Our Train Ride

Last Thursday, we went on a train ride. Mommy, Jacob, and I joined the M.P. school kids on the school bus at 5:45 a.m. We rode the bus to Girdwood, then we rode the train to M.P.
The train ride was fun!

"The Shield of Kindness"

We read the story "The Shield of Kindness." An old man wanted to give his three sons a test to see which son was the kindest. The kindest son would receive the special shield.

The first son went to Lake Tana at the start of the Nile River. He saved a baby from being eaten by a crocodile. His father said that anyone would save a baby.


The second son took care of a man's money while he was at the market. He didn't take any of the money. The father said he was honest and good.


The third son went far away to a mountain. There he saw his enemy sleeping on a cliff. He could have yelled to scare him and make him fall. Instead, he gently grabbed his enemy's arm and took him to a field for safety. His father said, "You showed true kindness because he was mean to us and you were nice to him."


I really like this Ethiopian fable!

(Illustrations taken from When the World Began-Stories Collected in Ethiopia by Elizabeth Laird...a delightful book that came from the Anchorage library with other books for our unit on Ethiopia. Regrettably, it's no longer in print-otherwise I would track one down for our personal library).

If I Were an Astronaut...

If I were an astronaut, it would be fun. I would jump in craters on the moon. I would tie a rope to a comet so it could pull my spaceship . I would make a video of volcanoes on Venus. It would be fun to be an astronaut!






















(Oil pastel with watercolor wash).