Little Voices

Babar, To Duet or Not To Duet

2012-01-26T22:16:00.000-08:00

We rowed Babar, To Duet or Not to Duet in December before Christmas Break. This Five in a Row book is not one of the original Babar stories but was written by Elaine Waislass in 1992. It has a great lesson about perseverance as well as offering many other great topics to learn about.
Some of our activities:

-- Good Manners. We started with this compilation of good manners. We discussed them and K acted some of them out. Then we looked at a list of manners from 1889. Thank you Classical Charlotte. While some of the rules seemed a little odd to us, K mostly noticed how strange it was that there were Capitals in Places besides those she'd Learned there should be.

--Discipline, or keeping trying when something is difficult. We discussed Aesop's fable about the Tortoise and the Hare and watched the Disney version and the Sesame Street News Flash Tortoise & Hare Rematch.

--Potato Print Pictures.

The kids enjoyed this; however, when I carved the potato stamps I forgot the image would be reversed when it was printed. So I thought the notes ended up resembling tall birds more than musical notes, but they didn't seem to mind or notice.

--Water Notes. Another fun activity we did after talking about musical notes and the subject of fractions (whole, half, quarter, etc.) was discussing how the placement of the notes on a staff signifies their pitches. I came across an experiment where you gather 8 identical drinking glasses and fill them to certain levels to make the different notes.
Filled: C
8/9 filled: D
4/5: E
3/4: F
2/3: G
3/5: A
8/15: B
1/2: C
It was a rough approximation of the notes, but it did work. I remembered that we had some child hand bells, and we placed the correct bell with its corresponding water glass. K loved clanging the glasses with a spoon and making up songs.

--Orchestra. We spent some time learning about the orchestra. Carnegie Hall's Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra was a good resource. The games were a little to hard for K but she liked being able to click on the different instruments, read about them and hear how they sounded. I also showed the kids my flute and played some simple songs for them. They liked that.
I often play classical music in the mornings before we start lessons and after learning about the instruments, especially after the next described activity, the kids were interested in identifying the sounds. The time we spent with this definitely made them more aware of the music we listen to. Surprisingly, T still asks about some of the instruments he hears.
Rowing Babar during Christmas concert season, I really hoped we'd be able to go hear an orchestra play. Disappointly, we just couldn't schedule it. Maybe we'll be able to catch a concert in the spring or even next year. That's the nice thing about FIAR--a subject doesn't stop being interesting even after you're done rowing the book.

--Haydn's Surprise Symphony. The beginning notes vaguely sound like Baa Baa Black Sheep and the FIAR manual suggests listening to this orchestral piece and finding the surprise. As we watched the 2nd movement on Youtube, the kids looked for instruments they recognized from the previous day's lesson. I turned up the volume really high so the quiet beginning sounded like an ordinary volume. When the fortissimo came everyone was SURPRISED!

--Elephants. It felt a little odd to be learning about elephants in the last days before Christmas Vacation, but kind of a nice break from the Christmasy hubbub, too. This had a lot of good information. It was interesting to learn about the differences between African and Asian elephants. I printed out a few Google images of each and K figured out which kind they were. We also watched various elephant footage on Youtube.

I wasn't sure if I would like rowing this book as growing up, I didn't care for the way the original Babar stories are written in the present tense. But this book didn't disappoint--another rich learning experience.

November Pictures

2012-01-16T16:11:00.000-08:00

This was a fun idea for a nature walk. As we looked for signs of fall, K found lots of leaves, sticks, dried grasses and interesting bushes. We were at the same place we took a nature walk last spring and it was neat to see how many textures and colors were apparent after things had died back from freezing temperatures. When we got home I made a weaving board with cardboard and yarn and K chose her favorite collected treasures and wove them into the "tapestry". Some of the pieces she needed help with, but for the most part she did this on her own.

The following five pictures were taken on Veterans Day. Ever since we rowed Lentil and learned about the American flag, K was excited to get one of our own. We picked one up around the 4th of July and she was so excited to help display it. So on Veterans Day we made a bit of a production of putting the flag up. We carefully unfolded it white T held the flag pole..

..gathered ourselves together and marched away. I think I was making drum sounds to accompany us.

Putting up the flag..

Hooray for the stars and stripes!

Finally, a picture of fall fun. Thanks to Aunt K for taking these pictures!

Cranberry Thanksgiving

2012-01-15T21:38:00.000-08:00

I wanted to do Cranberry Thanksgiving last year. It is an out of print book and when I started researching it last fall, all the copies on Amazon and Ebay were so expensive. But the following spring I was able to find a copy at a great price, so I was excited to row the book this year. Another great Five in a Row story that teaches how appearances can be deceiving.

We started with a discussion on settings. After K understood that there are many different settings where a story can happen, she brainstormed some of her own. We didn't make up stories, just thought of various places they could happen.

We did an experiment to understand what liquid spray starch does to fabric after reading the part of the story where "all the starch seemed to leave Mr. Horace."

Then we learned about cranberry bogs. We watched some videos that explained how cranberries are grown. Then K saw for herself that cranberries float.

We used cranberries, water and a pan to make our own cranberry bog. K and T poured water into the pan to make them float and "harvested" them. Thanks to Almost Unschoolers for this idea.

I love the dark red of cranberries and bought a plenteous amount. So with some of those cranberries we made a cranberry wreath for a Thanksgiving decoration. I poked straight pins into the berries and K stuck them to a styrofoam wreath. She needed some reminding to keep the cranberries as close together as possible but with help the wreath turned out really cute. It actually kept for a long time and made a nice Christmas decoration, too.

Since Cranberry Thanksgiving is all about Grandma's famous cranberry bread, we followed the recipe in the book (minus the raisins) and made our own. It was good!

Finally, I saw the idea for using cranberries to make a fun pink play dough here, and had to try that too. The kids loved this and played with the dough a lot.

Since it was nearly Thanksgiving, we finished this unit with a study on the first Thanksgiving. This year I focused most on the trip on the Mayflower. K made a list of things she would bring with her if she moved to a new land (Books! Toys!). Then we looked at pictures of some of the items the Pilgrims brought with them and K tried to guess what they were/what they were used for. Some of them, I'm sure, took too much space and were useless (body armor). We talked about that difficult first year and K and T made pictures of Pilgrim houses with popsicle sticks and shredded wheat for the roofs. K also added garden vegetables to her picture by choosing squares of tissue paper to crumple up and glue to the paper. She added details to the picture with markers.
I'm glad we got to row this book!

Little Nino's Pizzeria

2012-01-06T16:15:00.000-08:00

I am dreadfully behind in posting and am working to get caught up. So here's the next Five in a Row book we did-- Little Nino's Pizzeria by Karen Barbour. It is a colorful, simple book with a good message about how having the right priorities is more important than making lots of money. After our previous row, Little Nino was a considerably more laid-back study, but with good learning nevertheless.

We started by comparing Little Nino to a previous FIAR story, Night of the Moonjellies. Both books are about family businesses and it was interesting to compare the similarities and differences between the two stories.

Then we talked about homonyms/homographs/homophones. (Who decides the differences and what they're called, anyway?) How Much Can a Bare Bear Bear? was a good go-along that we enjoyed from the library. That night at dinner when K told Daddy The Word Man what she'd learned that day, he immediately chimed in with lots more examples of homonyms and the rest of dinner was filled with words that sound the same but are spelled differently, etc., being bantered back and forth.

The illustrations to Pizzeria are very colorful and done in a style similar to the artist Matisse. I set up a simple still life and K and I each made a drawing of it. Then we painted our drawings with watercolors. We were careful to let the different sections dry before adding the next color so the colors wouldn't bleed together and stay bright. While we waited, we played the homonym matching game from Homeschool Share.

It is interesting to follow the expressions of the pet cat and dog through the story. Their faces and body language help express the various emotions that are part of the narrative. They also show personification which we had discussed in Katy and the Big Snow. K helped me make up a story about the flower pot we had used in our still life earlier in the week and K illustrated the story. She did a good job--the expressive flower pot made the story kind of hilarious.

The next day K sorted some pictures of food into the food groups and we talked about the USDA food plate that shows the recommended portions. Then we pretended K was in charge of meal preparation, and using the food pictures, she made up some meal choices with all the food groups included. She really enjoyed this and for several weeks after asked me pointedly where the ___ food group was if she couldn't find it in our meal (or if it really wasn't there--how's that accountability!).

We finished this unit with a Pizza Day. K did a little creative writing about a pizza she would like if she could invent her own and she did some practice addition with pizza cutouts. (Matching problems to correct sums.)

Later in the day we made pizza for dinner! From scratch! The kids loved helping with measuring the ingredients, mixing, kneading, rolling out the dough and putting the toppings on. This is the pizza before it was baked.

Then when it was all ready, we had our very own pizzeria. We ate in the room where K normally does her school work. I set some candles up around the room, we moved the table to the middle so there would be room for potted plants around it. I even found an online radio station that plays Italian folk music. Then we dimmed the lights and the mood was set. It was great fun. The kids loved it. I liked watching their eyes large, looking around the room transformed by candlelight as they munched their pizza. They wanted to know when we could have another pizzeria dinner. My only regret is that I forgot I had a red checked tablecloth that would have been perfect as well. Oh well, gives us a reason to do this again sometime.

Another great row!

Happy Christmas, everyone

2011-12-23T18:12:00.000-08:00

We had a Christmas serendipity last night--carolers. We were just getting the kids ready for bed when B was the first to hear voices singing outside. We quick bundled the kids up in blankets and went out on the front porch to listen. There were about 20 people--I'm guessing from their exuberance that they were high schoolers and from their song choices and harmonies that they were a choir. They stood in the middle of the dark street and let their song fill the neighborhood. It was brief but great; the kids were entranced. It gave a lift to the night and now K and T know first hand what Christmas caroling is.

5 T Things

2011-11-14T22:21:00.000-08:00

1. Getting dressed more often than not seems to involve a to-the-death wrestling match with his clothes.

2. Time in the car is divided into "Is this going to be a long time?" and "That was a shwort trip!"

3. A current favorite is "the Henny Penny story". He periodically asks family members: Where are you going in such a hurry?

4. T's still hungry after finishing his bowl of cereal and makes a list of increasingly sophisticated seconds requests. I tell him he can have plain Cheerios. OK, he agrees. After I pour his cereal and milk, he asks sadly, "Where's the airplane?"

5. He's standing by the window watching the bird feeder when a bird suddenly thuds into the glass. "Oh!" His mouth is a perfectly round circle and his morning hair is standing straight up. I stifle my smile and he tells me the bird "is sad 'cause he bonked the window and he lost his mother."

Proud that he lined up all the stuffed puppies in the house

October pictures: color and love

2011-11-07T22:12:00.000-08:00

The last of the garden produce. The carrots did well this year. Tomatoes, which usually we get so much of that I vow to remind B not plant so many the next year, we didn't get nearly as much this season. It was a cool spring and summer. This winter I''ll miss having a supply of homemade tomato soup in the freezer. But these carrots were nice. Even T, who thought he didn't like carrots, is now a carrot fan.

Our 8th anniversary. It was cute how excited K was about this day--she always loves the chance for a celebration. She thought we ought to have our picture taken. We gave her the camera and I think she did a nice job. She wanted it to be 'a hugging picture'.

For our anniversary, B surprised me by arranging for me to have pottery lessons. I took pottery in college and loved throwing pots on the wheel. I've always wanted to take another class but have never done it. It seems 24/7 I have an constant loop playing through my mind of "I didn't get this done like I intended, I still need to do this, this and this." What a treat to have two hours a week to create and fully concentrate on something else and have that endless to-do list cleared from my mind for awhile.

I wasn't expecting the lavender to rebloom so much this fall, but I liked the contrast with these mystery flowers next to them.

So long, summer, fall's here now.

A New Coat for Anna

2011-11-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

This was a great book. It takes place in post-war Europe when money and supplies were scarce. Anna needs a winter coat and her mother barters various possessions to get one. The emphasis of the story is on the process of coat making as we follow it from sheep to finish.

We started this unit with a bartering activity. K pretended to be a mother of several children living on a farm. One of the children becomes ill, so the doctor is called.

T was recruited for the doctor role and he was glad to oblige.

After the doctor paid his visit, K told him she had no money, but offered him what she could from the resources on her farm. I had supplied pictures of various crops/eggs/meat and so on. There was quite a lot to choose from. The doctor decided he liked strawberries best.

This was a fun activity for the kids to act out and I think K was able to grasp the concept pretty well.

K dictated an informative story (she decided on "How to Make a Nature Sculpture") and we practiced linear measuring with a ruler, yardstick and measuring tape across the living room.

We examined how clothing is made from wool. We spent some extra time on this-- 4 days altogether, I think. First we watched a few videos on Youtube of people carding wool and spinning it on a spinning wheel.
Then we launched into our own project of dyeing and using patterns to make a doll pillow.

First we cut square patterns from old cotton socks.

I got the fabric ready for the dye by simmering it in half vinegar, half water for about an hour. Doing this also sets the dye.

Then we got ready to dye the sock squares. We used two techniques for this, Kool-Aid and natural dyes. I used this site for how to dye cotton with Kool-Aid. This natural dyes website has a huge amount of information of different plant materials that can be used and what colors they will produce. I basically followed the process of dyeing as described on this site, but also used this site. I liked that the second one suggested using more than one plant source for a richer color.

Based on the amount of sock squares we were able to cut, I decided to dye with two colors of Kool-Aid and three with natural materials. We did spinach in one pot,

frozen strawberries, pink rose petals and red Virginia Creeper leaves in another,

and onion skins, paprika and dandelion root in the third.

Each dye was simmered for about an hour, then we added the sock squares to the pots. The onion skin color seemed to be fairly strong, so its squares simmered for an additional hour, then rinsed. After the spinach and strawberries squares had simmered one hour, I turned off the burners and let them soak in the dyes overnight.

The squares were carefully rinsed and allowed to dry. Cotton absorbs less dye than wool, so the colors came out somewhat muted. This is how they looked, left to right: Blue Raspberry Kool-Aid, Grape Kool-Aid, spinach, onion mixture, strawberry mixture.

Since there were ten squares, K chose 8 for the bigger pillow and 2 for the mini pillow. Not having used a sewing machine since oh, about the 8th grade, I was pleasantly surprised by the results. The kids enjoyed stuffing the pillows--getting them just the right thickness.

It was so much fun to see how the dyes turned out and experiment with the colors in this project.

Since the book also discussed weaving the yarn, we couldn't leave that step out in our study of this unit. I showed K a Youtube video of a loom being used. Then she made a woven placemat with construction paper. I was afraid I had made it too complex for her, but once she understood the process, she really enjoyed making it and was proud of her finished product.

In addition, since there is a fiber arts center close to us, we took a field trip to visit it. Though it was geared more toward quilters (with some beautiful quilts to see), there were also spinning wheels and they happened to have extra looms on display for the month of October. The lady working there was very gracious in showing us each of them and explaining how they worked. K thought it was funny to learn new words like shuttle, warp and woof. K and T were even invited to try out one of the looms.

It was a fascinating visit. It made me realize anew the benefits of homeschooling. We were able to simply get in the car and visit; since it was just us, the lady working there gave us special attention and really tried to help K understand weaving, as well as gave us historical information about looms. (The colonists' use of them contributed to the beginning of the Revolutionary War.) And the fact that K actually got to weave on a real loom--if it had been a class visiting, it would have taken forever to give everyone a turn, and each of the children certainly would not have been able to get so close to each loom for as long as he/she wanted.

After learning about the looms, we looked at the yarns for sale.

T really wanted me to take a picture of the 'lallow'.

This was such a fun Five in a Row unit. I'm so glad we had the opportunity to do these activities.

September Pictures

2011-10-31T17:15:00.000-07:00

A bunch of snapshots from the month of September. They should probably be in separate posts, but then I might never get finished.

While Grandma and Grandpa were here we took a walk/bike/tricycle ride on a nearby bike path. We stopped to look at this horse and he came over to say hello and nibble grass fed to him through the fence.

Pictures from the Spokane Children's Museum. B had to work in Spokane for a week, so me and the kids came and joined him for a couple days. We visited the Children's Museum there; the kids didn't want to leave even after spending more than 2 1/2 hours there. T could have stayed on this excavator alllll day.

K's favorite was the microscope. She talked about it long after.

As the kids pedaled, they watched a tv screen that showed real street scenes.

There was a Philippine village interactive display. T liked fishing from the outrigger boat.

"Come on in, the water's fine!" At the hotel the kids had a great time swimming. Once they both got in the water.

I like the angelic look on T's face. He had such a great time being toted around in the water by Daddy.

K was the most comfortable I've seen her playing in the water.

And some more pictures from our visit to the apple orchard. There was a petting zoo where K met the two week old calf. The kids got to help feed a huge bottle to him a little later.

T met the goats and made friends with the farm boy.

K on the tire swing. She really enjoyed this until she fell and somehow cut her lip shortly after this photo was taken.

There was also an old tractor in one of the play areas. Both kids had a great time pretending to drive it.

It's interesting to compare how they've grown from last year.

How to Make an Apple Pie

2011-10-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

Our next Five in a Row book was How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. This is a funny story about a girl traveling the world to fetch the ingredients needed for her apple pie.
The timing of doing this book coincided with a local homeschooling field trip to an apple orchard. The kids had a great time picking apples.

We also made apple cider. Here are the kids sorting apples.

I didn't get any other pictures of the cider process because I was too busy helping prep apples, etc. We really enjoyed the cider we brought home and used our fresh picked apples for an apple pie.

After our orchard visit we did a mini apple study: K tested whether apples float or sink, predicted what the inside would look like and how many seeds there would be. She also put an apple on a balance scale and found how many unifix cubes it took to weigh the same as the apple. Apple prints were fun, too. K thought of apple comparisons (something red and round like an apple, something heavier, lighter, softer, same size, etc.), apple descriptions using the 5 senses and we had an apple taste test. K enjoyed keeping track of which kinds everyone in the family liked best. Each of us had a different favorite.

As far as what activities we did relating to the book How to Make an Apple Pie, we basically followed the activities as described in the manual. Favorites were finding the mentioned countries on a globe and marking the girl's journey with yarn. We did a science experiment to learn about evaporation by dissolving 1/4 cup salt in a pan of 2 cups of water, then leaving the pan until the water all evaporated. This took a couple weeks for all the water to evaporate. But when it did, lo and behold, the salt remained. I curious if there was still 1/4 cup salt. It actually measured more than 1/4 cup. We decided this must because the evaporated water salt crystals were much bigger than the ones we'd started with. B also suggested that maybe some impurities in the water were also left behind.

We did a very brief introduction to the countries listed in the book. We spent the most time with Italy and Sri Lanka. We watched a YouTube video of a combination Italian cooking/language lesson which K enjoyed because of her interest in all things relating to food prep. We also spent some time looking at the gorgeous photos my sister took during her stay in Sri Lanka. The kids especially liked the colorful boats the fishermen use and pictures of elephants. She even had a picture of a leopard ambling through the forest, just like in the book.

Some of our Jesus Time activities during the How to Make an Apple Pie unit included spending three days learning about the Fruit of the Spirit. The Music Machine CD was perfect for this. It has a song for each fruit. The songs are fun to listen to and describe Love, Joy, Peace, etc., in a child-friendly way. The first day K listened to the first five songs while coloring a Fruit of the Spirit coloring page. The next day she listened to the remaining Fruit songs and drew a picture of what the songs made her think of. She made a nice picture illustrating kindness. Then the third day she chose one song from the CD and we listened to just it, following the words and discussing it afterward. She chose the Self-Control song. T wanted to choose one, too, and he picked Joy. By the end of the unit both kids had Galatians 5:22 memorized and could sing the Fruit of the Spirit song.

We also discussed the harvest and John 4:35-38. We watched a YouTube video of a wheat field ready for harvest and learned the song "Bringing in the Sheaves". I was not familiar with this hymn, but this video on YouTube was good for learning the song and we also enjoyed this one of Sacred Harp singers. For some reason there was a Salvation Army band accompanying them for most of the song. Regretfully, the accompaniment seems to make the song rather ponderous in my opinion; the singers sounded much more joyful when they sang a verse accapella. But T, especially, really enjoyed watching the double conductors and tried to wave his own arms in sync with their motions. He still often sings his own version of the song at the top of his lungs. Gotta sing loud like those shape note singers.

Harold and the Purple Crayon

2011-10-19T23:04:00.000-07:00

Our first Five in a Row book this year was Harold and the Purple Crayon. It's a classic story that is both simple and rich.
For Language Arts, we discussed the humor in the story, specifically puns. We read Amelia Bedelia, one K's already familiar with and enjoys. Once she understood that Harold has some funny moments, she enjoyed appreciating that humor each time we read those parts of the story.
For Art, we looked at some Google images of cities, then K created her own city scene. To show her how to draw the buildings, I began drawing one myself, then kept working while K drew her picture. She seemed willing to put in more effort as I was joining her in drawing the same thing. T, never one to be left out, then began drawing his own city as well, and it actually vaguagley resembled one. Here is K with her city:

She said the little house on the right was to make sure the skyscrapers were ok, and she also added her "two favorite hanging trees. One's a weeping willow and one's a birch." I thought it was curious that she also chose to add an airplane to her picture, not something she usually draws. We did this unit in the week following 9/11; even though we didn't talk about that day directly with her, she's often had the ability to somehow pick concepts out of the atmosphere.
Then we hung all three pictures together for one big city:

Then for Science we spent a couple days on transportation. I had K make boats from a variety of materials including cork, walnut shells, aluminum foil, wood blocks, milk caps, a milk carton and a cantalope peel. The source I used for this idea suggested an orange peel, but no oranges were in the house. The cantalope peel actually worked surprisingly well. When all the boats had been constructed K and T couldn't wait to try them out. They also wanted to add bathtub boats to compare.

We had made little sails for the milk cap and walnut shell boats out of toothpicks, clay and paper, but by the time I took this picture, they'd been dismantled by hands eager to make stories about the "trim little boats."

K wrote a 5 line transportation poem using this pattern:

Title: Name of Vehicle

Line 1: size and shape of vehicle

Line 2: color of vehicle

Line 3: purpose of vehicle

Line 4: where you'd like to be in the vehicle

Line 5: name of worker who drives the vehicle

An example would be--

Subway

Long like a train.

Silver and red.

Carries people.

Tunnels.

Subway conductor.

The transportation K chose: Floating Log. Hmm. I wondered whether I ought to encourage her to choose a *real* form of transportation and make a conventional poem to go with her idea. But I had to admit the idea of riding a log down a river on a lazy afternoon sounded appealing in the frenetically busy month that September turned out to be. So why not. We went with the log.

Floating Log

Big and long.

Brown.

For taking rides.

On rivers.

Indian rower.

We also had a crayon day where we watched how crayons are made and pulled out all our Crayola shades of purple crayons to see which ones we had from the Crayola website. K made a purple picture and dictated a story about it.

In the story Harold climbs a hill to try to see where he is. The manual suggests finding a book to see pictures of earth taken from space. Looking Down by Steve Jenkins is a good go-along for this idea. Collage pictures illustrate scenes from earth as viewed from space, then closer and closer until you see a ladybug in the grass. We looked at the book backwards so the view went from the bug to space, as if we were climbing higher and higher like Harold did.

For our final activity for this book we took a walk up a very tall hill close by. We went on a weekend so B could come, too. It was a great walk. We'd meant to try this climb since we first moved to this house. The kids did great. We didn't make it to the top of the hill, but it wasn't long before we could look out and see very far away.

We got some nice family photos:

And every time we stopped for a break the kids quickly found a place to start playing.

I thought it was funny how even though there were grand views on every side, as soon as we stopped to look around the kids immediately began looking for things on the ground or set to work digging holes with their walking sticks:

It was a great way to complete our Harold and the Purple Crayon study and wonderful way to get the year off to a good start.

First Day

2011-10-14T00:07:00.000-07:00

First day of first grade--homeschool! (Complete with princess hands.)

Though there's been no posts to show for it, we're back in full swing of the school year. Homeschooling again, while T tags along.

We are using Five in a Row for our main curriculum. Each book we row becomes such a lovely journey, I wish we could do each one in all the manuals. I am so glad I found this curriculum that is children's book based. I recently came across these words from Honey for a Child's Heart by Gladys Hunt:

Children and books go together in a special way....Take all the words available in the human vocabulary and read them from the dictionary and you have only a list of words. But with the creativity and imagination God has given human beings, let these words flow together in the right order and they give wings to the spirit. Every child ought to know the pleasure of words so well chosen that they awaken sensibility, great emotions and understanding of truth....Somehow a limited, poverty-stricken vocabulary works toward equally limited use of ideas and imagination. On the other hand, the provocative use of the right words, of a growing vocabulary gives us adequate material with which to clothe our thoughts and leads to a richer world of expression....Books help children know what to look for in life. It is like developing the taste buds of one's mind as a child learns to savor what he sees, hears and experiences and fits these into some kind of worthwhile framework. What is unfamiliar becomes close and real in books. What is ridiculous helps children see the humor in their own lives. Sympathetic understanding is a generous by-product of sharing the emotions of others in stories. Books are no substitute for life, but a keener pleasure comes to life because of books.

Makes you want to pick up a good book to read! I'm looking forward to the possibilities of the coming year.

For math this year we are using Singapore Math. I was torn between Singapore and Horizons. B, with his strong math background and teaching experience, favored Singapore. Then I found that the local used curriculum store had a pre-owned set at K's level for a good price, so that settled that question.

Phonics will be a mixture of an A Beka seatwork book I found at another used curriculum sale, Making Words and other phonics games/activities I have in my files.

Reading will be ongoing practice and periodic comprehension excercises. K already enjoys reading so much and does a lot of it on her own. She often asks about the words she can't figure out, which leads to varying discussions about the material.

Writing: Last year we focused mainly on learning correct letter formation. This year I'm using Draw Write Now and lessons based on Ruch Beechick's teaching philosophy. (To teach reading we read, for writing we write.) She favors copywork and dictation from quality writing as a way to teach children to write. For K's level the copywork/dictation are very simple and accessible. I'm also going to give K the chance to do her own creative writing, and she's excited about "publishing" her own stories.

We have a Jesus Time every day. Last year I used a children's Bible story book as my main source for teaching Bible lessons. We spent a week on each story and I used other Bible story books and teaching ideas to help K learn the stories. This year we are using the Five in a Row Character Supplement book. It has all the FIAR books and has scripture passages/verses to go along with the themes of each book. There seems to be enough to spend one or two days with each idea, depending how long we row that particular book.

And this year we are also participating in a homeschool co-op. I'm glad we have the opportunity for this, last year we started too late in the year to get involved. I am actually teaching a class, too. It is a group games class where the kids will get to play games with a larger group than what is usually feasible when one has only a small number of siblings. It's been strange to be back in teacher mode for a group of kids. In a funny way it's been kind of like picking up where I left off--I quit teaching just before K was born and at the time it seemed kind of abrupt. One day I was teaching kids like I had for several years, then the next day I was not. Now it's like the sewing needle has poked back up through the material; K was in utero when I left off, now she is the age I used to teach and I am teaching a group with her in it. I've felt a little rusty, and in ways it is a totally different teaching dynamic, but K seems to really enjoy her co-op days and T is starting to feel more comfortable with it, too. He wasn't too sure about it to start with and asked if we could go to BSF like we did last year.

So, that's an overview of this year. As I write this we are already into our third FIAR book, so hopefully I can soon get caught up on what we've been doing.

I think I'll close with a photo I meant to post last year when we had a review day at the end of the year. I gathered all the FIAR books we'd rowed and K held her favorite. I wonder what will be the favorite this year.

Vacation, Day 3

2011-09-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

The next day we had to head home, but as the cabin owners allowed us to have a late check-out, we took a hike in the morning first. We found a trail up the road that was described as being kid-friendly, and it had a nice mixture of forest, open areas, and spots to get close to the river. Once again, the kids loved throwing things in. But once we got moving on the trail, they were happy to tramp along.

It was difficult for me to hold my pace down. After many, many family hikes from vacations long ago, my legs just wanted to get into the usual semi-fast-and-steady-hike-mode. But little children wanted to stop and look at every funny rock or fluorescent lichen piece fallen on the path. At one point, however, T and I were alone out ahead of everyone else, me adjusting my gait to his shorter legs, he stopping to poke his stick at every other bush. It seemed so natural that we were walking along this trail together. As I looked around at the tall silent trees, it occurred to me that the last time I had hiked in an Eastern Oregon forest was the summer before B and I married. So much had happened between then and now, yet the then didn't seem so far away and I could imagine the "then me" smiling in approval that things had come round full circle. Now the "future me" was hiking here with my son.
I hope there will be many more forest hikes.

K collected armfuls of sticks, bark, and Ponderosa needle bunches and carried them with her so she'd have a selection of items ready to throw into the river.

Then it was back to the cabin to pack up and head out. Goodbye, Eastern Oregon hills. Hope to see you again soon.

photo by K

Vacation, Day 2

2011-09-15T15:36:00.000-07:00

The next day we went to church in Baker at a Presbyterian church. It was such a chipper congregation with people that were happy and direct. I love Eastern Oregon straightforwardness. They sang loudly and whole-heartedly; not always on key, but like they meant it.
After church we enjoyed driving through some residential neighborhoods in downtown Baker City with beautiful old houses, each distinct. Then we grabbed a quick lunch and headed off to the Sumpter Valley Railway. We got to ride an old train with a steam engine!

At first T was really unsure abut this. I think he was afraid the engine would be really loud like the scary airplane earlier this summer.

But as the train got moving, he enjoyed it more and more. K looks really tired in the pictures, but she liked the ride a lot, too. When we got back to the cabin she began pulling chairs into a line to make her own train. And she was the conductor, of course.

On the return trip we rode in one of the open outside cars. It made for a beautiful view of the mountains, though bumpier, and we got a fair amount of ash blown on us from the engine smoke stack. K was terrified her hat would blow away and kept at least one hand firmly planted on it during almost the entire half hour ride.

It was a fun ride and I'm grateful we had the opportunity to do it.

Vacation, Day 1

2011-09-14T16:23:00.000-07:00

Over Labor Day weekend we took a trip with B's parents to a cabin outside Baker City, Oregon. It was a wonderful time. The cabin was in a forested area along the Powder River. We got there late Friday night and the next day was spent relaxing and simply exploring the property.
First we walked down to the river where the resident herd of alpacas greeted us.

They were freindly, but shy. They seemed espially curious about the children and walked right up to a group that had T and/or K in it, but if an adult tried to coax one near while standing by himself, they couldn't be persuaded to approach closer tnan an arm and a half's length.

They were kind of comical animals, and we enjoyed watching them.

When we reached the river we found it to be very fast flowing. There was a bridge which was great fun to toss sticks from and watch them quickly float away. K and T would've happily done that for hours.

Later, a worker came and began to operate a backhoe. B took T down to watch. In the next picture you can see T turning to watch the machine even in the excitement of riding on Daddy's shoulders.

It was bliss for T to be able to watch the backhoe at work. He and his daddy sat down nearby and just watched for the longest time. B said T copied the motions of the digger with his arm as it moved, and he was glad they had the time and freedom to watch as long as they liked--the joy of vacation when you don't have to be someplace else on time.

(picture taken by K)

K, meanwhile, was intrigued by the hill behind the house and thoroughly enjoyed "mountain climbing", collecting big pinecones, grasses and rocks. She got Grandma to climb the hill with her and together they made it to the top. She and Grandma made this trip several more times during the weekend.

Saturday afternoon was also a good time for a long, deep nap with ever-faithful puppy by one's side.

This was the first day of our trip. In the evenings after the kids had gone to bed, B and I taught his folks how to play the always entertaining and potentially interminable game of SkipBo. To keep this from getting too long, I think I will describe the rest of the vacation in upcoming posts.

Storm Brewing

2011-09-08T21:13:00.000-07:00

A thunderstorm began developing one evening a couple of weeks ago.

It made for a kind of glowing light on the flowers.

The sunflowers from the previous post had a nice mixture of warm light and shadows that made the yellow pop.

I liked the red light on K's hair, though her smile was a bit nervous because the approaching thunderstorm made her somewhat afraid.

Even if the children didn't think so, it was a beautiful evening.

Monster Plant

2011-08-30T21:33:00.000-07:00

When we first moved into this house I immediately started planning how I could fill up the many blank flowerbeds surrounding the yard. One of the things I planted was a Dakota Sunshine sunflower. I was disappointed, it barely grew at all. When the leaves started to turn brown and crunchy from the buffeting winds we get, I put an overturned pot and a bag of rocks near it to provide something of a shield. It sent up a couple weak leaves as the summer went on, but they seemed so small and half-hearted, barely an inch or two high. I was sure I'd need to replace it with something else the following year.

Lo and behold, this summer it came up again and started growing. Robustly. By the end of July it looked like this:

You can see the pot still there.
Now it has started blooming.

It makes a good backdrop for a family portrait on a really hot Sunday..

Or if you leave the bench there, it's a good place to catch two really goofy kids elbowing each other later on.

It also lives up to the claim that it is attractive to butterflies.

Morning Light

2011-08-29T15:45:00.000-07:00

Swimming Lessons

2011-08-25T17:54:00.000-07:00

Some photos from swimming lessons this summer.

We enrolled them together in a private class. Expensive, but worth it. When I told K she would be having lessons in a different pool than the year before, she said, "Good. The first pool was a little scary." Both kids did really well. K, especially, seemed to get much more comfortable with the water. T, a little less so, but he definitely learned a lot.

Waiting for their lesson to start

K volunteering an answer at the little talk they have at the beginning of the lesson

Practicing frog kicks

Blowing bubbles. If the kids had trouble, a technique the teacher used was to cup her hands for the kids to blow bubbles into. Much less intimidating than sticking your face in the pool.

Up to her ears. K demonstrating how she could go down in the water and get her ears in the water.

It was Sports Day, so all the teachers were wearing costumes.

Since it was the last day of swimming lessons, they also got to take a ride on the red hippo mat.

Petting the resident dog. T was thrilled about this. Every now and again, the dog would wander around the pool and utterly distract T. He couldn't take his eyes off it. Just as we were getting ready to leave on the last day, the dog sat down near the pool and the kids got to pet its curly fur.

Soundbites

2011-08-23T16:40:00.000-07:00

K: I'm a goldfinch,
      T's a starling,
      you're a dove,
      and Daddy's a quail!

The first thing T says one morning: I'm bigger but K wants me to be small.

K and T are looking out a window together.
K: Look at the tree and make a wish. It's a Sweetgum tree and the leaves are shaped like stars. What do you wish for? That you could fly? For a sewing machine, or something like that?
T: No.

With a great beating of wings, the quail family scatters and flies away when T unexpectedly comes around the corner. In a soothing voice he coos, "Oh, I'm sorry, birds! But you scared me, too! But I still love you!"

T's been in bed and absolutely quiet for a good while. Then a soft humming of "Joyful, Joyful" and all is still again.

Scary Airplanes

2011-08-20T11:45:00.000-07:00

Someone gave us passes to the local air show/boat races not long ago, so we attended one of the days. We were able to find a place to sit in the shade to watch the air show. I was glad of that. I'd never been to an airshow before--being stuck in the unrelenting sun to watch shiny metal always seemed unappealing to me. It was fun to watch the planes do their stunts and really exciting when the helicopters flew so close to us.

The kids waved to the pilots, who waved back. (Since then, T still waves to every airplane that flies by.) The action of the airshow slowed down, the kids were getting restless and hungry, time to get some lunch. While the kids and I ate (B was still getting his food), I half listened to the garbled announcement over the loudspeakers saying something about time to get your ear protection on. I thought that meant the boat races were about to start and since we had no ear protection, there was little I could do.

Suddenly, an F15 Air Force fighter jet blasted right over us. It came so fast. All you had time to do was take in the powerful sight, and it was gone. Then the sound hit. A deafening, roaring scream that made your ribs vibrate. Poor T, the jet came from behind him and the sound knocked him over. Literally, I looked down at him and he was lying face down, crying, hot dog and bun strewn across the blanket. He was terrified and cried and cried. He spent the rest of the time curled in my lap, trying to burrow away from the sound. Afterward, all he could talk about was the scary black airplane that "scratched the sky and hurt my back".

I tried to take a couple pictures while holding him and covering his ears, but the plane flew so fast, it was difficult not to get picture like this:

I managed to one-handedly get a couple pictures of the jet, but as it moved so fast I couldn't zoom in, and it ended up looking rather small and blurry. And the times it flew really close, there was no way for my slow shutter release camera to catch it.

But I think the following is my favorite picture. I took a picture but realized I hadn't even come close to getting the plane in the shot. So I started to put the camera down and this is how the picture came out:

I like how you can tell that an F 15 is a riveting sight. During all the other airplane acts, people kept milling around even as the planes flew close by. I also didn't realize how many people had their hands over their ears.

After the air show as over and T had recovered a bit (K didn't seem bothered much. Sitting in Daddy's lap kept her feeling safe.), I took the kids to the bounce houses that had been set up in the children's section. There the kids had a good time jumping non-stop for a good half hour. When we went back to B, we found him happy as a clam, watching the boat races.

T still talks about the scary airplane. But I think he's getting over it and he has spent a lot of time with a jet alphabet book we have. It has an F14 and an F16 in it; since they are so similar to the F15, he can talk about the plane that scratched the sky--on questioning him, I think he's referring to the sound-- and go on to look at lots of other planes. It may even be that he'll develop an ongoing fascination with planes, the way he loves vacuum cleaners now, though he used to be terrified of them as a baby.

10 things to make me smile

2011-08-18T15:24:00.000-07:00

1. The splotchy tear stains left on my shirt by a 3 year old who needed comfort after a particularly big crash.

2. Noticing that my 6 year old has good leg muscles.

3. Doing the week's grocery shopping alone after the kids have gone to bed. On coming out of the bright store into the darkened parking lot, the warmth of the day still radiating off the pavement feels good after the aggressive air conditioning.

4. In the no-man's land behind the shed a bright petunia from a neighbor's yard has poked through an opening in the fence
and bloomed.

5. I wish I was, but I'm not one of those people who can toss a little of this and a little of that together to create a new dish. Yet, I can look at the list of 6 ingredients jotted on a post-it and recreate my mom's beef casserole without using a single measuring cup.

6. T jerkily going down the stairs as fast as he is able to be the one to open the door for visiting Aunt D. When he goes upstairs he is now easily able to climb alternating feet, but going down the right foot must always lead.

7. In the many books she reads, K often comes across words she doesn't know. She tends to pronounce the long vowel sound where it should be a short vowel and vice versa. Makes for an interesting visual when she comes to tell me what she learned about the Big Diaper.

8.

9. bird shadows

10. "Did you see that the sunflowers are blooming? Want to come see?" asks K. She dances next to me as I walk to the volunteer flowers behind the garage. T tags along, and, "it popped," he chimes in, pointing to a cheery bloom. Then he asks me, "are they smiling?"
It reminds me of the time when T was about 5 months old, his grandma took him around to see her flowerbeds and he kicked his feet in happiness when she showed him the black-eyed susans.
I love it that my kids notice flowers.

Blueberries

2011-08-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

We found out about a blueberry farm very near us this summer and we took advantage! Here are the kids demonstrating their versions of proper berry picking technique.

T did well picking berries. When I took this picture he'd left his bucket behind somewhere and was gathering fistfuls of berries. He so reminded me of Little Sal--picking about 12 berries before tiring of that and humming to himself as he walked up and down the rows. I wasn't sure if he was pretending to be a bee or a truck. When Aunt D came to pick with us, he periodically stopped to pour his bucket of a few berries into hers. One time when he noticed a few of her berries had lighter purple spots on them he solemnly reminded her in his low voice, "Just pick the blue ones."

K, meanwhile, danced from row to row, stopping to pick berries here, then there. Her interest was in going around to each of us to see how many we each had picked, marveling at the quickly filling grown ups' buckets, and to tell us how many each person had. Then she sat down to make up stories, her sing-song voice never stopping its chatter.

Then to make blueberry recipes!

Blueberry crisp, blueberry muffins, blueberry cornmeal pancakes, blueberries on our cereal, blueberry scones, and some berries frozen for winter. I've collected lots of blueberry recipes, it was hard to choose. Everything was delicious. I think my favorite was

Mango-Blueberry Fool
serves 6
prep: 10 min.

1 (1lb) ripe mango, pitted, peeled & cut into chunks
1/4 C sugar, or to taste
2 T fresh lime juice, or to taste
1 C chilled heavy cream
1 1/2 C blueberries

Puree mango, sugar, lime juice and a pinch of salt in a blender until very smooth. Add cream and blend until very thinck. Blend in additional lime juice and sugar to taste.
Transfer to a bowl and fold in most of the blueberries, then divide among 6 glasses. Top with remaining blueberries. If desired, chill 30 min.

This was so good. It was one of those desserts that just makes you feel happy and smiley when you've eaten it.

Today..

2011-07-27T16:20:00.000-07:00

My times are in Thy hand, O Lord! And, surely, that is the best.

Were I to choose, they should be in no other hands,

neither mine own, nor any others.

When He withholds mercies or comforts for a season,

it is but till the due season.

Therefore it is our wisdom and our peace

to resign all things into His hands,

to have no will nor desires, but only this,

that we may still wait for Him.

Never was any one who waited for Him

miserable with disappointment.

~Robert Leighton

Stories of T

2011-07-21T21:06:00.000-07:00

- Over the winter he developed the ability to walk up to the window without scaring birds eating at the bird feeders. Sure, they hop a few steps back, but the rest of us so much as wave an arm from inside and they all fly away.

- His best friend is his stuffed puppy. They often have long conversations, I think they tell each other jokes. When he's in bed but not yet asleep, there will be long dialogue. Silence. Then someone makes a noise-- uproarious laughter. B says they remind him of Calvin and Hobbes. I have the fleeting thought they really ought to be separated, then when I find T asleep with his head on Puppy, I can't help but think, what are friends for?

- T has continued his endless fascination with lawn mowers. The sound of nearby mowing sends him racing from window to window to find which neighbor it is, then he is glued there watching until they are done. If we're outside he'll grab the wheelbarrow and push it to the front yard as if to say, see I have something big to push, too! Inside, he has commandeered K's old doll stroller as his mower and spends a good chunk of time pretending to mow the carpet upstairs. He has developed a very life-like mower sound, complete with motor undulations and a diminishing rumble when he turns it off. He pulls an imaginary cord to turn it on, though sometimes it's stubborn and won't start. He has to pull that cord quite a few times, some days. He does the same thing outside and also spends a lot of time edging, using the toy popper. His edging sound is really life-like, too. I've actually thought it was a neighbor edging until I noticed the sound kept stopping to take a breath. I don't know how he does that.

- He is extremely sensitive to where we are driving and often recognizes locations as we pass them, even when we are heading somewhere else and just happen to go by a familiar landmark. "Why are you stopping?" he asks as I wait for traffic to clear. "Why are we going up the hill?" he asks as we drive on a new road. And when I sigh after missing my turn, "What's WRONG?" comes the worried demand from the backseat. It will be handy to have him as my navigator when he's older.

- And even though his language skills have progressed remarkably in the last months, I like that there are still words he pronounces three-year old style. Yellow is la-low, helicopter is ha-weh-coptapter, and he is always so proud when he gets an owie that needs a Bambaide.

Invalid Recovering

2011-07-20T23:53:00.000-07:00

Today K was feeling yucky from a summer cold but she pulled this chair out into the grass so she could "sit and watch the bees tote around the flowers."

Stories of K

2011-07-19T14:36:00.000-07:00

- This summer she has taught herself to whistle (breathing in) and to snap her fingers.

- She has become a very good reader and seems to like the nonfiction section of the library the best. She has an extremely active mind, turning over and over the random information she's memorized. She quotes various lines, often with a "why is that?" tacked on as she tries to find places for the things she learns in the hierarchy of her thinking. Favorite books have been about measurement (telling T: "Let's see how many cubits you are!"), soap you can make, space, insects, what the quantity one million looks like, and many more.
When we started homeschooling, I bought a copy of What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know, intending to use it as part of my curriculum. Since Five in a Row is so thorough, I ended up using it very little and when we finished for the year I gave her the book to examine on her own. So the other night, after putting her to bed I stopped to look out the window at the sun setting on the hills instead of going right downstairs like usual. After a few moments I heard a rustle in the hall. Going around the corner, I found K startled at me finding her reading the Kindergartner book, curious to see what happens next to Little Red Riding Hood. I wonder if she'll be a flashlight under the covers kind of child.

- She often makes up words for things with unknown names. The wispy parachute seed (see, I don't know the name for it either) of a weed that reminds me of a dandelion on steroids is a "flimanimee".

- She has a strange kind of psychic ability to want to do the same things I've taken it into my head to do, though I've mentioned them to no one. Make pancakes. Go swimming. Make an apple pie (I've been planning to do this when we row How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World this fall). Put new pictures up in her room. (After hounding me for weeks to do this, when I finally got the specially chosen butterfly picture hung, she was so busy playing she hardly noticed. Though she smiled and said Yay! when I pointed it out to her.)

- Occasionally, she'll say something that melts my heart. One night while getting ready for bed, after she had just asked her hundredth "why" question, I asked in exasperation, "Why do you ask so many questions that if you thought about it, you already know the answer to them?"
"I forget to do what the book says," she answers.
"What book?"
"The one that says think before you speak. I always forget to do that."

We Visit the Lavender Farm

2011-07-11T20:22:00.000-07:00

On a Sunday in early July we packed up lunches and drove out to the lavender fields after church. First we had a picnic under one of K's "favorite kind of trees--the ones with branches that hang down". She doesn't seem to differentiate between weeping willow and birch, but gets excited about both. You can just barely see one of the lavender fields behind the kids.

Photo op:

Swimming in a sea of lavender:

Scenic shots:

Then me and the kids,

and the kids with Daddy and the silly lavender scarecrows.

After lots of exploring we were ready to go home. While K and I sat down and waited for T and Daddy to use the restroom, one of the farm owners who was sitting nearby, got up and brought out two kittens for K to hold.

Then, when T joined us, he was thrilled to hold one, too. They were such mellow cats and didn't mind being handled.

It was a memorable end to a lovely day.

Cheep Shots

2011-07-06T21:32:00.000-07:00

My, how they've grown. These were the quail chicks at the end of May. The picture is kind of blurry, but you can see how at this point they still took a lot of rest breaks very close to a parent.

Then early June they'd already grown quite a bit. Now there were five--down from the original ten or eleven, but at least this number has stayed consistent.

On this day after feeding for awhile, the chicks huddled together in the warm sunshine..

..while Mama kept watch above them. This is the last picture I have of her; she has disappeared. Dad still brings the chicks around and does a very good job of tending them by himself.

I managed to get a close up of a couple of them. You can see the little head feathers beginning to sprout.

Now late June. The chicks were nearly half-size and head feathers becoming much more pronounced.

Still the end of June. Their tail feathers have grown and they have lost much of their down.

This is the latest picture of the family. The chicks are nearly grown--very close to the size of Dad. Everyone still comes around together, but each day the chicks are more difficult to distinguish from the adults. I wonder how much longer till they graduate.

It's been fun to watch these guys. We've talked about how we wish they had little name tags so we could tell them apart more easily. It would be interesting to see which keep coming back after they've grown and maybe have chicks of their own.

A Nature Walk

2011-07-01T18:12:00.000-07:00

The last week of lessons was devoted to review and other activities. I had planned on doing a summer nature study that last week, but when we got to the trail, we found it was going to be much more of a late spring study. We had such a long cool spring with lots of rain; it seems summer has only just recently arrived. Anyway, there were lots of wild roses in bloom.

I tried to get a picture of the kids in front of some of them, but the mosquitoes were dive bombing poor T.

They loved exploring the lush undergrowth.

I couldn't believe how tall the Queen Anne's Lace was. The plants were like trees.

There was a variety plant growth along the trail. The sagebrush in that section was huge--taller than me.

The kids had a great time. You can see in the above picture that they were walking in the grass in the middle of the trail. They both insisted on that even though it was harder and slowed them down. Poor T sneezed and sneezed and sneezed when we got home. We tramped for half an hour and they were happily worn out and calm when we finished.

Lentil

2011-06-24T15:54:00.000-07:00

This was our last book to row for the school year. It was one of my favorites as a child, so it was a fun book to revisit.
We started with a lesson in geography; I printed a simple black and white map of the US and together we found Ohio (where Lentil takes place), and K colored it in. It was also a good time to stop and talk about other states of personal interest to our family: Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Missouri. We talked about where they were in relation to each other and to Ohio and how long it might take to travel to them.
We had given K a harmonica that came with a lesson book for Christmas a couple years ago and this Five in a Row book was the perfect time to pull it out and try a few lessons. We also watched a Youtube clip of a talented harmonica player--he played "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain", the same song that is played in the book. Then we listened to a recording of Pete Seeger singing the song on a cd I have. K really enjoyed learning this song.
The next day we did some art lessons relating to Lentil. Robert McCloskey's illustrations are done with charcoal and the characters' faces are very expressive. I showed K how to make some happy and sad faces step by step. Using charcoal pencils we drew them very large on the paper so there would be room for expressive eyebrows, mouths, etc. She did well with this and enjoyed embellishing the faces she drew. We also talked a bit about architecture and looked at house styles from over the years on this website. This was really interesting to both of us, and K couldn't wait for me to print out some of them so she could look at them more closely. She's not able to remember the names of the many different styles, but now whenever we happen to be driving in an older part of town, she talks about the different kinds of houses she sees. Here is a picture of a Second Empire house from the website; it is the kind Colonial Carter has in the story.

I saved doing this book till last on purpose, so we could also learn about Memorial Day as suggested in the manual. We also talked about patriotism and the American flag. We made this popsicle stick flag and it turned out really cute.
The last two days were science days. First we talked about sound and did some of the experiments described here by Tinderbox. They were excellent activities. They really helped K learn that sound is waves and how different factors can affect how we hear it.
Finally, we learned about the sense of taste. K looked at her taste buds in the mirror with a magnifying glass. We tasted the four different tastes with salt, sugar, cocoa powder and lemons and tried to determine where these taste receptors are supposedly located on our tongues. (Apparently the latest research says we actually sense all the tastes with our whole tongue and the strengths of the tastes in different spots is very slight.) She was excited to try the four different tastes, but after rinsing the salt out of her mouth with a drink of water she asked with a quizzical look, "But where on my tongue is the 'delicious' spot?" I tried not to laugh too much and explained that "delicious" is actually a nice combination of the different tastes and we taste it with our whole tongue. Then we used the lemons to make lemonade from scratch. Always excited to help make a treat, K was thrilled that we got to make this delicious drink. It got high marks from the whole family in the ensuing taste test.
K's favorite and oft quoted line from the book was Old Sneep's "Hmph!" She said that a lot, especially when something surprised or interested her.
I'm glad she got to experience this classic book.

Hello summer

2011-06-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

Welcome visitor

Chive Flowers

Shelling Peas

The kids were so excited to be Daddy's helpers. It was with great pride that they told me they were shelling peas from the garden so we could eat them for dinner. They obviously took their job very seriously.

Mr. Gumpy

2011-06-14T16:53:00.000-07:00

In May we spent almost two weeks on the book Mr. Gumpy's Motor Car by John Burningham. At first look it seemed like a simplistic story, but once again there was a lot to learn.
I'm trying to get my FIAR posts for this year finished as we are now on summer break, so I'm not going to go into great detail of what we did. I'll just describe some activities I developed and couple of our favorite activities from the manual.
We spent a couple days learning about clouds. I was going to do just one cloud day, but K seemed interested, so we added another day to do more exploration. We started out by learning the three main cloud types. This Youtube video does a nice introduction. We also read Tomie de Paola's Cloud Book which describes clouds in more detail. I cut a rectangle out of a sheet of paper to make a "cloud window" and we went outside and held the frame up to the sky. It was a good day to do this; there were a variety of clouds and having the frame helped in talking about which clouds had which characteristics. K also made a cloud chart of the three main types of clouds using cotton balls.

Since reading this book, cloud formation is a regular family discussion. The next day we read Cloudland which is also by John Burningham. This is the story of a little boy who has an adventure in the clouds with the children who there. Then, for appreciation of the beauty and stunning variety of clouds, I showed K a slide show of cloud pictures I'd put together from Google Images and photography by Aunt K. I had K pick out her favorite, and I printed a full page copy of it. Then in the style of the illustrations of Cloudland, K drew a picture of herself, cut it out and glued it to the photo. Then she wrote a story of what she would do if she could visit Cloudland. "I would rase," she said.

Another activity we did that I was pleasantly surprised with was discuss the passage of time in Mr. Gumpy. The story happens in the space of an afternoon and we talked about how stories can take place in a few minutes or many years. I read When the Fly Flew In... by Lisa Westberg Peters, which is about a fly buzzing in a room and happens in a very short time, The Sun's Day by Mordicai Gerstein, and The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton. The Little House was one of my childhood favorites and I was glad to have an opportunity to share it. These three books turned out to be really good examples of time comparison. I thought the lesson might have gone a bit over her head, but since then K has asked about time passage in other books we read. How long does this book take? she asks.
Finally, I had intended to do an introduction to the country of England, but it didn't seem to flow and time was running out. I ended up simply introducing the fact that even though the English speak the same language as us Americans, they pronounce their words very differently. I played a Wallace and Gromit clip from Youtube which the kids enjoyed and introduced one of the many English accents.
This is a book with many quotable lines. I love it when lines from a book become a way to communicate with your child. Some favorites were:
It will be a squash.
It's a lovely day.
I've got a bone in my trotter.
This is also a story they've enjoyed acting out, weeks after we've finished the unit.
Another great Five in a Row book!

Mike Mulligan

2011-06-07T22:15:00.000-07:00

Next up was Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. This was the first time we repeated an author, Virginia Lee Burton. I was slightly not looking forward to this book because, you know, steam shovels didn't sound that interesting to me. But one of the reasons I chose this book was because I needed to use a Mamapedia certificate for Christmas presents and this is one of the books that were offered. B said it was one of his absolute favorites as a child and I knew it was loved in the Five in a Row circles as well. So I got the book for T for Christmas, knowing we would "row" it with K later in the year. Kind of sneaky, I confess, but both kids loved the book.

The kids didn't have a concept of what a steam shovel is, so I checked out a book about backhoes from the library (T already knew all about those) and we watched Youtube videos of antique steam shovels in action. Other Youtube videos to watch for this unit were the Beauty and the Beast song "Be Our Guest" (personification) and time lapse videos of houses being built (Mike and Mary Anne dug the foundation neat and square). I had planned to visit an actual construction site, but since T was sick during this time, Youtube was a fine substitute.

We also talked about the styles of trees found in Mike Mulligan and drew our own to match. Then we looked at the trees in our own yard and sketched them. It was nice that it was early spring, so the trunks and branches were clearly visible under the tiny emerging leaves. This was one of those times when I didn't tell K that sometimes people think drawing is hard, we just looked at the shape of the trunk--whether it extended from the ground to the top of the tree or whether it branched off into the different limbs, and far off the ground that happened. K did a great job with this and liked the idea of sketching. Several days later, she took a clipboard, paper and pencil outside to do her own sketching. I have loved how she has taken such an interest in many of the things we have learned this year and made them her own.

I really liked the Mike Mulligan activities on the Houghtin Mifflin site, but they were geared for a little older than kindergarten. K did do the one where she wrote and illustrated a brief story of what she might dig up if she got to use Mary Anne.
Another day, instead of rereading the book, we watched a story based on Mike Mulligan that was posted on Youtube. The kids really enjoyed it.
We also talked about steam power and did the pinwheel/tea kettle experiment that is described in the manual. I was a little worried going into it, because from reading the FIAR forums and other blogs, it sounded like many people had trouble getting this to work. But the key is to hold the pinwheel horizontally over the steam billowing out of the kettle, then it will spin beautifully.
Finally, we paid a visit to a local park that has a steam engine. It was big.

We were all impressed. T still asks when we can go back to see it. K brought her camera and I liked the picture she took of it.

Another great book, not nearly such a "boy book" as I thought it would be. Just goes to show that in Five in a Row, there really are no girl books or boy books. Each story has so much material to cover that it really isn't an issue.

A Pair of Red Clogs

2011-06-06T16:27:00.000-07:00

After spring break we were ready to start a new Five in a Row book, A Pair of Red Clogs. This is a wonderful tale--a grandmother tells a story from her childhood in Japan when she received a new pair of clogs and what happened to them.
We started with a discussion about weather forecasting and what instruments scientists use to forecast weather. I dug out a mercury thermometer so K could actually see how the mercury rises and falls with temperature change. We went outside to look at our anemometer and I briefly explained the air pressure and humidity displays on our home weather station. We began keeping a record of the temperature and each day she made her own prediction of whether it would be colder, warmer or the same temperature the next day. She learned that weather prediction is not as easy as it seems!

A Pair of Red Clogs is a reminiscence. I explained what this word means and that night at dinner, B and I provided examples of reminiscences from when we were kids. K loved this and wanted more stories. After awhile, curious what a six year old would remember, I asked K if she wanted to reminisce and tell us a story from when she was little. She thought a minute, then came up with "I remember when I played on the big driveway [in Idaho], some people walked by and I didn't know if Daddy was talking to me or them." That's my factual little girl. The next couple nights she asked for more reminiscences and seems to have incorporated the word into her vocabulary by saying things like "I reminisce how when I ..." and then goes on to tell some memory, long ago or very recent.

We spent a day learning about Japan. I provided pictures from Google Images (along with Youtube, such a great homeschooling resource!) of many aspects of Japanese culture. We barely scratched the surface, but K got a brief taste of Japanese clothing (kimonos, geta), homes, hairstyles, food, gardens, etc. There is also a fun website where you can see what your name looks like in Japanese. K was intrigued by this and when I printed out all our names, she tried copying them on her own later.

To make Japanese culture come alive, K and I visited an Asian market and bought a couple of items to eat at home. We put on "kimonos" and set out our meal, being careful to bow first. (Unfortunately, they forgot to have their hands together.)

Altogether, it was a very good book with a good message. T's favorite part, was of course, the unique sound of the clogs: "Kara kara, koro koro."

Chicks

2011-06-02T15:41:00.000-07:00

The chicks are gone!
As I was eating breakfast this morning (K and T weren't awake yet) I looked up and saw Papa and Mama Quail on the patio alone. They had never come without the chicks before. Where are your babies? I wanted to ask Mama. From 10-11 to eight to six and then yesterday, four chicks. Now they're all gone? We've had a lot of rain lately, did they somehow drown? Repeat earlier remarks about cats. However do wild animals survive to adulthood? I felt so mournful. Mama and Papa were silent, they didn't cluck to each other the way they did when they were with the babies. And they didn't seem upset, but they usually don't even as the number of their chicks keep diminishing. Are they not able to count or do they have no choice but to keep moving on in life?

We were gone all morning and when we came back there was the happy sight of the whole family. Mama, Papa and five chicks. One must have been hiding yesterday. Perhaps this morning Papa and Mama were simply out on a date while the kids slept. I was so glad to see them I took some pictures.

The chicks are growing. They are beginning to have the humped back of their parents, they have speckled, stripey feathers growing in, and they even do a tiny bit of flying from time to time. They are so fun to watch as they search for seeds. When the parents head off, it seems that one is often left behind before he realizes everyone has gone. He rears up, little head stretching to see where they are going and chases after, his tiny legs a blur of motion and bitty wings flapping.

And as a bonus, here is a picture of one our cheery goldfinches and a sparrow friend munching:

Spring Signs

2011-05-30T15:35:00.000-07:00

We continued our little FIAR break with another mini-unit; this time we learned about glorious spring. Favorite activities were planting seeds to begin growing inside until it was warm enough to transfer them outside. It ought to be noted that this has been such an exceptionally cool spring that though these plants are now big enough to be planted, the weather hasn't cooperated. I began hardening one group a couple weeks ago, but we had more cold weather and winds that fatally knocked some over. It's been such a strange year, weather wise. Anyway, we also read lots of great books and K made a picture of a spring tree with popcorn blossoms (the kids were thrilled to pop popcorn again) and tissue paper daffodils.

After making a list of the signs of spring we'd read about in the books we'd studied during the week, we made a list of all the things that showed spring found in our yard. Then we took a field trip to do a spring nature study and find additional signs of spring. We went to an area near the river where we saw tiny spring flowers

and beautiful flowering bushes.

When we went down to the water, we found that the river was running very high, near flood stage. It was fun to throw rocks in the water and watch how fast debris was flowing downstream.

On the way back to the car, B stopped to check out a trail we didn't know was there while the kids were perfectly content to find things to climb.

It was a wonderful way to finish the week and we were then ready for spring break. Now you know how far behind I am in posting!

On the Farm

2011-05-28T14:37:00.000-07:00

After our Glorious Flight study, we moved away from FIAR for a short time to do a farm mini-unit. I used Homeschool Share's Busy Monday Morning unit for some ideas. Busy Monday Morning is a cute book about a boy helping his father with the wheat harvest. We talked about the different jobs farmers have and how there are many different types of farms. One of the activities we did was learn about prepositions, or position words, as we called them. Here is K demonstrating "above" with a farmer and a stack of hay.

The story is also set to song and the music is printed in the back. Since it is a Polish folk song it was a little tricky for us to fgure out on the keyboard, but we were able to recruit Aunt K to help us out.

Then it was off to the farm! Homeschoolers in our area were invited to a local farm to see the baby animals. It was great fun. Both kids got to feed the horses.

We saw some ducks and their ducklings as well as large geese who were, happily, quite mellow. K was fascinated by the tiny water area they had set up for these birds.

Then we examined the chickens. They were happy, peaceful creatures. There was also a hen house that the children peeked into with young chicks inside.

Then the sheep. There was a small flock with several lambs in a pasture, and we walked a little closer to see them. There were some little black lambs that were just laying in the grass by themselves as we quietly approached.

As more people started coming over, the mothers got a tad upset and signaled their lambs to come back.

It was a laid back, informative day and the kids seemed to get a lot out of it.

T, ever the great imitator, now does an expert sheep baa if we read a book with sheep in it. Amazing how encountering the real thing informs one's perception. As Almost Unschoolers always says, it's great to be a homeschooler!

The Sound of Birds Chewing

2011-05-25T13:59:00.000-07:00

Last winter B purchased two bird feeders and hung them outside on our patio. It's so dreary in the long gray winter, it was nice to watch the birds that discovered our feeder grow in number as the winter went on. Most common were the little black-headed juncos and the goldfinches in their drab winter coats. One day I was surprised to look up and see a hawk sitting close by on the fence. Unfortunately, he seemed to be holding something and then a white feather drifted down. It may have been a rough winter for the wildlife; another time all the little birds were snacking as usual when suddenly, as one they all whooshed away. The hawk was back. He came and landed near the feeder, looking around in his large imperiousness.

As it began to turn into spring, we got more variety. Mourning Doves began to come around, the males with their subtly pink tummies, and fat quail with their quick stepping glide. The goldfinches lost their winter coats and became brilliant yellow. I love how a goldfinch always manages to look like a poem, no matter what he is doing. Some birds come for only a short time. For a few days a towhee sampled some of the seeds that had dropped to the ground. As we decorated Easter eggs, a red-wing blackbird stopped by. One of the most surprising was a huge Northern Flicker. He was way too big for the feeder, but that didn't stop him from trying. He clung on underneath with his feet and his weight tipped the whole feeder so that seeds spilled toward him and huge piles dropped to the ground. The following is not a great picture because of the glare on the glass, but you get the idea.

Our most common visitors are now an assortment of finches and sparrows. The juncos must have another summer home in a different location because they are gone. The starlings that have their nests in the eaves of the house next door are back and make lots of noise, but I'm glad they don't come to feed often. Their cries-- I wouldn't call their noises songs, have a huge variety. I've read that they are good at imitating the sounds of other birds. These starlings must spend some of their time in the open fields because they have one cry that sounds almost like a hawk--the bird sound you hear in the movies when the main character ends up in the middle of nowhere. Some of them do a really good meadow lark impersonation. They almost get it right, but the final trill at the end that always make me think of a drop of water doesn't have the same lilt.

But! Our most surprising visitors in the last days have been baby quail!! As I was getting the kids to the table for lunch some days ago, I looked up and saw a bunch of tiny chicks skittering about while their parents stood watch. They were so little! Small enough to fit inside a golf ball while their plump parents are more like modest cantalopes. It is startling how fast they move. The parents, especially the dad, are really good at keeping a constant lookout for danger. As the family feeds, the parents quietly cluck, then make a distinct "get over here now" sound if someone wanders too far or if there is a hint of danger.
There are ten of them. There may have been eleven to start with, but they blend in so well and move so fast that it is difficult to count them. They seem to have no qualms about finding the seed they want. If another sparrow or finch is eating in a certain spot, a tiny quail just ducks his head down barrels right there and the sparrow flies out of the way. One day I even saw one chase a dove several times his size.

Just like human babies, they seem to need a lot of naps. Every once in awhile, the parents call everyone over and all the chicks tuck underneath and everyone rests. One day I looked out and saw the parents sitting side by side. They looked so cute together. Usually they don't sit so close. As I was taking pictures, one little chick escaped from Mom, but went right over to Dad. Maybe there was more room under him.

Since the quail chicks have arrived, we've been more interested in watching them than the other birds. Each day finds them a little bigger. Their legs seem to be growing the fastest right now. The babies don't need to sit down and rest quite as often, but Papa and Mama continue to guard them closely.

Since I started writing this post, the number of chicks seems to have diminished. It appears we're down to 7. Drat those neighborhood cats. Everyone thinks their own cat wouldn't hunt birds, but a cat is a cat is a cat. Since the babies arrived, I've counted four different cats prowling about, clearly up to no good.

Hopefully, I'll get more pictures of our feathered visitors as the little ones grow.

The Glorious Flight

2011-05-19T15:37:00.000-07:00

I'd seen this book before we rowed it and always thought it looked kind of blah. But one day when we visited our library it was sitting out on display and knowing it was a Five in a Row book, I checked it out. We found it to be a great story and a rich unit.

The first time I read the book aloud, I stumbled a bit with all the French names. Later I found a site where you can download a reading of the book. After listening simply listening to the audio sample, I found the names much easier to say. In fact, it all kind of rolls off the tongue.

Here are some of the highlights of the activities from this book:

We learned about the English channel and viewed pictures of the beautiful White Cliffs of Dover.

Onomatopoeia is such a fun word to say and it's a fun concept too. After brainstorming onomatopoeia words, K dictated a story using those words.

For math one day, we talked about Roman numerals. K had previously come across them elsewhere and was really curious about them. In fact when I saw Roman numerals was one of the math activities, this was one of the reasons why I chose to do The Glorious Flight next.

K made a watercolor picture of Louis Bleriot flying his plane based on the idea from this blog entry. It turned out well!

Then we sidetracked into a mini-study of airplanes. We had an airplane day and Daddy showed how to make paper airplanes and everyone had fun testing them out. We set up an English Channel in the hallway and tried to fly the planes across it. The real Channel is about 20 miles wide at its narrowest. Just as it took skill to cross it in an airplane for the first time in 1910, it took some practice and skill for a 6 year old to cross a bedsheet channel with a paper airplane. Here is K giving her plane a little help.

B also demonstrated how airplane wings provide lift.

The next day we continued our airplane study by talking about the parts of an airplane and learning the pilot alphabet. I coached K to greet Daddy with a "hi" in code when he came home, but on her own she exclaimed (laboriously) "Hotel India, Delta Alpha Delta Delta Yankee!" We also enjoyed a game of airplane Go Fish from Homeschool Share.
Finally, K dictated a list of different types of transportation and we finished our unit with this youtube video of the crossing of the channel in a replica of the Bleriot XI.

300th post: looking back by 300s

2011-05-13T17:35:00.000-07:00

I am not a prolific blogger, so when I reach a hundredth post, it feels like an accomplishment. Therefore, in honor of reaching this 300th post milestone, I thought about stepping back in time in segments of 300.

300 seconds= five hours ago Something we have been working on homeschool is creating an alphabet book. Each day we take a letter and look through the house for things that start with that letter. We arrange everything together, I take a picture and K composes a sentence describing all the parts. When we get all the pictures done, I plan to make them into a Snapfish or Shutterfly photo book. Today was the letter Q. Since we don't have many Q items in the house, K put on her Halloween costume and a paper crown and drew a picture of a quail. We have a lot of these birds around here; we're always entertained by their laughing call and the way they often run where they're going instead of flying-- their little head feathers bobbing. So the picture for today shows a *quiet* queen holding a quail, surrounded by quilts.

300 hours= 12.5 days ago About two weeks ago I found a child camera that was given to K a couple years ago; in our moves it had been packed away and forgotten. When I found it and replaced the batteries, the kids had a ball taking pictures. It's interesting to see the world through their eyes. Most of the time though, they like taking close-ups of the most mundane things. Here's a sampling.

300 days= 10 months ago This picture was taken exactly 10 months ago. A two year old boy in need of a haircut, mugging for the camera.

300 weeks= 5.8 years ago Stepping farther back now. In looking through the archives to figure out which photos were closest to 300 weeks ago, this mother's heartstrings were being tugged hard. Here is K on Daddy's lap while he did a crossword puzzle. For awhile she was content to intently watch..

Soon though,she was reaching..

Got it!

300 months= 25 years ago Roughly 66% of my life ago. I don't have many pictures of myself at this time, but I'm sure these pictures are from almost exactly 300 months ago. I remember I got to be excused from school this day because my grandparents were visiting from Wisconsin. We went to the Rose Gardens and enjoyed the beautiful blooms.

300 years= the year 1711 In this year the tuning fork was invented! Here are two pictures painted in that year.

Finally, if you are in the mood for a vacation, I found this this lovely cottage in northern France you can rent that was built in the year 1711.

Night of the Moonjellies

2011-04-30T17:13:00.000-07:00

Somehow April got away from me completely. I've got a lot of catching up to do! Here is our next Five in a Row book: Night of the Moonjellies. This was a new-to-me book. We all enjoyed it immensely. It is the story of a little boy who helps in his family's restaurant and also experiences life on the New England sea coast.

Night of the Moonjellies has beautiful pastel illustrations. One of the activities was to find pages where a warm or cool palette is noticeable. K was especially interested in this and she then picked out her warm-colored markers to make a picture. She made a picture of a sun setting behind a hill and then decided she needed to make a cool picture, too. I was so pleased she wanted to make another picture on her own. Since we did this lesson, she continues to notice warm pictures in other books we read. Usually, she says, "Look, there's a hot picture!"

We tried drawing a picture with oil pastels. I think it was good for K to experience filling up an entire page with color. We tried reproducing the scene of the Periwinkle out on the sea at night and K was interested in overlaying different colors to create the dark blues and greens of the illustration.

The Moonjellies family runs a restaurant, which is a kind of business. After discussing the many other kinds of businesses people have, K decided she would like to have an ice cream truck business. Then the next day I put together a grocery store business for her to experience. For math during our Moonjellies unit, K had been learning about coin value and had become familiar with counting by fives, tens and twenty-fives. I had a bunch of food pictures that I attached prices to and together we set them up in a store, sorting them by food group. Then I gave both kids shopping baskets and they had a ball shopping for food for a meal.

At the end we "rung up" the sale, and using real coins, K picked out the correct change. I was surprised how well she did with this. T had a blast, too. It was funny watching him expertly "scanning" the items and ringing them up. He is such a good imitator.

From there we moved into a study on sea creatures, specifically jelly fish. We had a Jelly Fish Day and made jelly fish by painting half styrofoam balls and attaching curling ribbon that I had somewhat straightened to the bottom.

The kids learned a cute jelly fish song and we watched some lovely moonjelly fish footage on Youtube. I had the kids examine jelly fish movement by using a turkey baster in the sink and then I made jelly fish "costumes" by attaching crepe paper streamers to yarn for them to wear around their waists. We went outside and played a couple games. First we tried a kind of tag where some of us were the fish to be eaten and the other was a jelly fish. This didn't work too well with only three of us, but T especially thought it was hilarious to chase and be chased. Then I scattered duplo block "fish" in the grass and timed how fast they could "sting" them with their tentacles and gather them in bags.

Another day we learned the vocabulary words pier and marina. After talking about it at home, we stopped at a local marina while out and about, and the kids got to see what a real one was like. Since it was winter, it was cold with nothing happening, but it was still interesting to see.

K has never been to the beach, so to help her get a feel of what it is like, I gathered some pictures of the Oregon coast from old calendars I'd saved and also dug out some ancient pictures of family vacations there. Putting them up on the wall made us feel like we could almost hear the roaring waves.

Those were our "big" activities while completing Night of the Moonjellies. It was a good mid-winter unit to help get rid of those winter blahs and we were sad to reach the end of this unit.

Tulip Love

2011-04-30T15:49:00.000-07:00

I've been enjoying this year's crop of tulips. Being late season bloomers, they were slow to come up and I was worried they'd be no-shows, but they have come through.

Even a tulip heart is satisfying.

It is interesting how different they look when brought inside. This one was knocked over while still a green bud and when I brought it inside to put in a vase, I didn't think it would have the oomph to mature. But it did, growing taller in its vase each day, and each day developing more color. I liked the evening light on it:

I was a little disappointed with the Easter pictures, though. I had been so hoping for a cute picture with bright tulips and Easter finery, but it didn't quite work out that way. Easter morning started out beautiful, but by the time we got home from church, it was cloudy and very windy. We still attempted a picture, but between the lousy light, T having a moment and refusing to look at the camera and K having a hard time keeping her eyes open and smiling while being buffeted by the breeze, it just didn't work well. We had better luck indoors.

A few days ago I picked a bouquet for our table, and it's been lovely to have something like a rosy campfire as a centerpiece.

The English were on to something

2011-03-30T21:57:00.000-07:00

How to get through that afternoon slump? My first choice is always a nap. If I'm already feeling rested, a brisk walk is great. But often, naps and walks are not feasible. However, I recently read this in a magazine: "Having a latte and a cookie in the afternoon may make you sharper. The combination of caffeine and sugar improves cognitive performance, attention, and memory, a study in the journal Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental reveals." (MSL March 2011)

I'm not a coffee drinker, but I love a nice cup of tea. Nearly every morning I brew a cup before breakfast, then after the meal, it has usually cooled to just the right temperature. My current favorite is Stash Chai Spice Black Tea. I love the way tea makes you feel calm and alert at the same time. I confess, I also crave the caffeine boost. After reading the above quote, I tried some Good Earth Jasmine Green tea with a few M & Ms one afternoon, and it worked. It made such a difference in the way I felt the rest of the day. I've occasionally taken a "tea time" in the afternoon since then and it is a lasting respite.

As I worked on this post I did a Google image search for "cup of tea". Naturally, I was most drawn to paintings of tea time and couldn't limit myself to just one.

But I think this sums it up best:

Madeline

2011-03-25T15:58:00.000-07:00

In February our next Five in a Row unit was another classic book, Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans. This was another story that covered many topics. We spent about two weeks on it.

We started off with a discussion of healthy habits and made an illustrated list of things K can do to stay healthy.

Then a day was spent focused on language arts: rhyming words and repeated phrases. The vocabulary word we talked about and added to her notebook was "solemn".

Madeline lends itself well to the introduction of symmetry. First we looked in the book for pictures that showed symmetry, then K set the dining room table with play dishes to show a symmetrical arrangement. I cut out some pictures from a magazine that were symmetrical (hooray Martha Stewart Living!) and K was able to find the line of symmetry in all of them. She also completed an online math lesson about symmetry. These activities were really interesting to her and it was funny to me to watch her become really excited about symmetry. She was especially intrigued by the idea that a circle can have an infinite number of lines of symmetry. She asked if I would cut out a circle shape for her to fold different ways to see if that were true. Of course, I willingly complied and cut out some additional shape for her to fold. Symmetry is now something she often notices in daily life.

Another day we made a French flag. "Vive la France!" K and T shouted as they marched around the house waving it. If only we Americans had such a catchy national phrase. K also learned to count to ten in French.

Many of the pictures in Madeline are of real Paris locations. It was some extra work, but I made a worksheet for K to match the book drawings of buildings such as the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame to googled images of the real ones. She liked this and wanted me to make a matching game of the pictures as well. So I printed everything on cardstock and it was a fun game to play. A wonderful go along book for learning about Paris is Crepes by Suzette.

I'd also seen on a couple blogs an idea to construct the Eiffel Tower out of wafer cookies and frosting. So we tried that another day. It was trickier than I thought, maybe a stiffer icing would work better than store bought frosting. By the time I took this picture, the tower had toppled a few times. But it was fun to sample the results.

The instruction manual suggests looking at some of the ways life has changed since Madeline was written. For example, houses are heated by furnaces rather than radiators in each room and buses have changed considerably. The manual suggested examining the differences, then if you live in an area with public transportation, to take a ride on a city bus. So we did! The kids thoroughly enjoyed that. Though it was a little unnerving, especially to T, that there were no seatbelts, it was tremendously exciting, and T still asks when we will ride a "seedee bus" again.

Madeline was a fun book to row, a very satisfying read. It was one I enjoyed as a girl and it was a great opportunity to introduce it to the kids.

Birthday Boy

2011-03-14T15:07:00.000-07:00

Hard to believe our little boy is three. How quickly he is becoming not little. Because of his fascination with all things wheeled, I made a train decoration on his cake. Actually, his "cake" was Double Decker Confetti Brownies.

We had to relight the candles to get this picture. The Happy Birthday song had barely finished before he blew them out.

The brownies were scrumptious. I LIKE it! he told us.

Birthday Girl

2011-03-14T08:17:00.000-07:00

Somebody turned six! We did a rainbow theme for K's birthday this year. Around St. Patrick's Day last year, this recipe for rainbow cupcakes was published in our local newspaper. K saw the pictures and wanted these cupcakes for her next birthday. A year later she hadn't forgotten about them and was eager to help me make them. Basically all you do is make a white cake recipe, divide the batter into six parts, then add food coloring to each bowl. It was fun to watch the colors mix into the batter.

She asked me to stop and take a picture of the orange too:

A rainbow of cake batter:

The finished product. The colors turn out much brighter after the cupcakes are baked. They are actually quite intense.

She loved them. We put up some rainbow decorations around the room and she was thrilled with her "rainbowy party".

Color Feast

2011-03-08T15:07:00.000-08:00

The sun is breaking over the horizon just a little earlier each morning and at midday it sits higher in the sky than it did a couple months ago. The buds on the trees are swelling and some of the tulips are up...but it's not spring yet. The colors of the land are still gray and a light bleached brown. The green of spring isn't here yet.
I'm longing for flowers blooming! I want to luxuriate in color.

I could go on. All of the above pictures are from Annie's Annuals, a nursery specializing in hard to find annuals and perennials based in the San Francisco area. A year ago, I stumbled on their website and was transfixed for some heavenly moments. The slideshows on their website are stunning. I did not order anything from them, but through the wonders of computer cookies, they found me at our present address and sent me not one, but two catalogues this year.

What About T?

2011-03-03T17:19:00.000-08:00

Lately, this blog has been focused on what we are doing in homeschooling. I thought it might be time to give a glimpse of what T's been up to, the kind of little person he is becoming.

~ I'm so happy with the way he caught on to potty training. We did the cold-turkey method with him. We didn't start till after he was 2 1/2, but went straight from diapers to big-boy underwear. It was a mess-filled two weeks, but then he got it. Public restroom potties are still a problem as is overnight training, but that will come with time.
~ He participates in all of K's homeschool activities. He doesn't want to miss a thing. He loves joining us on the couch to read the stories, and as I said in the last post, he often has parts of the books memorized after we've gone through them for several days. For some of the activities, I find a simplified way that he can make the projects; other times, he's content to scribble on a paper as K completes the more academic exercises. Other times he just wants to take over my lap and make it difficult to complete an activity with K.
~ He is still my cuddle bug. Extra sensitive, he has times where he finds great reassurance in sitting in a lap for awhile. But those times are definitely growing shorter and farther in between. Though he's getting bigger and stronger and more independent, he still has a need for physical contact.
~ He's got the all-boy-constant-motion thing going. Today K came to tell me, "T's making tremendous throws. Is that ok?" A few minutes later I find them both "doing tremendous jumps".
~ He is a natural at pretending and can make anything within reach into a play-acting story. Toy plastic shapes have conversations with each other; in a pinch his hand can be a car.
~ And what he imagines is to him completely real. A couple months ago, he went through a phase where he was afraid to play in one of the rooms of the house because of "the tiger outside the window". Another day, as we sat eating dinner, he suddenly began telling B about the lion in the back yard. He explained that Mama wouldn't let it come inside.
~ He has an admirable ability to imitate noises, especially those of vehicles.
~ He is a child of happy highs and passionate lows.
~ When explaining something, he often uses his hands to talk.
~ Some of his sayings: He picked out one of the dice from a game and brought it to me, singing, "He died for me. He died for me.."

I often give him sliced bananas for lunch. Every time, he searches out the end piece and triumphantly holds it up, saying "Bananan hat!"

One day after the phone rang, he asked me "Was it Mark Shasha?" Mark Shasha was the author of the FIAR book we were reading that week.

Stopping By Woods

2011-02-27T22:15:00.000-08:00

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, along with a unit on winter, occupied our homeschool lessons for a couple weeks in January. Our first activity was, naturally, making snowflakes! It was also fun to make Borax crystal snowflakes.

We digressed slightly with a discussion about sleighs and the bells on the horse's harness. This led to an introduction to the song Jingle Bells. K got a set of hand bells for Christmas and we improvised a music lesson playing the song with the bells. She actually got pretty good at playing the song by herself.
Another day we talked about animal tracks and K made a book matching animals to tracks using this source. I also made up a worksheet for K to find all the rhyming words in the poem and we looked at the rhyming pattern that extends through the book. It was fun to break from the usual linear story-telling and spend time with such an evocative poem.
We watched this Youtube video where Robert Frost himself recites the poem and then this silly Muppet take. T got a kick out off that one. Days after he talked about "the orange puppet [Fozzie Bear] who said 'sweep of easy wind and downy flake'". On a side note, I've been continually surprised by how much T picks up and memorizes from our Five in a Row books. He recites bits of the books we've read and has favorite pages in each story. Sometimes he has definite dislikes, too. He did not like the vultures that are in some of the pictures in Ferdinand.
After Stopping By Woods we segued into a winter unit where we read several winter-themed books and completed related activities. One of the books we read was The Mitten by Jan Brett. I made up a "pre home ec" lesson and cut two mitten shapes out of felt for K to sew together. She's been fascinated by a children's sewing machine she's seen in a catalogue and is anxious to try it when she turns 8. (It's for ages 8 and up, she tells me every time she looks at it.) I thought this activity might be a good sewing introduction for her. She did a great job and was also interested in learning about the animals described in the book.

Other favorite activities included K drawing pictures for a pop-up book of things people like to do in winter and discussing what animals do to survive winter. I designed a worksheet with a winter scene and lift the flaps to show where some animals hibernate. We discussed some specific animals, then K glued them down in the correct places on the picture. Later, she made up a little story telling about the animals.

Another day we took the opportunity to go to the park again for a winter nature study. Jane Claire Lambert's Winter Nature Study is an excellent resource. I know we will use this in years to come whether or not we continue homeschooling. When we were at the park we sat down near the pond and I had K use her five senses to tell me what she observed. Even in January, there is lots to see, hear, etc., if you just take the time to do it. We made a good list before we got too cold and then the kids were eager to do a "splash show" (throw rocks in the water). As the weather warms up, we will visit this park again to see what is the same and what has changed.

Waiting for Liftoff

2011-02-25T16:34:00.000-08:00

But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Isaiah 40:31 (NKJV)

     I've read that the reason eagles can soar so mightily is not because of their own strength but because they are able to take advantage of the invisible uprising currents of air. All they have to do is ride the wind.
     I knew that, but it had been a long time since I've had opportiunity to watch a bird soaring for more than a few seconds.  Until last Sunday, a brilliantly sunny day in winter, I happened to see a hawk flying in the distance as I looked out the window while I waited for T to use the potty.
     For long moments I watched this large bird flying, following its slow gliding circles. It looped higher, ever higher, effortlessly sailing over houses and fields in the blue. Its wings did not flap much; it was not using its own powers to climb. I don't think it was concerned about where it was going--it covered large distances while letting the movement of the drafts carry it along. I watched it until finally it moved too far away to see from my spot there at the window.

     "Those who wait on the Lord." The NIV version translates this as "those who hope in the Lord", with a note that this means trusting in or looking expectantly. A bird does not question the wind that lifts it. It does not occur to it to doubt that the wind will come. And the wind does come. I wished I had a greater sense of what that feels like--in times of trouble or need, to feel God's strength guiding and lifting--His power leading to a new place. In the running and walking of daily life, to have strength to get up and keep going, and confidence that God will do His "God-thing". Trust in where the Spirit leads.
     Let go and let God. I've heard that phrase repeatedly. This must be what it looks like. This bird must know what it feels like.

Beats riding a donkey, I guess

2011-02-17T16:27:00.000-08:00

For several days T's toy of choice was a Fisher Price airplane with a selection of Little People carefully arranged inside.
I paid little attention to this latest favorite until B, coming upon the plane parked in the middle of the hallway observed, "It's the Flight to Egypt. And Pontius is the Pilate."

Katy and the Big Snow

2011-02-16T22:40:00.000-08:00

Our first Five in a Row book for the new year was Katy and the Big Snow. There were lots of topics to cover.

We talked about kinds of weather and began keeping a record of the weather for January. I printed out a blank calendar and used address labels to make stickers of different kinds of weather. K enjoyed deciding on a sticker for each day's weather and affixing it to the calendar.
We talked about street signs and K did an interactive online quiz.
We talked about map directions and drew a map of our neighborhood. I also made a treasure hunt with directions such as "walk west until you reach the door". As the hunt progressed, the directions became a little more difficult, such as "now turn east and walk five steps". I gave her a compass to help her remember the directions. She loved this and asked if I would make more treasure hunts for her to follow.
Another day we looked at all the diferent buildings and businesses described in Katy and discussed how they help a town function. I put butcher paper on the floor and K built her own city with blocks. Then she drew in the roads. She called her town Care Street. We talked about what the people in her city would need--hospital, post office, fire station, etc. One thing she was sure of: a pool was essential. Of course, T wanted to help with this project and built his own large building in the center of town. We had recently talked about the boy Jesus helping his father Joseph the carpenter, so K explained that T's creation was the town carpenter shop.

We looked at some Youtube videos of snowplows in action. Katy is a v-plow, used for punching through snowdrifts. We don't have that kind of snowplow here, so it was interesting to watch them break through the large drifts, sending snow flying. How does a snowplow push snow? I cut up plastic cups to show how the c-shape pushes the snow to the side. The cups were rather flimsy and if I were to do this again, I'd try to find a sturdier material. But the kids enjoyed experimenting with their "snowplows" in a box of sand.

The book proudly says that Katy had a 55 horsepower engine. K wondered what horsepower was, and being rather vague on the term myself, I referred that question to the man of the house. So later at dinner, B explained that 1 horsepower is a load that one horse could pull. So Katy was stong enough to do the work of 55 horses. Sounds impressive until B told us that today's cars and trucks usually have about 100 horsepower. An eighteen wheeler has 500 horsepower. And, he said, a race car can have 1000. How times have changed. Made me realize how years ago, when people did so much work by hand and with the help of horses, a "horsepower" measurement would have had real meaning. Today, so much is dependent on seamlessly running powerful machines and computers. A horsepower is an abstract concept to the average person.

As Katy and the Big Snow is a classic story, we also made a timeline to show when it was written in comparison to when members of the family were born. I printed out the pages showing the years from the present back to the 1930s and it stretched out 8 feet. We put pictures of K and T on the years they were born, then we aded B and I, and then we added all the grandparents. Katy was written in 1943--roughly the time some of the grandparents were born, so I think seeing all the years laid out helped K begin to have an idea of the passage of time. We hung the timeline along the stairs and after the lesson, T enjoyed pointing to the pictues as he went up at bedtime. He told each of the grandparents goodnight as he passed them.

Katy and the Big Snow was a great book and K wasn't the only one who learned something!

Epiphany

2011-02-15T08:24:00.000-08:00

Back to getting caught up. We've reached January! I wanted to share one of our Bible story lessons that really took hold. Each week we learn one Bible story--each day either reading it from a Bible story book, the Bible, acting it out or doing a craft. At first K was a little impatient with the idea of doing just one story a week--she wanted to do a different one each day. But to really learn something, you have to take time with it. I've seen the benefit of taking this time and am glad to have the chance to help her absorb and learn the Bible stories and truths.

Anyway, for the story of The Wisemen I cut a piece of butcher paper and drew a long winding path leading to a simple Bible-time house. We used the wisemen from one of our nativity scenes to act out the story. I also used a toy castle and king to be Herod in Jerusalem. T, who always joins us for Jesus Time, saw me get out the castle and was sure I needed the empty toy stable and an angel, too. I hadn't thought of using those and they actually worked really nicely to explain how Jesus was a little older and Mary and Joseph had moved into a house by now.

In addition, I made the star to be a separate piece. We held it above and before the wisemen as they traveled along so they could follow it. After they visited Herod, we stuck the star to the paper above the house because the text says "after they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed...." (Matthew 2:9-10). Then we used the angel to tell the wise men to go home a different route.

Something else I did to help explain the wisemen's gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh was show a gold necklace chain, a few ancient sticks of incense that B found, and a tiny colorful perfume bottle. I put them all in a "treasure box"--the velvet-covered box for our wedding knife and server. (Knife and server removed, of course.) K loved having these visuals to play with. She also brought the copy of the song "We Three Kings" I'd printed out to the story area. You can see above her standing on the song with the treasure box behind her. Both K and T much enjoyed re-enacting this story later in the day.

Guess who now has a gapped-tooth smile!

2011-02-08T21:23:00.000-08:00

K's front bottom teeth had been loose for some time. Her dentist was the first to notice a little movement at her checkup in November. As the weeks went by that movement became more and more pronounced. It always used to give me the willies when my first and second graders showed me their loose teeth. I would stifle my shudders when they proudly demonstrated how they could wiggle the new loose tooth with their tongue. I'm not sure why it bugged me--I was never grossed out by my own loose teeth growing up. I even pulled out at least one by myself. K's wiggly teeth made me cringe, and as time went on, it seemed her tongue was always pushed to the front of her mouth, constantly working one or both teeth. Some weeks ago, her two permanent teeth had broken through the surface and were pushing up behind the loose baby ones.

Then yesterday morning I heard her call me early, before her usual waking time. I went into her room and she was lying stffly, eyes wide. "Sometime in the night when it was still dark, my tooth fell out!"
We searched around the sheets and blankets for the missing tooth, me growing worried that she'd somehow swallowed it. How does one do a first visit from the tooth fairy with no tooth? But she was sitting on it--how tiny it was. Looking at it, I remembered when it first popped up when she was a baby. Now she'd outgrown it. I asked her if it bothered her, losing a tooth during the night. She said no, not really, but "the clock in my room was ticking so loudly I couldn't go back to sleep for a long time."

Then that evening as she followed me into T's room, she suddenly stopped. "My tooth was wiggling and it just fell out onto the floor," she exclaimed. Once again, in the same day, we were searching for a newly lost tooth. Thankfully, this one wasn't difficult to find. Here she is with both teeth and her new smile. You can tell by her hair how it is much later in the day.

The tooth fairy successfully came and went without being discovered. She was relieved as she is new at the job and K is a light sleeper.

Winter Collection

2011-02-05T16:39:00.000-08:00

We had a snowy November and December. Lots of snow fun!

New pajamas made by Grandma.

Merry Christmas!

Ping

2011-02-03T21:18:00.000-08:00

The second book we "rowed" for Five in a Row homeschool was The Story About Ping. Unfortunately, I have no photos of our activities! We spent two weeks on this unit.

Some of the activities included:

a science experiment to find out how oily feathers keep a duck dry
exploration of colored pencils as an art medium, creating a picture using the overlay technique
duck classification
counting out the sisters, brothers, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins in Ping's 78 member family
listening to the sounds of different types of duck quacks
learning the Six Little Ducks song and how to draw a duck. K illustrated a Six Little Ducks book with her duck drawings. I thought it was funny how huge K drew the feather on 'the one little duck's' back. Below is the first drawing of the one little duck. As the story goes on, that feather gets bigger and bigger with varying shapes and embellishments.

We also went to the park to observe the ducks. It was a very cold day with a layer of crusty snow on the ground. The ducks there must not be used to people--they swam away when we (noisily) arrived. They didn't even come when the kids threw bread into the water and shouted "La la la lei" like it's done in the book. And I tried to take some pictures, but my camera was too cold and wouldn't work. But it was still a fun time, kind of surreal as the park is rather abandoned this time of year. Despite the highway being visible behind the trees, the snow muffled the sound. It felt like we were alone in the wilderness with the emptiness and the frightened ducks.

We also spent some time learning about China. K was really interested in this and was especially intrigued with the Chinese flag. We read D is for Dragon which does a wonderful job of introducing China with beautiful illustrations and simple explanations. We also

looked at examples of Chinese calligraphy
learned some Chines phrases
learned about the Yangtze River
ate at a Chinese restaurant! We enjoyed looking at the big red lanterns hanging from the ceiling.

Thanksgiving

2011-02-01T19:07:00.000-08:00

We took a brief break from Five in a Row to spend a week learning about Thanksgiving. I had two books I wanted to use to introduce the story: The First Thanksgiving by Jean Craighead George, illustrated by Thomas Locker and N.C. Wyeth's Pilgrims, text by Robert San Souci. These books have beautiful painted illustrations, but the texts are too long and detailed for a kindergarten attention span. So I skipped back and forth between the books, showing the pictures and telling the story in my own words. After spending a couple days retelling the story, looking at the pictures and reading aloud easier Thanksgiving books, we made Pilgrim and Indian puppets and acted out the events of the Pilgrims coming to America. We used the living room floor as the Atlantic Ocean, a book was the Mayflower and the couch stood in as Plymouth. K was very interested in the ad-libbed Thanksgiving story and used the puppets to act out the story on her own later.

Another activity we did this year was make a Thanksgiving Tree. This is an idea from Five in a Row Holiday. I made a tree using a template I found online (sorry, now I can't find the one I used) and had K cut out a bunch of leaf shapes. About a week before Thanksgiving we all wrote down things we were thankful for, one blessing per leaf. K did her own, B and I also thought of things and wrote them down, and we "helped" T think of things for his leaves. We taped each of the leaves to the tree. Then each night after dinner, K got to choose 3 or 4 leaves to take off the tree and and B led us in a prayer thanking God for these gifts. Then the leaves were placed at the base of the tree. When Thanksgiving came, we were aware of our many blessings and the tree was now empty with the leaves "fallen" around it. This was a wonderful way to focus on our blessings and I think we will continue this tradition from year to year.

Finally, to finish our Thanksgiving unit, we had a simple feast. First we made Pilgrim hats for everyone to wear. One of the teddy bears got be an Indian. Then I made popcorn using the air popper--which was pretty exciting to our feast goers. K and T thought the feast was delicious. They still ask when we will have another one. We also played a version of the bowl game, which was being played by the Wampanoag at the time of the first Thanksgiving.

Altogether, it was a fun unit and it was good to have the time to teach K the heritage and meaning of this holiday.

Homeschool Begins

2011-01-31T17:34:00.000-08:00

We started homeschooling in early November. I decided to use a curriculum called Five in a Row for our main studies while supplementing with phonics, math and handwriting from other sources. Five in a Row is so fun to use. It uses children's literature as a basis for each weekly unit. For five days you read a children's book and then do a social studies, language, art, applied math or science activity. The books are extremely well-chosen. They hold up well to repeated readings and the activities in the manual are practical and thought-provoking, as well as appealing to a child's curiosity as they open new worlds. The lessons are easy to prepare, too; though I've got lots of stuff I've kept from my teaching days that have been fun to use for additional enrichment. And there are about a jillion homeschool blogs with so many interesting ideas that it's easy and practically irresistible to branch out and stretch out a unit to longer than five days.

The first book we "rowed" was The Story of Ferdinand. I think I won't describe each and every activity we did, but instead describe a few of the highlights. One was an art lesson on size and distance. We have a collection of felt people that came in handy for this. I gave K and T each one to hold and we went outside with the camera. One child stood close to me and held up her person while the other stood a ways back with his person, and I took a picture of the two of them. The nice thing about digital cameras is that you can immediately see the picture you took, and from looking at the camera screen K could quickly understand how far away objects become small. They are also higher up on the picture plane. We tried a picture with one of the children even farther away, back by the fence, but though we could really see how small the felt person was in real life, it barely showed up in the picture.

After taking those digital pictures, we went inside and created some drawings to show large close objects and small far away ones.

I also made power point slide show of pictures of Spain. It looks to be a beautiful country with old cities and lots of castles. We watched You Tube videos of castanet playing and flamenco dancing. I printed out some the slide show pictures for inspiration, and with help K constructed a bull ring out of blocks. She enjoyed re-enacting the story.

Finally, there is a pasture, one of the last bits undeveloped green in our corner of suburbia, that we can see from our house. Some bulls happily graze there-- steers, actually, but we didn't get into the difference. We took a mini field trip to see them, K and T enjoyed observing them, taking turns with the binoculars.

When we were there many of them were sitting down, chewing their cuds. This presented its own bovine teaching moment. K thought the cow digestion process was pretty funny. T thought the whole experience was pretty interesting, too. Except, after we had been there a little while a garbage truck rumbled by. It picked up garbage from the houses across the road and he was transfixed by that, pretending to use the binoculars to watch.

Costumes

2011-01-29T16:25:00.000-08:00

We were invited to a Reformation party this year and all the children were encouraged to come dressed in medieval era clothes. I quickly found a way to make a Robin Hood type of costume for T, but as I procrastinated and didn't want to spend much on a princess costume for K, I found that to be a lot harder to put together. I found a Cinderella dress at the thrift store, but it didn't have sleeves and was very large. I thought I might be able to alter it into a nice costume, but as I have no sewing skills this was proving to be very difficult. Is it silly to get a wee bit stressed and pray about a princess costume? Well, I did, and lo and behold, about a week before the party B found a beautiful princess dress in K's favorite color at another thrift shop. The sales lady told him she had just put it out that morning. No adjustments were needed and it was even roomy enough for her to wear a coat under it for trick or treating on our street! I bought a headband at the dollar store, cinched it small enough to stay on K's head and wove some lavender ribbons through it. I also got some glittery tulle at the fabric store and altogether, I was pleased with the results.

Another picture. Big sisters can be a little bossy sometimes.

The party was fun and the children enjoyed learning about Martin Luther. It was so cute to see all the little knights, merry men and princesses running around. Wish we could have got a picture of all of them together. It was so nice to have something good to focus on, rather than the gimme and gruesomeness that Halloween has become. My favorite part was when all the families gathered in the living room, and accompanied by the oldest daughter on the piano, we sang hymns. Old and young voices alike, filling the room with song.

A trip to the pumpkin patch

2011-01-28T15:44:00.000-08:00

Our trip to the pumpkin patch was a lot of fun.

We had a picnic lunch in the warm sun on a cool day and saw some of the sights. Then we looked for pumpkins to take home. K couldn't decide on the perfect pumpkin and searched the whole patch before picking the biggest one she could carry..

while T was content with the tiny one he found right away.

Give a cheesy smile for the camera! This pumpkin patch we visited was on a family farm out in the country. Huge fields of grapevines surrounded the pumpkin patch and activity area.

We enjoyed wandering around to see the animals, displays and games. We tasted apples and fresh cider. But K and T's favorite part was swinging on the tire swing hung from an enormous tree.

Simple pleasures are best on a fall day.

First day of school, sort of

2011-01-27T15:54:00.000-08:00

We couldn't believe our oldest child had reached school age. The night before school started, B and I reminisced how not that long ago we brought this little bundle home from the hospital and her first day of kindergarten seemed so far away. And yet here it was.

I had my doubts, though.

I did my best to set them aside and try to prepare K for this new step. It was difficult--for somebody who has such a love of learning, she had so many hesitations. The school gave us next to no information about its expectations or routines, despite my attempts to contact the principal the previous spring and summer. When we registered her and asked if we could please see her classroom, we were told, no, we weren't allowed. It seemed rather odd, almost secretive. So much for parents as partners! But the school had a good reputation, surely everything would right itself.

The first day of school finally arrived. The custom at this school is that before class starts all the students line up outside according to classroom; then when the bell rings they process into the building. K dutifully joined the line of excited and fearful kindergartners, I joined the parents hovering close by. The bell rang, their teacher appeared at the kindergarten door and welcomed the children inside. She smilingly but firmly waved goodbye to the parents- we were not allowed to accompany them into their room. As the last of the line disappeared inside, a couple of parents hopefully tagged along behind. The rest of us watched to see if maybe we too, could follow in after all and make sure our children were being settled into this new experience. But no, they were quickly sent back out. The door closed and the noisy school yard was empty and quiet. For a moment everyone just stood there silently and an image popped into my mind that the big building was a monster and we had just been duped into offering it our precious children. I knew it was silly, but I'll never forget that feeling of 'ugh, how could I just give my child away like that?'

I know the first day is harder on the parents than the children. I noticed as we turned away to head back to the car that mine were not the only eyes with tears. But she survived, and a couple hours later T and I joyfully returned to pick her up and bring her home.

It took all of her resources and it was a major adjustment for her, but K managed to acclimate to kindergarten. But it became clear it was not a learning environment that was good or suited to her at this time. After a lot of thought and a lot of prayer, we made the decision to withdraw her and begin homeschooling at the beginning of the second quarter. The morning of the day we had decided we would tell K that we were going to be homeschooling, K told me about a dream she'd had. She'd dreamed it was recess time at school, but when she went outside, all the play equipment was new and different. She described some of it and told me she played on it and had a fun time. I felt a lift of joy as she told me this dream. It seemed God provided the perfect way to explain homeschooling to her--it would be a new and different way to learn, but lots of fun. Then, on her last day of school, her teacher gave me a hug and said how wonderful it was that I was able to do this and K would go so far with homeschooling. I was amazed and searched her face for any sign of cynicism or sarcasm, but there was none. Only a trace of longing as if it was something she was longing to do with her child. She even gave us some extra workbooks to keep.

Homeschooling was a decision we haven't looked back from since. It has been a joy. I have a few more posts of the interim time to do, then I plan to share some of the activities we have been doing. So, I think this will continue to be a blog of episodes from our daily life, but now that life is much concerned with "school". I don't know how long we will homeschool, but soon I think you will see why we are enjoying this journey so much.

Special thanks to Melissa, Karis and Mindy for answering my many homeschooling questions and providing insight from your own journeys as we pondered this decision.

Summer Love..

2011-01-25T15:58:00.000-08:00

a heart-shaped tomato

(that's been grown in your own garden).

Maryhill Museum

2011-01-24T15:22:00.000-08:00

It was nearly the end of summer and we took a day trip to Maryhill Museum. They offer free admission to residents in our county once a year, and we were able to take advantage. It was a beautiful drive through the Columbia River Gorge. I always love that drive (except in the winter, of course). We got there at lunch time and had a nice picnic on the grassy area shaded by large trees. After eating, K made up a little song and dance..
..and T flung himself about on the grass.

Maryhill Museum is a stone mansion built in the 1900s. The builder also collected art and ultimately decided to convert the house into a museum instead of making it a residence. I did not take any pictures inside, and with two little ones who were by far the youngest children present, we toured the building fairly quickly. There was a nice collection of art to see, maybe in a couple years we'll be able to spend more time there. K was fascinated by the map of the building they handed out though; she spent much time wondering about the reason for multiple restrooms on the different floors. She was also impressed by a huge four foot globe in one of the display rooms. This glass sculpture outside seemed to suit her well.

There was also a large modern art structure on the grounds. Below is a picture from the museum website, click on it to enlarge if you can't see it.

The brochure said viewers were free to "interact" with it. So interact the little explorers did.

They really enjoyed all the ins and outs, overs and unders, arounds and throughs.

The museum is situated on a high bluff where there are plenty of places to see out over the gorge. B, the midwestern boy, commented how such views almost didn't look real. Having spent much time on the lovely dry side of Oregon, it looked a lot like home to me. Below, our little Lewis and Clark.

Peacocks lived in another part of the grounds. This one stopped to pose for us, I think he was looking to see if we had anything to feed him.

It was such a lovely trip. We drove back home on the Washington side. A two lane road goes on this side of the gorge and since you're not flying along on the interstate, you are a little closer to the breathtaking views which are just as, if not more beautiful than what you see on the Oregon side.

I love living in an area where such scenery is accessible.

Where have you BEEN?

2011-01-23T20:56:00.000-08:00

Good question. Not far, life just got extremely busy and blogging fell low on the priority list. I wanted to get back into it, but had fallen so far behind I didn't know if I could ever catch up and didn't know if anyone would be interested anyway. Then things stabilized somewhat and I remembered that life is moving so quickly that if I don't get a record of it down somewhere, there is much I will forget as it all blurs together into the past. It's kind of strange to put aspects of your life out there on the internet, but it's also fun to put words and pictures together and then be published! I've begun working on posts-- brief snapshots of the various things we'd been up to in the last months. It's felt kind of good to come back to my little blog, to open that New Post tab with its blank possibilities. And I discovered that now there's a stats tab where you can view a record of the traffic to your blog. I'd always avoided installing that sort of thing on my blog before as I knew it would raise more questions than answers, and I didn't want my checking on the traffic flow to become more important than what I wanted to say. I can't quite decipher all the information the stats tab gives, but one thing is clear-- someone or people are still checking my blog. That was a surprise. I rather imagined Little Voices as alone and abandoned in the outer reaches of the blogosphere, shriveling into nothingness from disuse.

So it's taken awhile, but I've got a number of posts I'm throwing together recording the last months that I'll publish in the next days. If you're not interested in the ancient history of August-December 2010, ignore all this. I'll try to have more current postings soon. Though my blog stopped, K and T have not. If anything, they are more active than ever. I'll try to keep posting bits of daily life for my few gentle readers that may be interested and as a place to keep some of my own memories.

Summer days, adrifting away

2010-08-30T21:17:00.000-07:00

We've had a few chilly nights and cooler days now--those days are here where you can feel summer's end even though the calendar says we have a few more weeks left. So here's some pool fun pictures taken recently, on a hot day in the backyard.

Things started out calmy enough

We practice our bubble blowing
One of us looking suspiously like he just swallowed some water

Let the splashing commence

T is really fascinated by the flying drops

Taking turns jumping into the pool

Water ballet

I like how K plays while still keeping her body tilted away from the splashing

Just a grand ol' time

Cool in the Kitchen

2010-08-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

Every summer I'm on the lookout for simple, quick dinner recipes that keep the kitchen from overheating, as well. This year I found a combination that makes a tasty meal and is easy to prepare. This yummy barbecue sauce makes enough for two or three meals. I put the extra in ziplocs and froze it, which made the next meal even simpler to throw together. I really like this sauce on ribs. We barbecue country style ribs, coat them with a little sauce as they finish cooking, then serve extra sauce on the side for dipping.
For side dishes, Idaho instant mashed potatoes are really good, along with Cook's Country Poppy Seed Coleslaw. This slaw is the best I've tasted. I usually don't care for coleslaw, it so often has that cloying, sweet taste. This poppy seed coleslaw is not sweet at all. It has dignity and a tang, if that's a way one can describe food. Here's the recipe:

Poppy Seed Coleslaw
1 medium head green cabbage, quartered, cored, and shredded
2 tsp salt
1 tsp poppy seeds
1 shallot or 2 tbs minced red onion
3 tbs lemon juice
2 tbs olive oil
2 tsp Dijon mustard
3 tbs sugar
1 tbs honey

1.Toss cabbage and salt in colander set over bowl. Let stand until wilted, about 1 hour. Rinse cabbage under cold water, drain, dry well with kitchen towel, and transfer to large bowl.
2. Toast poppy seeds in skillet over medium-high heat, shaking skillet (or stirring) frequently, until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Let pan cool 5 minutes, then add remaining ingredients and whisk to combine.
3. Pour dressing over cabbage and toss to coat. Cover with plastic and refrigerate until chilled, about 30 minutes. Serve.

serves 6-8

Taking a Lesson from Turtles

2010-08-20T11:41:00.000-07:00

This is an excerpt from an article that was reprinted in our newspaper on efforts to restore the Smith and Bybee lakes in the Portland area to their natural habitat.

"'It was a very ambitious undertaking...it took a long time, but what we did out there was absolutely state of the art conservation work.'
The water-control structure is the highlight, but other work also has enhanced the area. Metro moved the Smith and Bybee parking lot and relocated a canoe launch because the previous launch site took paddlers immediately through prime turtle basking areas. Turtles need basking time to charge their bodily systems, and disturbances weaken them."

Now, to find a lake and a quiet afternoon..

Summer Notes

2010-08-17T15:14:00.000-07:00

1. It's been 10 months, and I have finally unpacked all my books, put them in their new permanent homes in the bookshelves. It was like seeing the faces of old friends again. Art books, beloved old classics like Little Women and Jane Eyre, as well as my small collection of Elizabeth Goudge and Rumer Godden. There are also newer favorites like The Secret Life of Bees and A Severe Mercy, as well as "new-old" books--ones by favorite authors I've picked up at book sales but haven't had a chance to read yet.

2. What a relief! My birthday is coming a couple weeks and somehow I'd gotten it into my head that I was turning a year older than I actually am. K had decided to make me a birthday card and I overhear her asking B how old I'm turning. When he tells her, I stop to do the math... and lo--he's right! It's like getting a bonus year to my life. Later, K tells me she's done with my card and asks if she should give it to me now or later. "Whenever you want to," I tell her. "How about both," she says and proceeds to read me her very sweet card. Then she puts it under the Kleenex box on my bedside table so it will be saved for my actual birthday.

3. At dusk the arc of the moon hangs bright and low over the black mountain. The sky in the west is still light but bands of red-brown smoke from yet another wildfire sweep across. Streets are quiet, heat still emanating from the pavement. Windows are lit where people have retreated to the indoors, though more houses appear to be completely dark. I think many people must retire to the back of their houses to watch tv or go online. There is an occasional cough or shuffle of someone still working outside, trying to finish work in the quickly diminshing light.

4. Well, alright. K had decided she didn't want to put her swimsuit on, she wasn't going to swim, just play on the equipment. But when I tell her T will be wearing his swimsuit and going in the wading pool, and she can just sit on the side if she wants to, but she'll need to wear her suit because the side of the pool will be wet, she agrees. It will be ok to just sit on the side and just put her feet in the water. We get to the pool and she sits on the side as planned. T, meanwhile, merrily splashes and laughs at the other children's antics. Soon, K is up walking around in the water, then dipping down into it, then going to the middle to play in the fountain, then practicing her kicks and bubbles. When it's time to get out, she proclaims that she wants to come back tomorrow.

5. We rarely eat fast food. Last month was a bit different with travel and other factors and we got to know the kid meals of the various chains. McDonald's has the fanciest toy. The Taco Bell toy was horrible--a toy with scary pictures featuring The Weirdos--ugly characters with bloodshot eyes. Arby's was the best--colorful, educational books. We were so impressed. Hooray for Arby's! The kids enjoyed their meals. T, especially, can eat a huge amount of Chicken McNuggets and fries. Now, every time we pass a McDonald's, K points it out as we drive by, and "Danno's," affirms T with fondness.

Hairpiece

2010-08-13T15:16:00.000-07:00

Confession: One of the (many) things that baffles me as a mom is finding the best way to work with my kids' hair. Actually, it's much better now than it used to be, I think I'm finally beginning to get the tricks of working with each one's mop.
K went from being a bald baby to a toddler with ultra fine, barely there hair. Her hair grew so slowly, she was past two before she needed her first trim. Though I kept trying, it wasn't until she turned four that I could finally put barrettes or hairbands in and expect them to stay for any length of time. Here's a picture of the first time she wore a barrette that actually stayed in. I was so excited at the prospect of doing fun things with her hair.

Not long after, I told her I wanted to put her hair in a bun. "A hamburger bun or a hot dog bun?" she asked.

Pigtails and ponytails are fun, too, but never stay put long. Her hair now seems to be growing faster, but it is still thin, baby-fine and breaks so easily. Just before we moved from Idaho, I took her to my hairdresser for a real haircut, and I was thrilled with the result. I loved the way her hair framed her face and looked perfectly cute with no need for decorations for effect or to keep it out of her face.

Since we've moved here, I haven't found a hairdresser I like for her (or me, for that matter). But since her hair is so fine and breaks even if I use the soft fabric hairbands, I think it's better to keep her hair on the short side for now.

T, on the other hand, has hair that grows very fast, and he has a powerful cowlick or two that battle me for control. The hair on top of his head has always liked to stand straight up. When he first started walking it made me laugh when I sat at the table and he would walk behind it. All I could see of him was the wisps of his hair standing up. It made me think of a shark fin gliding by.

When he was 18 months, he was well in need of a real cut.

By comparison, here's a picture of K at the same age. Her hair was growing, but still barely there. I often dressed her in pink or purple when we went out so people would know she was a girl.

Now T gets a good trim every three months and is mostly cooperative about the process.

His last haircut turned out very short. It reminded me of my teaching days when as the weather turned hot, one by one the boys would show up to class with their hair shorn into their summer haircut.

You can see that even though his hair is so short, there is that little stubborn cowlick, already beginning to spike.