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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...