Posted in Other book activities
We're not quite done with the week, but since I'm on a roll getting caught up...
Monday we had a field trip to a chocolate goods store. (Is that even a term?) Anyway, they sell all sorts of chocolate candies, and yummies dipped in chocolate. It’s one of the best field trips we ever went on. There were so many of us interested that they had us come in shifts, and we were with the last group. The coordinator tried to sort us roughly by ages, so most of the kids in our group were Maddy’s age. The lady doing the tour gave a very brief history of chocolate, showed them a nice color picture of cacao pods and had them practice saying cacao, and she had them taste unsweetened chocolate. (She also had a trash can handy!) Then she let the kids sample white chocolate, and flavored white chocolates, and then gave a spiel about testing products before selling them, offering the kids several mystery items dipped in chocolate, which ranged from grapes to cherry tomatoes to carrot sticks. The kids had a blast guessing. Then the kids got to tour behind the counter and see the big vats of dipping chocolate. (Wisely, they had all long-haired folks tuck their hair down their jackets, and all the kids had to keep their hands in their pockets.) After that, there was a station set up where the kids could dip marshmallows in either milk or white chocolate, and then roll it in either cookie crumbs or sprinkles. They even gave out goodie bags! And the whole thing was thirty minutes. It was the perfect blend of information and hands-on, with attention spans taken into account. You can bet we had fun shopping afterwards, too!
Monday evening was Cub Scouts, and we took the craft activities. We worked on two electives, the picture frame one and the decorations one (we made paper snowflakes while the glue on the frames set a bit). The boys had fun with it, though perhaps it helped that there were only three and it made it very easy to share materials.
Tuesday was the final storytime of the season. She read several Santa stories. One was very cute, a rendition of “Twas the Night Before Christmas” called “One Was Stirring.” Apparently we’re not the only family attending that has tried to focus a little less on Santa and a little more on the original Saint Nicholas (not that Maddy believes me at all … Santa is real!). As soon as Miss Amy said ‘Saint Nicholas’, another little girl piped up, “He’s dead.” Of course her mother was going “Shh!” and I was trying not to laugh. Miss Amy wisely ignored the interruption and went on with her story.
Maddy’s not buying the whole “Santa is a fun pretend game” thing. She’s sure that, even if he’s not real today, he’ll be real on Christmas for sure. It’s kind of hard to convince a not-yet-four-year-old of anything she doesn’t want to agree with.
Ted enjoyed the picture frame craft so much, he spent today making several more. Maddy got in on the act too. And I used the colorful popsicle sticks (courtesy of the dollar store) to make a craft I’d been trying to figure out … a magnetic Advent wreath set. I used three purple sticks, one red one (it was nearly pink), and two green across the bottom to look like a wreath. I glued a magnet strip on the back, and used some yellow foam stickies colored with orange marker to make separate flames. Now we can add one flame each Sunday. I need to paint a jumbo stick white for the Christmas Candle … not sure how to work that one in, though. Anyway, the set came out pretty well … much better than most crafts I attempt.
We’ve also been working with a
As for stories this week … we’re using random fun ones out of our Christmas assortment. So far we’ve enjoyed Merry Christmas, Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola and The Wild Christmas Reindeer by Jan Brett.
Ted’s been asking what I call Big Questions lately … hard ones. Like, what happens when we die, and things like that. The latest was “When was the world made?” I wasn’t really prepared for that one … of course he’s familiar with the Creation story in the Bible, but now he wants to know exactly when it happened. And I’ve realized, it’s really hard to find young-earth perspective materials that aren’t written as a debate to evolution. We tried to watch an AiG video I had on hand, but I decided to stop it shortly after starting … it is refuting evolution, and Ted has never even heard of the concept. We simply hadn’t addressed timeline concerns yet. (Our wall timeline only goes back to 4,000 BC.)
I want to teach him that different folks believe different things (even Mommy and Daddy), but I don’t want to do it in the context of an argument. So far we’ve talked about it in the perspective of working from what he knows … obviously the world is older than he is, and older than Mommy, and older than Grandma, and so on. I explained that if you add up the events in the Bible, it goes back roughly six thousand years, so it has to be at least that old. And then I did explain that some people thought things looked a bit older than that, and decided that the world was probably millions of years old, but that’s not what Mommy thought. In other words, I was trying to keep it simple: folks have reasons for believing what they believe. But still teaching a Creation perspective.
But my search for materials has been eye-opening. I’ve gotten some great referrals from the FIAR ladies which I will have to look into, but so far the ones I’ve found on my own are debate materials, even the kid ones. I guess they’re aimed more at older kids, or perhaps just PS kids who need to hear another view. I just want something like all the fossil books on the shelves, the ones that make reference to millions of years and don’t feel a real need to justify what they say; they let their science stand for itself. I’d like something like that from a young earth point of view. In kid-friendly terms (for me as well as Ted!).
I guess this means I’m going to work on compiling resources, and once I’ve got a good list, I will share it. So far there are some CDs that look promising, and Ruth Beechick’s books might help, though they are for older kids and adults.
We had a storm last night, and Maddy was so cute. She is afraid of storms. At one point it quieted down, and Lysle went in to check on her and turn off her flashlight for lights out. She commented on the quiet, and said that "the storm must have moved away to go scare other little people." Later the storm got noisy again, and she crept out of her room to join us watching TV ... using the storm as an excuse, but she likes to try that anyway. We cuddled her for a while and then sent her back to bed much happier.
