Books of the Week – Thornton Burgess

We’ve been reading more and more chapter books lately.  I read out loud to M at lunch, which really helps me not to eat too much, which in turn helps my level of fatigue in the afternoon to not be too terribly awful. (Like you really needed to know all that, right? :) )

Anyway, we’ve just finished reading The Adventures of Buster Bear, by Thornton Burgess.  This was such a fun book to read.  I have to admit, I edited a tiny bit of it that had to do with hunting, but it was only a couple of pages and really minor.  This book is full of fun, and excitement.  it seems funny to say about animals, but the character development is wonderful. :)  The vocabulary that Burgess uses is great, and the context of the story is so easily understandable that new words were absolutely no problem for M.  In my opinion, this was good, old-fashioned storytelling at its best.  If your child loves animals, he or she will love these books!

There are not many illustrations, but I don’t think M even noticed.  The story is just detailed enough to help along one’s imagination.

I bought this book and many of the others in the widget above several years ago, and I’m so happy to be able to read them to my son now.  M is really looking forward to all the other stories!

For more reviews of children’s books, check out Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns.

Have a beautiful day! :)

Learning by Heart – Week 6

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom”
– Henry Ward Beecher

I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago, but computer problems delayed me a bit.  Just thought I should explain why there are Halloween pictures at the end. :)

M is 4 years old 

 

SHELF ACTIVITIES:

Well, the hit of the week was dropping colored water:This is how I had it set up for him (we were doing letter F things this week).  M loved this activity so much, it merited its own post, here.  If you’d like to keep your child busy for hours, go read it. ;)  Ok, I can’t promise that your child will be as into this as mine was, but I definitely say give it a try!

Mini peg board and marbles, for fine motor skills:The idea was to place pegs in the peg board, then use the tongs to place a marble on top of each peg; turns out it was too difficult to get the marbles on the pegs with the tongs, so M used his fingers.  The marbles are all a clear, light blue.  When they are placed on the colored pegs, look at what happens to them: They change colors!  And, you can’t see this in the photo, but there are tiny air bubbles in some of the marbles that make them *sparkle* on top of the pegs.  Very, very cool.  We were fascinated by this (I really didn’t know this would happen!).

Sand art pictures, which are always a hit, good for fine motor skill development, and so simple for me to prep:  The yellow pages have shapes on them that you can’t quite see in the photo.  Various sections peel off and reveal sticky cardboard, which the child then fills in with the colored sand.

Apple Basket Game, for counting and fine motor skills: To play this, we separated out the apples into two groups of ten.  We took turns rolling the die, then used the tongs to grab the apple stems and place that many apples back into the basket.  Whoever got all of their apples into the basket first won.  We played this once, then M was not interested in it again.  This basket and set of apples was given to me, and I’d sure like to come up with some interesting things to do with it.  Ideas??

Mr. Turkey Heads: These were used with cutouts of Mr. Potato Head parts (pic below, before they were cut out), and M loved making them! We did something similar with Mr. Pumpkin Heads for Halloween and M had been begging to do some more.

Fuse Beads, for fine motor skills, and fun ;)  :                       Another airplane, besides the 5 he’s already made.

M continues to love using his fuse beads to create things.  We are being overrun with plastic bead creations here.  And recently he discovered that they make small glow in the dark fuse beads (biggie beads are pictured above, small ones below).  That’s right – glow in the dark.  Can you even imagine how glorious a 4 year old boy thinks this is?  So, he’s been busy with these babies quite a bit:And yours truly has been kept busy ironing these little buggers.  I’m ready to put them away!

New F and G objects for our phonics box:

   football, fish, frog, flowers, flag, giraffe, guitar, girl, gorilla, elephant, and cake.  (Hee hee, I’m not sure how elephant and cake got in there!)

By the way, if you are interested in finding miniature objects a great place to look is at the decorative buttons at Michael’s.  I found some very cool things there!  (But, oh, how I wish a Hobby Lobby was nearby!)

Lowercase f letter craft, a frog on a log with his leg dangling down:

The letter crafts have officially lost M’s interest.  This was the only one of 4 that he did this week.  Ah well, we may pick them up again some time.  For now we’ll take a break, and focus on other ways to sharpen letter knowledge. 

As a little aside here, it is easy to get discouraged when he is not interested in something I planned; BUT I am trying, trying, trying to remember that there’s no need to learn it all now.  Simply exposing him several times to various skills is all he needs academically at this point (quite honestly, academics in general aren’t really necessary at this age.  This should all be just for fun!).  Even more importantly, he needs patience, love, and for me to listen to him with a mother’s heart.  If we accomplish nothing that I’ve planned, but we did snuggle and read books together, then we had a successful day!

Polishing Pennies with vinegar and salt (from The Wonder Years), a little science, a little practical life work:This was another big hit and he worked on these pennies for over an hour!  Some he let soak in the vinegar, some he cleaned with q-tips.  The white cloth is there for rubbing each penny dry after it’s been cleaned.  The copper in the pennies oxidizes because of the oxygen in the air, and makes them look dirty.  Vinegar is an acid that removes the oxidized copper and reveals the shiny, pretty copper underneath.  Does he understand all this?  I’m not sure, but he did have fun!

 

OTHER ACTIVITIES:

A fun counting activity with pennies (I’ll talk more about this in an upcoming post):

Our nature center class, where we got to touch a turtle and a snake, and take a hike to see some beautiful nature. :)

           The beavers have brought all this wood to the middle of their pond so they have food in winter without having to travel far from home.  You can see the very edge of the beaver lodge at the top of this photo.

It looks like the end of autumn is beginning in this picture, and now that we have several inches of snow, I’m pretty sure that’s true.

 

Mixing vinegar and baking soda, to kill many a dinosaur with red hot lava from a volcano: Actually they just said “ow” a lot because their feet were a little hot.  M is too gentle of a soul to really want them to die from his volcano. :)

To prove this point, here’s a couple of photos taken during M’s free play this week… Superman and The Thing (from the Fantastic Four, if you know your superheroes), who apparently got a little tired and needed to nap, and so used cotton balls for pillows.  :)  Seriously, is that not sweet?!  Superman was lucky enough to even get tucked in with his cape for a blanket. 

When this guy bangs into something he yells, “It’s clobberin’ time!”, but M insists he is saying “It’s cooperating time!”.  Hee hee. :)  

Here’s my little Superman on Halloween, all buff because he has a coat on underneath his costume:He was flying high, let me tell you, after all that candy!   

I’m linking this post up to Preschool Corner and Weekly Wrap-Up; be sure to check them out!

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

Craft Time – Turkeys with Crumpled Tissue Paper Feathers

Thanksgiving can’t go by without at least one turkey craft, can it?  I know many of you are up to your ears in turkey crafts; if you can’t possibly stand one more, don’t read this post! :)
This was very simple and fun.  I used this activity mainly to introduce M to the “scrunch up tissue paper and dip it in glue” technique that I think is so neat, but that he’s never really been interested in.   This time he enjoyed it, but didn’t like the fact that once in a while glue would get on his fingers. (When did he become Mr. Neat and Clean?)
Supplies: brown paper, marker, scissors, glue, saucer or lid (to put the glue on for dipping), googley eyes (or buttons if you have no googley eyes, although you might regret it – see below), orange triangle, red waddle, and tissue paper cut into 2” x 2” squares.  The measurement does not have to be exact.
Draw a turkey head (think key hole shape) on half of the brown paper, and on the other half draw an arc that covers most of the area.
Cut out the turkey pieces, or have your child cut them out.        
Put a puddle of glue on the saucer or lid.  Scrunch up pieces of tissue paper, dip them in the glue, then stick them to the semi-circle.


Try to completely cover it with the wadded tissue paper pieces.
Glue eyes, beak, and waddle onto the turkey head. 
If you want, use a square of styrofoam or a ribbon spool, or something similar to make your turkey a bit more 3-d.  Place glue on whatever you are using for a spacer, and glue it on top of the tissue paper.Place more glue on top and glue on the turkey head and neck.  It is fine to simply glue the turkey head right onto the tissue paper area if you don’t have anything to use as a spacer.

Hm. Hopefully yours will not also look like a
crazy, hypnotized turkey. :)

You can tape a cardboard tube (t.p. or paper towel, cut to size) to the back of your turkey to make him stand up in the center of your Thanksgiving table!  I think we’ll face ours to the wall, hee hee. ;)
Have a beautiful day! :)
 

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.

Floor Number Game – free printables!

 

I’m having a blast coming up with fun math games and activities to do with M.   I’m almost glad he didn’t take an interest in the bead bars and number boards (although, honestly, I do hope that he will, eventually!).

For our Floor Number Line Game I printed out some large number cards, 1 – 20, and laminated them.   I also made two dice – one has numbers on it, and one has actions on it. 

Here is the number die:

The action die looks like this:

To play, we scatter the numbers around our floor, while still keeping them in order.  So #1 goes nearest the starting place, and number 20 goes the farthest away.  You want enough room between numbers to have space for doing the actions.  It’s hard to crawl from #1 to #2 if there’s only a few inches between them. ;)

Each player starts at number 1, and the first player tosses both dice.  If you get “+2” and “hop on one foot”, you would hop on one foot forward two spaces to the number 3 card (forward means towards the higher numbers. Depending on how you have the numbers laid out, it could actually be sideways).

The number die has a zero on it, which means stay where you are; and some numbers have a minus sign (-), which means go back towards one. 

Whoever reaches 20 first is the winner!  When we first played this we only used numbers 1 to 10 and that was a lot of fun too!

If you have more than one child, this is a great game, as you can retrieve the dice for them.  If you only have one child and you are playing with him or her, it’s still a great game, but whoever is retrieving the dice for each turn will need to remember his or her spot on the number line!  This could also just be a fun activity for one child, without being a competitive game at all.

The floor cards are made to be printed on colored paper, and so don’t appear in order on the printable (I didn’t want 1 through 4 to all be purple, and so on, so I mixed the numbers up a bit).  You can download the game materials below.

Floor Number Game

Have a beautiful day! :)

The Art Box

This is the final Art Box post.

M is at a point now where he’s drawing the same thing over and over and over again.  And then one more time.  He still loves his art box, perhaps more now than ever, and gets it out at least once a day.  But I feel that the quality of the posts I’m writing about this aren’t worth the time and effort I put into them.  I will continue to take pictures of his artwork for his little memory box and of course we’ll save some of it.  I just won’t be posting about it every week.  I am hoping to do at least one, maybe two, structured art projects with him per week that I’ll try to post about.  Or maybe one art project, and one craft project, depending on the season (and my need to craft ;) ).

So, for an ending note, I thought I’d share with you about the variety of things that go into M’s art box and how I switch them out each week.  Occasionally, when I’m feeling brave, I let him into my craft drawers to pick his own supplies for the week. :)  

There are some art basics that are always in the box, which I replenish as needed. 

BASIC ART SUPPLIES:

1. paper – usually this is a combination of newsprint and construction paper.  For a change once in a while I add in some colorful tissue paper, fun foam, scraps of wrapping paper, or aluminum foil.
2. scissors – the safety kind for children are always in his box.  I also add in one or two pairs of my craft scissors (with fancy designs) from time to time.
3. glue – basic white school glue.  If interest in gluing wanes, adding a few drops of food coloring to the bottle and shaking it up (or stirring it in with the pointy end of a small paintbrush) can revive interest pretty quickly!  Glitter glue is always a big hit too!
4. drawing utensils – this can be crayons, oil pastels, markers, colored pencils, gel pens, chalk, etc.  Lately there have been two to three of these in his box at one time – did I mention a lot of drawing has been going on here?
5. paints – fairly non-messy paints include watercolors, roll-on paints, and do-a-dot painters.  I also have a small pill container that I keep a little tempera paint in.  It has seven sections – perfect for the six primary and secondary colors, plus white.  M has been painting since he was born (well, maybe not quite that early) and isn’t all that messy anymore.  For a younger child, or one that hasn’t painted much, the temperas should be used under supervision, for the sake of mom’s sanity. ;)
6. paintbrushes – chunky and big, as well as thin and small.  Foam paintbrushes are a fun change too, as is a mini paint roller.
7. collage materials – this can be just about anything.  Torn pieces of paper, catalogs (Christmas ones are lots of fun!), tissue paper, fabric pieces, or ribbons.  I also keep a small divided container in M’s art box and it’s usually filled some combination of the following items:
   1. pom poms
   2. googley eyes
   3. buttons
   4. beads (usually pony beads or foam beads)
   5. sequins
   6. shapes from craft punches
   7. dyed macaroni
   8. glass mosaic pieces (like what you find in stepping stone kits)
   9. seashells
   10. cotton balls

Extras – depending on space, I try to have a couple of the following extra items in his art box each week:

1. craft sticks
2. pipe cleaners
3. stickers – foam or regular, occasionally something fancy like pop-up stickers
4. tape – colored, scotch, double stick, masking, or electrical
5. glitter
6. play dough that is just beginning to get old (this is great for making sculptures to stick things into!), or is being replaced by new play dough
7. something new to paint – like a wooden train car, airplane, or those bendable wooden snakes and crocodiles; small ceramic or plaster items would be fun too 
8. stencils
9. stamps
10. feathers
11. new things to paint with – a bath pouf, crumpled plastic wrap, porcupine balls, potato masher, small cars with that make neat tread marks – just about anything will work for this!

I know there are many, many more things that could be added to this list.  If you have a favorite that isn’t here, leave it in the comments!  One of the reasons I started writing these posts was to share ideas and get ideas from other mamas so our Art Box would always hold something interesting for M.  I’d love to hear about your child’s favorite art supply!

Have a beautiful day! :)