amandaspace1330

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 ...