Posted in FIAR book activities

This Patricia Polacco title is as good as all her others. We enjoyed reading the story, and tasting honey, and learning about bees. Maddy learned to draw hexagons.

Storytime was all about the circus, and they made cute little juggler crafts. Handwriting continues to go well enough, as does math... it'd be easier if he wanted to do the work, but he does like the programs we use and hates to stop in the middle as much as he hates to sit and work. So we keep on.

Science didn't go as well. Noeo uses Young Scientist kits for some of the experiments, and this one just didn't work out. The agar wouldn't set in the petri dishes till we put it in the fridge ... unfortunately it later liquefied again, thus ruining the test. The yeast wouldn't activate properly either, and by the time it did, all the cups were the same temperature, ruining the test. At least the bread came out okay. I don't know if we got an old kit, or what, but I wouldn't be inclined to buy any of their other kits after this one. Next time around, I'll buy some pre-filled petri dishes to use. (And, as a caution: While Googling to figure out what we did wrong with the agar, I came across some very helpful sites. They warned that after growing bacteria for this sort of experiment, the equipment REALLY has to be sterilized, soaked in bleach, or whatever, before it could be used again ... because you can never be sure exactly what you grew. None of these warnings were included in either the kit or the Noeo guide.)

Ted has joined the children's choir, and has been to a couple of practices. We missed the one at the end of this week, though. In another week they'll begin rehearsing for the Christmas program.

Thursday we changed up our plans a bit to pick up Grandma at the airport. Unbeknownst to us, that was the same time the Vice-President was leaving our area ... and we got stuck in traffic as the police blocked off the roadways to the airport. It was quite exciting. It would've been more exciting if we'd known he was being dropped off ... we thought he was coming that night and the cars were just going to pick him up. It was scary for my anxiety issues, but kind of funny otherwise.

Ted earned his tiger pawprint thing, the "Immediate Recognition Emblem" that they put their beads on. He's the first boy to earn it this year in his den, and he was SO proud about it! Just a few more things to memorize and he'll have that Bobcat badge, and they're well on their way to the Tiger badge.

Sunday we had over Lysle's family to celebrate his father's 65th birthday. Fun to see everyone!

Posted in FIAR book activities

We had a short week due to Labor Day, but it was a busy week! We went to the library, worked on our weather station for science, had extra play time with Daddy (who took extra time off), and even went out to dinner one night.

We build our own  "Geoppolis" to go with the story. First we drew roads on a large sheet of paper (packing paper from a box of books, actually) and then we used MegaBloks and other odds and ends for buildings. It was a pretty cool city! We practiced mapping by drawing the same roads on a smaller sheet of paper and marking where the buildings were.

Friday we went to a game night with other homeschoolers. There weren't very many participants, but again I was struck with how well behaved they all were. The older kids let Teddy play along with their geography game, even though he couldn't read most of it (he won by accident anyway, the first round, so one of the kids paired up with him for the second!) and another girl played with Maddy with the train set. It was held at a local homeschool store, so after eating with the kids, I was left to myself to browse the books ... fun all around! I hope for a better turn-out next time, but it was a great evening for us.

Sunday was Promotion Sunday at our church, and the kids were assigned to their new classes. As a new first grader, Ted received his very own children's Bible which he'll use weekly in Sunday School. Already he's loving his new class and his fantastic new teachers.

Posted in FIAR book activities

From August 25^th to 29^th we focused on the FIAR unit Three Names. We looked up prairies on Wikipedia (and found that Ted was right, there really are prairies in Texas, where he’d originally wanted to place our story disk). There are some great national parks resources out there … one of the Junior Rangers programs focuses on a prairie park … the printables were fantastic but unfortunately required actually being in the park to find the answers. So if you’re near a nation park, look online to see what’s there! We also talked about hyperbole, one of the language lessons. Ted insisted that he “never” exaggerates, which had me cracking up. We wanted to try the game Fox and Geese (mentioned in the story) but weren’t able to find a good time. It requires a field of snow, or a prairie to trample down, but we’ve found that a large patio with a chalk-drawn diagram works pretty well too. We talked about how many feet were in a mile, and a bit about wind, which dovetailed nicely with our Noeo weather lessons.

For memory work Ted is working on the Cub Scout Promise, the Law of the Pack, and the Pledge of Allegiance. He’s getting better at them! His first meeting isn’t for a bit yet, but we want to be prepared.

We took time off to go and vote!

And we tried a roasted potatoes recipe to go along with the story too… Ted loves potatoes in just about any form!

Posted in FIAR book activities

This was a nice title to lead up to Mother's Day. The kids enjoyed finding all the old-timey things in the pictures, and shuddered at the large snake. Ted picked a spot on the Appalachian Mountains for our story disk.

Storytime was the last one for the semester, with a Mother's Day focus and a cute flower planter craft.

Our curriculum orders came (yay!) and the kids had fun playing with our new bucket scale. We also had a lesson on safety and calling 911, to go with the story in our Beyond the Code workbook. Ted is annoyed ... he thinks it ought to be pronounced nine hundred eleven, or written with spaces between the digits. :)

The Lowe's craft on Saturday was a memory box. Teddy gave me the one he built, and Maddy saved hers for Grandma, who's recuperating from surgery. The surgery was Wednesday and went well. (I got to visit several times, which was very reassuring for me.)

Posted in FIAR book activities

We had a lot of fun with Mirette on the High Wire. Europe is getting pretty crowded on our map, but we managed to squeeze this story disk in too! And for a laugh, there was a picture in our newspaper of someone driving a car across two high wires in China. We practiced walking a 'tightrope' by following the pattern on the edge of our living room rug.

Storytime was the book Nothing by John Agee, and the kids made musical shakers. Afterwards we made a quick stop at a local playground to try out their balance beams.

Math and reading continue to progress.

This is an article from another source, found via browsing the web(http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2833838.html):

Tightrope trial

A Chinese man performed a breathtaking stunt by driving a car across two steel cables suspended 150ft above a river.

Liu Suozhu, 48, of Henan province, completed the 750ft journey over Miluo River in Pingjiang city, Hunan province.

Liu, who is nicknamed the Car King in China, drove the motor from a platform in front of tens of thousands of cheering spectators.

During his 30-minute journey, Liu communicated with the performance host via radio, which was broadcast to the audience.

"The cables are a bit shaky, not very stable... the slope is very steep," the showman said, to more cheers from the crowd.

Liu says the last few minutes were the most difficult and dangerous because the steep slope blocked his rear view. He stopped several times during the last section of his journey.

Posted in FIAR book activities

We hopped back over to England to enjoy Mr. Gumpy's Motor Car. We also worked some more on our Webkinz Stargate script for Script Frenzy (yep, this is Teddy's story!) and enjoyed a storytime of the rather odd story Hey, Al. Over the weekend cousin Joey came to spend the night, which was fun for our kids. Also Daddy mixed up cement and drilled new holes in our swingset frame and we got to anchor the set and hang new swings on it. MUCH safer now, and nicer too. We'll wait till next summer, or later, before investing in newer playground equipment... it's so expensive to get a really nice set, and they all seem to be a bit grown up for our three year old. So we'll wait another year or so. Our toddler and young kid swings and our plastic climbing playsets and slides will do for now. (Gotta love secondhand stores and yard sales!)

Posted in FIAR book activities

Our next spring title was Miss Rumphius. We enjoyed this book, especially talking about making the world more beautiful.

Storytime was Swimmy by Leo Lionni, and a fishy craft that didn't quite float right in the tub, but which the kids loved anyway.

We were introduced to the "Eagle Cam" at http://chil.vcoe.org/eagle_cam.htm by a mom on the FIAR forums, and had fun watching that over the next few weeks. Once or twice we even saw the eaglets being fed!

Over the weekend we started our Script Frenzy project (www.scriptfrenzy.org for adults and http://ywp.scriptfrenzy.org for students), and made stepping stones with jewels (which later fell out) for our garden. There was enough in the kit for each one of us to make an individual stone. Not real impressed with the kit overall, though, so won't post the brand here.

Maddy started working hard on writing letters, and Ted and I had a big bedtime discussion on oxygen (and why we shouldn't wrap our heads in blankets to sleep!) ... went well with our plant parts lesson, at least. LOL.

Posted in FIAR book activities

This past week we read Wee Gillis. The kids didn't like it as much as I did, but I think they'll enjoy it next time around. Of course, we snacked on shortbread cookies while reading! And we placed our story disk on Scotland.

This website has some nice snippets of bagpipe music: http://bagpipes.com/music.html

Storytime was Night Cat, and afterwards the kids made cat-ear headbands. Miss Mary even painted their noses and painted whiskers on their cheeks ... my kids were cats for the rest of the day. Miaou!

Yesterday was going to be a mini-curriculum fair at my house, for our play co-op, but illness and other reasons caused several families to cancel. Since we woke to pouring rain and my plan had been to have the kids all play outside, this was probably just as well! Not sure what happened to the other families, but only one mom and her kids ended up coming. We had a lovely time, though, and got to share what we each use. I know I got some good ideas, and my kids had a blast having playmates over.

Next week is officially Spring Break around here. We'll probably focus on Bible stories and church over the week, and pick up lessons again the next week. We're not going to be doing the Reading Rainbow contest after all, but that would probably have to be mailed soon.

NaNoEdMo is going on ... I'm behind so far, due to laptop dying and internet constantly crashing, but I am struggling to make up the hours! And I'm definitely making progress on my book. Much better than last year, in that respect, even though this year has been ten times as frustrating.

A FIAR mom posed the question regarding first grade math, about whether the kids knew even/ odd, and whether they could correctly tell how many pennies were in $20. For fun, I asked Ted about the pennies (he's done even/odd for a while now). Astonishingly, he was able to work it out, and said two thousand rather than twenty-hundred (which I had expected). Yay Ted! I actually took longer to think it out than he did. LOL.

Posted in FIAR book activities

Our first unit of March was Make Way for Ducklings, always a favorite. We have the book and the Scholastic video, which was a nice change-up. We put our story disk on Boston. Coincidentally, the newspaper had a story this week about the Old North Church, so we looked at those pictures and then saved the article for when we do Paul Revere.

We got an email from Grandma in Hawaii, very exciting! And more dear friends, Tim and Karen, had their third child, a boy named James. Welcome, James! Two new babies to cherish ... very exciting. The kids can't wait to play with them. We got to see baby James at the hospital, visiting very briefly after storytime.

Storytime was Jerry Pinkney's The Little Red Hen, accompanied by butter making. She had two large jars of cream for everyone to take turns shaking, and then bread to snack on with the butter, after. Yum! We've also been checking out Magic School Bus videos from the library; this time the kids picked the one on Bees.

Friday was a t-shirt decorating party for our play co-op. A little chaotic but fun. Ours didn't get properly ironed (I was hasty, as there was a line) and I've learned a valuable lesson ... do not put wax paper over it to iron it down further at home ... the wax paper gets glued to it. A few trips through the washer helped the paper come off, but the lettering isn't as good as it should be, now. Oh well.

Over the weekend was another Lowe's workshop, this time building a periscope!

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!

Posted in FIAR book activities

Posted in FIAR book activities

Posted in FIAR book activities

Posted in FIAR book activities

Posted in FIAR book activities

The Clown of God by Tomie dePaola was our book of the week. Very sad, but nice story. We marked Italy on the map, and tossed in the North Pole because of all the Santa chatter we’ve had. J We had to pick up Dad from work Monday due to car trouble, so we popped in to see the Botanical Gardens light display … great family outing. One figure was a juggler, which was exciting since it tied in with our story.

Storytime was The Gingerbread Man by Jim Aylesworth, and then fresh baked gingerbread men to decorate. Miss Mary really does try to make some neat special activities for the kids … we’re spoiled rotten here.

Thursday was our local play co-op’s Christmas Party, which was a lot of fun, more than I expected. (I’m usually ready to go long before the kids are, because it wears me out to keep an eye on them. But this time they played so well and weren’t into mischief, so I got to start visiting with the adults! We’ve been a part of this group since Ted was about two, so it’s time I start learning more names.)

Friday we watched the Food Network show “The Secret Life of Christmas” about all sorts of traditional Christmas foods. And we did some bridge stuff during the week, mostly looking at pictures of different kings.

We also spent some time fixing up Ted’s NaNo book … formatting it, adding lots of clip art (his choice), and adding footnotes to explain things to outside readers (and no doubt us in ten years when we forget the little things). He is so proud of the red folder with his final printout. As he should be.

There, that gets us caught up to this week, about.

Oh, and I got a copy of Cay Gibson's Christmas Mosaic from Amazon. It looks as delightful as her other offerings that I've seen, a very nice compilation of resources and activities to go with favorite Christmas titles (and a lot of titles I'd never even heard of). I highly recommend her books. (I loved Literature Alive!)

Posted in FIAR book activities

Theoretically we were back to a normal schedule here, except that Daddy was out of town. The cleaning we got done Sunday, due to my franticness, was pretty astonishing! The Rag Coat was our focus book of the week, a serious planning error with Daddy gone, resistance to schooling creeping in, and Mommy being emotional. Oh well. We’ll try it again another week. Ted picked the place for the story disk, after I showed him where all the Appalachian Mountains went. And we put on our forgotten Thanksgiving disks.

Lots of tangrams and pattern block play, and lots of music listening (fun stuff like old VBS songs).

Storytime was about Snow and we made beaded icicles on pipe cleaners. They’re still hanging from the dining room chandelier. Ted also expressed a desire to study bridges, so we got some bridge books from the library, and spent some time with building blocks.

Wednesday we visited the mall Santa, for our official photo opportunity. Lots of fun. Surprisingly, Ted finally ‘got’ the whole Santa idea and actually had something to ask for … last week he still hadn’t a clue. Fortunately what he asked for is already in my gift stash. The rest of our lessons kept on according to our plans; we’re doing one phonics page a day now (slowed it down a bit) but still doing one math lesson a day.

I finished my NaNoWriMo story this week, finally. It was the hardest one I’ve ever done, but it’s done. I spent a lot of time cheering on other folks, online, and being cheered by them. (Congrats to all the FIARowers who tried this year, and especially to the ones like Denise who finished!) Learned a lot about my writing, which again is that I need better outlines and a smaller scope if I want to get anywhere. I think it was worth the lesson. Lysle’s talking me into getting a laptop to use for these endeavors (to free up the family machine) so I spent a lot of time browsing ebay and doing research. Ended up with a nice ’99 or so Mac Powerbook, very nice but more work than expected to upgrade properly. Still, probably a good investment in the long run. (I do like Macs, even though most of my internet stuff like this blog is done on the family PC.) Also ended up with some migraines and sleepless nights.

Lysle got home Friday night, so we set up the tree over the weekend and went to the TGIO party for the local writers on Sunday … very nice brunch at a local hotel. It was fun to meet some of the folks I’ve actually been talking to online for quite some time. Nice group of folks. Maybe now I'll be braver about going to the local write-ins.

Posted in FIAR book activities

This week we focused on Truman’s Aunt Farm, a very cute FIAR title. We chose to place the story disk on Georgia, since one of Ted’s aunts lives there (and the rest all live too close to us). He also wrote a thank-you letter to Publix for the wonderful Halloween party, to go along with all the letter-writing in the story.

We missed storytime but kept on with our regular lessons. Aunt Kelley even came for a  visit, which was great timing for our story. Lots of fun visiting with family!

Lysle introduced Ted to Sim City, and as he was playing Saturday he got to experience his city’s first natural disaster. We had a nice chat about tornado safety as a result of that, which is good since we’re heading into tornado season soon. And we learned how to repair the city, in the game.

The kids started drawing lots of pumpkins. Maddy’s getting really good, for a not-quite-three-year-old. She’s got a sort of template going, and they are all the same basic pattern. Very cute, since Ted never did much drawing at that age. Ted takes some of her creations and colors them in. Cooperative art.

Posted in FIAR book activities

I tried to post before but the cyber-gremlins ate it. Let's try again. :)

We had a good Fall Break, following the local school calendar. It was good to let the workbooks rest, and interesting to see how a week felt without a focus book to work around. Very empty. All that conversational learning really adds up, even if it's hard to annotate in a lesson plan book. I needed a week off to see how much we truly do accomplish even on the weeks we don't get everything done.

'School' pictures were that week, as was the Lowe's Build-and-Grow workshop for the Fire Truck. THAT was a tough one! Lots of little tiny nails in different sizes, and a million pieces. Even the employee helping us commented later that he thought it was too difficult for the kids. But it was a cool fire truck all the same. Lysle was busy at a local sci-fi convention, leading game tables, so I took the kids. It was new for me, as he usually does that. We survived though, LOL, and then had fun browsing the early display of Christmas items. We missed storytime due to the pictures, but at least we called and let them know we'd miss it.

The following week we read A New Coat for Anna. I spent all week looking for little potholder looms and loops, not having planned ahead well. Didn't find them till Friday, and we didn't get to do them till the next week. The kids loved the weaving, though. Ted actually finished his and it came out great. Maddy was very unhappy that hers didn't look as good, but she did great for a kid who's not even three yet. Storytime ended up being cancelled but we didn't find out till we got there. We still had fun checking out books, and then we took advantage of the extra time to go to a local toy store with a great model train layout. It wasn't turned on for the day yet but they turned it on for my kids. I expected them to have the potholder stuff with their crafts, but they didn't. Maddy did a lot of scissors work this week, and Ted got better at pedalling his Buzz Lightyear thingummy ... a big stride for him. He can't quite manage the bike yet. Friday was when I found the potholder kits, at the dollar store of all places, while doing some shopping for our Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes. The kids had a blast helping me pack up all the goodies we've collected. Thanks to Grandma for her contributions too!

We even went out to dinner as a family that Wednesday night, something we haven't been able to do in awhile. We went to a quick-food place with GREAT chicken tenders, and the kids loved it. We need to try to do that again before winter settles in.

That Saturday was our church's Fall Festival, with games and snacks and costume events for the kids. We went as a family, and it was fantastic. Ted wore last year's Spiderman costume, and Maddy wore a cheerleader costume that was a gift from Grandma. VERY cute. They loved the moon bounce, and the go-fish, and the pumpkin bowling. Maddy enjoyed the games more than Ted did, and came away with a lot more loot. There was even a silent auction for some really neat stuff, and we ended up winning an adorably bench seat / toy chest for Maddy's room, for a birthday gift. It's white with flowers and will be great in her room.

We also had a fire safety chat with Ted, when we discovered a wooden toy stacked on a hot lamp. We read some fireman books and talked about telling Mom or Dad if you ever see something unsafe like that, even if you're NOT the one that did it. I think we made a pretty good impression. :)

Last week we started focusing on fall, with a new title (not FIAR) Leaves! Leaves! Leaves! by Nancy Wallace. It goes throughout the year, studying trees and leaves as a mother bear shows her little bear all about them. Great book, and as deep or as cute as you want it to be. Lots of information. We've been collecting leaves ever since. We also read Apples by Gail Gibbons, as we're still on an apple kick since the Apple Pie book. Monday we did the potholders and played a lot outside; the weather was absolutely gorgeous.

Tuesday was storytime, and Miss Mary had her computer set to watch the shuttle launch. She let my kids behind the desk so they could watch too; very cool. Then she read the kids The Runaway Pumpkin by Kevin Lewis (we love his books) and let them each make a caramel apple and dip it in sprinkles. Saturday was another Lowe's workshop, this time making simple spider decorations for Halloween. Each child made one, and they're currently hanging from our chandelier. Also Saturday was our yearly Halloween party. This time we opted for pizza and board games, rather than our usual murder mystery dinner. We had a lot of fun, though Ted fell asleep in the middle and woke up hysterical later that night. Daddy spent Sunday afternoon teaching him Settlers of Catan (the game) and he's better now.

Math and phonics are going well, still. Ted is making good progress.

This week we're doing more Halloween fun and getting ready for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Ted and I will both be writing, as will Lysle, and turns out quite a few of the local homeschooling mamas and some of our friends. Quite a few FIAR folks, too .. I am very excited. I got to go to one of the local kick-off events, last Thursday, and meet some folks I've been chatting with since March when we did editing. They were really nice. Not sure how far I'll get this year, but I look forward to trying.

Posted in FIAR book activities

We've had a lot of fun over the past couple weeks!

First we read Storm in the Night. Ted chose to place the story disk on Alabama, since we often have storms which knock out the power just like in the story. We were going to read about Noah as our Bible go-along, and one of Ted's Rocket Readers is a Noah story, so that worked out nicely!

We also looked through The Cloud Book by Tomie dePaola and talked about the different types of clouds. We've had lots of clouds over the past couple weeks so the kids had lots of chances to see different shapes, and to try to find cloud pictures. They really like this, ever since a Blues Clues episode and a Mickey Mouse episode both had the characters finding cloud pictures.

We talked a bit about punctuation, specifically quotation marks, but I think Ted already knew about those. We also found a word search on www.abcteach.com that was made for Storm in the Night ... pretty neat! A little hard for Ted, but he had fun with it.

We took that Friday off to deal with ongoing plumbing issues (oh, so expensive!!!) ... it was nice to have the option to do that. Friday was their playday with Miss Jennifer anyway, so that helped a LOT. Sunday night was Children's Choir again. Ted is not so interested in it this year. Turns out he really dislikes the performance aspect. Okay, no big deal .. he doesn't have to get up in front of the congregation with the bell choir anymore. I'm still going to let him rehearse for the Christmas program, because I think he enjoyed doing that last year. He's just in the chorus so it won't matter if he changes his mind later on. And I'll verify that with the lady in charge.

Last week was lovely October weather and tied in beautifully with How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. We'd even managed to tape the Reading Rainbow episode at one point. I had transferred it to DVD and amazingly it worked. (I also transferred some home movies, which did NOT work, alas.) We had fun placing the story disk on Vermont, and then stringing yarn across the map to show the girl's many stops.

We tried to make a meeting at church, only to find out it had been cancelled. I'd told the kids we might stop at the Farmer's Market before going home, so we used the extra time to do just that. We picked out mini pumpkins to decorate (with markers) and then picked out some apples ... Red Delicious and Ginger Gold. The Ginger Gold was really tasty! It's a newer variety. Ted was disappointed that there weren't animals, but I explained that this was the market, not the farm. The kids really want to go back again.

Tuesday we went to a different branch library for storytime, and had fun. Miss Mary always has a very small group, and we've got friends who go there, so it was nice. We didn't stay long afterwards, and we won't make it this week, but we'll probably go there again.

We went to the grocery store Friday for some odds and ends and got to choose more apple varieties to taste. The kids also enjoyed looking at the indian corn, "just like at the Farmer's Market!", which made the produce guy laugh. We also got some caramel for dipping, which Ted didn't like after all. He loved the apples though. Sunday Daddy turned those apples into pie, and we got to use our 'pie bird' for the first time... it was his Christmas present but we hadn't done much pie baking since then. It didn't seem to make a lot of difference but it was fun anyway.

This week is Fall Break in our area so we're going to take it easy, maybe just do a bit of phonics work. Or not. He's further ahead than I thought he was, so I've slowed down the pace a bit to not burn him out. The sticker chart is still working well as an incentive, he's on his third one now. He's memorized a lot of the readers, but is reading them with expression so I let them count. I add new ones every now and then.

Our newspaper subscribes to the Breakfast Serials program, which they print each Monday. It's a full-length children's book broken into about 18 segments and printed one a week. They've done some interesting titles, but I thought they were mostly contemporary till last week's new story showed up. They're doing Magic Elizabeth which is an old favorite of mine (and older than I am). The illustrations are by the same guy who illustrated Elizabeth Enright's books, too. This book is about a girl who has to stay with a great-aunt, and ends up going on a magical quest to find the aunt's lost doll. She travels back in time to experience some of her aunt's favorite memories of the doll, and then pieces together the clues to figure out where Elizabeth is now. Very sweet story.

That's where we're at right now!

Posted in FIAR book activities

This one was particularly fun to row!

Our math and phonics got caught up finally, which was good. We'd gotten a few pages behind. A lot of the week's math focused on measuring, which tied in with the suggestions for the story too. Ted's doing well, though now I see a discussion over at www.fiarhq.com on Explode the Code, and it appears we accelerated Ted even more than I thought we had. Oops. So much for a relaxed K year. Well, he's learning and he does seem to like it (even on the days he resists workbooks) so we'll keep on. But  I may slow it down even more. It's so hard to know how to balance continuing learning without being pushy, when they're so young. He's still not particularly challenged with the 1st grade math, even though we're 37 lessons into the year. K isn't about challenge, though, it's about setting the learning habit. But one of these days he's going to hit something he doesn't know and I won't have a clue how to teach him. Or scarier, maybe he won't hit something he doesn't know ... The funny thing is, I hang out on a forum for parents of gifted kids, and compared to their kids, my dear Ted is quite ordinary. I can't imagine the challenges they face on a daily basis. It helps me keep things in perspective.

Maddy is still working on counting one to ten. She can go a little higher, but she really loves one to ten. She's got a new game where we take turns laying down, the one who's awake counts to ten and then shouts 'Wake up, (name)!' and the sleeper has to jump up and say 'Good morning!' ... very cute, and I approve of any game that lets me sneak in a nap. LOL. She's also been playing with the Color Bingo set and the counting bears as Ted does his worksheets, or practicing on her scissors skills and shredding paper.

www.readfortherecord.org does a yearly event, picking one children's book and trying to get as many folks to read it as possible. This year the date was Thursday the 20th and the book was Ferdinand, how convenient for us! There were events locally at our library and at ToysRUs. We didn't make it to the toy store event but we did go to the library, and I'm so very glad we did because it was a surprisingly small crowd. They used a big book edition, with color illustrations, and Ted commented on every page. It was so cute! Guess he really liked the story .. and was recalling and anticipating what would happen next. Also, our children's department has a mural of literary characters and I'd never noticed Ferdinand was on it ... so we got to look at that. The librarian provided coloring activities (cowboy pages, the closest she could come up with) and we were the only ones who stayed to complete those. Well, we had fun, and she did the best story reading we'd ever heard her do, so I am glad they had the event.

At a thrift store on Friday I picked up a gem of a book called Measuring Penny by Loreen Leedy (I think). A little girl measures her dog in a variety of ways, height and weight and food consumed and more, as part of a class assignment. It went along great with our Ferdinand measuring, and we made a chart comparing Penny the dog, Ted, and Ferdinand. Ted was miffed that he was in the middle. As a side note, I had to do some Googling to find the height and weight of an average bull ... and I was *ahem* surprised at the things they choose to measure on bulls. Definitely do this research yourself, and not let your kids do it unsupervised.

(I also made a new friend at the thrift store, she exclaimed over a book in my pile that I wasn't particularly desperate to keep, so I gave it to her and helped her find others in the series. It was great to meet another lady my age, who'd read some of the same obscure children's books, and yet it was a striking contrast to see the differences in our lives. Different races, different ages of children, many differences, yet for that brief morning we bonded over books. Gotta love the power of reading!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cork_oak is Wikipedia's article on the Cork Oak, Ferdinand's favorite tree. Very nice photos, at least at this time. As Wikipedia can constantly be edited, I suppose they may not always be there, but right now they are.

We also got started on our fall flower planting, again nicely timed with the story. Very fun, and so far the pansies have surived. The mums are quite healthy, and the lettuce is hanging in there. (Just trying it out to see how it does.)

Grandpa had a birthday so we had a family party this weekend, and astonishingly we held the whole event here without my having one panic attack! A surprisingly normal weekend, and greatly enjoyed. Much work in the yard was accomplished, much housecleaning, and my dear husband also worked on the final clearing out of the closing business he owns (owned). We're looking forward to having more family weekends as his schedule will be freer.

That's our week in a nutshell. I have GOT to get some photos uploaded.