First, big thanks to S. over at Learning Umbrella for awarding me the Nice Matters award!
She’s too sweet. I would pass along the love - but most of my daily reads have already been awarded! Just take a look at her site to see some of the nicest bloggers going. Instead I’d like to give this award to all of HomeschoolJournal.net for being the nicest community of bloggers to share bandwith with.
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Today was also made nice by a quick item on Good News Network reporting that US breastfeeding rates have hit an all time high.
And by a freebie lapbook about Egypt over at Homeschool eStore.
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Of course my NICE day was also a lazy one at home with JediBoy. Here are a few of the things we did…
JediBoy woke up early to join me on the second half of my exercise DVD. He asked why there weren’t any kids on the video, so I promised him I’d look into some good ones for us to do together. I’ve heard there’s a Leslie Sansone Family Walk workout which we could try. If you know of any other family-together fitness DVDs for these dreary days - beyond Yoga Kids - I’d love to hear about it.
We spent a few hours in the middle of the day exploring books and learning materials - more “relaxed homeschooling” than “unschooling” today. We pulled out the Math-U-See blocks and played with them, getting to know which color is what length and playing the grab bag game (can you reach in and find the 1 by feel? how about the 7?).
We read My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett. If you haven’t read this early chapter book, you should check it out. It is so much fun: the story of a boy (the narrator’s father, years ago) who travels to Wild Island to free a baby dragon who is being kept tied up there by the wild animals. It has a fun way of presenting ridiculous situations (he escapes a lion by giving him a comb and a brush and seven fancy hair ribbons for his mane) in a matter-of-fact way. JediBoy loves the story, which has a picture on nearly every page, and he loves to act out his favorite moments.
We had lunch together - JediBoy likes vegetable soup with fish crackers swimming in it. I finished up the left overs of easy chicken provencal from last night.
We read two picture books with dinosaurs: Can I Have A Stegosaurus? by Lois Grambling and Patrick’s Dinosaurs by Carol Carrick. Both are fun looks at dinosaurs inhabiting our world.
JediBoy then offered - “If I read to you from my orange book, will you read more to me?”. I wouldn’t have asked him to do that, but since he was offering… of course I took him up on it. We hadn’t pulled out the Hooked on Phonics set in a month or more, and he surprised me by reading fluidly and confidently the last pages we did - on ch- and sh-, th- and wh- blends. So we pushed on a little and did one of the word play pages - spelling words out with the cards - and it turned out to be harder for him to reproduce the blends than to read them on the page. But he did well with something that wasn’t easy.
When we finished this, he asked me to read Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown. He loves this story too, the silly tale of a boy flattened by a bulletin board, who slides under doors, gets mailed to California, flies like a kite, and catches some robbers by posing as a painting. After we read the book, I told him that there are groups of homeschoolers who make their own “flat travelers” to send around the country on adventures, and he was so enthusiastic that he wanted to make one RIGHT AWAY. I promised him we’d work on it this week, if we can get the printer driver up and running. So if any of you are interested (he specifically mentioned Carbon, since we swapped with you last year) in sharing flat travelers, let me know!
After that much quiet and still time, JediBoy spent about an hour playing in and out of the house, mostly with his new bow (he had PisecoDad help him tie a string to a stick this weekend) and acting out the characters from PisecoDad’s current video game, Fire Emblem. He tries so hard to narrate the game to me and discuss the characters, but because I’m usually working on the computer when they play on the weekends, I just don’t have a clue what he’s talking about! So he spent some time drawing the characters to help me understand.
Now it’s that slow time of the late afternoon, and he’s come to me with his energy low. We’re going to go snuggle on the couch and watch some Electric Company. Easy Reader, that’s my name. Mm, mm, mm.
