Posted in FIAR book activities

This was a fun book! We really enjoyed this week, so much so that we ended up spending two weeks on it. Ted's on a New York City kick, so he loved doing a story set there. Not only did we read The Little Red Lighthouse, but we also tossed in some go alongs. One big hit was a very old easy reader called The Secret Three by Mildred Myrick (I think). It involves boys on vacation who meet a boy living at a lighthouse, by solving his secret code message in a bottle. Since then, we've been doing a lot of secret codes here. Even a kindergartener can handle the 1=A, 2=B sort of code. Ted loves it. We also read Beacons of Light by Gail Gibbons; her books are always a nice addition to a unit study. Friday we downloaded the Fold-N-Learn (a lapbook) from the FIAR site and tried to assemble it. Maddy had fun cutting and randomly pasting, but Ted tried to do his more deliberately. It took us most of the next week to finish. It was nice, but a bit over Ted's head, and the map currently in it is inaccurate (they are going to fix it).

Wikipedia has a nice article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Red_Lighthouse for pictures. It really shows the scale of the lighthouse, which I thought the book had to be exaggerating. Apparently not!

Over the weekend and also this week, we have been finishing up a science kit we got at Target some time ago, "My First Science Experiments" or something like that. It's all colors and light and water, very simple but fun. The equipment it came with is pretty sturdy, too. And for phonics, we've still set aside the Explode the Code workbooks and are using Beyond the Code book 1 ... Ted has really enjoyed the change of pace. He likes the stories and the worksheets, especially the art ones (completing the illustration and then coloring.)

Tuesday, Daddy took off work to be with us. In the afternoon was our cover school's ice skating party. It wasn't quite what we expected ... we didn't know any of the other families there ... but the kids had a surprisingly good time, in spite of the fact that neither can ice skate. Daddy and I got thoroughly worn out, as a result. That morning, though, the kids and I went to storytime, where we heard Frederick by Leo Lionni and made mouse finger puppets.

Saturday we had a real treat of an opportunity ... picture book author and illustrator Denise Fleming was speaking at our main library. In spite of much confusion over the tickets and the suggested age ranges, we ended up attending the afternoon showing, which was supposed to involve hands-on art. If you want to see how she actually creates her picture books (it's an amazing process), check out www.denisefleming.com for the details. Anyway, the event started off with a puppet show by some branch librarians, a very exciting adaptation of In the Tall Tall Grass, and then several slides by Denise Fleming which included childhood art (and discussions of possible story ideas from them, and how anyone obviously can grow up to be an artist, LOL), pictures of the nature in her backyard and of her pets (who give her much inspiration), pictures from the books, and lots of very funny anecdotes. Well worth going to see. The group art ended up being a giant mural, construction-paper collage. Very cool. We also got to speak to her personally, and get books signed. (I was actually in line too long, while Ted was finishing his art ... one of the librarians had just gone to check on him, though, and he was brought to me before he could get too upset... poor guy. He knew where I was, but forgot, and I was just out of his sight.) Here is some of Ted's art:

(The rest of the pictures came out blurry. I got a video of the whole mural but am not sure how to do those.)

The next week we continued with the lighthouse book. We also played around with compasses and stuck a potato in a glass of water to see the eyes turn into leaves and roots. (We've since planted the potato in a bin of dirt and are curious to see how it grows.) We also got a good art lesson out of Beyond the Code. The instruction was to draw another cup or two in the picture, to show the ones Zack the dog knocked off the shelf. Ted didn't know how to draw a cup, so I suggested he draw a cylinder. Amazingly, that simple instruction worked, and he was SO PROUD he learned how to draw something. He's not much for realistic art. Then he learned how to draw a cylinder rounded at the bottom to make a teacup.

For storytime, the librarian read the pop-up version of Horton Hears a Who. The pop-ups are quite impressive, but the story was too long for most of the children to sit through. She then let them make Who-Horns, out of individual soda and water bottles with the bottoms cut off (all thoroughly washed). They decorated them with foam stickers.

Wednesday it actually snowed again, so the kids got to enjoy that. And we started reading out of the first CLP Nature Reader. Those are nice simple books, but it was more about wasps than I ever wanted to know. We haven't picked it back up again yet, but we will.

Thursday we took some of our work and went up to the church, to see if it was possible for me to accomplish my job as church librarian with kids in tow. They handled it for a little while, then got antsy. But we hit on the idea of taking a stack home each week to work on, and bringing them back all nicely labelled and pocketed to swap for another stack. This may work.

Friday the weather was nice again and we started planning our gardens. The weather is completely nuts. :)

Oh, and some of our dear friends, Greg and Anna, had their first baby, a boy they've named Eric. Welcome to the world, baby Eric!