Halloween 2013

Again this year, the boys just wanted a new superhero costume from Target so they could amp up their dress up games.  Hazel is the only one who still wants me to sew for her, which frankly, is fine by me.

This year, she was dead set on Princess Celestia from the My Little Pony cartoon.  She is obsessed with MLP.  I tried my best to talk her into one of the ponies that did not have a horn or a crown or jewelry or any of the extra junk that the princesses have.  Nothing doing.  She was only interested in Princess Celestia.

We did our best, and I think we did OK!

I started with these two tutorials: one and two, and used them as a base for wings, mane, tail, ears, horn, and cutie mark. I used a purchased white sweat suit, though.  No sewing a hoodie for me, thankyouverymuch.   The necklace and crown I totally winged, using sparkly craft foam with velcro dots and "jewels" hot glued on.  She's pleased, therefore so am I!

with her protectors, Iron Man and Wolverine

Wrap Up: Wee Gillis

Our Wee Gillis unit is a wrap!

Wee Gillis is a book by Munro Leaf, from Five in a Row volume 2.  I was excited about this book for two reasons.  One, we Wallaces have some Scottish heritage and two, we really enjoyed our row of Ferdiand, which is also by Munro Leaf.  Here's what we did with Wee Gillis:

Geography: We placed our story disk on Scotland, colored a map of Scotland, and discussed the lowlands and the highlands, as mentioned in the story.

Social Studies: We learned about kilts, tartan, and bagpipes!  I read some from a library book on Scotland and we talked about traditional Scottish dress, kilts, and tartan.  I showed the kids the wool blanket that David got in Scotland that is in the Wallace clan tartan, and then we tried paper weaving a Wallace tartan-like pattern.

the real and the paper Wallace tartans, for comparison, with a goofy face from the 6yo

and bagpipes! We watched several youtube videos of bagpipe players, and then we made our own "bagpipes" following these instructions.  They don't really make "music" but they do illustrate how bagpipes work, and the kids LOVED them.

  

The kids' Musikgarten class has also been studying the British Isles and I planned this row to coincide with their week in Scotland.  They listened to some music with bagpipes, read a Scottish fairy tale, and sang some related songs, I think? I don't always get clear answers to "What did you do in music class?" It's fun when those things can line up like that, though!

Science: In the story, Wee Gillis' lungs get very, very strong from calling cattle with his lowland relatives and holding his breath while stalking stags with his highland relatives.  We read a library book about our lungs and then tried this lung capacity experiment.  Jono took one picture of Charlie, but you can't see much.

No one was satisfied after their first attempts (marked in black sharpie) and wanted to try again.  Jonathan and Charlie significantly improved their result (in silver, hard to see) on their second try.  I suspect Hazel's lungs held more air than she managed to blow out, too, but she couldn't prove it.  Mama can empty the entire bottle.  Kids were suitably impressed.

Art: I photocopied two illustrations from the book for us to compare.  The two pictures appear at first glance to be nearly identical, but the kids found four things that were different between them and circled them.  They seemed to really enjoy looking for those details.  I'll have to get some similar puzzles for them to work through.

For language Arts we read some lovely poetry! We read the A.A. Milne poem "Halfway Down" and the Robert Burns poem "My Heart is in the Highlands" and discussed them.  We ended up reading most of the rest of the book of poems by A.A. Milne.  He's certainly a favorite.

We watched both the movie of Wee Gillis (from the library) and the Pixar movie Brave, which we hadn't yet seen.  Both were popular, although the kids said that Brave was too scary.  That's been true of every Pixar movie they've seen the first time through, so I wasn't surprised.  I thought it was cute!  I did not show them Braveheart, of course, but we did read the little blurb in our Scotland library book about William Wallace and his campaign for Scottish freedom in the 13th century.  Charlie was particularly interested in that, given his middle and last names.

Overall Wee Gillis was a very enjoyable row, and we just have one more book on our list before Thanksgiving!  We'll be spending some time learning about flight with The Glorious Flight and then do a short geography unit before we head to Virginia to see the grandparents for Thanksgiving.

Thanks for following along!

Wrap Up: Henry the Castaway

We spent the first two weeks of October on the Five in a Row unit Henry the Castaway, from volume three.  This was a book that neither of my available library systems had, so it's one I put on my kids' Christmas wish lists last year and they got from my brother and sister-in-law.  Score one for homeschool Christmas gifts!  It's an adorable story and a super fun "row".  Here's how we did it:

Social Studies:
In the story, Henry and his dog Angus set out to explore the "uncharted seas".  They come to a river that Henry says "must be the Orinoco River... (which) goes through very wild and dangerous territory."  We found the actual location of the Orinoco River which runs through Venezuela to the Atlantic Ocean  and placed our story disc on it.  The kids colored a map of Venezuela and located the Orinoco River.  We checked some books about Venezuela and South America out of the library, but the kids have mostly ignored them.  We also watched this short video clip about the river, the local plants and animals, and the people groups who live nearby.



We did a second social studies day on Columbus and (general) explorers.  In the story, Henry finds some cats on the island they explore and names them Mrs. Friday (which is an allusion to Robinson Crusoe? I've never read it.), Columbus, and Elizabeth.  He also talks about "exploring the uncharted seas".  We read kids' library book about explorers and discussed what it might have been like to take off in a boat and really not know (exactly) where the ocean you were sailing would go.  While I read, they colored a picture of Columbus.

For geography, we read a book called Mapping Penny's World which was a fantastic introduction to map reading.

Science:
We read a library book called Follow the Water from Brook to Ocean.  Very cute story and illustrated how streams flow into larger rivers which flow into the ocean, etc. We also started reading the Caldecott Honor book Paddle-to-the-Sea, which is about a boy who carves a toy canoe and sets it to float out on the melting spring snow from his home in Canada above Lake Superior with the hopes that the boat would float through the Great Lakes and out the St Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean.  We aren't finished with this book yet, but it's been a big hit so far!

Math:
We did the lesson from the manual about tallying using the animals in one illustration of Henry for counting.  My kids were not super interested in this, so I'm not sure it stuck. We'll try again.

Miscellaneous:
We looked up Scottish Terriers (like Angus) in a dog breed book and that led to discussing different kinds of dogs that the different people we know own.

We found this adorable go-along book about cataways--Castaway Cats.

We spent some time on survival skills and talked about what Henry did right when he was on his adventure with Angus and got stuck on an island with no way to get home.  We read a library book called Lost in the Woods and discussed it.  I'm pretty sure my kids think they're experts at building a shelter and killing wild game, and I'm not remotely confident they paid attention to the admonition to STAY IN ONE PLACE, so yeah... let's just hope they never get lost.  They'd be in trouble.

We also built popsicle stick rafts (since we couldn't really build canoes like Henry had) to float in the water on our own Exploring Adventure.

This is how explorers dress! 

And then... we set off like Henry to see if we could explore the uncharted seas.  For us, the uncharted seas were simply the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain.  We went to Fontainbleau State Park to hike nature trails and splash in the "beach" on the shore of the lake.

Setting off down the nature trail.

Ahh, nature.  Either a large worm or a small snake.  I wasn't sure. 

"Splash" turned out to mean totally swim in your clothes regardless of the fact that this was one of the first mornings we had temperatures in the low 70s.  I have no clue why there weren't shivering!  Good thing I packed a dry set of clothes for everyone just in case!  

my view

My sandy one.  This kid LOVES the beach. 

trying to blow his raft along

We brought home a TON of these little brown and white shells.  

A few other fun shots from the week:

Jono doodled this while I read Henry one day.  If you're familiar with the story, I'm sure you'll recognize parts! 

Jono built some towers with sums of seven using cuisenaire rods.  He's a big fan of towers. 

The twins started All About Spelling this week and really enjoy it so far!

It was a fantastic adventure and a wonderful row.  Thanks for following along!

Wrap Up: Lentil

We have just finished another super fun Five in a Row unit study on the book Lentil, by Robert McCloskey.  Lentil is a book that we owned before we began our FIAR journey, so it was familiar, and Robert McCloskey is one of our favorite children's authors.  We always enjoy getting to know a familiar book even better by taking it through Five in a Row.  Here's what we did with Lentil:

Social Studies:
1. Map work and coloring page for the state of Ohio, in the United States.  We found both Ohio and Louisiana, colored both, and discussed how far Lentil lived from us.
2. Patriotism and the United States flag.  In the book, there is a big parade welcoming home Colonel Carter, the town's most important citizen.  They decorate with flags.  We read a library book about our flag and what the colors and symbols on it mean, and made flag collages.  We listened to Wee Sing America while we worked, for some familiarity with America's famous patriotic songs.

Art: We tried our hand at soap whittling, which is not as easy as it seems!  In the story, the antagonist spends his time "whittling and grumbling".  My kids much preferred playing with the soap afterwards than the actual activity of carving it.

Science:
1. Acoustics and sound.  We set out to discover why Lentil says that when he plays his harmonica in the bathtub the tone is improved 100%.  We watched the Magic School Bus on sound and bounced a ball on the couch (it didn't bounce much) and then in the bathtub (it bounced a lot).  We decided that sound waves must bounce better in hard places like the tub just like balls did.  Then all of the kids got a harmonica and they put on show after show after show.

really hard to get a picture of a busy kid bouncing a ball!

again with the bouncy blurry kid

2. Taste buds!  Old Sneep (the antagonist) tries to ruin the Colonel's homecoming by sucking on lemons so that the members of the band would pucker up when they looked at him and be unable to play their instruments.  We read the page in our Flip Flap Body Book about taste buds and then tasted some salty, sweet, sour, and bitter foods.

not a fan of the sour lemon!

in disbelief that Mom actually handed over a cup of (bitter) coffee!

Music: Besides playing with our new harmonicas, we explored the instruments in the brass section of the orchestra.  The book talks about several brass instruments, so we listened to that section and read the accompanying pages in The Story of the Orchestra.

In non-FIAR school news, we have a new plan for nature study and a new artist and composer for picture and music study.  Our new artist is John James Audubon, the 19th century naturalist who painted many many bird species.  Our local zoo, aquarium, insectarium, and a park are named for him, so I thought he'd be a good artist to study.  We started with a picture study of a pelican he painted.  The kids were surprisingly enthusiastic about it!

We have been listening to Camille Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals for composer study.  We have a book and CD that includes a poem by Jack Prelutsky for each movement of the piece, along with fantastic illustrations by Mary Grand-Pre, who illustrated the Harry Potter books.  The kids have LOVED this. We've been listening at breakfast most mornings.

Finally, nature study.  We have had the hardest time getting nature study off the ground.  It's something I really want to do, but I have not been consistent with it.  I decided that I just needed to follow someone else's plans and DO IT until it became more comfortable and routine.  So, we jumped in with the first of the 10 "Getting Started" Outdoor Hour Challenges (OHCs) on the Handbook of Nature Study blog.  Here's the first one:  http://handbookofnaturestudy.blogspot.com/2008/02/green-hour-challenge-1-lets-get-started.html We followed her instructions to the letter.  I read the introductory material in the Handbook of Nature Study (well, re-read, since I had read them before), then we went out for a walk around the block with our eyes and ears open, but with no other expectations.  The kids brought in some leaves, seeds, and acorns they were excited about, and I gave them the opportunity to record some of what they saw or found in their nature journals.  The twins and I all made nature journal entries, and Jono put his leaves and magnolia seed pods in the nature basket to save for later.  Overall, it was an enormous success!  We're going to head out on an OHC every week and try to finish those introductory ten before Christmas.  I'm so excited to have a plan!

We had a few bumps in the road, schedule-wise, during the last couple of weeks, and didn't get to quite everything I had planned for Lentil, but we still very much enjoyed it, and we're looking forward to a couple of weeks with Henry the Castaway coming up next!  Thanks for following along! 

Toy Library

We have a new toy library! Before I tell you all about it, here's a little history of us and toys:

When my kids were babies and toddlers, I rotated their toys.  I found that they just played better with fewer options, that clean up was easier (and faster!) with fewer options, so I split them up into thirds or so, put the "off" toys in big plastic bins in a closet, and rotated them about once a month.  This worked well enough, especially since they didn't really remember what was missing, so they didn't ask for things that weren't out.  I didn't like the job of rotating boxes, though, so it got put off sometimes.  It was sort of a pain, but I felt it was worth it.

We moved here just over two years ago when my kids were newly 4 and newly 3.  We had a playroom at first, so I didn't split toys into rotations, I just dumped them all in the playroom.  Sure, it was always a disaster, and the kids were too overwhelmed with the volume to clean up effectively, but I also didn't have to go in there, so I was able to turn a blind eye and tackle the mess infrequently.

About 15 months after we moved here, we had exhausted all the room sharing combinations and came to the conclusion that my kids sharing rooms was just NOT going to work.  We needed to sleep a kid in the playroom.  I split the toys up between the bedrooms and for the last year, it's been a big toy nightmare.  Hazel's room absorbed the "girl" toys (play kitchen, barbies, dollhouse, baby dolls, American Girls, My Little Ponies, other ponies and barns, etc).  Jono doesn't like a lot in his room.  He likes a large pile of stuffed animals, some action figures, and that's about it.  That meant that Charlie's room (the former playroom) had all the rest.  Trains, lego, dress-ups, tool bench/tools, blocks, cars, Imaginext Star Wars, Mr. Potato head, etc.  He was regularly melting into a puddle because even though his siblings would go into his room to play with toys there, no one wanted to help him clean, and it was FAR too much.  This is what it looked like most days...

SCARY!!

We needed a solution.  I wasn't willing to take on rotating their toys for them again.  And they wouldn't want that anyway, since they have favorites.  Some things they play with daily, some things much less frequently.  They're 6 and 5.  They needed choice and freedom if this was gong to work.

After some time with my friend Google and a little blog reading, I started to hatch a plan. I started by paying the kids in lollipops to bring all of their toys out of their rooms.  ALL of them.  Every single toy they owned.  I sorted them into groups in the living room floor.  I ended up with somewhere around 30 individual "items" for check out.  Dolls, barbies, blocks (3 different kinds) cars, dress ups, stuffed animals, ponies, play kitchen food and dishes, action figures, transformers, puppets, and on and on it went.  

pre-sort

Then we bought bins.  LOTS of bins.  I was willing to try this without this step, and use the myriad randomly sized containers and baskets that toys had been living in, in bedrooms.  My husband suggested (and he was SO right) that I might like the uniformity of a just a few sizes of bins.  Not cheap.  Worth it.  

not pictured: a box of those big 2 gallon ziplock baggies for those things that didn't require a full bin

Everything then found a home in a bin in the shed. Several of the blog posts I read used space in their basement or a spare closet.  While I'd give my left arm for a basement, my house is actually below sea level which means that our water table is something like half an inch below the grass in my backyard.  Yeah, so, we don't have a basement.  Luckily, I do have an awesome big shed.  

one corner

yep, toys. right there between the edger and the extension cords. awesome. 

the other corner

with the card table, the bird seed, and some sports equipment.  whatever.

(closer up)

My kids checked their first toys out of the library yesterday afternoon and it's been a huge hit!

My initial plan was to have two types of bins, big and small, defined by how big of a mess their contents made, not necessarily how big the actual bin was.  I was going to allow kids to have one "big" and three "small" bins checked out at any given time.  I initially divided the bins in the shed along the same lines.  Big bins in one corner, small bins in the other.  My kids don't appreciate this distinction. In the first afternoon, Charlie wanted to swap superheroes (a small bin) for log cabin blocks (a HUGE bin).  I had just started to protest when Hazel bounded around the corner and, having heard her brother was finished with superheroes, wanted to trade the trains that she had (big bin) for his superhero bin.  It was not worth arguing with both of them over bin size.  So I dropped that distinction before the 24 hour mark, and now they're simply limited to four bins apiece.  

My initial thoughts?  AWESOME.  My kids have four bins of things in their rooms.  This is about the same volume of toys that Jono used to voluntarily keep in his room, so no big change there.  But Hazel and Charlie can now clean up without weeping!  Wahoo!! I am not limiting how often they swap things out.  So far, Jono is happy with his initial four choices.  Hazel and Charlie have traded bins multiple times.  I don't want to limit their access to their toys. I just want to limit how many they have access to *at the same time*.  

The most interesting thing to me has been what they've chosen to play with.  This is the first time in their lives that specific toys have not had a "home base".  Even shared toys (like dress ups, play kitchen, and blocks) have been stored in one room or another.  Hazel currently has her My Little Ponies, the superheroes, the dinosaurs, and the small animals in her room.  She's got a big mash up world going on in her (empty) dollhouse with all the components of those different bins.  I love it!  I have a feeling that besides her MLP, the other "girl toy" bins will rarely leave the shed.  She's just not into them, and that's OK.  

I'll keep you posted as we use this for a while, but so far, I'm really excited! 

Wrap Up: Amber on the Mountain

We just wrapped up a week on the Five in a Row unit Amber on the Mountain by Tony Johnston.

I know I say it every week, but this was such a wonderful story and fantastic "row"!  Amber on the Mountain is about a lonely little girl who works on the family farm in the Appalachian mountains.  Amber cannot read or write, but she desperately wants to learn how.  A man brings his wife and daughter with him while he works to build a road up to the mountain.  Amber befriends the man's daughter, and the daughter, Anna, teachers Amber how to read.  Throughout the story there are references to Amber's mule Rockhead and his stubbornness.  The girls call themselves "rockheaded" when they set their minds on teaching and learning to read.  It's a beautiful story of friendship and determination!  We remain completely enamored with FIAR as our core homeschool curriculum.  Here's what we did with Amber:

Social Studies:
Amber is set in the Appalachian mountains.  The book is no more specific than that, so I had the kids color a map of the mountain range, we discussed what states are in Appalachia, and we chose to put our story disc on the map in West Virginia, right in the middle of the range.  We looked at the page in The Amazing Pop-Up  Geography Book about mountains and mountain ranges, and had good time locating some of the world's highest mountains on the world map.  The kids were disappointed that none of the mountains on the list of top 5 tallest were in the Appalachian Range.  Yeah, sorry kids.

That afternoon, we watched a video from the library called That Book Woman.  This was one of my favorite parts of the week.  It's also about a family in Appalachia who have little access to schools or books.  This darling story is based on a real group of women, the Pack Horse Librarians, who through a New Deal project in the 1930s took mobile libraries up into the mountains on horseback, giving the people in the back woods of Appalachia access to books and magazines.  Definitely pick up this title as a go-along if you row Amber!   On the same theme, we enjoyed Waiting for the Biblioburro, which was pretty much the same story, but set in Mexico.  Beautiful illustrations in that one.

We did a second day of social studies on the character trait of friendship, drawing comparisons between Amber and Anna and Max and Boris from Another Celebrated Dancing Bear.  I wasn't sure if they would hear the overlap in plot between the two stories, but they were SO excited and pointed out all the similarities I had hoped they would see.

Language Arts:
Amber is FULL of similes.  There are multiple similes on every page in the story.  We read Crazy like a  Fox to start our language arts day, and once the kids understood the idea of a simile, we re-read Amber, with them nearly jumping out of their seats over and over again, every time they heard a simile, to point them out.  I had them do a notebook page after that, completing the sentences "This mountain is as high as..." and "That road is windy like..." and illustrating one of the similes they made up.  My favorites were Jono's "That road is windy like a swirly whirly pool," which is what my kids call whirlpools, and Charlie's "This mountain is as high as the deepest ocean trench." There was a blurb in the Pop-up Geography Book about how some of the highest mountains in the world come up from the ocean floor, and really latched on to that idea.

Science:
For science we discussed why Amber's Granny thought that there was no way you could build a road up the mountain with "people rolling clean off."  I made a play doh model of a mountain and we put a little house up on top and then discussed how a road straight up the side of the mountain would be far too dangerous and steep.  We then talked about alternatives--switch backs, or a road that winds slowly around the mountain. We discussed that those paths are longer, but much safer, etc.  The kids pointed out a few days later, when we were at Storyland Park, that the path up "Jack and Jill's hill" is windy so that it's not too steep, but that the slide off of it is straight down, since it's OK for slides to be steep, but not paths/roads.  They got it! I suspect I'll hear the same the next time we are at Monkey Hill at the zoo!

I also bought the kids a set of Lincoln Logs and brought them out this week.  Charlie has done little else,  building many a cabin for Amber and Granny Cotton.  The first day he built a group of log buildings together in the middle of his room.  The second day, the tore them all down and re-built them in the corners of his room, spread apart.  When I asked why, he quoted from the book, "Mountain people live scattered far from each other.  Amber was lonesome." Sweet boy.

Art:
In the book, when the road is complete and Anna leaves, Amber gives her a little clay mule.  We played with clay (a first for us!), discussed sculpture, and made a trip to the New Orleans sculpture garden.  We've been there before, but it's always fun.

We also tried our hand at following these instructions and drew Rockhead the mule!

We skipped applied math this row, but we have continued to do work our way through our stand-alone math curriculum, so that subject has certainly not been neglected.  Thanks for catching up with us!