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Last weekend we enjoyed a day at Hershey park. Fun times riding the rides and drinking loaded hot cocoa and spending time with Grandma. This was Tristan's first time enjoying some of the rides and we were all very excited and proud of him. Anastasia has always loved riding rides at the amusement park and had a blast. We also saw Santa's reindeer - though all this week I have been getting the question about why Rudolph's nose was not red-! It was a good time.  This week we have enjoyed a few versions of The Twelve Days of Christmas as well as a few other Christmas books during our holiday-focused week. Brian Wildsmith, Louise Breirly and Jan Brett all have beautiful and uniquely illustrated versions of The Twelve Days of Christmas .  For Science we researched Partridges, and calling/colly birds.  For  math we added and subtracted 12 to numbers 1-12 and added all of the gifts given by "my true love". What a Christmas! For Social Studies we made...

Our topic for this week was friendship as we read Best Friends for Frances, by Russell Hoban. We learned about how we should and should not treat friends and, that our siblings are/ should be our best friends. We enjoyed lots of time indoors this week, since it was cold and rainy most of the week. We completed the suggested activities from The Frances Study Guide, by Valerie Bendt including planning and going on an outing. This included a basket of food: pickles, pretzels, yogurt cookies, of course sandwiches and fruit and games in our basement. I added a compare and contrast Best Friends for Frances with The Berenstain Bears' No Girls Allowed. These compare and contrast exercises are so rewarding and the children always have such insight. We learned two math rules this week. We learned that to add nine to any number, you take one away from it and add ten. This is simple, especially if looking at a number chart. We also learned that even numbers added together give even numbers....

This past week we read the next installment from the Hobans , Bread and Jam for Frances. In this story, Frances is cured of picky eating and learns to enjoy a balanced diet. A story to which every preschooler can relate. We have been learning about the food pyramid off and on all year, and the children noticed right away that bread and jam do not constitute a healthy diet. We completed the word puzzle included in The Frances Study Guide packet and I adore the comprehension/discussion questions provided by Mrs. Bent.  I added to this week for math: adding nine to numbers 1-11. At the beginning of the week we used our number chart and our base ten blocks to visualize the addition; by Thursday we were able to write the problem down on the white board. For science : Animals in Winter , Henrietta Bancroft. We made cranberry-popcorn chains for the deck. This was fun and challenging for the kids and all was going really well, until Anastasia lost her needle! E...

Time gets away from me this time of year, and I forget to blog! Thanksgiving is over. The first Christmas cookies have been baked and eaten and the Christmas tree now fills our family room with light. I have yet to take down our Thanksgiving tree but it too will come down this week. We enjoyed learning the story of the Pilgrims and Indians. Week 2 of pre-Thanksgiving school activities included making Ricotta cheese, making fireman crafts and turkey activity sheets. We read The Plymouth Thanksgiving by Leonard Weisgard and The Thanksgiving Story by Alice Dagliesh. I am encouraged by how similar these accounts were to 1621 A New Look at Thanksgiving (at least when it comes to the Pilgrim's story). We reviewed the four seasons and read the book Autumn by Stephanie Hedlund. I talked to the children about public servants who must work on holidays, Doctors, Nurses, Military, Police and Firefighters. We read The Firefighters' Thanksgiving by Maribeth Boelts, it's a tearje...

Last week Thanksgiving became our topic for school. We read the book 1621 A New Look at Thanksgiving, by Catherine O'Neil Grace and Margaret M. Bruchac, and did various crafts and activities related to Autumn and Thanksgiving.  I love the cute traditional crafts, and want to do them all, so I decided to set aside these two weeks for Thanksgiving. We have made hand-print turkeys, leaf rubbings and paintings. The kids made a mini book entitled Autumn about the colors of the changing leaves and we made a Thanksgiving tree, which we add leaves to every day. We have also spent the last two Mondays making applesauce with Grandma. This is such a neat tie-in to our conversation about Thanksgiving, because each Monday, we have experienced the harvest and all that goes into making the most of it. Also, I thought these two weeks would be a good time to do food science and nutrition. For hands-on science, we have focused on dairy foods. We...

The misleading title of this post imitates the misleading title of last week's story, A Birthday for Frances, by Russell Hoban. We read this story out of sequence because I wanted to read this one on the week of Gwendolyn's first birthday . A Birthday for Frances is about Frances little sister Gloria's birthday and how Frances deals with someone else having their "day in the sun". She is precocious as ever in this relatable tale about sharing in one another's joy. I love having Valerie Bendt's guide-book full of thoughtful comprehension questions and comparisons. Our week was very full last week, and I leaned heavily on the pre-planned lesson in the curriculum guide. We had a few fun projects last week. We made book jackets for the story, A Birthday for Frances, by Russell Hoban. The kids now have a better understanding of what information should be found on the cover of a book. They really enjoyed this project and were very ...

This week we read the story A Baby Sister For Frances, by Russell Hoban. The illustrations in this book were done by Lillian Hoban. This is a funny story about Frances dealing with a new baby in the home. We have been dealing with this very scenario for the past year, and I think my two could relate to Frances' feelings of neglect, though I'm pretty sure they've never thought of running away! They enjoyed reading about Frances pretending to run away, and again her bedtime antics. They also enjoyed the ways this story referred back to Bedtime for Frances, reminding me how much Frances likes piggy back rides to bed. We were able to introduce some new vocabulary this week - knapsack, cozy, allowance - and also work on our reading. These books with dialogue between characters lend themselves well to shared reading. By week's end, I encouraged Tristan to read the Father's lines. This was a good challenge for him. Anastasia helped me finish Frances' lines. She seems...

Sticking with the same format, we are using a new curriculum, Valerie Bendt's Frances Study Guide. So, for the rest of this semester, barring holiday weeks, we will be reading through the Frances series written by Russell Hoban. To start us off we read Bedtime for Frances by Russell Hoban. Valerie Bendt provides simple pintables, awesome study questions and suggestions, and we really enjoyed this story. My children were interested in Frances' precocious personality and got a kick out of her bedtime antics. As suggested by Bendt, I had Tristan and Ana both retell the story each day, and this revealed a lot to me about what they are hearing and retaining during our story times. This book lent itself to this type of analysis, because the text says more than the illustrations. The illustrations in this first story of the series were done by Garth Williams, (also the illustrator of Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and the Little house series). It was he who original...

If you've followed the blog for any amount of time, you know about my love, slight obsession, with alphabet books. I've had a more difficult time finding good counting books, that is until a few weeks ago. I mentioned to a friend this void for counting/math related books and then, boom! I had a bench full of them. I wanted to share my favorites on the blog. There are seven that really impress me. 1) I've already mentioned Cinquenta en la Cebra , by Nancy Maria Grande Tabor. This great book counts to fifty and also challenges vocabulary on so many levels! Great one! 2) Another book that counts to fifty; super fun and unexpected, The Long Line , by Tomoko Ohmura. 3) How Many Mice, Michael Garland. This awesome book only counts to ten, but teaches one to one relationship along with addition and subtraction. It includes the math in an action packed adventure story.  4) How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?    by Margaret McNamarra is not a counting book...

This past week I wanted to continue learning about the Middle Ages. I got a great resource from the library  Knights & castles : 50 hands-on activities to explore the Middle Ages / Avery Hart and Paul Mantell., and I used lots of the ideas from this book last week. We read through The Big Golden Book of Knights and Castles as well as David Macaulay's Castle. It was fun to build our own castle, make a shining sword and helmet and pretend to be knights. We enjoyed starting each day off with the finger play of St. George and the Dragon. The kids enjoyed St. George and the dragon so much that on our family trip to Philadelphia Zoo Saturday, Jason mentioned that one of the reptiles was St. George's Dragon. The kids were wild about and immediately summoned Mommy, who was introducing Gwendolyn to the very awake and active rattlesnakes, to come see St. George's Dragon! For Science we talked about herbs and their medicinal/antimicrobial powers. These ...

       Last week we read The Duchess Bakes a Cake by Virginia Kahl. We loved this story and had an awesome week digging into it! The story is set during the middle ages and the Duke, Duchess and their 13 daughters live in a castle complete with moat and drawbridge. The rhyming text tells a little of the life of a fine lady and how bored she became. So bored she attempted to bake a "lovely, light, luscious, delectable cake". This story not only entertained us, but also afforded many learning opportunities. For Math: we learned about the number 13, the baker's dozen. To begin, we counted the Duchesses daughters on the cover of the story. (What clever foreshadowing!) We doubled it, tripled it, tried to evenly halve it. We tried to split a pile of 13 markers into 3 even piles, and four, and five, all to no avail. I introduced the idea of prime numbers. If we subtracted one, we were left with a true dozen.   For Language: we learned about alliter...

  This past week we ventured out to Hawk Mountain raptor conservatory for a morning of adventure. The morning quickly became afternoon as we enjoyed hiking and bird-watching. We visited Hawk Mountain earlier this summer and we did not see any birds, so you can imagine our amazement at seeing half a dozen Sharp-Shinned hawks, twice that many turkey buzzards, an immature Bald Eagle, and a few Osprey as well. One amazing thing about Hawk Mountain is the fellowship that happens once we make it to North Lookout. On both of our trips up we have chatted with such friendly and knowledgeable hikers/birders. This Saturday, there were a handful of other elementary aged kids playing at the top and also quite a few members of the Hawk Mountain staff taking bird counts and calling out what birds we were seeing. This was nice since, honestly, I wouldn't know an immature Eagle from the Ospreys, and I've never heard of a Sharp-Shinned hawk before Saturday. The kids reall...

Proverbs 28:1 The wicked flee when no one pursues him, but the righteous are bold as a lion. This week we enjoyed learning about lions and reading James Daugherty's, Andy and the Lion. This adventuresome tale entertained us immensely. The story is dedicated to the lion sculptures that stand in front of the New York Public Library and this story begins and ends at a public library. The rest of the 3 part story is silly, adventuresome and totally unbelievable. The two tone illustrations add so much to the text and remind me of C.W. Anderson's sketched illustrations. Turns out, Billy and Blaze was published only two years before Andy and the Lion. Both Tristan and Ana enjoyed this story about a boy and "his" lion. Our word for this week: lion. We talked about vowels and consonants and how vowels have different sounds. If there are two vowels in a word, they often take their long sound, as in lion. For Math: we counted the pages of the book a...

This week we continued the theme from Salamander Room . We focused on the forest reading two books by Marianne Berkes. Monday and Tuesday we read Over in the Forest: Come on let's take a peek and then Wednesday-Friday we also read Over in the Jungle: A Rainforest Rhyme. At the beginning of the week we learned about the Temperate deciduous forests that we are very accustomed to seeing here in Pennsylvania. Then mid-week, after introducing the Rainforest, we began to talk about the rainforests as well. Marianne Berkes provides many neat learning and teaching ideas in the back of these books as well a small write-up about the animals in the story. Many of the ideas for this week's school came from the books themselves. Tree was our word for the week. (We also talked about other words that have ee in the middle of them: week, bees, seed, knee, cheek, etc.) For math: we counted animals! These two books by Marianne Berkes are counting rhymes to 10. This is...

This week we read the story by Anne Mazer, The Salamander Room. What a neat story about a little nature enthusiast and his big imagination. The illustrations by Steve Johnson add so much to the story and even though we read this book for a whole week (as we always do) we didn't tire of the text or pictures. Each day provided us with something new to discover.  For math- we counted animals and insects and added and subtracted them.  For Social Studies/Geography we discussed relationships between people (Mother and Son) and between people and animals. We also marked the forested areas around the world on our map. Anastasia got to choose where to put our salamander story token and she put him in the trees of PA.  For Art we talked about drawing realistically, dew drops, shadows, trees and animals. We also noted the use of space. The illustrations in this story begin as a snapshot and by the last few pages have overtaken and outgrown the pages.  We learned ...

We are back to school and happy to be back in some sort of routine. The book of the week was, Little Nino's Pizzeria by Karen Barbour.  The story of family business, hard work and togetherness. Karen Barbour shares the idea that money doesn't buy happiness and family is more important than success in a way that young children can understand. The colorful illustrations engage the imagination and reinforce story content, while adding much more than the words contain. We enjoyed learning about Pizza. This became our word of the week and by week's end, Ana at least, could identify the word by sight. For health: we studied the food pyramid and decided that pizza is a complete meal. Whole wheat flour for the dough, sauce and veggie toppings for vegetables, we even could add fruit (pineapple), pepperoni is the meat and cheese constitutes the dairy. The fat is found in the dough and also the pepperoni. For math: we counted, added and subtracted pizza toppi...