Dropping Colored Water – a Fine Motor Activity

This week I had as many shelf activities out for M as I usually have, but one of them was such a huge hit he did it for 2 hours the first day, and went back to it each and every day, while completely passing by every other activity.  I finally had to take it off the shelf so he would choose something else!

It was simple to put together and not at all time-consuming.  I simply printed magnet pages from Making Learning Fun (which are supposed to be used with circle magnets) for the letter F, one of our letters for the week.  I placed the pages in plastic page protectors and put them on a tray along with a few paper towels and a small dropper with red water in it.

 

The idea was for M to squeeze one drop, and only one drop onto each circle, then place a paper towel over the top and watch the color soak through. 

Well.  Never did I imagine that this would be The Best Activity in the World,  but apparently it is.  He did both F pages a few times, then begged for more.  I had some number play dough mats printed out and in page protectors already, so I grabbed those and he did them several times too. And, he got in a little unexpected math work by counting the circles on each page as he dropped water onto them.  Gotta love an activity that multi-tasks! ;)

 

It was M’s idea to trace the numbers with the colored drops.  It was so neat to see the number form as the water soaked through the paper towel.

Our dropper was just an old food coloring dropper.  You can pry the tip out, fill the container with water, drop in a tiny bit of food coloring and put the tip back in.  It worked perfectly!   I must have refilled this thing 20 times during the course of the week and it kept working great.  I didn’t want to use a regular eye dropper with an open bottle of colored water because  I wanted to eliminate any chance of spilling the water (food coloring stains!).  This turned out to be the perfect solution. 

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

Book Review – In Every Heartbeat, by Kim Vogel Sawyer

I’ve been putting off writing this review for ages because I just don’t enjoy writing negative reviews.  In Every Heartbeat, by Kim Vogel Sawyer is presented this way in the synopsis from the publisher:

“As three friends who grew up in the same orphanage head off to college together, they each harbor a special plan for the future.  Libby Conley hopes to become a famous journalist.  Pete Leidig believes God has called him to study to become a minister.  And Bennett Martin plans to pledge a fraternity, find a place to belong and have as much fun as possible.  But as tensions rise around the world on the brink of World War I, the friends’ differing aspirations and opinions begin to divide them, as well.
When Libby makes a shocking discovery about Pete’s family, will it drive a final wedge between the friends or bond them in ways they never anticipated?”

In reading the book, I found very little of WWI ever mentioned, and it certainly did not play as strong of a role in the plot as I had assumed and hoped.  This was disappointing.

I also found the story hard to get into, and I really had to force myself to finish it.  The characters did not “feel” real.  Libby especially was a bit unreal.  Apparently we are supposed to believe that she grew up as more of a tomboy than a “girly-girl” (the type of girl she disdains on every other page in the beginning of the book); however, she is constantly on the brink of tears, rolls her eyes an awful lot, has stomach flutters as she reads a romance story, does some angry stomping off, has a few cute temper tantrums, and all in all behaves like a young, and pretty immature, girl. 

I may digress here a bit, but I really wonder about books like this with young women who are not happy being women and seem to think other women (who act “girly”, which honestly is not great either if “girly” means silly and mindless) are somehow less than men.  I’m not sure it sends a healthy message to the young ladies who might read this book and other books like this.  It would be wonderful to have a female character who aspires to great heights but remains okay with her femininity at the same time.  Anne of Green Gables comes to mind… in my opinion Libby is nothing like Anne, although I suppose she does mature a bit in the end, and perhaps we are meant to believe that she becomes more wholly herself, comfortable with both her ambition and her femininity.  Let’s hope so.

{I do think, after some reflection, that at a younger age (most likely the age this story was written for), I would have “connected” with Libby a bit more and would have even found parts of this book inspirational.}

Another problem I had with this book is that it gets a little “preachy” about romance stories – which is a bit strange, when you see that this is basically a romance novel – and, in the context of the story, opines that perhaps they aren’t the best reading material for young minds.  But then you have Libby “aware” of the nearby presence of one of the male characters; and there’s a lot of “husky voices” and “senses thrumming”, as well as embraces and long kisses.  I mean, is this not the same kind of thing?  Romance is in part these physical feelings… good grief, it has to be since we are human beings in physical bodies.  I don’t think gratuitous descriptions of romantic encounters is great – among other things, it usually makes for pretty bad writing – but pretending that the physical aspect of romance doesn’t exist or isn’t “right” is just… strange, in my opinion.  Libby begins writing these kinds of stories, and from what I could tell her stories weren’t much worse than the book itself in describing the romance between characters.  For the record, the scenes were not gratuitous at all, in either the book or the stories Libby wrote.  However, a little romance is a little romance is a little romance, and reading about it conjures up certain feelings, so why preach against them in the same book?  That was very odd for me and something that I couldn’t get past (obviously).

This is the only book I’ve read by this author.  I do plan to read others and, from what I’ve heard, look forward to a better reading experience than I had with this particular one.

Thank you to Bethany House Publishers for sending me a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes.