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 Dover set of Christmas stickers and cards, Victorian scrapbook style. The kids had fun designing them and deciding who would be the recipient of each. Ted is handwriting all his labels, so it’s taking a while to finish, but I am proud of his effort.

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.

Posted in Other book activities

In Scouts, the boys made pine cone bird feeders. That involves smearing a mix of peanut butter and shortening all over the pine cones (with a string already tied to them) and then rolling the whole thing in a bag of birdseed. Then you can hang this from a tree and let the birds go to town … unless, of course, it happens to rain before they find it. Oh well. It was still fun. (I do suggest, if you do this other than at home, that you take a bag or bowl to transport the feeders home in, as they leak birdseed like mad.)

Wednesday was a special treat for Ted. He’d earned his October BookIt! certificate, so Daddy took him out to lunch to claim his pizza prize.

We collected leaves outside and did more leaf rubbings, for part of science as we’re now reading about forests. We also started letting Teddy dictate his Nano … he’s already halfway to his goal of 2,000 words.

Posted in Other book activities

We did random fun seasonal books this week, including an old favorite, Popcorn by Frank Asch, and a new favorite, Leaves! Leaves! Leaves! by Wallace. By the end of the week Ted was reading Popcorn all by himself.

We also worked on planning Ted’s novel for NaNoWriMo’s Young Writer Program. He (and Maddy, she wouldn’t be left out!) made lists of their favorite things to include in stories.

For Cub Scouts, the pack had a Halloween party, and the kids got to wear their costumes again. Ted’s spider costume was made of a black sweatshirt and black sweatpants, with extra spider arms made of black knee high stockings stuffed with cotton. One end of each pair of legs was pinned to each side of his shirt. The other ends were joined with string which looped around Ted’s wrist, so that when he moved his arms, the extra legs followed his motions. He also wore some  spiderweb decorated mittens we found in Wal-Mart, and a headband with glittery pipe cleaner antennae attached. Maddy’s angel costume consisted of self-decorated pink fairy wings (courtesy of a kit from Grandma), a frilly white costume skirt with lights, from Wal-Mart, and a white turtleneck and pink pants. Plus a wand, and a halo of the same glittery pipe cleaners. She loved it. The pack started with an awards ceremony. Ted was the first of the Tigers to earn his Bobcat badge, and they all earned lots of patches and beltloops from other things. Then they had snacks and a silly game involving lots of toilet paper and teams wrapping a mummy person.

I forgot to note what they read at storytime, but that evening the kids planned out their pumpkin and Daddy carved it at their direction.

Friday was Halloween, and Daddy took them for a really long walk, as the houses close to us mostly don’t invite trick-or-treaters. For once we had a lot of kids come to our house, though. I guess we stood out, being the only ones participating on our block.

Saturday was the first day of NaNoWriMo. Due to panic attacks, I’d been trying to convince myself not to participate this year, but I wrote a few words anyway.

Our math, science, and phonics are going really well this year. And we're still loving FIAR units!

Posted in Other book activities

At scouts the boys did leaf rubbings, which was fun but quick. It was neat to show the kids how to do gentle strokes with the crayons held sideways, and watch the leaf veins and stem show up.

Storytime was all about teeth. It’s been fun to go because there are several older homeschooled children. Ted’s still the oldest, but it’s fun that it’s not just the preschoolers (though that’s who it is geared toward).

Friday evening was our church’s Fall Festival event. The kids and I went, and it was a lot busier than we expected! We went on the moon bounce first thing of all, and it’s just as well we did, because the line was super long for the rest of the night. Ted tried out his spider costume for the first time, and Maddy tried out her angel fairy princess outfit. We had fun playing the simple games (ring toss, ball toss, fishing, and so on) and collecting prizes. We put in a few bids (losing, as it turns out) on the silent auction items, and had a dinner of hot dogs. All in all, the kids had a great evening.

Posted in Other book activities

 To go along with our science study of insects (we’re using Noeo Biology I), we decided to venture from the FIAR titles and use an Eric Carle resource from HomeschoolShare this time. We chose The Very Lonely Firefly. There were still a few lingering fireflies out this time of year, so it was pretty fun. We also read Fireflies in the Night by Judy Hawes, and enjoyed watching our Eric Carle storybook DVD.

 We also baked bread, a leftover experiment from our previous week’s science assignments. It was fun! Ted enjoyed the kneading and punching it down.

 At the scout den meeting, they talked about the Food Pyramid, and cut out pictures from grocery store advertisements to fill in the spaces on their own food pyramid charts. The boys had a lot of fun with it, and it was interesting to see how hard it was to find examples of some of the food groups in the ads.

 The storytime theme was Fall, and Miss Amy read us several titles: Oliver Finds His Way, Scarecrow’s Hat, and A Color of His Own.

 Thursday was a field trip day for us. At our local children’s history museum, re-enactors were going to portray James and Dolley Madison. An area mother had set up field trips for all the local homeschool groups, and we were able to attend. There was an enormous crowd! We only spotted one other mother that we knew, and it was a fellow FIAR mom. After the initial greeting, our assigned groups went separate ways, so we didn’t get to chat. They were pretty good at keeping all the groups on schedule, but the activities weren’t designed with young active children in mind. That was a disappointment. The groups went from re-enactor to re-enactor (of local personalities) and that meant mostly sitting and listening. They were great, but since our groups ranged from babes in arms all the way up to teenagers, it would’ve been nice for more active stations. The biggest hits were the Virginia Reel station (the only active one) and the Cherokee Indian, who proceeded to demonstrate starting a fire with a string and a stick, and stopped after mere seconds because to go further would set off the alarms. I thought he was just teasing, but there was actual smoke after mere moments of the drill method for starting a fire. Amazing! Anyway, after a few rotations, we all lined up (all the groups) to go into the large auditorium and meet the guest stars, the Madisons. They started with Dolley Madison, who chatted with the children, and then brought in James. We weren’t able to stay for the entirety of this portion, because it was hard to hear their quiet voices and my two were tired of sitting. So we quietly stepped out.

 It was hard to go on the field trip; an anxiety attack hit pretty hard when we arrived, but a sweet mama in the next van over (in the parking garage) stopped to make sure I was okay, and that moment of kindness made it easier to keep going. The kids were excited about the chance, and I’m glad we got to try, even if it didn’t turn out how we hoped.

 And as a bonus, my sister came into town and joined us after for lunch and chit-chat before she had to continue on her way to meet some friends for a weekend trip. So that was great!

 We did some Cub Scout memory work, and Friday afternoon Ted used his new fishing pole in casting practice, to prepare for Saturday.

 The Cub Scout Fishing Rodeo was on Saturday. Daddy took him, and it was quite an exciting event. We’d never been fishing, and had no clue about anything, including how to get a fishing license, but the FIAR forum gals were a great help in sorting us out. (I printed and saved all your advice, ladies! It was a BIG help!) Unfortunately (fortunately?) no fish were caught by Ted, but he had fun anyway. The boys also got to do activities toward the Fishing Belt Loop, including making their own bamboo fishing poles and learning the parts of a fish.

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.