Posted in Other book activities

To kick off April, we read My Spring Robin by Anne Rockwell. It's not a FIAR title but a sweet little book anyway. And as a bonus, most everything pictured in the story can be found in our backyard or neighborhood, which makes it a perfect spring title for our family.

We did more Brighter Vision pages, progressed further in math and phonics, played with some other workbooks, and tried Usborne's I can draw people for fun.

Storytime was a book called Pedro the Brave, and Miss Mary helped the kids make a medal to wear.

We watched Peter Rabbit some more, and also some Magic School bus videos. They love these!

Miss Jennifer took them to the park, and they tried to play tennis. :)

Posted in Other book activities

Posted in Other book activities

Tuesday was quite a birthday celebration for Ted. We went to Ruby Tuesday’s for dinner as a family, and then Ted and I went to the mall for ice cream. Except, we got side-tracked by the Christmas trees and decorations, and the bookstore, and visiting Santa. Santa and his photographic helpers actually remembered Ted from last year … amazing when you consider how many kids they must see in a year! Ted was thrilled with all the goodies they were giving away. Then we went upstairs to finally get the ice cream … and Ted spotted this bungee-trampoline thingummy that he really wanted to try. Kids smaller than him were already on it, so I finally consented. (The minimum weight is a mere 25 pounds! And the moms there told me all about some toddlers they’d seen on it.) As it turns out, it went too high for him and he got scared, so they turned off the machine part of it and just let him jump. Then the lady hoisted him up a bit for his souvenir photo. He was thrilled. Finally we got the ice cream, and he happily dripped chocolate all the way home.

Thursday was Thanksgiving, and we celebrated at home, our first Thanksgiving all to ourselves. We had a pre-made turkey loaf thingummy, but at my mom’s suggestion made fresh cranberry sauce … we can never go back to canned now. The difference was astonishing. It was a very strange, but calm, way to have a holiday. The kids watched the Macy’s parade, and now it has its own picture disk on our map. We also watched an Emeril cooking special we’d recorded, about genuine Thanksgiving foods. Pretty neat.

Over the weekend we read some more Thanksgiving stories, including This First Thanksgiving Day. We were supposed to gather with Lysle’s side of the family for birthday celebrations, but schedules didn’t work out, so we cancelled. Lysle was due to go out of town Sunday, for a full week, so we didn’t want to make it too chaotic. Sunday the validator went live on NaNoWriMo so Ted got his purple Winner bar, of which he was especially proud (particularly since he beat me to it). We also added a story disk to Iowa for Daddy’s trip (later, I think, but this is when I noted it).

Posted in Other book activities

We did a lot with leaves this week, too, including trying to make some laminated placemats, which didn’t come out so well. Storytime was the Lois Ehlert book Nuts To You and then some leaf rubbings. They enjoyed this a lot.

Jump roping was the activity of the week … I forget why it came up, but the kids were excited to learn how. I think it was on that Max and Ruby DVD. Anyway, they were impressed at how well I could do, and I was impressed at how much more of a headache jump roping gives you as an adult. Anyway, we need to get a better rope for the kids, but it was a lot of fun. (The cheap plastic dollar store variety aren’t really flexible, and it’s too long.)

Posted in Other book activities

We had lots of Halloween fun this week. Our book was Popcorn by Frank Asch, always a favorite. Of course we made popcorn to snack on! We also got to pick up our school picture proofs. I don’t know why, but my kids just look goofy in photos. Lysle flat-out refused to buy them this time. Ted’s at the age where he tries to follow directions, so he had a very stiff fake smile pasted on his face, trying so hard to do as they told him in the pose. Oh well.

Storytime was fun. Miss Mary read Annie Was Warned, which isn’t as scary as it sounds, and then let the kids decorate mini pumpkins. Lots and lots of pink paint, I don’t know why they all liked pink, but they did. And stickers and googly eyes. Very cute.

We also watched the DVD “Max and Ruby’s Halloween” which has lots of fall-themed stories including one on leaf collecting. And we read What A Scare, Jesse Bear and colored lots of pictures and mazes. Oh, and we watched the DVD “Magic School Bus: Creepy Crawly”.

Wednesday was Halloween itself, and I took the kids over to Grandma’s to trick or treat. We stopped at her local Publix on the way, since they’d advertised Halloween activities. Wow, did they have a lot! You could hardly get in the store, and I felt sorry for the regular shoppers. There were activity centers all over the store. It was a blast. And Grandma’s house was fun too, which was good because NO ONE in our neighborhood did trick or treating. The kids were in tears after Lysle took them up and down the street … nobody was participating. He ended up taking them a few blocks away, just so they could ring some doorbells. On the plus side, we had lots of good candy left over … we love Reese’s Cups!

Thursday was November first, the beginning of NaNoWriMo. Ted’s goal was set at 1000 words, and I was supposed to be aiming for 30K out of the 50K for adults. Friday they got to go to the playground … we skipped lessons that day. Saturday we took a family outing to the science museum to see the new robot exhibit. The kids got sidetracked by the bubbles and the kids’ area though, but we all had a pretty good time. Maddy had a fit when it was time to leave, though.

Posted in Other book activities

This past week we read a non-FIAR title, Star Shapes by Peter Malone. It's a picture book about constellations and has the most absolutely gorgeous illustrations. It's a must-see.

Among other things, we made our own little star viewers from this project at NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forkids/activities/A_Constellation_in_Canister.html; and also a coloring sheet from Crayola (http://www.crayola.com/activitybook/print.cfm?id=624) ... we decided they didn't look much like pictures there. LOL. The viewers were pretty neat. We used paper towel tubes, but had to use extra layers of paper for the end ... it needs to be a really dark viewer to see the pinholes just right. There were some other art projects that we didn't get to, like my favorite Kid Pix (old version) project using the star paintbrush tool and a blue background for the sky, then the line tool to make constellations.

We tried to see the eclipse when it happened, but it was too cloudy here to even find the moon.

Ted's been struggling with reading; he can do it but says 'It's too hard'. So we thought an incentive plan might be the way to go. We made a sticker chart for reading either little phonics readers or a chapter out of an easy book, and he'll get a little prize for every five stickers. So far he's loved it, and just got his second prize last night. He decided to read four books in one go just to finish that row. This will be fun till October when the Pizza Hut program starts. What he really needs right now is just practice, till the fluency kicks in, and this may be the way to do it. We'll see how it goes.

Math is still going well. His second 'test' was this Friday. I didn't preview it very carefully because Ted's pretty independent with his math work, so it wasn't till after the test that I realized it covered things that weren't in the workbook before that! They'd covered equal and not equal, but usually using words or tally marks vs numbers. The test included things like 5+3 __ 9. And he got them all right. I was so proud.

Friends came to visit on Friday, which was nice. And this has been a holiday weekend, also a lot of fun.Our friends Greg and Anna came to visit. Ted loves them, and Maddy enjoys them when she gets over being shy. They're expecting their first child, so it was fun to do all the 'Mommy chatter'. I was supposed to set up Communion at church on Sunday, an always stressful job, but two ladies graciously volunteered to take on the task (after I'd given up finding a replacement) and I was able to concentrate on enjoying our guests. We really had a good time.

Maddy has done a lot of counting this week. She can rote count to around 12 with accuracy, and can actually count objects to 11. She went through a phase where she'd count accurately but insist on ending with ten no matter how many there were, but she seems to be getting past that. We've been trying to teach her to 20 to make up for it. That has helped.

The weather has finally been cooler, yay!, but we had tree cutters for three days last week, so playtime outside was still limited. Very peeved because they never told us they'd come back the next day, but they were there at 7:30 or earlier with the chain saws. And they kept moving stuff around in our yard, carelessly, and ripped the kids' play tent ... it was anchored to the ground and they didn't check that before yanking it up and moving it out of their way. I have called in some complaints, but the person in charge said he'd send someone to talk but never did. Not very impressive. Not sure where to go next. It was a cheap tent, but not something I want to pay to replace.

Anyway, it was a good week. And this one looks to be good as well ... we're reading Lentil, and I am typing this to the sound of harmonica music.

I spent last weekend compiling together my previous year's blog entries into one document, and adding other family photos and clip art. I uploaded it to www.lulu.com on Sunday and am now eagerly awaiting my little book. This is the second year I've done this, and it really makes a nice keepsake. Sort of a cross between a journal and a scrapbook. The book was about 80 pages (6x9), color (for the photos), and with shipping was only just over $20. Very reasonable. I could've saved on shipping but didn't want to wait on media mail. Plus having the blog here and the file there means there are backups for our precious family memories, should disaster strike. And since I blog all year long, and never know what else to do with those digital photos .. this is a nice project to pull it all together. Didn't take very long at all, since I already knew how to format it from last year.

Happy Labor Day, everyone!

Posted in Other book activities

This is a picture of the bulletin board where I posted my kindergarten class's attempts at Eric Carle - style art. As you can see, some were more successful than others, though they all had fun trying.

This masterpiece has a sun, two trees, a pond, two birds, and I'm not sure what all else.

As I described before, we spent one day painting our sheets of paper with various colors and patterns. We ended up with a lot of sludgy green-brown colors, hence the trees. This Monday we cut out our shapes from all the papers we'd painted together and assembled them into whatever kind of picture we wanted. Some, as you can see, tried to assemble landscapes, others made a sort of hodge-podge collage (hey, that sounds pretty good ... hodge podge collage) of their favorite scraps. All were very proud of their efforts. I'll keep them posted for a little while and then send the art home for the parents to admire.

Next Monday we'll be reading Carle's Draw Me a Star and trying to draw our own multi-pointed stars. Then it will be on to a Tomie dePaola unit.

Posted in Other book activities

Today went pretty well, considering I woke up with no voice. Got the kids dressed and ready and out the door on time, for once. Got the computer lab set up quickly ... the star activity was a big hit! ... and set up the art room.

We're doing an Eric Carle unit, the kindergarten and I. Last week we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar and talked about how Mr. Carle does his art. There are some neat clips of this on hiw website www.eric-carle.com. We looked at pictures from a magazine article, though, and talked about painting the papers first and then cutting out the shapes (collage). Today we read (and acted out) From Head to Toe and began our painting. They had a hard time understanding that we were not doing pictures, but solid papers or patterned papers, and that if we all did the same colors it might not work later. Oh well. Next week we will do the cutting and pasting, after reading some more stories. I may post some pictures of our efforts, if they turn out all right.