I discovered a fun site today call Fraboom. It is an online Children’s Museum. One of the fun things that they offer is a live class in how to draw cartoons. The link is at the bottom left area of their homepage. It helps to have a pen and tablet in order to use the live classes on the site, but you can draw with a mouse or with pen and paper, too. The live presenter did a great job giving simple instructions to draw the ant shown above. She also made it a good lesson by giving the proper names for the different sections of the ant. This is definitely worth checking out!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

We were on the road for part of this week, so our “official” school time was pretty limited. We did a lot of “car schooling”. I posted earlier in the week about our wedding trip to DC, Canada and Detroit, Michigan. The photo to the left was taken in Maryland during our trip. This mosaic sculpture was outside the restaurant where we had breakfast. Tornado Boy saw it from the window where we were sitting and wanted to go investigate after we ate. Unfortunately there wasn’t any sort of plaque on it and I couldn’t find any further information on it. The tile work was really neat, though. We’ve done foam mosaics and we once participated in a group mosaic tile at our local gardens, but we’ve never done a full tile pattern. I think I’ll put that on the bucket list for this school year. I’ve seen craft kits for them at Michael’s before. I’ll have to put a note on my to do list to save one of their coupons for it.

Science:
We attended a drop-in science class this week that was really awesome. I’ll post more about it on Sunday, but this photo is Tornado Boy holding a balloon that we were able to pass a dowel through without popping it. They had so many cool experiments set up for the kids to try out.
We also got a neat impromptu lesson in animal camouflage when we saw this Katydid on our door. If he was on the right plant, he sure would blend right in. His wings have veining identical to a leaf. We’d still hear him though, they make a tremendous amount of noise. Between the Katydids and the frogs around here, it is loud with wildlife at night.

Reading:
We turned in our Summer Reading program sheet at our local library this past week. Tornado Boy is super excited because he now has a “Star Reader” sticker on his window of the car. Unfortunately we didn’t get to Barnes and Noble yet and Borders was out of most of their free promo books, so we’ll have to try again later to complete those programs. I’m glad that we had participated in What We’re Reading for several weeks because it made it really easy to log the books that we had read on the worksheets – all I had to do was look at my blog posts.

Math:
Tornado Boy is working on memorizing his addition and subtraction facts. He can do some in his head, some on his fingers and for some others it helps to use the Math-U-See blocks. I had him do this Toucan worksheet this morning to try to evaluate where he was. He seems to know all of the +0, +1, +2 and doubles facts for addition. The remaining facts he is typically using a manipulative to solve. He taught himself subtraction, so we haven’t learned them in “families” of facts.
I’ve sort of put Math-U-See on hold for the moment and we’re mostly working on writing fluency at the moment. He can write the numbers, but he will sometimes reverse seven and the rest still require a some thought to print. He got the answers correct on this worksheet, and then I scanned it into the computer and we used the computer to do the color by number part.

Playtime:
Tornado Boy had fun doing a puppet show for me in the new studio at our Children’s Museum. They have a great selection of puppets, but he was disappointed that there was not a curtain for the stage.

He also visited the art studio for a bit of painting time. In the first one he was just experimenting with mixing colors – green, blue and yellow. In the second, he asked for my help in making a rainbow. He picked the colors using the ROYGBIV mnemonic – except that as usual, there was no indigo paint.

If you’d like to see what else happened this week, check out the “Weekly Wrap-up” at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

We knew that we wanted to do some sort of patriotic craft this week. We read several books about Independence Day, but the one that was the inspiration for our craft was Fourth of July Mice! by Bethany Roberts. The book skewed a little young, but the story of how the mice celebrated the 4th of July is really cute due to Doug Cushman’s illustrations. You can see a sample of the book below.

We used the Star Spangled Wavers craft from Family Fun Magazine as the inspiration for our craft. We modified the materials and used them to create a table centerpiece with some existing things that we had.

Materials:

• Adhesive backed foam in red, white and blue. We had glittered red and blue, so it was even more festive.
• around 2 feet of patriotic ribbon (or plain red or blue) for each waver – double sided works best
• 3/8″ wooden dowels – about 12″ long (one per waver)
• scotch tape
• scissors
• yard stick
• vase
• filler for vase such as clear stones
• silk flowers

Let me apologize for the photo quality. My point and shoot camera really needs to be dropped off some high cliff.

Prep work:

1. I created a template file for the stars. You can download the pattern here. I printed a copy on cardstock. I cut those stars out first and then I used the cardstock stars to guide the cuts onto the foam. You’ll need one of each star (6″, 4″, 3″) for each waver that you want to make. If you decide to make them double sided, you’ll need two sets for each waver. You can choose the color combinations/sizes that you’d like for your stars.
2. I cut out the star pieces. Older children or kids with better fine motor skills may be able to do this by themselves. If you use felt instead of foam, you’ll definitely need to use sharp scissors.
3. I put together the vase, clear stones and silk flowers. TB kept insisting that he wanted to smell them, so I sprayed them with a bit of perfume.
   
4. I put together the materials that we would need on our workspace.
   

Main Craft Instructions:

1. Take dowels and use them as drumsticks, or maybe chopsticks. This step is purely optional!
2. Select one star of each size and attach them to each other. If you don’t have self-adhesive foam, you can use tacky glue or velcro dots or the like. Attach the dowel stick to the back of the star group. We used scotch tape for this. If you’re making double-sided wavers, sandwich the dowels in between the two sets of stars and stick them together. Celebrate with your waver (optional).
   
3. Use a yardstick to help your child measure out about 2 feet of ribbon. Cut a piece for each waver that you’re going to make. Tornado Boy was really impressed with this step, can’t you tell?
   
4. If your child is learning to tie their shoes, this is a good opportunity to help reinforce that skill. Tie the ribbon around the dowel stick.
   
5. Make goofy faces with wavers (also optional).
   
6. Insert wavers into flower arrangement to make a centerpiece.
   

You can also just use the wavers to celebrate the 4th if you don’t care to make a centerpiece. Tornado Boy wanted me to mention that he made his own festive t-shirt at camp this week.

Happy Birthday, America!

Check out what other kids are reading and doing artwork for at A Mommy’s Adventures.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Check out more Wordless Wednesday at Five Minutes for Mom.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

What came first, the chicken or the egg? For, this week’s stART project, the “art” part of the project preceded the “story” part. The craft worked out so well that I wanted to find a book to go with it so that I could feature it on the blog. Is this cheating?

We read the book The Magic School Bus Rides the Wind. In this Magic School Bus adventure, the bus takes to the skies after Wanda’s kite blows away. Ms. Frizzle teaches the children a lot about the power of wind while they chase the kite. This books is also a good choice given the current events surrounding the gulf oil spill – it introduces children to the concept of wind power and shows some of the ways that windmills work. After the kids rescue Wanda’s kite, they use their kites to decorate the wall of their classroom.

Here are directions for making your own kite. The idea for this craft came from my son’s week at camp.

materials:
1 small paper lunch bag
string – about a two foot length
paper streamers (4) about 16 inches long each
a single hole punch
tape
scissors
crayons or other materials to decorate the kite

1) Cut off the bottom of the bag leaving a paper tube.
2) Punch a single hole in the middle of the “top” side of the bag. It may help if you have a reinforcement for the hole.
3) Attach the length of string to the hole.
4) Have the child color and/or decorate the outside of the bag.
5) Tape the streamers to the inside of the kite at the bottom – on the same side where you attached the string.
6) Take your kite outside and run like the wind.

Sorry about the picture quality. A cell phone camera and a running kid do not a good picture make!

Check out what other kids are reading and doing artwork for at A Mommy’s Adventures.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

I am very excited to join in stART, hosted by A Mommy’s Adventure for this first time this week. Our artwork is fairly sporadic at home, but this week Tornado Boy was very inspired by the book Library Mouse and he decided to create and illustrate his own book.

Library Mouse by Daniel Kirk is the story of a mouse named Sam who lives in a knot hole in a library. He decides to write and illustrate his own books and leave them in the library for the children to read. The librarian becomes very curious about who “Sam” is and wants to arrange a “meet the author” event. I’ll leave it to you to read the book and find out who the children meet. This is a really wonderful children’s book and is so worth picking up.

Tornado Boy asked if he could write his own book after reading Library Mouse. I stapled together some papers for him and helped him with the spelling for the title pages. I left the house and Tornado Dad worked with him answering his questions and helping him learn how to draw a truck. When I came home, the two of them shared the story with me. I was delighted with what they created. I scanned the book and transcribed the story. Here’s Tornado Boy’s book and story:

The Lonely Cheese - a book by Tornado Boy

Illustrated by Tornado Boy

This is the Lonely Cheese - he is unhappy.

...so he had a sandwich (cut diagonally).

Then he found his three friends,

and they played soccer.

Then he was tired so he went to bed. (The drawings are a moon, window with curtains, and his bed)

In the morning he got his keys,

and got in his car to look for his friends. (Daddy helped draw this car)

Then the Lonely Cheese got thirsty...

...so he stopped for a drink.

Then he went to find his friends.

These are his friends.

And they shared a brownie for a snack - like the Backyardigans.

Then the Lonely Cheese was happy.

I’m really hoping that this experience will help Tornado Boy to trust his creative instincts and to want to try more art projects at home. This was so much fun.

Check out what other kids are reading and doing artwork for at A Mommy’s Adventures.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Language Arts:

Hot Air Henry was Tornado Boy’s favorite book of the week. We selected it after reading Big Balloon Race last week. This is the story of a Siamese Cat names Henry who pilots a hot air balloon after a human refuses to fly with “that cat”. The story is told from the cat’s perspective. TB really liked this book and the adventures that the cat had.

We also picked up the Reading Rainbow video for Hot Air Henry. TB loved this. He’s been running around the house singing the Reading Rainbow theme song. This was his first exposure to the program. Our library has several episodes on DVD, so we may view them from time to time. LeVar Burton – the host of the show – recently “tweeted” that a Reading Rainbow 2.0 is in the works. I’d be curious to see what comes of that.

Math:

We started Alpha level of Math-U-See this week. Tornado Boy is thrilled with this program and will often play with the manipulative blocks on his own. It’s really helped with his number writing because he likes to make up and solve his own problems. So far the parts of the program that we’ve worked on are a review of the Primer level curriculum. The curriculum is very systematic in how it teaches addition. We are working on addition +9 facts now. They are the third set – after +0 and +1. The order seems a bit odd to me, but we’re rolling with it. We’ve opted to put the worksheets that go along with the program into a three-ring binder when we’re done with them. Tornado Boy was using this the other day to “teach” his butterflies how to do math (see above). Since part of the ‘mastery’ criteria of MUS is that the student should be able to teach the concept back to you, I figure this is a step in the right direction. LOL

Creative Pursuits:

Tornado Boy asked me to take a picture of him after he made this little Lego-type car creation at the museum. I wish they’d had more blocks for him to work with. They had some neat boards to build on, but very few blocks to work with. I hadn’t seen them there before, so I’m hoping that maybe some of them had been misplaced.

Science:

Science was definitely Tornado Boy’s favorite thing to work on this week. He heavily favored it over everything else we did. We spent a lot of time observing our “growing things” that I posted about earlier this week. The butterflies in particular generated a lot of conversation. TB asked if they were going to lay eggs and hatch into caterpillars. I told him that I didn’t know because we weren’t sure if they were boys or girls. He told me that “of course they’re girls – they’re Painted Lady butterflies, after all”. Totally logical, as always. It seemed very odd to TB that Painted Lady butterflies would represent both genders.

We learned that butterflies often secrete meconium directly after they hatch. It looked like they were bleeding on the side of the cage. TB immediately touched it and asked what it was. He was not pleased when I told him that it was butterfly poop and he ran to wash his hand. We also were able to get close enough to see the butterflies’ proboscis – straw-like tongues in action. Tornado Boy observed that the butterflies looked a lot like Monarchs. We looked at some of the differences in the color patterns of the two butterflies. We learned that Monarchs have a much longer life cycle.

Our caterpillars are growing quickly. I really hope that our next batch of butterflies is healthier than this one. These ones do not fly much at all, so we haven’t released them to the wild. I’m not sure how we’re going to handle the transition since they only live for a couple of weeks.

Physical Play:

Tornado Boy had his final sports class this week. The kids wrapped up with a demo of some of the sports that they had learned. This was the first time that I’d actually gotten to sit in on the class. They kids clearly loved the class and it was really pretty well organized and run. I was impressed that TB did a pretty good job with listening throughout the class. He really has matured a lot in the past couple of months. The picture above is from the soccer section of the class. I think he really enjoyed being able to try so many different sports.

We had a very nice week together. The weather this time of year gives us so much freedom to work indoors or out we love it. To see what other families are up to this week – hop on over to Homeschool Creations.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

We do a fair amount of driving. That used to be a time that was some of my more relaxed with Tornado Boy. He’s strapped into his carseat, so I don’t have to worry about his tendency to run. Usually we listen to music or an audio book, or watch an educational video. He used to be pretty quiet. Now he’s either constantly pointing out businesses or “Mighty Machines” (construction equipment). Pretty much the car is now filled with non-stop questions. His desire to know a little about a lot is fun, but so exhausting. I bought him a lap desk recently and I think I’m going to try drawing or reading in the car. I’m a little concerned because reading in the car makes me feel sick. The drawing I’m not too sure about because the kid drops EVERYTHING. I’m really not exaggerating on that one. I can’t remember the last time I rode somewhere with him where I don’t have to explain to him that I’m driving and I can’t pick his stuff up. He drops his sippy cups, toys, snacks – anything that’s in his seat with him. I have no idea how to make that one better. Even strapped down, he’s still a wiggly kid.

Anyway… today I brought out the Draw Write Now Book 1. We hadn’t used it in a while. Tornado Boy had been pretty insistent in the past that he wanted me to guide his hand when he tried to make a drawing from he book. Today he dove right in on his own and started the lesson to draw a goose since we’d seen some geese in the park this past week. He did ask me to help with the feet since they were sort of an odd shape. He also wanted me to outline the figure for him to color it in, but overall it’s his work. We didn’t do the exact copy work from the book. It was three sentences long and more than we had time for, so we made up our own sentence based on what we had learned about geese last week. I want to start “Sentence School” with him soon, so we’re working on spacing, punctuation and the like for now. I was really very pleased with Tornado Boy’s care in writing this sentence. He’s come so far since we pulled him out of preschool last September. I cannot say enough good things about Handwriting Without Tears. It really is a fabulous program. The Draw Write Now series is a good complement to it.

Here is Tornado Boy’s goose drawing and sentence work. If you look closely, you’ll see that he added a “TM” (trademark) by the goose. That sent me into gales of laughter. He sees and notices tons of things every day that have either a copyright mark, registered mark or trademark, so he thought that his drawing should have one as well. LOL

You can download the following sample lesson from Draw Write Now here.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

Here’s what we’ve done over the past couple of weeks:

Math:
We have been working through the second level of Destination Math on the computer. Most of our work has centered on identifying larger numbers, working with place value up to the hundreds and thousands. Tornado Boy absolutely loves doing this. He’s very good with recognizing numbers and creating numbers with his base ten blocks. I’m going to have to work on using paper models for some lessons because we only have 1 “thousand” cube and he wants to make numbers larger than that now.

As much success as we’re having with place value, Tornado Boy is still struggling/disinterested in basic addition. We tried a CD called “Listen in Addition” to help him with his facts, but he doesn’t seem all that impressed. I’m not really that taken with it either. It still doesn’t really matter if he’s got them memorized at this point, so we’ll keep working on the things that he’s excited about and enjoys.

Tornado Boy has been interested in drawing more shapes besides the basics and he really loves the song “Nonagon” by They Might Be Giants. He asks for this song a lot and he really enjoys the video which is very cute. I love it when he’s into music that doesn’t annoy me.

Reading & Language Arts:
We had a couple of reading standouts this week “Stop, Drop, Roll” by Margery Cuyler – a book about fire safety. We’ve talked a bit about fire safety and what to do if you hear the smoke alarm go off. It’s always good to have a reminder about how to deal with smoke and what to do if your clothes catch on fire. The little girl who is the main character in the book is a bit of a nervous Nelly, but the message is good.

We also read “Faucet Fish” by Fay Robinson. It’s a “whale of a tale” of a girl who wants fish, but her parents don’t agree. It has a lot of pretty extensive marine vocabulary, and a sub-theme about listening – this time it’s the parents who aren’t listening. They illustrations are fun and it’s a good reminder to listen to your children.

We worked on mostly science-related vocabulary words this week. Tornado Boy can now read “photosynthesis” and “chrysalis” – although I have a hard time spelling them!

Physical/Gross Motor:

We’ve still been pretty heavy into the bike riding since the weather has been so beautiful. Tornado Boy has also learned a bit about t-ball; both from his Dad and from a one day exposure during his “sports” class. His very favorite thing, though was learning the “Tootie Ta”. This is a very silly, funny kids “follow the leader” type game. The song is available through iTunes or there are videos of it on YouTube (see above from a dance class). We love the game and we taught it to his cousin over Easter. Here is Tornado Boy and his cousin playing while I sang the song (you’ve been spared audio of that!)

Tornado Boy also learned a game called “midnight” that’s fun to play with a group of young kids. There’s a very good explanation of the game here. Basic setup – one child (or adult) is the captain. All the other kids stand behind a line and ask what time it is. They must take that number of steps forward. If the captain says “midnight” when they ask, they all have to run to “home” or the safe spot. The child who is caught gets to be the next captain. It’s another silly, fun game.

Artistic Endeavors:

Tornado Boy displayed an unusual amount of patience when we worked on this project. He did some cutting (we really need to work on that), pasting, coloring and sticker peeling/placing for this. His coloring is really improving and he’s far more excited to draw and color these days. This has been a major change in the past month or so. I drew the second flower when his grass got really high and then he colored it in.

Science:

We’ve been using the Download N Go Spring Surprises as the basis of our Science unit for the past couple of weeks. One of the things that we talked about was rainbows and what it takes for them to appear – sun and water. We watched a clip on “The Happy Scientist” about creating a rainbow with a garden hose and tried that outside one day. We got wet, but have no pictures since I’m not coordinated enough to hold a camera and a garden hose at the same time without fear of a huge failure. We also noticed that the glass block windows in our house will sometimes produce a rainbow on our wall. Tornado Boy loves the song about the color spectrum called “Roy G. Biv” by They Might Be Giants (see video above) and he requests it often. He also created the mnemonic device on our bathroom wall with his tub letters this week:

I absolutely love the tub letters for spontaneous spelling. We bought a second set long ago because one of each letter just wasn’t working out for us. I highly recommend them as a tub toy.

We’ve also spent a lot of time learning about the basic parts of a plant – seed, roots, stem, buds, leaves and flowers. Tornado Boy can identify them all and continues to be very fascinated with our tomato and pepper plants which are coming along nicely. He especially loves that he can look into the AeroGarden and see the roots growing. He told me today that he could even see the root hairs. I’m still really hoping that this will help him develop a greater affinity for vegetables!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.