Tired, Need Sleep.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Books of the Week – April 30, 2011

M has recently discovered Syd Hoff’s wonderful stories, and I’m rediscovering how much I loved them as a child. We own Danny and the Dinosaur, which is a favorite, but M ran across the Syd Hoff collection at our library. Interestingly, he knew they were somehow connected to Danny and the Dinosaur, because the illustrations are so similar. (LOVE the illustrations!)

So, on to our new top four Syd Hoff books…

Sammy the Seal, written in 1959 :This is the story of a seal who lives in the zoo, but is allowed to have a day off because of good behavior. :) What I love about Syd Hoff is his ability to really know the imagination of a child, and to make this kind of idea seem perfectly reasonable!

Thunderhoof, written in 1971:This is the story of a wild horse who doesn’t want to be tamed, but eventually realizes that being loved isn’t so bad after all. M likes to say “Good old feller” a lot after reading this book. :)

Oliver, written in 1960:Oliver is an elephant who had hoped to be in the circus, but the circus doesn’t need him. He spends time with some children (who adore him; who wouldn’t want an elephant to play with?), and eventually the circus realizes just how talented Oliver really is.

Julius, written in 1959: Julius is a gorilla and leaves the jungle to work at the circus. He is the epitome of politeness – a real gentleman, and I really crack up at how he goes out of his way to be polite (this is a great model for kids!). He ends up being pestered by a fly and scares a few people as he tries to shoo the fly away, but he is simply misunderstood. Julius has such a big heart, and I think this was M’s favorite – he has asked for it daily and it’s one of his “in bed” books at night.

For more reviews of children’s books, check out Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns and Feed Me Books Friday.

Have a beautiful day! :)

Friday, April 29, 2011

Learning by Heart – I See the Moon

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

{M is 4 1/2 years old}

M is in love with the moon.

It all began with If You Decide To Go To The Moon , by Faith McNulty:

I heard about this book from Natalie over at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns, and thought M would like it. Well, he did. He couldn’t get enough of it and was instantly fascinated with outer space in general, and the moon in particular. We have previously read books about outer space and the moon, but none of them sparked his interest as well as this one.

So we began a very simple little moon unit.

We watched the launch of the space shuttle Discovery in February (yes, this is a pretty late post) live on the laptop: watching launch of Discovery

It was thrilling, to say the least. He talked about it for days afterward. I couldn’t quite get him to understand that they weren’t going to the moon, but oh well. :) He loved learning about how everything is weightless in space and how the astronauts can float around inside of the space shuttle. He wanted to get into the nitty-gritty details of how they live in it, especially how they go to the bathroom. sigh. It’s all part of learning, right? ;)

We played games with some beautiful space flashcards I picked up from Target over a year ago. space flashcard game

I was smart enough to get two sets at the time, although I wasn’t smart enough to think of a way to use them. But once M’s interest in all things outer space was in high gear, I remembered this post of Ticia’s, where she created a game for her kids using these same flashcards. Click on the link to her post to get the specific details. This was fun and as soon as one of us had a card covered we flipped it over and read all of the interesting information on the back. I think it would’ve gone a bit more quickly if we’d had more than just 2 players though, or if I had separated the flashcards into smaller groups.

We learned a bit about the phases of the moon too.

We watched this video:

We looked at this page of the Starchild website a bit:

The website is part of NASA, and has tons of interesting things for children to learn about. I highly recommend taking a look! We only went over the moon phases web page, but I think we’ll be back to learn more!

I made some moon phases Montessori-style 3-part cards. I couldn’t find exactly what I wanted online (for free anyway), so I used a public domain photo of the moon, and edited it to show the various phases:

We had an art project waiting for us as M matched up these cards and labels, and I felt like he was hurrying through it to get to something more fun. However, he has since talked about the “gibbous” moon on his own, so I guess some of it stuck! :)

You can download and print the Moon Phases 3-Part Cards here:

M had fun making a little outerspace artwork. We used black paper, green and blue chalk dipped in water, aluminum foil, scissors, sequins, silver glitter glue, and two circle-shaped lids: supplies for moon artwork

I showed M how to hold a lid and draw around it at the same time in order to draw a circle. He cut one circle from foil for the moon, and one was drawn onto the black paper with chalk. He drew some areas of land on his “earth circle” and then colored it in with wet chalk (wet chalk on black paper is fun, and a good art project all on its own).

He drew a face on his moon, then sparkled up the the rest of outer space with some sequin and glitter glue stars:

On a trip to visit my parents, we were lucky enough to find this amazing book in a box my mom wanted me to look through:

I’m not sure if or where it can be found, but it is truly amazing. :) It is filled with facts, and after reading it, you can unfold the pages:

Open it up: space shuttle book (1)

And you have a 4-foot long space shuttle model! M was in space shuttle heaven. :) There’s a lot of great details, like a satellite in the cargo area: space shuttle book (4)