursive. You don't have to give any personal details about where or how, of course. But if you're homeschooled, was there a textbook or workbook that you used?

I remember that there were two huge rites of passage in terms of handwriting at my school. The first one was when you learned cursive letters and got to write "in script." The second one was when they let you write script with a pen rather than a pencil!

I learned cursive before I learned to print, I believe. I had a bunch of little subjects when I was in Kingergarten-4th grade, and I had a whole book dedicated to learning to write in cursive. I had to copy letters and write journal entries and various things like that to learn, and then I learned to print. I don't prefer either script or print over the other, but I do believe we should be learning to do both.

I was private schooled, but the curriculum works very well for homeschoolers as well. The English (as in "language arts") note packets taught cursive writing in... I want to say grade three, but I don't remember. They showed the process in steps (so one stroke at a time) with little arrows showing how the strokes where made. Then they started writing examples out in cursive (dotted-line words, phrases, or sometimes whole answers) in note packets from all subjects. After a while, the curriculum expected the student to write all answers in cursive, which I did.
My penmanship isn't the greatest, but I do prefer my cursive over my manuscript because my manuscript gets sloppy really fast, especially when I write in a hurry. Oddly enough, most of the notes I took in college courses, I wrote in sloppy manuscript that sometimes became a cross between manuscript and cursive and on occasion slipped into straight-out cursive.