Mind Games

Percy Jackson is a huge part of KarateKid’s imaginary play, since he adores the five-book series by Rick Riordan.  This week, we decided to do some special Percy Jackson and Greek mythology studies to gear up for the first movie, The Lightning Thief, which comes out on Friday.

Originally we weren’t going to do a fancy muffin tin today, because there wasn’t a specific theme, and we were scheduled to have a Shakespeare planning session with our homeschool group starting at noon.  Unfortunately, the leader of this project wasn’t feeling well today and had to cancel the meeting.

I couldn’t very well have the chicken nuggets and frozen veggies I’d planned back when I thought we needed to make a quick escape!  So I took the kids to the supermarket for a tour of their Mediterranean bar to pick up some Greek food.

We brought home a mixture of green and black olives with feta cheese in a Greek dressing, frozen spanikopita, fresh dolmathes, pita chips, tzatziki (yogurt with cucumber, lemon, and garlic), and hummus.  KarateKid also made a plea to remember Dionysus with a bottle of “wine” – sparkling grape juice.

The kids loved the olives, spanikopitas, chips and tzatziki.  They weren’t crazy about the strong feta cheese or the dolmathes, but they both gamely ate everything!

We have been enjoying our Netflix streaming through our blu-ray player to watch Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Greek Myths.  KarateKid and I have also been working through a fun etymological study of English words with roots in Greek Mythology at this site.  More fun Greek stuff is planned for the week ahead, and then the big movie on Friday!

GoGoGirl is 39 months old.

This week, we did several fun activities using the first letter of her name.

I stuck a sticker J onto a handheld mirror, so when she looks in her mirror she can exclaim, “J is for (GoGoGirl)!”  She loves this!

I printed out two copies of each of several photos from the past month.  I put one copy of each in a baggie with a magnetic J and a C, and she flips through the pictures and puts the J on her face and the C on KarateKid’s. It’s a great take-along activity, too.

I cut up the other photos, cutting out her face from each one. She glued these onto a giant letter J to make a fun poster.

KarateKid made one too!

All week she would bring me her mirror, or the photo bag, or her collage, and tell me, “Let’s do school! J is for (GoGoGirl)!”  She’s starting to move from being a happy little tag-along to a kid who wants her own time to learn fun things with Mommy.

To see more fun with tots, click below to visit Tot School at 1+1+1=1.

KarateKid absorbs knowledge on his schedule, not anyone else’s, and certainly never on mine!  He has a wonderful mind but picks & chooses what he’s interested in at any given time.  Most of the time, this isn’t a problem for me, but we’ve chosen a very straight-forward, chunked-knowledge math curriculum in Math-U-See, which means that two months may go by before he’s willing to open it again, but when he does, look out.

building the multiples of 6 with MUS blocks

I feel like single digit multiplication has finally filtered through enough times to become truly functional for him.  He’s understood the theory behind multiplication for ages but still often skip-counted to figure out the answers.  This is totally fine for a 7 year old and I wasn’t going to push him, but at the same time, I didn’t feel that we could move ahead to multiple-digit multiplication until he could do single-digit with a little more speed.

This week I suggested we try a little Math-U-See again, and he has astounded me by quickly covering 4 chapters of single-digit multiplication in four days, and when he saw that the light at the end of the multiplication tunnel is only 3 chapters away in the enticing “Multiple Digit Multiplication” lesson, he begged to do 2 lessons today.  Unfortunately, we are heading out the door right now for a check-up on my poor ear drum, so I couldn’t  indulge him in more math.  But I love that we’re moving forward again!

Since we started the week with a Seuss-inspired Muffin Tin, it seemed only fitting to do an art project inspired by One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.

First, we decided to make some zany creatures like the Yink and the Nook.

I set out a variety of collage materials – toilet paper tubes, plastic cups, googly eyes, pom poms, popsicle sticks, plastic lids – and two very full bottles of school glue.

The kids had a marvelous time choosing things and squeezing out obscene amounts of glue all over the place!

In fact, they enjoyed this so much that we have left the table of collage things out all week. I have had one or two moments where I realized GoGoGirl was Gluing Without Supervision, but we avoided any serious spills or gluing-the-lizards-to-the-couch incidents.

Here are just a couple of the kids’ creations. The house is slowly filling with aliens, robots, animals, monsters, farmers, and “girls from China who snore” – that’s GoGoGirl’s cupcake liner creation below.

In addition to this fun free-form art, I also did a week-long project with the kids.

First, we made handprints with paint.

When they were dry, we cut them out.

Another day, we used bubble wrap dipped in paint to create the background of the mural.

The kids love to play with the bubble wrap and pat it down onto the paper. Sometimes GoGoGirl gets a little over-enthusiastic and starts to smear it around, but with some encouragement she goes back to the gentle patting that makes nicer prints.

Another day, after the background was dry, we glued the handprints on and gave them some googly eyes. KarateKid decided to cut out some green paper for seaweed and make a really neat sea anemone in the middle. Here is our finished mural:

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

For more great story + art activities, visit A Mommy’s Adventures.

If you’re thinking that taking pictures of the kids while Dad is home to lend a helping hand might be a good idea… don’t bother.  His very presence makes them all wound up and crazy.  Especially the GoGoGirl. Something like this…

Eventually, a picture is snapped which has both kids looking at the camera and at least marginally smiling, and you decide that’s good enough for today.

When you pull up the image on the computer, you see a charming… scratch? bruise? smudge? on the young lady’s cheek and ask aloud, “Is that peanut butter?”

There’s nothing left to do but laugh.

Visiting the local children’s museum with our homeschool playgroup results in pure, lovely, red-cheeked fun for the kiddos:

Can you see KarateKid’s sweaty hair and red cheeks?  I snapped this picture of five-in-a-boat just before the Chenlets had to leave, and the kids had been playing together for almost three hours.  (Also important information: it took us five minutes to get them all in the boat at once, and the instant I snapped this test picture, two of them jumped out and ran away.  So this is as good as it gets!)

KarateKid had fun playing hide-and-seek with the big boys and enjoyed the bubble room.

GoGoGirl loved being adored by the older girls and rode dozens of times on the tiny carousel.

After the museum closed, we had a short nap/sandwich break in the van before karate and soccer at the Y.  It made for a long day, but the time we all spent with friends was delicious.

To the Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators, Weather Prophet Extraordinary… thank you! Unlike most of the country, we just haven’t had our fill of winter yet.  Not one huge mounding snowfall so far – at our house, we haven’t once had more than 5″ fall in a single storm all season.  We’re still waiting for that 9″ or 12″ or 15″ storm that snows in the county and surrounds us in a muffling blanket of white.  Let’s go, snow!

The kids say thank you too, for the lovely presents.

KarateKid was pleased with new “True to Life” tri-tip markers and an electronic gadget that talks to him about animals and quizzes him about them.  GoGoGirl enjoyed her new colored pencils (with special pencil sharpener, what a treat!) and a new I Spy book for her Tag Reader.

We have been celebrating you all day, Punxsutawney Phil, starting with our special breakfast of Groundhog-in-a-Hole.

We have read books (Gregory’s Shadow, Punxsutawney Phyllis, and Nature’s Children: Woodchucks), drawn drawings, completed mazes and puzzles and coloring sheets.  We watched a clip of you, Phil, emerging – er, being forcefully yanked – from your comfy home in Punxsutawney, and predicting the six more weeks of winter we’re looking forward to.

We warmed our bellies and tickled our funny bones with a fancy Groundhog Field lunch – see the sausage groundhogs, emerging from their biscuit burrows into the salad field?  It was yummy.

Now we’re getting ready to head out into the cold, first to a children’s museum with our homeschool group, then to the usual Tuesday rush of karate and two soccers. But we wanted to say thanks, and we’ll see you next year!

The kids and I enjoyed reviewing the new release of Air Bud: Golden Receiver Special Edition to dvd this week.

We’ve become familiar with the family-friendly, talking-dog movie series by reviewing other releases in the past year, including the original Air Bud, Air Buddies, and Space Buddies.  Golden Reciever features the loyal golden retriever from the first movie (where he saved the school’s basketball team) – this time out, he’s tackling a new sport – football.  As you can predict, his teenage owner is having a hard time at school and on the football team, when Buddy’s athletic ability saves the day.  The “villains” in this dvd are two circus owners who dog-nap Buddy to be their new star.

The Air Bud movies are sweetly predictable, but my kids eat them up.  They love the athletic dog, and in later movies, his chatty and opinionated puppies.  They love the slapstick scenes as human football players are outrun and outplayed by the family dog.  A new Air Bud movie is a guaranteed 90-minute hit around here.

This new edition includes a funny “instant replay” bonus as the puppies (including Budderball and Rosebud) trade one-liners about their dad’s football career.  The special new packaging includes a whistle necklace that my kids also adore but can only use outside!

This new movie slips easily into our folder of movies that will keep the kids entertained for a while if I have something I need to do or if one or all of us are sick, gentle favorites.  Since watching Golden Receiver this week, they’ve asked to go back and watch the other films again!

Air Bud: Golden Receiver Special Edition comes out today, February 2.  This is a Click Communications review.  The Air Bud: Golden Reciever dvd was provided to me by Click and Walt Disney for the purposes of this review.

On the way out the door to gymnastics and karate…

…their favorite classes, followed by dinner with Aunt Robin.  The best night of the week!

GoGoGirl kept telling us loudly at dinner that, “My favorite teacher of all is AUNT ROBIN.”

We couldn’t let the fun of this morning’s Dr. Seuss Muffin Tin end… so we had some fun at lunch time too.

First, we read The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.  Do you remember this one?  The Cat takes a bath and leaves a pink ring around the tub.  He cleans the ring… with mom’s dress… and cleans mom’s dress with dad’s shoes, wipes dad’s shoes on the hall rug, and so on, until the pink stain gets blown outside by a fan, where it stains the snow pink.

I made mashed cauliflower, one of my favorites.  I just steam a small head of cauliflower (or a bag of frozen florets if I don’t have any fresh), then blend it with about a cup of cottage cheese.  It’s the only way my kids really like cauliflower, and I think it tastes better than mashed potatoes!

I scooped out big servings of mashed cauliflower to be snow and gave them small squirt bottles of strawberry milk to use to “stain” the snow pink!  We used white tablespoons as “shovels” and spoons, and had chicken nuggets too.  (We found a bag of Banquet nuggets that are shaped like little snowmen and snowflakes – just perfect for this meal!  I noticed they also make “under the sea” nuggets, and Tyson makes dinosaurs… lots of great ideas.)

The kids had a blast spreading the pink stain and having the snowmen shovel it up!