amandaspace1330

We are enjoying our Christmas vacation. Wonderful times with family and cousins. Last week we read the story The Very Last First Time, Jan Andrews. This is the story of an Inuit girl growing up and doing things on her own. We enjoyed learning about Canada and the Inuit people. We learned about polar bears and arctic life and we did some dot art. It was a fun week. This story was thematically appropriate for the week before Christmas. Tristan enjoyed his subjects this week. He was not too excited about having to read The Very Last First Time to Anastasia but otherwise he had fun. I really enjoyed The King of Prussia and a Peanut Butter Sandwich, Alice Flemming. I wasn't able to source this book until this week, but it should have been paired with Climbing Kansas Mountains . This story made me cry, it is the amazing true story of Prussian Mennonites who relocated to the Crimean Peninsula for religious freedom and then moved to Kansas for the same reason. They grew winter wheat ...

Christmas! The past 3 weeks have flown. The thing about December that gets me is that the weekends are more packed than the weekdays. School has been flowing along relatively well. Sure, we've had the occasional party, or morning out Christmas shopping, but the weekends! That's when the real activity happens. Anyway, Anastasia has enjoyed 3 nice story units in Kindergarten and Tristan is doing well on his second grade work. The first story: You Are Special, Max Lucado. This one I pulled off the shelf the week after Thanksgiving  because our books hadn't come in over the holiday week. The children enjoyed this story and I was able to help them understand the allegory and the deeper meaning of the story. Anastasia did some copy work and a coloring page related to the theme. Ana is joining Tristan for Math lessons; more on that later. The second story Anastasia enjoyed:   Warm as Wool, Scott Russell Sanders. This is a wonderful, true, story of...

Happy Belated Thanksgiving! I am excited about December and the first day of Advent (more on that at the end of this post) but we gave Thanksgiving it's due. Two weeks ago our Five in a Row book of the week was Cranberry Thanksgiving, by Wende and Harry Devlin. Anastasia loved this story. She really got excited about cranberry bogs and learning how cranberries grow. This story is set in New England, like most of the stories we've read this semester. Ana seems to finally understand where New England is located on the map. I'm a fan of any book that includes a recipe. All in all, a fun week. Tristan learned about farming in science that week, which paired well with Anastasia's unit on Cranberry bogs. He is tracking along pretty well with his second grade work. We all enjoyed a field trip to Chick-Fil-A to check out their kitchen, and we took a family trip out to Strasburg Railroad to ride on Thomas the Tank Engine. So Fun! Happy B...