Again, we failed to have a typical week! What are those, anyway? Monday we were away from home, Tuesday and Wednesday I was grumpy and doing the minimum, Thursday was pretty normal and then Friday was wiped out by a stomach bug. We did manage to sneak in some fun things anyway!
If you’re interested, you can find my summary of the week’s learning notes behind the cut. Read More…
Our local children’s museum had a library day today: free admission to anyone with a library card, crafts at tables set up in every room, and a reading and book signing by children’s author Matthew McElligott.
Most of the crafts and activities had a general reading theme, including lots of tables to make bookmarks and one featuring Curious George. Since Matt McElligott’s two most popular books are about Backbeard the Pirate, several of the tables had a pirate theme. At the first table, just inside the doors, the kids could make pirate flags by putting fun foam stickers onto pieces of felt. JediBoy chose to make his a pirate ghost flag.
In another room was a fantastic activity. The library staff had photocopied black and white pictures of Backbeard, and brought along a whole bin full of fabric scraps (from a librarian’s personal quilting stash) so the kids could cut the fabric and glue it on to make a new outfit for Backbeard. This was such a great idea, and I’m sure to steal borrow it in the future. JediBoy went with a Halloween fabric for Backbeard’s newest outfit.
They also had some crafts that were more BabyGirl’s speed, including an appliance box painted like a tree with leaves for the kids to glue on, and a giant piece of paper with crayons nearby.
With all of these activities, plus the normal run of the museum, the kids had a blast. But the best part was the reading by Matt McElligott. If you haven’t read Backbeard and the Birthday Suit, go check it out. I’ll wait! The book tells the wonderfully funny story of a pirate who heads into town on his birthday to buy new clothes - and replace his parrot - and the wondrous suit he winds up wearing (but he doesn’t pay for it, since pirates don’t pay for anything!).
Matt read the book aloud in a darkened room, with the book’s illustrations projected on-screen. Backbeard has been a favorite in our house for quite some time, so we were thrilled to hear the story read by the author and to see the illustrations larger-than-life. To me, the most interesting part came next, when he told and demonstrated how he created the illustrations.
First, he did pencil sketches for each scene. Then he took about 500 photographs of all kinds of textures - the back of a barn, a close-up of burlap, his own hairy leg, and more. Finally, he used his computer to color the pencil sketches by dropping in these textures, and finessing the shades a bit. The walls of Backbeard’s cabin came from the back of a barn, his old ratty suit came from a burlap sack, and his hairy feet came from Matt’s own hairy legs! I was amazed and inspired by his description and demonstration, and at lunch I sat down to re-read the book and peer closely at the illustrations, seeing for the first time the photographs within.
The kids asked some questions and then Matt read his latest book, Bean Thirteen. He warned the kids that “this book is about math and vegetables” but we all loved it. The story is about a pair of bugs trying to divide 13 beans. They continue to invite more friends to dinner, but dividing the beans between two, three or four bugs still leaves one leftover, the wily bean thirteen. At each page, Matt would walk up to the screen and have the kids add up the beans, to see that it was bean thirteen leftover.
To JediBoy, though, the absolute best part was talking to Matt himself and getting his book signed, complete with a hand drawn pig-and-crossbones. What a wonderful experience! There’s nothing like meeting people who do work we admire. I’ve come away inspired and JediBoy is blissful.
Hello, Mr. Murphy, and welcome.
Just as we had regained our emotional balance and returned to “normal” around here, we were hit with a stomach bug. BabyGirl, JediBoy and PisecoDad were all up sick from 2:15 am last night, sometimes in shifts and sometimes in tandem. Naturally, the Mom was up the whole time through, cleaning up, holding heads & fretting. Lots of laundry today.
Fortunately, they all seem to be improving already, though certainly worn down and still needing to rest. The boys are playing through a favorite video game a second time, trying to unlock secrets and hidden treasures. BabyGirl is unusually sedate, mostly just sitting with the boys and watching the screen.
That gives me, finally, a time to sit and catch my breath. Tonight I’m looking ahead, in a general way, to the next month and a half - Thanksgiving week and then the Christmas festivities. Here are a few of my bookmarked websites that I’ve been reading tonight. If you have any favorite activities or sites, please share!
Family Fun Homemade Christmas
Kaboose Christmas Activities
About Family Crafts: Christmas
Celebrating Christmas
Jean Warren’s Preschool Express: Holiday Station
First School Winter Holidays
Everything Preschool: Christmas
A to Z Teacher Stuff: Christmas
KinderArt: Christmas
Pratt’s Educational Resources: Christmas
Thanks to supportive comments, a good night’s sleep, and a happy, sunny Thursday, we’re all doing a lot better here today. I had to laugh, though, when I came into the living room this morning and saw a mound of books. While I had been coping with my negative emotions, JediBoy was coping in his own way. With “fluff.”
The mound contained 21 Sesame Street picture books, 15 Curious George picture books, 26 Berenstain Bears books, 12 Clifford books, 7 Dora and Diego books, 16 Magic School Bus books, 5 Little Critter books, 3 by Robert Munsch, 3 by Ezra Jack Keats, 8 by Frank Asch, 4 by Kevin Henkes, 27 other miscellaneous picture books (mostly 8×8 paperbacks), and a handful of chapter books (Magic Tree House, Arthur, and Pokemon) - more than 150 books in all, almost entirely fluff! Twaddle! Drivel! And exactly what JediBoy needed to get through the stressful hours.
My own coping techniques tend toward the keep-your-hands-busy variety, and so, inspired by a timely post by Michelle at Scribbit and some ideas I’d been having about things that BabyGirl might like, I’ve been keeping my hands busy with quick little yarn projects. More on that when I finish.
This afternoon, I taught JediBoy how to “finger crochet” and make a long string, rope, or vine of yarn. He picked up on it fairly quickly and made several green vines for his Playmobil people. He was even inspired to create a birthday present for a certain friend, and we made a special trip out to the fabric store tonight to get the right shade of yarn. He sat up in bed with me for two hours, and finished his present! His determination was very sweet, and he liked the finished product so much that he’s going to make himself one tomorrow.
Just so you know it’s not always a bed of roses around here…
I’ve been in a bit of a funk since my children acted like monkeys at the doctor yesterday. The poor PA was trying to have a decent conversation with me - it was the first time we’d seen her and she was actually being supportive and helpful about JediBoy’s allergies. She was trying to talk through all the symptoms, including the cat allergy that has developed since we had JediBoy tested a couple of years ago. She was patient, kind & thorough, intelligent but not condescending. And she encouraged the kids to open up, smile and talk to her.
Whoops.
The kids opened up! JediBoy insisted on: carrying BabyGirl piggyback, practicing his white belt kata, tickling BabyGirl, crawling under the furniture, and talking loudly to BabyGirl in a sing-song voice. Even after he had been asked, repeatedly for each action, to stop, to calm down, to model good behavior, to knock it off already! BabyGirl figured out how to: open the door of the room, get up on a chair and call for a pig-gack ride, grab the pens and papers off the desk, and lie down on the floor and demand more nummies even though she had clearly finished her baggie of Cheerios.
It was an exhausting 45 minutes, and left me feeling drained and discouraged about this whole parenting thing.
JediBoy asked me to take him out for calzones after the appointment. I did not. He asked if he could watch a movie while I was trying to rest and recover my sanity. He could not. He wanted to know if there was anything he could do to make me feel better. There was not.
Even today, I’m feeling the residual effects of this anger that I have almost never felt. How can I be angry with them? They were just kids being kids. As much as I can understand what was going on (JediBoy even said, “I just wanted her to know that I was smart, and strong, and a good big brother,” letting me see his motivations for acting so wild), I’m still emotional about it. Phooey.
So today has been a little strained. I decided it was a good day to take the kids out and run some errands, because we could drive peacefully from place to place, listening to the radio, and so I could see them behaving more appropriately in public. It worked fairly well. We picked up our Halloween portraits at the mall and then went to the craft store to look at frames for those and a list of other supplies for other projects I have planned. Then we went to JediBoy’s basketball practice and came home to have sandwiches and soup for dinner. I’m hiding with the computer now, and breathing deeply, and believing that soon I will feel fully myself again.
I did have a nice email conversation with F, who commented on my Learning Notes post this week. She asked my opinion on the Magic Tree House books, since there are several negative reviews on Amazon (citing run-on sentences and poor grammar). Here is my response:
Ah, the “twaddle” debate! What do we do about books that aren’t the greatest literature, but our kids love anyway?
I will always have a soft spot for the Magic Tree House books. #3, Mummies in the Morning, was the first chapter book that JediBoy would sit still for, at 3, and not only would he sit still for it, but he insisted on having that book for bedtime every night for several months! Today, at 6, as you’ve seen on the blog, he reads them all constantly.
I can’t recall any glaring examples of bad grammar from the MTH books I’ve read, and from what I recall, the books are more prone to sentence fragments than run-ons! The choppy style is meant to be easy for young kids to read, I suppose. They are not well-written books, but personally I don’t think they’re so bad that I’d keep them away from my son.
They do introduce historical and scientific topics - not enough to really teach about them, but enough to make kids aware of them, and ideally make kids curious enough to learn more about the topics. I know that my friend’s 4th grade classes in a local public school read Revolutionary War on Wednesday as part of their curriculum.
In the end, I guess, I see these books as brain candy. If the MTH books were all he read, or all he heard, I might be concerned. But we do lots of other reading together and I’m confident that he has enough models of better writing that he’ll not be harmed by the MTH series.
There have been several online discussions about “twaddle” or “fluff” recently… but I’d love to hear your opinions too!
As the door banged behind PisecoDad on his way out to work, JediBoy roused from his cozy sleep. His head poked out from the covers. He squinted in the bright, sun-on-snow morning, and he peered around the room to take stock of the situation. Two quietly mumbled words escaped his lips… Buenos dias! …and he promptly fell back asleep.
More Muzzy in action?
The theme for Muffin Tin Monday this week was Fruits & Veggies, Dips & Spreads. We were lucky enough to be spending the day with our friends, Heather and her kids, and so we shared our muffin tin with them.
We had four fruits (apples, bananas, grapes and clementine slices) with two fruit dips (caramel spread and peanut butter mixed with vanilla yogurt) and four veggies (carrots, broccoli, snap peas and celery) with two veggie dips (ranch dip and guacamole).
BabyGirl liked the apples with caramel the best.
JediBoy loved the celery with peanut butter. Jamie tried a little bit of everything! There was even some left when Ben came home at noon and he got to share in the tin too.
We were also visiting beautiful 3-week-old baby Jillian, but I don’t have any pictures, because taking a picture would have required me to let her go and I couldn’t do that! You’ll have to hop on over to Heather’s blog to see the most adorable magnetic birth announcement which BabyGirl is thrilled to have on our fridge too.
We’ve just finished week 20, which seems like a lot, doesn’t it? We had a nice week that was a little mixed up, with PisecoDad home on Tuesday, appointments and sports and other interruptions, but we had lots of learning fun as we went.
If you’re interested, you can find my summary of the week’s learning notes behind the cut. Read More…
Uncle M. was bored. He said we should all come over.
We did!
We descended on their formerly quiet, clean & peaceful home and made it our own: loud, messy and rambunctious. The kids played and fought and wrestled and sang and danced and ate. The grown-ups mostly just played and ate. We had two rousing games of Hex Hex mixed with the Hex Hex Next set, and then a play of the CSI: Senses game (reminiscent of Cranium).
It was a wonderful night. JediBoy enjoyed watching movies, pretending to be the character in a video game while we all called out what buttons we were pushing, and helping Uncle J. and me do some charades as part of the CSI game. (He acted out “answering the phone” by himself, then helped us act out “sketching the crime scene” by being in the crime scene, and “putting on handcuffs” by acting as the arresting officer.) BabyGirl and Cousin C. tussled over books, cups, and toys, but hugged and kissed and read books together too.
If you’re looking for a fast-paced, ever-changing, get-your-neighbor card game, try Hex Hex. The deck is full of unusual cards that change the direction of game play, and adding the expansion Hex Hex Next (which is also a stand-alone game) just makes the game that much more flexible and furious.
In the game, there are cardboard hexes, which you are sending around the table in a game of grown-up hot potato. If someone sends the hex your way, you need to find a card from your hand that will send it to someone else. If you can’t, you’re hexed, and lose a point. The person who sent it to you gains a point, and a new round begins.
It’s not quite that simple. Many of the cards will double the hex’s value, or copy it and send both to someone new, or compel it to only go left. The cards might give you the chance to play your cards face down and bluff your opponents, detonate a hex before an opponent has the chance to move it along, or fling your arms in the air and take points from the last player to catch on and copy you.
We’ve played Hex Hex for many years, and adding the new Hex Hex Next cards tonight got us all laughing and having a great, chaotic time. Even J. said he was having a blast - when he was at -15 points. It’s a great game - have you ever played?
The kids love to paint. Today they are using shiny paint - half glue and half tempera paint on aluminum foil. BabyGirl likes to refill her paintbrush often and glop and sloosh the paint onto the foil. JediBoy experiments with designs.
Three or four paintings in, things start to get silly.
Really silly.
I am finally forced to capture the silly monkeys behind bars.
DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS. THEY EAT ENOUGH ALREADY.
